Day 76

14/09/2009

Oh what a day.

Don't people in Indonsia realise that by attempting to rip off the few visitors who do come to their country that even fewer will come in the future?

So you will have guessed that extracting our vehicles from the hold of a boat and out of the port wasn't a ten minute job.

The full details would be a bit dull. The summary is that it took from 8:30 to 13:30, and cost us a total of $740. There seemed to be some random number generator in operation to calculate the port fees, which was finally resolved when we sat at the desk of somebody sensible and miraculously the cost fell by $170.

Having left Belawan we hit the roads of Sumatra to find them quite well surfaced, but very busy in the first 100km. As the rice and palm growing plains gave way to rubber plantations and then to tropical rainforest on the hills of the south-west side of the island, so the roads became less conjested and our average speed moved up from 35km/h to about 50km/h.

We just made it to the edge of lake Toba before nightfall which is not long after sunset at these lattitudes. Rather than camp as we had planned (there was a storm moving in from the east) we found a hotel. It's up on a headland above the lake so should be a good picture or two in the morning. It's slightly eerie as we are the only guests, the hotel is down a long twist track from the main road and there's not another house anywhere nearby.

If I don't update the blog tomorrow, you have our coordinates......

Lat 2 41.73 N
Long 98 55.08 E
Nearest Town Parapat