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.