When the super-volcano in Toba erupted 70000 ago, nobody thought that its the crater will be such a relaxed place like it is now. There are some reasons why, maybe. 70000 years ago nobody really took care about 2010, and the volcano killed most humans then alive on earth. You like it or not, but according to the Toba catastrophe theory we are all now the sons of some 1000 breeding pairs which survived after. Meaning that bataks and me have, definitely, something in common. It could be the tuak ( aka jungle juice – a palm-tree wine ), the out of tune guitars or something else. What is quite sure is that the combination mentioned above made our last days in Tuk Tuk quite funny.

Being back to the bataks, I’ve read somewhere that only a superficial approach will characterize them like having a abusive taste for drinking, singing and all the others that will make out a funny party. It could be so, however this is not as bad as 200 something years ago when they still use to eat their enemies just to scare the remaining ones. They now use the out of tune guitars instead, which apparently does not work properly, since everybody get in rhythm and become addicted to the jungle juice easily. Back to the good habits. They do have. They like dogs. Well done, served in blood. Just to be gentile enough, one may not see any eating place showing a fried dog on their advertising. However, if you don’t like dogs, beware of that places where a B1 is shown on the entrance. B2 is fine, since it’s the short way of writing ‘babi’ , meaning pork in bahasa indonesia. Dog is “biang” in batak language,…only one B.

After one week in the 6 dollars jungle-garden style accommodation, we had to say goodbye to mr. Moon and head to Taman Gunung Leuser . The 200 km road , split in at least three segments, mostly using colorful durian stinky minibuses, ended in Ketambe after 12 hours bumpy ride. Raining cats and dogs here, not so many chances of seeing orangutans or other wildlife. But I’ll let u know after.

Enjoy the pictures from Toba and from Pelni, the 22 hours ferry ride we’ve took to reach Sumatra.