Two weeks in Bali behind us and it was definitely time to get out of there and see a bit more of the rest of Indonesia... and to be honest, we were starting to miss people stopping us in the street to take photos.
From Denpasar, we flew to Jakarta and then Medan, in North Sumatra. Having a large American man drop his carry-on baggage onto my head as we left the plane did not get things off to a good start, but when we were met at the airport by the first of many of Sinead's extended family things quickly picked up. We were whisked off to an Auntie's house nearby, to learn that it's completely normal for a middle-class family in Indonesia to have 3 or 4 live-in housekeepers and to have between 2 and 22 guests over for coffee at any given time. After spending one night with the three of us sharing a bed (this is also pretty standard practice in Indonesia) we travelled down to Lake Toba, a few hours south. The smell of the bus station was not to our liking.
The lake is absolutely amazing, and we were also pretty happy to be staying for free in Sinead's great-aunt's enormous hotel, although it's a shame there aren't more people who visit Lake Toba as it's a really nice place.
Incidentally, the great-aunt was exactly as you would imagine an Indonesian, female version of the Godfather. Quite literally. We pretty much had the island to ourselves, and other than a day when we hired scooters to zoom around, we really just swam in the lake and hung out.
After a reasonably entertaining experience where a bunch of locals pretended to be taking photos of a dog nearby while in fact surreptitiously taking photos of me, we got a car back to Medan with a driver who literally did a huge, open-mouthed burp once a minute for 4 hours, and slept again at the Auntie's house (and this time we managed an extra bed). The next day, we headed up to Bukit Lawang, to the north of Medan (although the Auntie's house is nice, Medan is a bit of a hole so we are attempting to keep our time here to a minimum). Bukit Lawang is famous for its proximity to jungle inhabited by lots of orang-utans, so is popular for jungle trekking etc (what is known in Australia as 'bushwalking'). We stayed in a great place called Garden Inn where we ate way too much for three days straight and still had a grand total bill of $90 for the three of us, such being one of the great joys of Indonesia.
Other than a hilarious afternoon spent 'white-water rafting' on a bunch of truck tyre inner-tubes tied together (pretty sure my insurance doesn't cover that one), and a weird kind of Alanis Morisette singalong (you really had to be there), the highlight of our time in BL was our 'jungle trek'. Although there's an orang-utan feeding platform heavily populated by elderly Americans, there was a bit of a lack of orang-utan action so we were really excited when a bit further into the jungle we came across two adult orang-utans and two babies! It was so cool, they were literally three or four metres away from us, and there was only us three girls, a spanish couple and two guides there to see them. Looking an orang-utan square in the eye has definitely been a highlight of Indonesia.
We were pretty sad to leave Bukit Lawang as it's just such a nice place, but with more adventures on the cards our time was unfortunately up. The car ride back to Medan was also fairly entertaining as the middle-aged Muslim driver was apparently a bit of a Justin Bieber fan. Globalisation has a lot to answer for.
xx Iona
