Sumatra - an island of contrasts

We left KL and flew the short hop to Medan - the capital of Sumatra - the Indonesian island which is to be our home for the next few weeks. Medan isn’t the prettiest of places and despite going to the Lonely Planet’s top rated guesthouse in the city we didn’t have the most comfortable of stopovers! That said we had an afternoon wandering around exploring, a couple of exciting rickshaw journeys and watched some world cup games with fellow travellers and locals.

The view of Bukit Lawang - a million miles from the view of Medan...

Having decided that Medan is probably not the best place to experience Sumatra we took a bus the next day to Bukit Lawang. Bukit Lawang is a beautiful village next to the jungle - one of the few national parks in the world where you can see Orang-utans (the others being in Borneo where we were earlier in the month). The accommodation and food were brilliant and the setting even better. One of the reasons for venturing to Sumatra was to try and see Orang-utans in the wild on a two day jungle trek from Bukit Lawang so we arranged a guide and headed off into the depths of the jungle the following morning.

I’m always a fan of jungle trekking and this time was no different. The going was a bit sweaty, the jungle was incredibly hot and at times the paths we took were quite steep and very slippery - I think we all fell over at least once. We stopped every now and then for snacks of fruit, sometimes next to tranquil pools and little waterfalls to take a break.

Hanging out with the locals

We didn’t have to wait too long to find some Orang-utans. The first we saw was a male and female couple who watched us for a bit and then scarpered into the trees. The most exciting Orang-utan we came across was a huge male sat up in the trees, eating and looking down at us. We just stood and watched him for about half an hour. At one point he came down the tree to move into a different one and everyone panicked and ran – he was enormous, you wouldn’t want to mess with him!

In addition to Orang-utans we saw all sorts of other monkeys (including one called a Thomas Leaf monkey or ‘funky-monkey’ due to the Mohawk haircut).

We camped next to the river and were surrounded by monkeys in the trees and the occasional large monitor lizard surfacing in the water. There were also fireflies, bats and all sorts of other jungle insects.

The ants were massive...

...and then I found one biting through my vest!

Our guide trying to get revenge on the ant, by eating it?!

We had a great second day, finishing off by jumping and swimming in the river, then tubing downstream back to the village.

A well-needed drink

Following our jungle trekking we made a beeline back to Medan and onwards south to the largest volcanic crater lake in the world – Lake or Danau Toba. To give you an idea of size, the small island in the middle of the lake is the same size as the Isle of Wight so the lake itself is enormous! We weren’t too sure what to expect as we’d heard that Lake Toba and Samosir island were touted as the next big tourist traps in Indonesia but whether its down to frequent threats (and occurrences) of natural disasters in Sumatra or just a government official over-hyping things, the alleged 10,000 beds available on the island definitely aren’t full!

Danau Toba

We actually decided to slow things down whilst in Sumatra (one reason being that the roads and buses are notoriously bad so with Sumatra being the sixth largest island in the world this isn’t a good combination!) so we ended up staying on Samosir for two weeks. Mainly relaxing by the lakeside we did venture at one point around the island in search of hot springs (not quite deluxe spa style!) and visited a Batak village (one of the indigenous groups of Sumatra) which we learnt was a meeting point used by the head of the tribe to cast judgements and hand out punishments to other members of the clan (one punishment involved having your skin split open and then being rubbed with garlic and chilli!)

Traditional Batak house

The "court-room"

Surprisingly the climate here is much cooler than the rest of Indonesia that we’ve experienced but to be honest a break from humidity and burning rays has been very welcome! Whilst here we also surpassed our nine month travelling mark so its been a nice breather from hurtling around to reflect on all the cool places we’ve seen and awesome things that we’ve done.

Tomorrow we're heading back up to Medan then onwards to Bangkok and through SE Asia before hopefully reaching China for September!