Danau Toba

Kyle and I are relaxing now after a seven hour motorcycle ride around Samosir Island, which is in the middle of Lake Toba. This lake is set against the mountains and makes for some pretty impressive scenery. Riding around on motorcylces was a perfect way to see it. Today reminded me of the closing scenes of a James Bond movie, as the film wraps up to James and his girl riding along a beautiful coastline to some slow, lovey music. Not exactly the same situation but it was something like that. This place is dirt cheap too, which has been the case with most of the places we've been, but I feel like the dollar is kicking extra butt on this island. Our room is $2.50 a night, right on the water - not a white sand postcard but a nice little spot - the hotel restaurant serves anything you could want, I've been getting the Fresh Fish Curry every meal for $1.50. Curry is the spice of choice here, and the dishes are just called "curry's" like, "ah man we got the best curry's on the island." The motorcycles we're $7 for the day including gasoline (we we're getting about 80 kilometers to the liter on those hogs) and we've got a ping pong table right outside of the room. The ping pong is free. I mean, what else?

When we left Bukittingi...three days ago I guess...we went to a different lake called Maninjau, which was unimpressive. It looked amazing on the ride in when we first caught a glimpse of it from a high distance, but most of the shore was lined with fish ponds and the water was gross. As soon as we got off the bus we were planning our escape but decided to go ahead and stay the night since we'd made the journey out. We were almost lured into staying with an offer to join a pig hunt - supposedly made up of 500 men and hundreds of dogs - but we would have had to stay two more days so decided to move along. 16 hours and 4 numb butt cheeks later we arrived at Lake Toba.

Tomorrow we are heading north into the province of Aceh, where we will end our stay in Indonesia. Yesterday we realized we'd made a rookie Indonesian travel mistake: planning a trip during Ramadan, the largest Muslim holiday of the year, check out the link to learn more (mom, dad, and grandma: click on the underlined word 'ramadan' which will take you to another webiste where you can read more about it). Travel is supposed to be awful during this time, and since we are heading to Aceh "the Muslim capital of southeast Asia" we should get the full experience. Oh well. We'll get a little cultured. Tomorrow we are going to Kutacane to arrange a trek through the Gunung Leuser National Park. The hike is supposed to take 4-5 days so if you don't hear from us by the 20th or so please send condolances to:

Rolf and Claire Embertson
1401 Redd Rd.
Lexington, KY 40510

Internet here is pretty slow here so no pictures today. Hopefully we'll have some good ones from the hike for next time!

-Ryan