#5 Lake Toba Chill

After staying no longer than two nights in all the previous places we visited, finally, we were heading to a destination where we were about to stay for 5 days – lake Toba.
Our initial plan was to stay in Bukittinggi for one night and hike up to a volcano (name to put in), but the weather forecast was really bad, so we decided to catch the earliest bus to lake Toba.
The bus ride was around 16h (from 1:30 PM till 4:30 AM), we arrived early morning in Parapat city, from where we took a boat to Samosir island (funny fact, we met our captain in breakfast place, his name, as he claimed was Nelson Mandela 🙂 ).
Our guesthouse (Sibayak Guesthouse 120 000 IDR/day for 2 ppl) was shot walking distance from the port, in the small, backpacker village called Tuk Tuk. The guesthouse is directly at the lake, so the first thing we did was a short swim in its clean waters.

Lake Toba is the biggest sweet water lake in whole Southeast Asia, it has 1145 square km, and a depth of 450 meters. It is also a place, where the first inhabitants of Sumatra lived – the Bataks’.

Batak people are still living in Danau Toba surrounding. Mostly Protestant Christian, with a mixture of their ancient rituals and beliefs. One of the most known rites is how they bury their people. The tombs are miniatures of their houses with a small cross on it, so if you will see a cute little house on the side of the road, beware that it is a grave. What’s more, after 15 years they are digging up the remains of the bodies of their loved ones, to clean and polish the bones and bury them again. After we heard that, we decided to go to Bataks’ village to find out more about them. One of the most memorable information was that they were cannibals and they were eating their enemies and wrongdoers, spiced with garlic and chili – but no one can confirm that :P.

We still had a lack of hiking, so we decided to rent a scooter (80 000 IDR/day) and we drove to the base of the mountain Pusuk Buhit. It supposed to be a nice hike, with a stunning view over the lake, unfortunately, the hike wasn’t as pleasant as we expected it. We were alone throughout the whole way up, the path was full of two meters high bushes. We also took two phones out of battery and no cable for fully charged power bank :). Fortunately, we managed to do at least a few photos, which you can find below.
Next few days of our stay we took easy and just chilled around the island. We did some laundry, sorted out photos and wrote our first blog entry. 🙂
While spending quite a lot of time around our guesthouse, we met a guide from Ketambe (our upcoming destination).
His name was Harry and we managed to get a quite good deal for an Orangutan Jungle Trek -3 days, two nights in the jungle + one additional night before the trek in a guesthouse near to the starting point of the hike. For everything, we paid 82 euros/person (regular price on the market is 100 euros/person, without the night before in the guesthouse).

The day after we left at 7 AM, together with our guide Harry. We traveled for 10 hours in 1 minibus and 3 labi-labi’s (200 000 IDR /person) to reach Ketambe.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

•