Lake Toba, Indonesia, Sunday, Father's Day, June 17, 2007

Happy Father's Day to both Charles & James and to all our father friends. We are on the island of Sumatera, indonesia on the far North end ion a small island - Samosir - that is a caldera formed from a gigantic volcano eruption 75,000 years ago. We arrived here on Friday after spenind another couple days in KL basically doing a bit of shopping and continuing to bargain with taxis to get them to turn on their meter! Quite an accomplishment when it happens. Because of the heat in the city we had to take it pretty slowly so it seemed to take a long time to get anything accomplished. Aislyn walks twice as fast as we do and Brian generally lags a little behind - he is really feeling the heat so we have to stop often for rests. Got a great flight out Thursday night on Air Asia to Medan, Indonesia. $210.00 for the three of us - total. Very much like Ryanair in Europe. Efficient and cheap! Medan is the third largest city in this country and is filthy and overcorwded so we were thankful we only stayed the night before heading up to this somewhat mountainous region. We took a "tourist" bus to Parapet which took us 4.5 hours with no A/C and a loaded minivan!!!! Arrived unscathed but hungry so while waiting for the ferry had a bite, experienced the local (non-western) squatting toilets! What an experience for a woman. At the ferry station we had about 1.5 hours to wait so were approached by young men who were hunting for customers to stay at their hotels ?!? on the island. We did stay at one of them since once we arrived at 7:00pm it was dark, there is only 1 road around the island and we didn't have a clue where we were. We got a couple of rooms and today changed to another spot which is double the price but at least the matress is soft and has sheets on it! nOur total stay for the 2 nights with all our meals for the 3 of us came to a whopping $55.00. I still can't get over the prices but they all seem very happy here and don't seem to care too much about money. When we walked to this new spot they even drove us back to the first place so we could pack up and check out - all for free! Brian doesn't do too well with lots of walking even though it is quite cool here and there is no a/c anywhere. It rained all day yesterday and I mean almost 24 hours solid so caught up on lots of reading and talking. This new place is very nice, has a bit of a beach and seems to be a weekend getaway for alot of the locals. We will be here until Tuesday morning when we will reverse our last trip and then fly from Medan to Jakarta for a couple of days. Talk again soon!