The next day Barnadi and I started our own trip although not as epic, we headed out to Indonesia with our friend Rae and Stuart. Leaving Goofy and Jesse in the capable hands of Adam and Coralee. Our flight got delayed and so we arrived in Jakarta later than planned. Even though we were late Agus, Barnadi's brother in law, who was meant to be picking us up was nowhere to be seen. The lift was eventually co-ordinated when Barnadi managed to get his phone working and called his sister to find out where Agus was hiding. We then headed straight to Barnadi's sister's house where we spent our first night. Rae and Stuart had a nap, Barnadi went with Bariah his sister to have his fillings replaced (Bariah just happens to be a dentist), and I stayed back and played with Barnadi's naughty nephew and niece.
We arrived in Jakarta in the middle of the rainy season which after a week of 40+ days in Melbourne made a refreshing change. It did cause a lot of flooding in Jakarta, and not a day went past when the word 'banjir' didn't feature in the news headlines. We managed to avoid the worst of the flooding as the very next day we had a ride to Bandung. Bandung is the third largest city in Indonesia and is located in the mountains of West Java, it is also a good base from which to visit some of our favourite sites in the area, Kawah Putih a large sulphurous volcanic lake and Tangkuban perahu a large dormant volcano with a huge steaming crater on the top, and a smaller side crater full of bubbling pools, some cool enough to paddle in, others so hot you could boil an egg in them. Bandung is also known as the Paris of the east, although how the connection was made is not entirely clear. Like most cities in Indonesia it is dirty and polluted and old architecturally important buildings are left to go to ruin while new ugly and poorly constructed high rises take their place.
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| Tangkuban perahu |
From Bandung we then headed to our house in Puncak where we spent a relaxing few days doing very little, kept in most days by the rain. Barnadi and Rae filled the time with cooking while Stuart and I filled it with eating. The few excursions we did manage were short walks to some of the local temples, the markets and the botanical gardens in Cibodas. Our time in Puncak had to come to an end, and we were picked up by Toni, Barnadi's brother, who drove us back to Jakarta.
After a couple of nights in Jakarta we managed to escape again this time to Sumatra and lake Toba. We were not travelling alone as Bariah, Agus and their two children, Samantha and Suren came with us. Agus is originally from Sumatra and the whole family return every year to visit his family for Chinese new year. Agus's family own a taxi company and so when we touched down in Medan airport a couple of cars were waiting to take us directly down to Lake Toba. The journey took a lot longer than the 2 hours Agus insisted, and the constant cutting in and out of lanes round blind bends made it a less than relaxing trip. When we arrived at Parapat, on the banks of Lake Toba, the sun was setting and we still needed to get a ferry across to Samosir island to the resort Barnadi had booked. The car ferry which was meant to run every hour had decided that because it was quiet it would wait until 9pm before it ran again, if it was going to run at all. It turned out there was also a passenger ferry, and although it wasn't scheduled to go where we were heading, a little extra rupiah and they were willing to take a detour. So we temporarily ditched the cars grabbed our cases and boarded a passenger ferry, stepping over the buffalo carcass slung across the deck, we begun to wonder if we had made the right decision. As the boat pulled away and the disco lights started to flash and loud music started pumping it really was the strangest boat ride I had ever been on.
We docked directly at the resort Mas cottages just outside Tuk tuk, and were shown to our rooms. The resort had two types of rooms; standard rooms, like in any hotel and traditional Batak houses. Although we were originally planning to stay in a traditional Batak house, they were far from bug proof (mossies being the biggest worry) and they had no hot water, so disappointingly we resorted to a standard room. When the sun rose over the horizon the following morning, the previous days long and excruciating journey melted into insignificance. It was all worth it. The vast expanse of the lake, the imposing surrounding mountains and the pink fluffy clouds above made the location so picture postcard perfect, it was hard to believe it could all be real.
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| Lake Toba |
The next few days were easily the highlight of the trip, lazy days swimming in the lake and exploring the local historical sites, such as the stone chairs and kings tomb. Rae got down to business haggling over old textiles, but that was about as energised as the trip became. The town of Tuk tuk itself is very much a tourist hot spot, crammed with over sized hotels, souvenir shops and restaurants advertising the availability of magic mushrooms, we were lucky that our own resort was far enough out of Tuk tuk to not have to get involved in that side of things.
Lake Toba itself is the largest volcanic lake in the world, covering an area over 1700km2, that's 1000km2 bigger than Singapore. The Volcano underneath has been dormant for the last 40,000 or so years, it's last eruption however is thought to have been the largest volcanic eruption in human history. Volcanic ash from the eruption has been located as far away as Malawi, and a layer 6m thick has been located in parts of India.
All good things must come to an end, and we had to face the long drive back to Medan, after 1 night there we continued a journey home with a change of planes in Jakarta and Bali before finally arriving back in Melbourne. It is sad how quickly a holiday can feel like it never happened once back into the normal routine of work. It was however good to get back to see Jessie and Goofy, and see how much bigger they had grown in only two weeks.
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