Monkey Business..

(potp: somewhere in the mountains of Samosir Island we met a family which had this nice little monkey as a pet..chained of course; is this allowed in Germany?)

WHERE'S THE OLD STUFF?

I got some questions regarding the whereabouts of the first posts. I decided to show only the most recent 10 posts on the main page, because it would otherwise become to big. You can access the older posts by using the archive function on the right sidebar.

SUMATRA - PART 2

Sumatra Pictures

Well, a few days ago I uploaded tons of pictures about Sumatra..of course, nobody really wants to crawl through all this material without having someone to tell some stories and anecdotes. The old problem again.. either everyone joins me via MS-Netmeeting for a discussion or I leave it like that. Without a close relationship to what happened, one will of course find it rather boring to look at 200 pictures..But if you're interested, take a bit of time to explore them..it is worth it, I think!

Well, after spending a nice evening in Medan, we headed north the next day. We wanted to get into a big national park where there were Orang-Utans living in the wild. Our way was marked by .. uhm .. streets (bumpy, bumpy, not too good for the virtually non-existing suspension of our bus), many small villages, beautiful jungle landscape, craziest motorcycle drivers (why not overtake directly in the bend? It's ok la...) and the realization that every kid that was able to walk had to have a plastic rifle or gun, which they pointed at us at every possible occasion (while smiling and cheering at the same time, of course..).

CAN I HAVE YOUR BACKPACK, PLEASE?

The Orang-Utans weren't very interested in us though. The important thing for our guide was to have bananas handy all the time to attract them. Understandably, the monkeys had developed a Pavlovian reflex to associate backpacks with bananas (the guides always stored them in their backpacks...for the orang-utans, therefore a backpack must have been a magic thing..), so we had to leave them immediately after we ran out of bananas...their greedy looks were testimonies of what possibly would have come next.

SPEED LIMIT?

After spending almost the whole Friday on the bus to get to our next location (Samosir Island, which is located right in the middle of famous Lake Toba), Georg, Thomas and me rented motorcycles the next morning to explore the Island. Note, that there was no need to produce licenses or anything.

(Me: 'Sir, what's the speed limit here in Indonesia?'
Answer: 'Ooohh, speed good, bike very fast!'
Me: 'No, I mean, is there any law? How fast are we allowed to go?'
Answer: 'Ah? Fast! Bike very fast! Will be fun!'
Me: 'Well, thanks a lot!')

These 5 hours with the bikes (125ccm) were the best of the whole Sumatra trip (my perspective). It was simply awesome to drive up to the ridge of the Island, to see many small churches, temples and mosques (sometimes right next to each other! what a positive example).

HISSSSSING SOUNDS..

Later the same day we went up a volcano (damnit..forgot the name already) to camp in the crater. It was abviously still active, taken into consideration the constant hissing sound of 3000°C hot sulphorous steam coming out at several spots. The whole area stank like rotten eggs..

Well, what we did not know before was that the night was to become our very Indonesian cultural experience. As it happened to be Saturday night, there were some locals camping at this place as well. They usually arrive late at night, start a campfire, take their guitars and play Indonesian folk songs until the sun rises again. It was damn cold up there, but the singing and the friendliness or our guides and other locals kept us warm and awake. The atmosphere was truly special and unforgettable..

But get an impression.. mp3 (1 MB)

Aayohh..

Maik