Road Trip! July 8 and 9

We are concerned that you will think that all we ever do is go to Lake Toba for holidays, but rest assured that we are doing our share of work around here. At the close of the international seminar (though several of the speakers from Medan had spent six months each doing research coordinated through the Univ. of Alabama, I would say that we and the Deaconess Megan Ross were the “international” part of the “international” seminar) we were told that we were leaving immediately for Lake Toba.

Yes, that says Saturday, karaoke until 4 am!

Now here’s a big cultural difference…most Americans, after they have completed a huge event, they kick back, relax and get some rest. The concept here of relaxation is ROAD TRIP! Jump in the car, drive several hours in the dark and rain on pot holed traffic clogged roads, check into a hotel that has, as a featured activity, karaoke until 4 am, then get up at 7 the next morning, have a little breakfast, do a few hours of touring around the area, and then drive for two hours, now in the light, over pot holed traffic clogged roads back home. I don’t know if it was the roads or the karaoke booming into our room until 4 am, but I was exhausted when we were finally dropped back at our house.

Jacob put on quite a performance in karaoke. When he wasn’t searching for songs to sing he was dancing up a storm showing Nancy his big moves. Nancy says they were pretty random. We really hadn’t read the sign about it lasting until 4 am, so I thought when I went to the room a little after 10 (past our Indonesian bedtime) that it would be winding down soon. 

Like all sound-related subjects in Indonesia, the music was being amplified to an eardrum shattering level inside the gathering room, which featured several open doors to terraces outside. Though our room was at least 100 feet away, the sound was loud enough to vibrate the bed where I was trying to sleep. This made sleeping difficult, multiplied by noisy groups of people walking along the balconies outside our room, squealing and talking in very loud voices. I think everyone in the hotel was there for a ROAD TRIP! But the room was very nice, the sheets were clean, and the bathroom featured a flush toilet and a hot/cold shower. Nice.

View from the hotel balcony

The next morning after a breakfast of fried rice (they didn’t mention the opportunity to have toast until we were finished eating…) we went on a tourist boat tour to the Hanging Rock, and continued on to Tuktuk and Tomak on Samosir Island. The Hanging Rock story is sort of a Romeo and Juliet story of young love that could not be fulfilled due to the kids being from the wrong families for a marriage, and the girl jumps off the rock, only to be caught by her hair, dangling over the water. Sadly, there was no heroic rescue. 

That's the famous Hanging Rock above
the traffic jam of tour boats.

This is a great story, I believe invented so the tour boat operator has something to say when the boat circles around under the big cliff.

Tuktuk is the village on Samosir Island, across the water from Parapat, with the boat dock, and Tomak is just a stones throw up the hill, through a long tunnel of t-shirt vendors and assorted souvenir stands. Except for not having salt water taffy and fudge, I think the Lake Toba merchants have their Gatlinburg counterparts beat! Of course Jacob was the star attraction and the crowds divided as we walked along. 

This is a short primer on boating safety in Indonesia.
For a tour boat with over 100 passengers, there were
 only two life jackets visible and both had seen better days.

The main safety rule of "don't fall off" is sometimes
put to the test!

This is the Nommensen dance team. The girl in the center
with the brown hat is the wooden statue coming to life.

We were on a tight schedule and walked directly to a place for Singalegale, a traditional Batak dance. We had just seen the student dance team perform this on Saturday, and I thought we’d see natives of Samosir Island perform.

This is the equivalent of getting your picture taken in front
of a black bear in Gatlinburg.

Thank goodness the local children were there to show us
how the dance was done!

As usual, I was mistaken. There was a wooden statue with movable arms, fingers and eye lids, controlled with hidden rods by a guy sitting behind it. We were each given a uhlos to drape over our shoulder, the music began, and suddenly we were the dancers. Thank goodness there were some local residents, grade school kids, who did the real gyrations. We were just the sideshow. But there was no other dancing provided, just the wooden statue doing it’s thing, us and the kids. I think the gathered throng, which paid good money for the performance, was satisfied just to see us in action. Perhaps we can go on tour!

We headed down the hill back toward the boat dock. We had a few minutes before departure so we ducked into a restaurant for a quick drink. While there a lady stopped by our table, she had a plastic bucket filled with eggs. I started asking about the eggs…were they hard boiled and eatable on the spot? Our friends thought I wanted one, and it was hard to explain that I was just being curious, not volunteering for another adventure in eating. We ended up getting a few of the eggs, but I didn’t eat one.

We returned to the boat just as it was shoving off, so all the seats under the canopy were taken. Even though we didn’t have our hats or sunscreen (shudder!) we sat up top on the roof with no cover, in the bright sun shine. Though we did end up with pink noses, the breeze was blowing nicely and it was a quite pleasant ride back to Parapat. I especially enjoy watching the families here, and there was a family with four children that joined us up top. The little girls were eating ice cream bars and the boys enjoying instant noodles (the boys here are bottomless pits when it comes to eating), and everyone was dressed up for the group event. The girls looked nice in their dresses and plastic necklaces, while one of the boys were wearing a Public Enemy t-shirt, with a target on the back and I’m sure the silhouette of a police officer in the middle. I wanted to mention to the parents the meaning of the picture, but they didn’t seem to speak English and I didn’t want to interrupt their holiday.

After the boat tour we enjoyed a pot hole tour on the road back to Siantar. We sat in a long traffic jam in the same spot as on the night before…do I detect a pattern here? Then we reached Siantar and stopped for a long lunch in a Chinese restaurant, which served a little bit of everything. That means noodles and rice and fish and chicken dishes. The food was delicious. We all ate until we were full, and then ate some more.

We were happy to return home to get some real rest and relaxation. Nancy and I went for several walks and stuck our head in the auditorium to confirm that our furniture was still there. The workmen were sweeping up mountains of the snack and lunch boxes, then gathering them in bundles and dumping them in a big fire near the main road.

We hoped that our furniture would be returned Monday morning and that proved to be true. We were still wiping the sleep from our eyes when the moving crew arrived, having carried our heavy wooden furniture from the auditorium, over a quarter mile away. Many thanks to these hard workers who helped return our home to normal.