Berestagi, Lake Toba and Beyond

So we had two long travel days back to back to get to Lake Toba.  Lake Toba is a local destination for Sumatrans to vacation at.  And we were going there during a national holiday – no not mardia gras for our LA peeps but instead chinese new year.

We left Bukit Luwang around 8am on Saturday, and had a long drive to Berstagi.  Its not distance but traffic, traffic in Medan is horrific.  Its just pure chaos and does not appear to have any rules of the road.  We got to Berestagi around 4pm, and visited the local market.  We felt like local celebrities in the market.  But we picked up some souvenirs.  We stayed at this absolutely dreadful hotel that night, we were awoken by karaoke, call to prayers, chickens, crying puppy and children throughout the night.

Anyway, on Sunday we made the trek to Lake Toba and had several stops along the way.  The first stop was Pecaarrn Village, a local Batak Village.  The Batak are the local tribe to this part of Sumatra, and famous across Indonesia.  Our Guide, Sool, does not think particularly highly of the men as lazy and not loyal.  They are also mostly christian, whereas the rest of Indonesia is Muslim.  We got a tour of the village, which is an actual village and not a museum.  We saw the traditional houses and got to see inside of them.  It was very interesting to see how 8 families would coexist in about 1000 sq ft.  

After that village, we stopped at a local hot spot, a waterfall.  It was like everyone in Sumatra had stopped there to see it.  Due to the weather, we really couldn’t see the waterfall.

After the waterfall, we headed to a Batak Museum.  It was the site of where one of the local Batak kings lived.  We got to see his house, and got a bit of history on the Batak people and their culture.  The site has fallen into a bit of disrepair.  There is a pair of buffalo horns for each king.

Following the waterfall, we drove to Paparet where we had lunch and took the ferry to Lake Toba.  It’s been raining the last days, but it was nice to be in a town vs. a small village.  We have been constrained to eating and drinking at our hotels, but we are going to sample some of the local delights at a variety of places.  Last night, the tour company bought us dinner to make up for the failed taxi pickup.  They provided quite the feast.