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.