Lake Toba adventures...

Monday morning we jumped on Susi Air and headed to Medan. We then proceeded on the 4-hour drive to Lake Toba, much to the horror of the Scotts who couldn’t believe the suicidal over-taking manoeuvres of our driver. Gold! We met up with Juan at the ferry at Prapat. He works at Christina’s guesthouse in Tuk Tuk peninsula on Samosir Island, right in the middle of Toba, and set us up in awesome Batak-style accommodation right on the lake. Best views in the house!

The next few days were spent doing the following things:
* cruising around on motorbikes to see the sights of Samosir, which included hot sulphur springs and lakeside beaches
* relaxing over copious quantities of big Bintangs
* playing pool and dancing at the little nightclub down the road
* washing our clothes in the lake
*testing the effects of the local special fungus
* eating tacos (the Indo version, which are more like vegetarian calzones) and fresh fish caught from the lake
* chasing a big rat out of the walls of our bungalow, which ate our clothes!
* shopping at the markets, and
* playing never-ending amounts of our favourite card game, Shithead.

Bradey and Searle continued their obsession with water buffaloes by (unsuccessfully) trying to ride one (they were too scared of the big gentle creatures!). The best souvenirs purchased were a fluorescent, inflatable pink cow, which immediately became our mascot and the subject of a number of random photographs, and a massive Batak mandolin, which we saw being carved and finished by a couple of local instrument-makers. Making Bradey try, and seeing his reaction to, the local food was also loads of fun. Ha!

Searle and Dan both managed to come off their bikes… resulting in appropriately serious scratches, cuts and bruised egos, particularly from Searle who managed to crash his bike into a ditch at about 2km/h when taking off from a U-turn. Dan’s injuries were a lot worse, as he was travelling at quite a high speed when he swerved to avoid a broken bridge and had a major stack! There was lots of blood but fortunately not much serious damage.

And in pure Australian form, right from the beginning there was an onslaught of swearing, which blew me away, considering I hardly hear (or say) a lot of filthy words here in Simeulue! So to try and combat this, I decided we should have a contest to see who could restrain themselves the best. The loser’s task was to swim from our jetty to another one about 100m away. Let’s just say Bradey ended up the winner by a huge margin (a world record of 16 f- and c-words in one afternoon) and reluctantly set off on his task, with Dan in tow for back-up, much to the amusement of the locals when the two figures emerged from the deep! The water weeds in the lake, which they had to swim through and which kept grabbing at their limbs, completely freaked them out. It didn’t affect the swearing though, which skyrocketed the following day to normal levels, and I must admit, I was the first offender…

We could easily have spent our whole time there just relaxing, and time seemed to escape us for a majority of our days in Toba. However, there were other destinations on our itinerary, so we returned to Medan in the death-cab for our onward flight. Next!