Penang - 1 day

We woke up rather early when the train got into Butterworth. It was like, 7ish, and was supposed to be even earlier technically but then there was the delay in leaving. We trudged over to the ferry station, but we just missed one so had to stand around for a while. Eventually another ferry came, and I dozed in my seat on it and didn't even notice it had left. I was so confused when Nina and Alex were like "we're at Penang" because it totally didn't feel like it had moved at all. We got off the ferry and managed to find a tourist map of Penang. There weren't very many spots marked with names that indicated their activities, but we decided to go to this area where there was a toy museum and a floating mosque.

We decided to taxi there, and asked a few taxis. The first one said we weren't going to get anyone to use a meter in Penang, but we wanted to try anyway cause that was so much cheaper than agreeing on a price beforehand. Finally some guy got us a metered taxi - but it ended up being a cab that's meter was running like at twice the speed it should have been. :| Would have ended up being cheaper haggling with the guy who refused to use meter in the first place. Ah well, lesson learned. Don't use the big blue van taxis. He also didn't really know where he was going, and didn't speak English well, and took us to a hotel first but some random guy on the street was able to translate for us and we made it to the toy museum.

Only.. we ended up spending 100% of our cash on the taxi, so we had to find an atm. And apparently the closest one was a 15-20 minute walk away from the toy museum. We finally made it there and got out money. We decided to walk to the floating mosque first because we thought we were very close to it after the walk we made, and then we wouldn't have to backtrack later. It was a bit confusing to find, we got contradicting directions from our map and asking locals, but we made it there and wandered around it some.

We wanted to find breakfast, but nothing looked super appealing for a while. Eventually, back near the bank where we used the atm, we settled on this random restaurant. Nina wanted something more breakfast-y, and I wanted something more vegetarian, but I was carrying around a bag of mangosteen so I was glad to have a place to sit down and eat at least. The guy told me a couple of the dishes were vegetarian, but as soon as he served me one with pieces of chicken in it I no longer trusted him and didn't really eat any of my $2 meal. My mangosteen were delicious, though. Best fruit ever.

Afterwards, on our walk back to the museum, we found what we had really been looking for - a delicious amazing bakery. I ate a slice of chiffon cake and had a can of chrystanthemum tea, and bought another slice, an apple pastry, and an almond cookie to eat later on our long train ride. I was kinda tempted to buy a whole chiffon cake (only $5 USD!) to eat later but we were a little worried about running out of cash again so we held off on it. Nina tried my other piece of cake later and realized how amazing it was, and was sad she hadn't tried it while we were at the bakery cause she totally would split the whole cake with me. We wandered over to the nearby bus depot to use the restrooms, and spent a few minutes looking at a sadly adorable litter of very unhealthy looking kittens begging for food near a table where some people were eating.

Finally we made it back to the toy museum, paid our admission fee, and wandered around for like 45 minutes. It was well-sized for the amount of time we had to spend there. It was mostly action figures, some dolls, some life-sized giant things, some other types of toys. Alex was saddened by the lack of things like blocks and legos. We caught a bus back to the ferry station (much cheaper than the taxi, and not much slower, tbh) and then ferried back over. I got a garlic bun and more tea during the ride, and bought a bag of roasted chestnuts on the way to the train station.

Our train was delayed about 20 minutes, not a big problem, I started reading the second book I brought on the trip, The Eye of the World. We got on and I was surprised because the sleeper cars were in their seat form, not their bed form. I wanted a bed so I could more easily nap and relax for the journey XD. I spent a couple hours blogging, read a little bit, napped a little bit. We had to get off at the border and get our passports stamped / some papers processed for leaving Malaysia and entering Thailand.

Shortly after we got back on they came around with menus for food. That was really exciting because we weren't sure the train would sell any food, since it was super tiny and didn't appear to have a food car or anything. Also, I had eaten all the pastries I had saved and all my chestnuts within the first few hours of the train ride. Oops. Anyway, what was even MORE exciting was that they had a specific vegetarian meal on the menu! Yay! They handed out food in a kind of confusing manner, sometimes setting down bowls or plates and then taking them away a bit later, but I ended up with a plate of pineapple, a bowl of soup, two bowls of vegetables, and a plate of white rice. The soup was questionably vegetarian; it looked like vegetable broth, and didn't have any chunks of meat, but Nina's bowl of it had what was probably one chunk of weird looking chicken. I had eaten some of mine before noticing that chunk in hers, so I just finished eating the cabbage / root vegetables in mine anyway. The vegetable bowls were AMAZING. Probably my favorite meal I've had on the trip. There was baby corn, broccoli stems, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, and ear mushrooms. No green onions for me to pick out, omg! It was a super garlicky and slightly gingery sauce, super flavorful without being spicy. Managed to eat both bowls, somehow. I want more, now. :P

A bit after dinner they turned our bench-seats into beds. I settled into my top bunk, and stayed up a little bit chatting and reading but went to bed around like 10 I think.

Kuala Lumpur - 2 days

We spent a long time the first morning in KL trying to decide what to do. Other than going to Batu Caves, we didn't really know how to spend the rest of our time. We browsed through a tourist map and guide book, and asked some questions of the family who owned the hostel of how to get places. We came up with some ideas, but decided to still go to Batu Caves first. The commuter train went directly there, so we walked over to the station and rode it over.

I got some delicious fried Indian snack and a hat with a really neat pattern while we walked over to the stairs up to the cave. I tied the rest of the bag of snacks to my belt loop so I didn't have to carry it myself, and we took a handful of pictures around at the bottom before starting our ascent. There were 272 stairs up to the top. Once we had climbed up a small portion of them, we started seeing monkies along the sides of the stairs, and clambering over them some. When I got close, the monkies became incredibly interested in the bag of snacks I had tied to my belt. One on the side grabbed the bag and tried to pull it from me, and when I went towards the other side of the stairs another one started eyeing me and approached. I was scared so I turned around and hurried back down some.

I successfully escaped with my snacks, but I had tied the bag too tightly to my belt loop, and I couldn't undo it. I waited til the monkies had cleared away mostly, and hurried up to reach Alex and Nina. After we climbed more of them, however, another monkey tried to get at my bag. I had Alex help me tear the plastic bag off my belt loop, but while doing so a monkey grabbed the inner bag that contained the fried snack. He spilled it all over the steps, and he and a few other monkies grabbed big handfuls and ran off - I got a bit of video of this part. After that they left me alone; my purse wasn't brightly colored and didn't look like food, I just shouldn't have brought those snacks with me. XD

We reached the top and poked around a little; it was very pretty, but we were all super sweaty cause it was so hot out. On our way down, we walked to the side a bit where they had a separate cave called the Dark Cave. You had to buy a guided tour to get inside these ones. We wanted to do it, but I was starving because I hadn't had much of anything for breakfast. I wanted to go down to get lunch first, and Alex and Nina were nice enough to consent. We ate at a vegetarian Indian restaurant at the base of the steps; the Thali Plate I had wasn't amazing but I greatly enjoyed the parts of Alex's Masala Thosa I ate. Afterwards we realized we didn't have enough cash anymore to pay for the Dark Cave tour, so we went on a 30 minute adventure to the nearest atm. It was so hot outside and so gross that we got a taxi back from the atm to the front of the caves.

Back up the steps, and this time Alex was the one who was silly and brought food/drink. A monkey bolted off the wall and tore his orange soda bottle from his hand. The monkey couldn't even open it; we saw him sitting on the wall for quite a long time, just holding the bottle and trying to bite at the plastic. The cave tour was pretty cool; there were some interesting bugs and bats in there, though there was this family that kept talking really loudly and over the guide and it was very frustrating we couldn't hear him.

After the tour we trained back to the hostel. We decided to go to the Luna Bar that Freeman had mentioned; he was there, so we talked to him about how to get there. He also told us about this great brunch deal at Sky Bar on Sundays, which happened to be our second and final day in KL. We decided to do that on the next day. We wanted to take public transit to Luna Bar, but the station for the train we needed was closed for technical difficulties when we got there. So, taxi instead. It turned out that there was a pool party going on at the Luna Bar; the whole staff had rainbow afro wigs on, the pool was filled with awesome floaty toys, there was neat music and flashing lights going on. We had some drinks and two orders of this delicious Spanish Mushroom appetizer. My drink basically tasted like strawberry milk, it wasn't as epic as the Frozen Space Cookie that Nina got.

We changed into our suits, swam around and hung out in the pool for a while. The most fun toys were giant orca whales and giant crocodiles that you could clamber up on and float around on top of. Nina kinda wanted to hang around longer in case more people showed up to the party, but we ended up leaving cause we thought that it probably wouldn't get many more people than were already there. We walked over to what Alex was told was a huge shopping district, and browsed the streets. It was mostly food and massages that were being sold. I bought 400 grams of roasted chestnuts from a street vendor, and we ate a mediocre meal at a mediterranean place. Afterwards, taxi back, and we went to sleep fairly shortly after returning.

The next morning we caught a taxi to a Deer Park. We were there 15 minutes before it opened, so we hung around until it did. It was a fairly small park, but we got to see a huge herd of deer. They came up super near the fence because of this family who was there at the same time and tossing them pieces of bread. They also had quite a few mousedeer enclosures. Mousedeer are so freaking cute, I would love to own one. Afterwards, we sat by a nearby lake and evaluated plans. We had originally intended to go to the butterfly park, but then realized it might not be a good idea while covered in bug spray.

Instead, we walked over to the nearby National Museum. It was really interesting; we learned things about Malaysia's history. We only had time to explore the two galleries on the bottom floor (there were two more on the top) before we had to leave to make it to the Sky Bar in time for the sunday brunch deal. Basically, for about $50 US we got a fantastic buffet lunch, access to the hotel's swimming pool, a fifteen minute shoulder massage, and unlimited cocktails from 12-3. The parts of the meal that I could eat were garlic bread, gazpacho soup, amazing samosas, a vegetable omelette, and french fries. None of the drinks we got really wowed me, but they were good enough.

We swam around in the pool for a bit, but it ended up getting kind of cold as clouds gathered. There was a lot of thunder, but we didn't really see any lightning. Probably because we were in the hottub around 3, it ended up taking forever for us to get our desert and bill. We asked about desert 2-3 times over 45 minutes and then we finally got it around 4: an amazing coconut pudding with carmelized pineapple, a banana crepe each, and some pandan / lime ice cream. Then finally our bill. Wed got out of the hotel around 4:30, which sort of sucked because we had wanted to go to a flea market that closed at 5. Our intentions were to take public transportation back, so we started walking to the nearest station.

However, while walking, the sky basically opened up and water started pouring from the sky. We hid under bushes to evaluate the situation, then found a blue tent and sprinted over towards it. We gave it about five minutes or so to see if it would pass quickly, and then started to try and flag down a cab. It ended up taking about ten minutes or so to do it because almost all of the taxis were driving on the other part of this three way intersection we were near. Eventually we got one and went back to the hostel.

Once at the hostel, we dried off a bit and told Freeman about our adventures at the bars he recommended. We had some time to kill before going to catch our evening train, so we decided to wander around Petaling Street, a famous shopping area in Chinatown (where our hostel was located). We got a couple souvenirs / gifts and Nina bought a purse. We tried some jackfruit pieces and their texture was meh, it tastes kinda like a melon. We also managed to finally find someone selling cut pieces of durian wrapped in plastic. I bought more roasted chestnuts, but these ones were inferior as their outsides were all sticky and made my hands a mess while eating them. Alex and Nina both bought satay from street vendors and ate them while wandering.

We ended up being kind of in a rush to get to the train station; we had to pick up our tickets before 8pm even though the train to Butterworth/Penang didn't leave unil 10. It was close, but we made it in time. I found a restaurant that had a vegetarian section; we sat down there and I got some fried rice and veggie-meat satay. The rice was too spicy and not that great, but the veggie chicken satay was totally amazing. The pumpkin soup Nina ordered was fantastic as well, even though I don't like pumpkin.

Our train ended up being delayed over an hour, and I sat and read while waiting. Once we were on, I was only one chapter away from finishing my book, but after I did I felt incredibly motion sick from reading while moving. I sat for a few minutes hoping it would go away, then just threw up in the bathroom and felt massively better. Fell asleep rather easily on my bed in the sleeper car.

Singapore - 2 days

For our first day in Singapore, Alex and I were mostly on our own - Nina had to work both Thursday and Friday, but she had a lighter day on Friday. We decided to go to the Singapore Zoo, as it's a pretty acclaimed place to visit and we hadn't been to any zoos thus far. We took public subways and busses over there (they have an amazing public transporation system, super efficient), ate some pizzas, then wandered around for a few hours. I learned some stuff and saw some animals not common in American zoos. There was a really cool part where we were in this enclosure where some lemurs were, and they were super unafraid of humans and hung out really close to us, people were even touching them - though we didn't, cause the sign said not to :(. We also rode elephants, which was alright, a little scary. We didn't get any real pictures of that though since we were both on an elephant at the same time.

After the zoo, we headed towards this place called Haw Par Villa where we were going to meet Nina around 5:30pm. We stopped at a mall on our way because we thought we had enough time - bought ear plugs, a pasta snack, aloe vera for my sunburn, more sunscreen, and Alex got his glasses adjusted because they were being really annoying to him. We ended up being a bit late, but we still had enough time to get through the Ten Courts of Hell exhibit before it closed at 6pm. Luckily, the rest of the park was open for another hour. We went mainly because of the Ten Courts, but the rest of it ended up being super amazing. Basically it's like a park / garden where there are a MILLION statues and different sculptures of random mythology or cool animals. Nina had come with her boss, Ray, and her coworker Andrew. Ray posed us a bunch of times to take cool pics, and Nina and I scrambled up on top of quite a few animal statues. Our most epic one was a golden deer that was perched rather high off the ground to start with, though Nina said a giant gorilla was harder to climb.

Sadly, my camera had run out of power while Alex and I were at the zoo, so I didn't get to take any of my own pics. :( But I'll steal the ones from Alex's camera and I'm sure I'll get some back from Ray eventually.

Once the park closed at 7, Alex and I showed them how to get back to the main part of town on public transit (Ray usually took cabs, but with 5 we would need two). We got off in Little India for dinner. Alex bought a belt when we were wandering around the streets, because he had lost one in Brastagi, but this new one broke like two minutes after he bought it. Ray bought us all a delicious Indian meal, and I was incredibly satisfied by my food, it was actually mild enough that I could eat it all.

Afterwards we went to this store called Mustafa's, which is GIGANTIC. It had multiple floors and seemed to stretch for blocks. We wandered through it for a really long time trying to find shoes because Nina's new sandals (which we had picked up for her in Brastagi) were killing her feet. We eventually found em, and she eventually chose some shoes that were decent. Ray bought some interesting juice drinks for us all to try, and paid for a van taxi that we stumbled upon to take us back to the hotel. Then, sleep.

The next day Alex and my morning adventure was: find a place to do laundry! Conveniently, there was a self-service place 20 minutes away on public transit. Google maps also showed a vegetarian Chinese food place there, which sounded exciting. We headed over with our clothes, started laundry, then attempted to find the food place. After a ton of wandering and asking locals where it was, the eventual conclusion was that it was no longer existing. :(. So instead we went to a food court where one of the places was labeled "vegetarian." Food courts in Singapore are basically like, small shopping areas with tables where all the people who used to be street vendors were set up so that they would be off the sidewalks. I got some bland noodles and a cabbage dish with a fake meat in it that I didn't like too much. Also, a can of cold chrysanthemum tea. It was around this point that I started consuming massive amounts of that. So delicious. Then we switched laundry and hung around at the place until it was dry.

After our laundry was done, we went back to the hotel and had perfect timing - we ran into Nina, Ray, and Andrew when they were on their way out for lunch. We went with them because I hadn't been fully satisfied with my noodles earlier, and we were waiting for Nina before doing our next activity anyway. The place we went only had one vegetarian item other than rice, lady fingers (okra) with garlic sauce, so I got that and it was also kinda meh. The service at the place was really bad, too. We had to order our drinks three separate times, and they didn't even come until after we had gotten our food.

After lunch, Alex, Nina and I caught a taxi from the hotel to a nature reserve in central Singapore. We did a 1.5 mile-ish hike to the highest point in Singapore and back. It was alright; fairly standard rainforesty area and I don't like hiking all that much. There were a bunch of monkies in the parking lot, which was cool, but we didn't see many while actually hiking. We had read earlier how to avoid monkey aggression, and were careful not to make eye contact, keep our distance, and not bare our teeth at all. They didn't pay much attention to us.

We taxied back to the hotel, then changed really fast and jumped in the pool really quick before we had to leave for the airport. Nina and I had been craving nachoes, so we ordered them from the pool bar, but they were very strange and made with Doritos. O_o. Whatevs, they were pretty satisfying. Quickly changed, Nina dropped off part of her luggage at the Fairmount desk, and then we were off to the airport. The taxi driver we had there was a very bad driver, and by the time we got there I felt super nauseous. I bought a grilled cheese with tomato after my stomach calmed down, and then two bao for desert - one filled with lotus paste, one filled with red bean. All was delicious.

Our flight was super short, only like 45 minutes, and then we got a taxi from the airport to KL proper. At first we thought we had been overcharged because we had purchased a taxi from an airport booth (came to like 25 USD) but then it turned out that KL was like 75km away from the airport, sooo actually not that bad of a deal. We checked into our hostel, went online with the wifi there for a bit. This guy whose name we later learned was Freeman (I have no idea how to spell that name) talked about how despite all the hype, the best views of the city weren't from the KL Tower or the Twins but from these two hotel bars, Luna and Sky bar. We chatted with him a bit, then went to our beds and slept. We had three beds in a dorm-like room of about 12. Alex and I had been a little unsure about staying in a hostel, as neither of us had ever done it, but in total it ended up being a really great experience, everyone there was fantastically nice. The bed I slept on the first night was right under the vent, though, so I was rather cold (the next night I traded beds with Alex).

Brastagi - 2 days

We woke up at like 5 or 6 the next morning to get ready for our epic hike. Breakfast was okay, I had some fresh fruit and toast. At around 7:30 we met up with our guide in the hotel lobby. I stayed and chatted with him, while Alex took a quick motorbike ride with someone from the hotel to go to an atm. We took a short bus ride to the base of the trail, then started the hike. Most of the way up was a paved road, which wasn't too bad.

There were lots of interesting plants the guide stopped to point out to us. My favorite was a fern-like plant where when you touched it, the leaves retract to the stem. There was also a plant that had seed pods that exploded when you squeezed them. We saw a cinammon and acacia tree on our way up also, which were neat. Apparently the road was paved so nicely because loggers need easy access to the trees at the top, which was kinda sad. There was also trash everywhere. We passed by an empty little shack where the guide said a shop used to exist, but there weren't enough tourists anymore to support it.

After a while we had to climb up a dirt trail to the side, then we came to this really cool rocky area with a crater and lots of places smoke was coming out. The sulfur smell was strong but I didn't find it super unpleasant. We FINALLY made it up to the top of this little peak, then sat down to eat our lunch. I was made a vegetarian fried rice by our hotel, which was actually rather delicious. However, there were A MILLION TINY BUGS EVERYWHERE. They kept flying in my face, behind my glasses, in my food, crawling down the neck of my shirt. It was probably one of my worst experiences of the trip. I had no problem with them while hiking up or down, it was just when sitting still with food that they were so unbearable. I applied copious amounts of more bugspray, ate as much of my fried rice as I could, and had a couply bananas that the guide brought.

Alex wanted to climb to the top of a different peak, cos it was technically a little higher and looked pretty easy, so he spent like 30 minutes running over there to do that while I chatted with our guide. He was a really cool dude, passionate about nature, and was talking about how sometimes he would pick up a ton of trash on the mountain and the other guides would never help him, just would think he was crazy for doing so. When he came back, we chatted a little with a Dutch couple that had been hiking along the trail a bit ahead of us for most of the way up. Then, we started the descent.

The descent was much shorter, about 2km vs 7km, but was rather difficult going. It was primarily steps, but they were very steep and uneven and there were often places where steps were missing and we had to jump down large gaps. At one point there was a HUGE fallen tree blocking the entire path, we had to pass our bags through to the guide and then squeeze ourselves through, grabbing on to hanging rope vines for support on the steep side past the trunk. I was insanely sore and exhausted, and my legs were kinda shaky, they weren't used to that sort of exertion. Alex had a really hard time with this part because he isn't very flexible, and it was kinda fun and amusing that there was actually something related to hiking that I could do quicker and more easily than him. It was at least fairly cool, since we were rather covered by the rain forest and not exposed to any direct sun. It was also a cloudy day.

At the bottom we had to walk about ten minutes through town before reaching the hot springs. Changed into our swimming suits, then sank gratefully into the water. Basically it was a little facility that had pools fed by the hot springs running off the volcano. Some of the pools were way too hot to get into. It was nice to rest there for a few minutes, but when I was reapplying sunscreen before getting in I missed a few spots (my shoulder / neck area and arms) and so later I ended up getting a sunburn. It was mostly mild except for the left part of my neck, that got super red.

Once we had sufficiently soaked, we walked for a while to a bus that would take us back to Brastagi. The busses in Indonesia were not very good quality; they were like 60's vans that had sideways seats in the back, very cramped and bumpy. We just made it back to the hotel when it started raining some, our timing was very lucky to get the coolness of impending rain without having to get wet at all. Since the hotel didn't have much vegetarian food, I just ordered french fries with cheese in the room. It was really difficult to get the person on the phone to understand we wanted "french fries" and not "fried rice." After eating, I took a couple hour nap, ordered more french fries, took a shower, and passed out - I was completely exhausted and sore after hiking.

The next day we woke up pretty late since we didn't have many plans other than traveling. We ate breakfast at the hotel, went online a bit, and packed up to leave. We took a shared taxi leaving at 11 back up north to Medan. It was more expensive than it should have been, but we paid extra for the convenience of having our hotel set it up for us. They recommended leaving that early because sometimes traffic was pretty bad, and we had a flight to catch at 4:50, but we ended up getting to the airport around 2. Medan's airport is probably the worst I've ever seen. No airconditioning really, and not even any restaurants, just little snack booths, and only a few chairs. We got some snacks and I read more or less until our plane left for Singapore.

Once we got to Singapore, we grabbed some dinner (I had delicious Indian) and then took an airport shuttle bus over to Nina's hotel, which was the really fancy five star Fairmount hotel. We hung out in the lobby for about an hour. Since she didn't have a phone on her, we had prearranged that that was where she was supposed to meet us around 8:30 or 9. But my estimate was off, we ended up getting there like 10:30. She had an event to go to that night, so we weren't sure when she'd be back. We were somewhat worried that she had already came back and gone up to her room, and we weren't able to get online to see if she was on aim. Eventually around 11:30 she arrived, though, and everything was good. We went with her, her coworker Andrew, and this girl Kate who also was working the conference to the famous Long Bar in the Raffles Hotel. It was where the Singapore Sling cocktail was invented, which is apparently moderately famous, at least in Singapore. I didn't get one myself, but Kate let us all taste hers, it was okay.

After that, back up to the hotel and I got to sleep in half of Nina's room's awesomely amazing comfy king bed. We weren't even sneaking into her room, she had told the front desk and we were registered as guests and got our own key, it was pretty sweet.

Samosir - 2 days

Our Medan hotel was pretty nice. I ordered a fried tofu dish and some lady who worked there was really nice and warned me there was shrimp bits in the breading, but she could get it made vegetarian for me. The dipping sauce was SO SPICY though, oh my god. Basically Indonesian food has thus far been way spicier than Vietnamese food. Alex and I also tried this beer called Bintang, which was rather tasty. We wanted to buy massages since they're pretty cheap, but they only had one massage therapist so I let Alex get one and I fell asleep.

In the morning we had to find a ride to Parapat, a town on the edge of Lake Toba. Our hotel didn't arrange one way rides, so we left it, and someone at the door tried to sell us a private taxi for 700k (like $90ish). We haggled him down to 500k, but we didn't want to pay more than 450, so when he refused we just walked away. A random tuk tuk driver stopped us on a corner and offered to take us to Lake Toba. We had a bit of confused conversation, his English wasn't very good, but somehow we thought he'd give us a ride to Parapat for 300k. As it turned out, however, he gave us a ride to some random place and wanted 30k. But he had some English speaking friends there that told us where we could find a shared taxi (that's originally what we wanted to do, but no one picked up when we tried calling numbers that we had). We got a ride to a place for 40k, and from there paid 90k each for a ride to Parapat.

The minivan ended up taking about 4 hours. We stopped in a little town and I bought a bag of rice cakes, which were pretty bland but vegetarian at least. There are tons of delicious bottled teas in Asia, we need more of those in the US. I slept for about half of the ride, then our driver got kind of lost driving us to the ferry station. The ferry station we were at was very touristy, but it said the next ferry wasn't leaving until 5:45pm, and it was only 3pm when we got there. We knew there was another harbor, so we decided to try to get there. We mistakenly thought that the harbor was called Tomok (because the sign had two listings of ferry times, but actually Tomok was the name of the harbor on Samosir, where we were trying to get). We hopped in a small bus that took us over to a different ferry station, where we were able to get on a ferry that left just 30 minutes later.

The ferry ride was super beautiful - Lake Toba is gorgeous. Once we got in to Tomok, we took another bus over to our hotel (Tabo Cottages), which was also absolutely charming. Tons of small little cottage places, a beautiful grassy area and tons of fantastic places to just lounge around near the lake shore. Dinner was delicious, I got a rice souffle (spicy), a hot milk with honey, some very crispy fried tempeh with lime juice, and more Bintang. We also tried tapioca chips, but I prefer them sweet to salty. Afterwards, we bought massages from the hotel. They were awesome, then we slept.

I woke up around 7, and Alex and I just hung around for a bit since we got a free breakfast at 8. It was super delicious, I had awesome chewy bread with butter, avocados, and an amazing cheese I wish we had asked the name of. We also ordered a cup of Kopi Luwak coffee, which either is way less delicious than the hype or our cup was poorly made. It was super grainy. We arranged a driven tour for the day, and we left around 9 with the driver.

The first place we stopped was a very tiny village called Ambarita. There were like, six traditional Batak houses (though smaller than the traditional ones used to be) and one of them was set aside to be a museum. A guide led us through the museum and told us fascinating stories about the Batak people, such as how strongly they valued having babies. A common dream for a woman was to have 33 babies, a sacred number, but usually they only hit 10-20 before they couldn't have any more. The Batak people were cannibals, but only in certain instances. This was because prisoners who committed certain crimes (rape, murder) were considered animals, and killed. Thus, since they were just animals, villagers could eat them if they wanted to. We were shown the stone chairs where judgment was passed and then the other set of stone furniture where people were killed, it was very interesting.

Next we went to another small Batak village where we saw some traditional Batak dancing. Then to another village where an old lady with really bloody teeth/gums was sewing traditional blankets. Our driver gave us some avocados and this nut thing whose name I don't know how to spell. The nuts were delicious, though. After that we went to a hot springs, and Alex got a bit to eat (I didn't totally trust the place we stopped at for lunch to be vegetarian). We drove back down to the southern part of the island and saw the grave of a Batak king, and then we were done on Samosir and had to catch a ferry back to Parapat to get to Brastagi before sleeping.

Hanging out at the Tomok ferry port was really amusing. This Batak guy was chilling there with a couple kids and his wife and we talked to them. At one point, he caught a beetle with his bare hands and tied a string around it, giving it to his young daughter. She ran around holding the string as the beetle buzzed loudly and angrily above her head - it was really amazing and hilarious, I caught part of it on video. Afterwards, I shared some coconut wafers with them and the man showed us some pictures on his phone of a fish with tusks and a giant catfish he caught in Lake Toba. Eventually our ferry arrived and we left back, then bought ourselves a shared taxi ride to Brastagi.

The ride to Brastagi was AWFUL. The roads were super twisty and not well paved, I felt more motion sick than I ever had in my life. Somehow I managed to survive the three hours of this, but I was also starving since I essentially skipped lunch. We checked into our hotel and I had a plate of some spaghetti / vegetable thing, and we booked a guide for our hike the next day and a ride back to the airport two days from then. Then we passed out, exhausted.

Ho Chi Minh - Day 2

Woke up nice and early to be out the door around 7 for our Mekong Delta boat tour. There were like 9 other people on the tour, and our guide was very nice and spoke fluent English. They were very considerate about my vegetarianism, and I got a nice croissant with lettuce and tomato for breakfast. The boat ride was very smooth and I didn't get seasick at all, it was very interesting looking at all the run-down houses on the edge of the river and the plants once we got further into the more rural areas.

Our first stop was at a Buddhist pagoda, where we were shown around and told stories about various aspects of Vietnamese tradition. One interesting story the guide told us was about how, traditionally, a new wife lived with her husband's family for three years after the marriage. She was always the first to wake up and last to go to sleep and had to help take care of everyone. After the Buddhist temple, we went further on the boat and stopped at a rustic village. First we walked around the farmland, it took about 45 minutes and we saw lots of crops, interesting tropical plants (pineapple bushes, banana and coconut trees, etc).

Then we boated a few minutes away and got off at a more trade-oriented part of the town. We walked through a super crowded market where people were selling all sorts of fascinating things. This and the crop area we walked around seemed very un-touristy, and was a neat glimpse at how people actually lived. The grossest thing at the market was a bowl of living frogs. On closer inspection, their eyes were missing and there were only bloody sockets, and their skin was super pink - it looked like they had been skinned alive. Completely awful. There were also bowls of live fish and pens crowded with little chicken and duck babies. One of the catfish decided to jump out at us, and an Australian man in front of me was tossed a bucket by the person manning the stall. He was able to catch it and return it to the bowl, which was impressive.

It was somewhat drizzly while walking around, but it started pouring near the end of our walk through the market. We walked under a more stable shelter (lots of the booths had only cloth coverings, we stood under a bigger metal one) until it conveniently ended a few minutes later.

We then boated over to another nearby area for lunch and visiting a Cao Dai temple. Cao Daism is fascinating, and I had never heard of it before we visited the temple. It's basically a Unitarian-esque religion, that values strongly Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Confucionism, etc. The temple was one of the prettiest buildings I had ever seen in my life. It was painted in gorgeous rich colors and looked so bright and happy.

After we saw that, we had lunch at a second Buddhist pagoda; this one also served as an orphange. Our guide told us that some portion of our ticket price is donated to this orphanage as charity, which I'm guessing is why they were willing to cook all of us a meal. They were insanely considerate of my vegetarianism. Not only could I eat two of the main dishes, but they cooked me a separate little dish as well. The main dishes I could eat were a very spicy vegetable soup with bamboo, pineapple, tomato, and okra, and a fried rice dish with tiny green peppers and carrots chopped up small that was somehow tasty even though I like neither green peppers or carrots. I also was made a dish of well-seasoned tofu and cooked lotus root. They were considerate enough to warn me the salad had fish sauce in it. There were also kittens roaming around, one stayed close to our table, mewling pathetically and loudly and rubbing against our legs. A British girl beside me felt bad for it and fed it some rice.

Then the boat ride back - this took about an hour and a half. It was raining pretty steadily, so most of us sat inside the little cabin area instead of out in the front where it was more open. We ate fresh lychee purchased from the market, along with a relative of lychee whose name I forgot and some mangosteen. I learned that mangosteen is like the BEST FRUIT EVER. I had like, three of them. They taste like a mixture between peaches and lychee and I hope I get the chance to eat like a million more before going back home.

Once back to our hotel, we decided to wander around the streets near our hotel. It was fun just walking by all the different shops. I bought a laptop bag because of weight limits on airplanes - on the way here I learned my bag could only be 7kg, or about 15lbs. Mine was 18 to start with, and I intended to acquire some things. You're usually allowed one carry-on and one "small bag" to stow under the seat. So I figured I could put my heaviest things in my laptop / small bag, and then my backpack would be light enough. Hopefully it'll work out; as far as today's flight goes, though, my limit was 10kg and they didn't even bother to weigh my backpack. It's nice to have just in case, though. Only cost me $10 to get, and I bet I could have haggled them down cheaper.

We also bought snacks from a bakery, and cream puffs from a cream puff store. The cream puff flavors were so weird! We wanted to get a durian flavored one, but they were out, so we got a thing of 9 mini vanilla cream puffs and one creampuff with strawberry flavor and cheddar cheese on top. It was too weird of a combination, I made Alex eat most of it. I'm going to accidentally make him fat on this trip with how often there are delicious things I want to eat, but can't finish. Oops. After we felt we had wandered sufficiently, we stopped at an Indian restaurant and I had some of the best Indian food I've ever had. The okra and peas in my dishes tasted insanely fresh and amazing. Only problem was that it was a bit too spicy for my tastes.

We had considered drinking a little and playing pool at a bar we had passed in our wanderings, but we were both too exhausted and Alex felt like he had had enough calories for the day. So back to the hotel, where we showered and took care of random stuff online.

We decided to book a different hotel than the one we had chosen initially for Medan; the hostel we had booked seemed really sketchy and had bad reviews. So we got a nicer place, which is actually kind of important because we're probably going to be spending most of this evening hanging out there. Basically, the only thing we're doing today is traveling. We woke up around 5:30 and headed to the airport (and accidentally got scammed by a taxi whose meter had to have been running way faster than it should have - our ride cost $15, it should have been like $5. lesson: do not let people at hotels get you a taxi, know the reputable companies and pick the taxi out yourself). We had a 9am flight and I typed up most of this while we're sitting around waiting in Singapore for our 4:50pm flight from here to Medan. Medan isn't a great city, so we plan to stick to our hotel other than dinner. Early tomorrow morning - off to Parapat, Lake Toba, and Samosir.

Ho Chi Minh - Day 1

So the flights ended up being not too bad. I was basically able to sleep for most of the first 11 hours of our 13 hour first plane ride. I woke up briefly every 2-3 hours and played around for a bit on the in-flight entertainment system, which was fun to do considering that's what I'll be working on once my job starts up. I read for basically the whole second plane trip, from Taipei to Ho Chi Minh, and I'm on page 200 of the first Game of Thrones book now. Super good so far. When we got to Vietnam, I was a little worried because I had realized at LAX that I left the passport photos I took back in my Irvine apartment (needed them for a visa), but I was pretty sure I had read they would take the photo there for a small fee and they were able to do that no problem.

We decided to just use one of the taxis advertising near the exit of the airport, even though it was a bit expensive compared to average rates, we paid $9 for about a 30 minute ride to our hotel. Once out of the taxi, this guy tried to convince us to stay at his hotel instead (not notable because of the occurrence, everyone on the street harasses tourists to spend money), but when we said no he helped point us towards our hotel. After we had dropped off our luggage inside and went back outside, he was waiting to talk to us more. We mentioned we were going to lunch at a vegetarian place (one across the street had a note that they had veggie options) and he offered to show us a better one. We agreed, and he led us over a couple streets to a cool little shop. His name was Bamboo, and he was very friendly.

Alex and I ate lunch at the store. I *tried* to order fried okra and a cabbage blossom with a garlic sauce, but the waiter didn't speak much English and when I pointed at the menu he messed up and brought me fried onions and a vegetable plate instead. The plate had cauliflower, carrots, and onions, so it was edible anyway although it had a light sprinkling of a peppery peanut mix on some of it that I wasn't super fond of. While we were eating, a guy from Spain sat down at the restaurant and amazed many locals by playing an accordion. After lunch, we originally planned to go to this tourist park thing but when we had looked it up in the hotel earlier it was a bit too far away to go to in just an afternoon. Since we didn't have any plans, and we liked the guy Bamboo who had helped us out some, we asked him for some recommendations of where to visit.

He offered to take us around and show us a few places (not as sketchy as it sounds - a lot of people sell rides around the city on their motorbike). Vietnam traffic is pretty nuts, way more motorbikes than cars and tons of honking because that basically seemed to mean "I'm going to drive past you now, please don't hit me." It was really fun riding through the city that way. Bamboo took us first to the War Memorial Museum, which was really interesting, obviously way biased against the United States, and incredibly depressing. We stayed a while reading through the exhibits, then he drove us over to a Buddhist temple. It was super pretty, and had two ponds filled with turtles and fish. Next was a handicraft factory where they made lacquered plates and art work (they were either hand-painted or in-laid with mother of pearl / eggshells), and I accidentally fell completely in love with a small piece of art made of eggshells and had to buy it. Finally he took us to see these two cool buildings, a Notre Dame Catholic church and the very historic post office.

After that back to our hotel, and then of course we had made the very silly mistake of not negotiating rates upfront. For some reason even though both of us knew that piece of advice, we had assumed that Bamboo not mentioning anything meant we would just pay him whatever we wanted to for his help. We had planned on just giving him about 100k dong ($5) and he wanted 600k ($30). His reasoning was based on an unspoken rate of $5 an hour per person for three hours. Whatever, it was a little pricey when compared to the average rate of renting a moto driver, but he was nice and it wasn't really that much money and we'll remember to negotiate upfront definitely in the future.

We went inside for a bit, then managed to summon up the energy to feed ourselves and find Alex a phone. He wanted to get a prepaid one so he could be reachable. We found one partway down the street for a decent price, and also bought some outlet converters (conveniently unnecessary in our first hotel, but will be probably needed in later ones). Then we went to dinner, and I ordered a vegetarian crispy noodles + veggie/tofu dish but the sauce on it tasted really bad so I didn't eat much of it. I had some of the bruschetta we ordered for appetizer, and part of an avocado shake which was fun to try but made me realize that avocado and sweet things really don't go together well. Had some of Alex's rice, too. We also picked up a motion sickness medicine from a pharmacy next to our hotel, which we might end up needing for either our boat tour tomorrow or possibly our budget airplane rides coming up internal to Asia.

Totally time to sleep, now.