man about forest
after a couple of days of blissed out laziness in danau toba the harsh realities of tran-sumatran travel loomed into view on wednesday morning as we stepped off the ferry at parapat. despite a trio of ready made attractions in north sumatra there remains no easy way of connecting the dots, with journeying from one place to the next always requiring a detour via smog filled medan. we had already knocked berestagi off the itinerary for precisely this reason but there was no avoiding it when making the journey across to bukit lawang. we actually managed to argue a pretty good rate on an air conditioned 4x4 which was heading that way so avoided having to revisit the worst excesses of sumatran public buses, but having negotiated what we had presumed would be the hairiest section of the journey with relative ease we arrived at the northern bus terminal to find no minibuses for bukit lawang in residence. ignoring the plainitive claims of a couple of touts shouting that the last bus had departed and we should book a private taxi all the way we pressed on, but soon realised that there did appear to be a relatively strong chance that there were no more pubic buses heading our way. ignoring the touts, on principle more than anything, we ventured out further and eventually found ourself squeezed into an opek, a hollowed out minivan which was making the short hop over to bukit lawang, stopping at every street corner in the hope of enticing in an extra passenger or two with the promises of rust and loud bollywood tunes. after a stop start (and stop and start again, repeated ad inifinitum) journey we finally arrived at bukit lawang and checked into a little homestay on the river just in time for another monsoon downpour to hit.
a quick word on riverside living. having stayed in a couple of beach shacks in my time i have always loved and romanticised living by the water: the gentle, repetitive lap of water on the shore is both soothing and soporific and lends itself perfectly to tranquility. rivers, however, are different beasts. no gentle lap or repetitive motion, just the constant, surprisingly loud, sound of water gushing over the rapids. this is both relentless and noisy but, more problematically for those of weak mental fortitude like myself, also means you need to get up to pee every ten minutes, negotiating ants and mosquitos for a psychomatically induced and consequentially pathetic trickle. beachfront, good; riverside, the jury is still out.
the reason for our ten hour jaunt to bukit lawang lay in the gunung leuser national park just across the river from bukit lawang, home to the sumatran orangutan. regardless of just how unnecessarily difficult the journey had been, the bugs traipsing around our bed and the 6.30am blasts of bass heavy bollywood hits, as we watched the first of these fabulous beasties swing in above our heads on thursday morning our feeling that it would be totally worth it was instantaneously confirmed. it's hard to do justice to these creatures by word (and there are many, many photos to come) but their expressive faces and incredible dexterity constantly amazed, as they gambolled up, down and across the forest canopy, a bizarre juxtaposition of human and animal eating etiquette as they elegantly peeled bananas before stuffing them into their faces. after an hour at the feeding station for the semi wild orangutans who are being rehabilitated prior to return to the wild we headed off into the jungle. it was a long, sweaty trek made infinitely more difficult and tiring by the rain the night before turning the tracks into slippery mulch but we were fortunate enough to see a couple of sets of orangutans in the wild as well (including a famously agressive beast from who we had to beat a hasty, if clumsy, retreat). hot, sticky, rustic, deet-infused days though they have been, bukit lawang's most famous residents lived up to their reputation and made the journey to this rural backwater a massive highlight of this trip (and dare i say it better than pandas?)
back into medan now but straight to the airport as we jump on a flight to penang for some electricity, massages and lots and lots of food...
toba or not toba
sumatra was the major slice of indonesia that i had missed last time around so i was particularly excited to be ticking this last box as vicki and i flew into medan airport on saturday night. from the turbulent bumpiness of the short hop across from KL to the torrential downpour which greeted us on the tarmac, i was beginning to worry that this gigantic, enigmatic island was not going to be as immediately welcoming as the rest of the archipelago had been to me in the past. saturday night in medan did nothing to allay our fears with a glut of often full, yet always overpriced, hotels and guesthouses constantly dissapointing. having shoo'd a cockroach under the bed of our mid-range priced but budget standard room it was with a sense of mild trepidation that we fell asleep, our appetites not yet whetted by this grotty, singularly unattractive first stop.
sunday morning seemed no better as the rain was replaced by that sweaty heat which is distinctive of the tropics. oddly, however, I quite like the sensation of every tiny exertion leading to damp armpits and grubby face: for me it correlates almost exactly with the south east asia which i have visited a couple of times before and still remain keen to return to. after a bumpy five hour ride filled with some sumatran karaoke classics, the pounding beats and ethno-synth solos complemented by a dancer who's brilliant campness seemed to exude from the screen and permeate the entire bus, we fell off the bus at parapat and onto the ferry to samosir. samosir is the small island in the middle of danau toba, a volcanic lake which dominates the north sumatran highlands. actually, some scale is probably needed to qualify those statements. samosir isn't that small insofar as it is about the same size as singapore: it just looks petite because of how gargantuan danau toba is, a frankly absurd 1,700 square kms. the fact that it is a collapsed volcanic caldera makes you realise just how unfathomably large, and potent, volcanos in this neck of the woods can be. any traces of magma and the like are long gone however, and now all that remains is clear blue water stretching as far as the eye can see , encircled by a continous line of narrow peaks and ridges.
after a bit of a wander we found a nice little batak bungalow by the water and settled in. indonesia is still cheap, but not as cheap as it was a few years ago. i don't know if that is actually solely a result of the woeful performance of sterling recently, even against supposedly comedy currencies like the rupiah. communal costs, such as public or ferry tickets, still remain extremely cheap but the traveller facing amenities have gone up markedly. my staple of nasi goreng used to cost me about $.5 in 2005 - $4-5 seems to be the going rate now. similarly although we aren't really in the market for the rock bottom dives which i used to seek out previously the gutter price seems to have gone up from about $1-2 to nearer $10. i don't actually have a problem with what are frankly fairly insignificant increases to us which conversely materially improve the lives of the beneficiaries, but i do wonder just how possible shoestringing on $10 a day is any more. having said that, sitting overlooking the lake typing on my netbook prior to uploading courtesy of my guesthouse wifi i have to say i've done the shoestringing and, whilst i occasionally get trapped in a little nostalgic eulogising, i don't miss it at all. a combination of having vicki and a few more years means shelling out the extra few dollars definitely feels the right way to go.
danau toba is wonderful, exactly what we needed. low-season empty, picturesque and small enough to get around easily. we rented a little scooter today and went zipping around the island, lake on one side, batak burial mounds and tombs looming from the paddy fields on the other. vicki got back to her motorbiking roots by swooping and leaning into corners, i reclaimed my inner indian by honking at everyone who passed or ould be lurking round suspicious corners (safety first and all that). bar numerous chicken/pig/small child near misses (a honk means stay off the road, not try and run across it) and a minor dead battery incident resolved by some resourceful downhill jump starting it was a perfect first proper day. i'm currently sitting up in the eaves of a small batak house overlooking the lake watching some indonesian kid with a snorkel trying to spike fish with a bamboo spear whilst his (lazy) dad watches on from a canoe, the various bangs and crashes of south east asian life punctutating in the most complementary way the soft lap of the water on the shore. sheer bliss: another day of under-exertion tomorrow as well I think.
