Sumatra

(30/1/2007-10/2/2007)

Despite having to get up at 7 to get the ferry, it didn't leave until 10. It was only a small passenger one, and moved quite a lot in the waves. As the inside was filled with the usual dreadful music, we spent most of the day on deck until it got too hot. It was pretty boring, especially as the journey lasted 9 hours instead of the 4 or 5 it was meant to, so when we finally arrived in Indonesia it was too late to get the bus to where we wanted to go so we had to spend a night in Medan. All the hotels were pretty crappy, so we decided to take the $2 or $3 dollar one, consisting of a mattress on the floor of a room with cardboard walls in a place called Spoutnik, as it was only for one night. To make things better we had a desert of some insanely rich cake/pancake thing with chocolate, peanut and a non-cheesy cheese and Sally being able to speak Indonesian made things alot easier than they had been in some other places, as well as more interesting as conversations weren't limited to basic English.

Where we wanted to go was Bukit Lawang to see the orangutang rehabilitation centre, but we didn't have time to do a full jungle trek as the guides at the hotel tried to persuade us to do, and certainly not one pushed on us like that. So the next day, after having a lie in to make up of being woken at some stupid hour by the mosque next door, with the help of a guide who was going back there anyway (he also wanted to get us to go on a trek with him, but didn't push too hard so it wasn't too annoying), we took first a betchak (kind of sidecar thing), then a bemo (minivan), then a minibus, and finally another betchak to get there. It was a small village by some rapids with several hotel type things, only a few open as tourism has kind of collapsed in Sumatra and Indonesia in general in recent years. We had the usual search for accommodation, taking longer as everything was spaced out along the bank, passing monkeys playing by one of the cafés as we went past, and settled for a room at the top of a two story hut with a basic but clean bathroom, a balcony with chairs, and no electricity but an oil lamp instead. It was so peaceful there in the jungle that the next day we managed to sleep until 4 in the afternoon! We were only woken when a group of macaques (small grey monkeys) came and ate durian (a large, disgusting smelling fruit) on our balcony and the rocks outside out window. Once we got up we walked down to the inn nearest the orangutan centre, although it was too late to see the feeding there, and had breakfast, during which on the opposite bank of the river a mother orangutan came down for a drink with her baby.

Having missed them on our first day, we made sure to get up in time for the feeding of the orangutans the next day. to reach it we had to cross the river by means of a boat pulled across my a rope around another rope spanning the rapids, which was quite fun in itself, and then after paying we were lead up a hill by two rangers to the platform. They called to the orangutans, who soon came to get their bananas, about seven or eight in total including a little young one, a mother and her baby, and one the ranger told us was pregnant, as well as some macaques trying to steal some food as well. The orangutans here were one that had been kept in captivity and had been rehabilitated, so they were semi-wild and came right up to us, one even trying to steal Sally's bag as it thought there might be bananas in it (unlikely, she hates bananas). It was so good that after playing Scrabblecards and having some pancakes, we came back for the afternoon feed. About the same number came, including a male, and this time I was able to play with the baby orangutan, holding it's hand and pulling back and forth. It's mother got very friendly with the ranger, trying to climb up him and get a piggy-back, and when that didn't work because she was too heavy she came all the way down the hill with us and sat watching them build a new rope bridge, which the ranger told us he didn't understand why they were building it "just for the queen of Spain" as then the orangutans will be able to get across the river. We finished the day by renting a couple of tubes and going tubing down the rapids, a much more informal, and certainly more dangerous way to do it than what we'd done in Laos, as the water flowed much faster, but it was pretty fun.

We decided to leave the next day, but luckily when we got up there were some Thomas Leaf monkeys in the trees nearby, which are cool black and white ones with tufts of hair like Mohawks. So that was a good start to an otherwise boring day, as we had to go all the way back to Medan through the rain, changing buses halfway, cross the city to the other bus station where (after reassuring the stall owners that we weren't Muslim, and trying to explain that we had no religion) we had some pork and got the bus to Lake Toba, a huge water filled crater of an extinct volcano. From the town on the shore we got a ferry to the island where we wanted to stay, foolishly listening to what some people had told us at Bukit Lawang and getting off at the Reggae bar, which was full, or just didn't want us to stay, so we walked down to another one called Abadi which only had two disgusting grotty rooms, but as we were tired and had made the mistake of not leaving out bags at the top before coming down the steep steps to look at the rooms, we took one of them. Combined with some ridiculously expensive noodles we had for dinner and our neighbours playing the harmonica badly late into the night, the next morning we almost felt like leaving the island and going to our next destination. However, instead we decided to spoil ourselves and walked to the nicest sounding hotel in the Lonely Planet Guide, Toba Cottages. There they gave us an off-season discount, so for $20 we basically had a house: the room was in a building built in the local traditional style, and was huge, the steps in it up to a platform where there was a mattress and a great view of the lake, the was a four poster bed, a fridge, some seats, a balcony with seats and a hammock, really nice clean bathroom with a bath and hot water, and a buffet breakfast was included, which turned out to be really nice as the place was run by a German and had a German style bakery with (obviously) German style bread, tasting even better after the woolly processed stuff we'd had to eat since leaving former French colonies.

The rest of the day was just a productive: we walked to the King's Grave, one of the supposed attractions of the island, which in itself was not that exciting but we got to see some of the island (which is really big, you could easily spend a week or two going for walks in its hills), and when we got back some other guests were watching Pirates of the Carribean 2, so we did as well, then had tempe (traditional Indonesian food made from soya) burgers, then sat on our platform reading for a while with beers kept nice and cool in our fridge. The next day we got up early to get bus tickets to Bukit Tinggi, our next destination, to enjoy our buffet breakfast and our room until check out time. As the bus wasn't until the evening, we left our bags and walked to the other "attraction", the more interesting stone chairs where judging used to take place, then came back for a swim and to get the ferry from the hotel's garden. The bus was the usual horrible South-East Asian bus journey with terrible music at stupid times of the night, screaming babies, and this time the added novelty of going along mountain roads that only seemed to be half build and so the bus could go at only about 5 miles per hour in some places...

Amazingly we got there only 2 hours late, after crossing the equator sometime during the night, and had a bit of a walk into the city, some some steps to the top of a hill, then down some others again. We had some breakfast and did the usual search for a hotel, finding one where the owner seemed to have taken a liking to us so gave us a discount. It was an OK room, without windows but not too close to the mosque, and the owner made us breakfast of fried chocolate sandwiches and tea every morning. We then went to the zoo not to see the live animals, because I hate zoos, but to see the freaky stuffed ones in the museum such as two headed goats and eight legged cows. From there we walked to the "fort" which was just an unimpressive white building, then on to a park with a view on a canyon and some tunnels the Japanese had forced locals to build while they were occupying, which were not nearly as fascinating as they sounded, and finally we had a look around the market. The day after we had thought of going to a nearby lake, but got up to late, so we had some drinks and played Scrabblecards for a bit then went for a walk, got some fruit and other snacks for the 24+ hour bus journey we had the next day, and had rendang, a local dish of spicy beef, slightly spoilt by an annoying guy trying to practice English, or get us on a tour, or something.

Our bus journey the next day started at 9am and was to go down half the length of the island to the Southern tip at Banda Lampung, so we didn't get there until about noon the following day. The bus didn't finish there though but continued to Jakarta, so it dropped us at the outskirts of the city, then we had to navigate the complicated system of bemos to get to the area with travel agents where we thought there might be hotels. We went to one travel agent to see how much their tour to the national park we wanted to go to would be, but it was stupidly expensive so we left. After a while of wandering around looking lost trying to find a hotel, an Indonesian guy in a fancy 4x4 pulled up and offered to help us because he was "a good guy", which turned out to be true, even if he claimed that God had told him to help us rather than him doing it of his own accord... He drove us around and found a reasonably cheap but decent enough hotel for us called Hotel Lusy and told us how to get to the national park, said goodbye and left. We spent the rest of the day getting bus tickets to Bandung in Java for the next day, then went wandering for snacks in a supermarket, discovering the disturbing existence of durian flavoured condoms, getting bright coloured cakes and iced tea in a plastic bag rather than a cup, and meeting a friendly betchak driver who wanted his photo taken with us, so we got it printed for him in a nearby photo shop. We finished the day with a tasty meal of pempek, a kind of dumpling.

As our bus didn't leave until the evening and the Way Kambas National Park that we wanted to go to was supposedly only 2hrs by bus, we decided to do that the next day. We got up nice and early, got first one bus, then another to get to the bus station, a third bus to a second bus station where we could get a minibus to a road and there get two ojek (motorbike taxis) to the park itself, so we didn't arrive until about 2 in the afternoon. This gave us time to have a 30 minute ride on one of the elephants they have, wandering through the bush and discovering that riding elephants is actually quite uncomfortable, at least the small type they have there. We also got to play a bit with a baby elephant and watch them bathing, and it was all quite fun even though I don't really like to see animals being used for entertainment like that, but we didn't have time to go to see the Sumatran rhinos which have some kind of rehabilitation centre there, as we had to get the motorbikes back to a small town in order to get a bus back in time for our night bus, but luckily that didn't take as long as getting there had.