Bornean Gibbon: Sumatra Pt. 1

Christmas Eve, Medan. We knew we'd only be spending one night there so we decided to splash out on some middle-range accomadation. We stayed at the Hotel Antares. The hotel is located on Jalan Sisingamangaraja, a main thoroughfair running through the city.

The next day, Christmas day, after an Indonesian breakfast of fried rice and sickly sweet coffee, Steph and I set about trying to find a way to call our families back home. We walked down Jln Sisingamangaraja asking around at different stores for phone cards or sim cards. This proved to be a huge challenge. The sun, the smell, the traffic and the sermons blaring from the nearby mosque all combined felt like a club to back of the head. Perhaps this was culture shock. I became quickly overwhelmed and wanted to scurry back to the hotel room. Eventually we did find a lady that sold us a sim card, but all of our attempts to put credit on it and makes calls failed.

Afer giving up on the idea of calling home for the day, we walked across the road and booked a bus to take us to the town of Parapat, on Lake Toba. Our plan was to catch the ferry that night from Parapat to the town of Tuk-tuk on Samosir island. We hopped on the bus at lunch time. The driver dropped us off somewhere else in Medan, where we then waited another half an hour for the next bus. Traffic was heavy all the way to Parapat. We arrived there at 7pm. The last ferry to Tuk-Tuk had left at 6pm, but luckily a local family offered us a ride on their ferry for a slightly increased ticket price. This meant waiting around for a couple of hours though, so I wandered up the street and looked for a bite to eat. A man waved to me an d invited me into his kedai kopi for a long neck of Bintang (Indonesian beer). We sat down and the man told me that when he used to work in one of the nearby hotels many years ago a group of Yugoslavians had visited and invited him to drink with them and he drank so much that he nearly drowned in the lake. Then he started telling me about how much he liked Thai girls - that they were the best - and I told him I had a ferry to catch.

The ferry to Tuk-tuk from Parapat took half an hour. When we arrived in Tuk-tuk that night it was like a ghost town, and we ended up staying in a ghost room.

Tuk-tuk could be called Desolation Row. In the 90's Tuk-tuk was a top party destination for western tourists, but when things started getting bad in nearby Aceh, the westerners packed up and left for Thailand. And they haven't come back. We stayed in Tuk-tuk for five nights and four days. The weather was nice for most of the time we were there. We hired a motorbike and rode out of the town looking for some hot springs, but never found them. What we did find were a lot of empty hotels, bars and restaurants, many of them with signs out the front advertising things like pizza, hamburgers, and magic mushrooms. Even the secondhand bookshop advertised magic mushrooms, which seemed strange in a country known for it's harsh anti-drug laws. I borrowed a Raymond Carver book from this store. The following days were mostly spent sitting out the front of our Batak-style longhouse accomodation reading and staring out at the lake and surrounding mountains. On one of the days we found a vegan café about fifteen minutes outside of town by motorbike selling delicious food. The curry there was nearly incentive enough to stay on Samosir island.for a few more days. Eventually though we got restless, and made plans to go to the village of Ketambe, near the Gunung Leuser national park in Aceh province.

We left Tuk-tuk the day before New Year's Eve.