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.
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