Chill time Toba style

There's not much to be said about Medan - it's all very uninspiring really. Indonesia's fourth largest city offers little to the imagination; it's just another big Asian metropolis with too much pollution and not enough to see or do.

One good point is that the airport is only a 10 minute ride from the city centre (something to do with a belief that noise keeps evil spirits at bay) by becak, a three wheel motorised death trap that has you wishing you'd paid a few cents more to get to your destination in one piece. Fortunately we did reach ours and checked into the appaulingly bad Hotel Zakia. Aside from the cess pit toilet and flea infested bed we somehow overlooked that our hotel sat directly opposite what has to be the city's biggest bloody mosque - Mesjid Raya Medan - whose resident muezzin's call to prayer happened far too often and at a volume that the rest of Sumatra would have heard. Good ol'Islam, eh!

Medan is of little value to travellers passing through, hence we'd only planned to be there one night. To be fair though we did clock up some 12kms plodding the streets, something not too many westerners undertake given the number of cat calls that greeted us. Bizarrely the look of a 6ft blond Dutchie didn't seem to work up the men like the sight of a curly haired Kris did the women - we calculated at least nine marriage proposals and one proposition of a quick "f**k"!

It was while sipping a few cold beers (Bintang is a truly excellent drop) and shouting over the mosque's deafening adhan that we met the fine Finnish quartet of Matti, Maija, Simon and Juese, and lovely Thai Lieuw, who were to become our travelling companions for the next week.

And after much Bintang was drunk we turned in for the night having decided on Danau Toba as our next port of call - no need for an alarm call, we all knew the bloody adhan would be waking us up!

Created by a massive explosion some 70,000 years ago Lake Toba sits atop a suken supervolcano and stretches over 100km long with a depth of over 500m. It can be found at the end of a four hour local bus ride from Medan on which vomiting and wafting shit smells are routine. To be fair, as far as Asian bus trips go this one wasn't too bad. There were no goats or sheep standing in the aisles, just chain-smoking locals, and christ can the Indonesians smoke!

The ride into Parapat, the main hub sitting on Toba's northen shoreline, was breathtaking. When you get your first glimpse of Toba all of the last four hours is forgotten. Steep volcanic walls rich in green tower high above the pristine blue water; in the middle sits Samosir, an island the size of Singapore that was to be our home for the next week.

If the Toba eruption theory is to be believed such was the verosity of the blast that it changed the earth's climate forever and wiped out almost all of then human life creating a population bottle neck in central Africa and India that impacted the genetic inheritance of all humans today. Amazing, eh, but not quite as amazing as the setting.

Apparently this place used to be home to throngs of hippies in the late 80s before their gaze turned to the Thai islands. And it's easy to see why. The locals, or Bataks, are wonderful hosts who pride themselves in their cooking and hospitality, while the surrounding fertile slopes are adorned with "magic" mushrooms and weed. Visit for a week, stay for a month!

For a crazy 50,000 rupiah a night (NZ$1 = 7300) we lived in luxury on the lake shore, the calm lapping of the water rocking us to sleep every night for a week. When it got too hot we cooled off by plunging into the deep water. When we got hungry we dined on Batak-styled fish dishes. And we when we got thirsty we took turns gathering up as much chilled Bintang as one person could carry. Life can be so rewarding some times!

It was after too many said Bintangs that Kris our his Finnish male counterparts somehow decided it would be an adventure to take on Samosir's 1600m peak. At dawn they said farewell to the ladies and trudged off into the darkness, not quite sure if, let alone when, they'd be back. It was madness but like true boy scouts they were intent on hacking their way through the impregnable bush and scaling the near vertical slopes. It took em six hours to reach the top where, exhausted, they came upon a small coffee plantation run by a local family who, in true Batak style, took them in - slaughtering one of their prize cocks and cooking up a feast!

In short, Toba was a true Sumatran experience not to be repeated. Should you ever get the chance, go. The late night drunken laden beaches of Bali this is not. Toba is a small slice of heaven deep in the heart of Sumatra - the largest of Indonesia's 15,000+ islands; Borneo and Papua are larger but shared with Malaysia and New Guinea respectively.

While much of the island was devestated by the 2004 tsunami and a massive earthquake less than six months later it is great to see a level of normality has returned to every day life even if so much of the damage that was caused is still openly visable to all who visit.

As much as we would have loved to have followed in the hippies' footsteps and stayed on for a month the 30 day limit on our Indonesian visa (extendable these days if you can navigate your way through the red tape) forced us into action. We bid our Finnish compatriots farewell, well three of them, and headed back to Parapat to flag another local bus that would take us south to the town of Bukittinggi.