Week 3: Sumatra

Emmy about to gorge herself on durian, the foul-smelling king of Indonesian fruits.

Weeks 3 and 4-- Sumatra, Indonesia

We spent weeks three and four on the island of Sumatra, famous for orangutans, SCUBA diving, crater lakes, Muslim separatists, and tsunamis. We skipped the orangutans.

If you aren't careful in Indonesia, transportation can swallow your vacation whole. Emmy's tour of Indonesia takes us to only 4 of Indonesia's 17,508 islands, but we still spend countless hours in transit. From our last post in Borneo, we flew to the city of Medan on Sumatra, shuddered through a 15-minute motorcycle-taxi ride to the bus station, hopped on a 5-hour bus ride to Lake Toba, then a 1-hour ferry ride, and finally a white-knuckled 20-minute ride on the back of a single motorcycle-- us and our giant backpacks!

The ferry to the island inside Lake Toba

Lake Toba is famous among foreigners in Indonesia because it's beautiful, clean, quiet, and relatively cool-- sounds like heaven to any Westerner living in the sweltering chaos of Jakarta or Banjarmasin. Lake Toba is also famous because its strange geography isolated the indigenous Batak people into creating a unique architecture, music, religion, and cuisine. We stayed in a traditional Batak house, complete with tiny door, sloping roof, and distressed bat that forced Emmy under the covers while it swooped around in search of the tiny door. We ate traditional Batak barbecued fish-- Amos swooned in culinary delight, so we ate it the next day too. And we danced to Batak music, which wasn't so unique after all. These magical Batak people somehow stole the beat, sounds, instruments, and even costumes of Mexican mariachi bands. Viva los Batak!

A traditional Batak house on Samosir Island, the island inside of Lake Toba.


Our own traditional Batak house that we rented for a whopping $5 a night.

However, Geologist Emmy didn't add Lake Toba to the itinerary because of the scenic vistas or lip-smacking fish. She wanted to go because Lake Toba was formed thanks to Earth's most recent supervolcano, which scientists believed lowered global temperatures by 9 or 10 degrees Fahrenheit and killed most of the planet's human population 74,000 years ago. Amos and Emmy fought about the rest of this paragraph for 2 days straight, but never reached an agreement on how to impress our readers in a scientifically factual way. So that's it for Lake Toba's geology.


Lake Toba, formed from the caldera of an ancient supervolcano that exploded 74,000 years ago. At 62 miles in length, the lake is the world's largest volcanic lake. Samosir, the island inside Lake Toba, is roughly the size of Singapore. (written by Emmy)

After our vacation-within-a-vacation, we flew to Northern Sumatra to see Aceh, an Indonesian province that was at the top of Emmy's list because the Department of State banned everyone in the Fulbright program from visiting this infamous province. Infamous for what? Aceh's overwhelmingly Muslim fundamentalist population, angry at the secular central government for stealing most of its oil wealth, spawned an infamous separatist movement that carried out terrorist attacks until 2004. Then the province was hit by the infamous tsunami and since then, the Acehnese have been struggling to rebuild their lives. We were nervous about new separatist murmurs on the eve of the Indonesian presidential election, as well as the Islamic sharia law that governs Aceh. But our only problem during the visit can't really be blamed on tsunamis or terrorists. First, we visited a testament to the tsunami's power-- a 12,000-ton power plant ship that now serves as a tourist attraction in the downtown of the capital city, a staggering 3 miles from the ocean. After visiting the region's largest and most stunning mosque for evening prayer, we returned along dark streets to our hotel. Amos said "Emmy, there's a sidewalk here..." and immediately fell waist-high into an open sewer. He spent the rest of the night scrubbing and sanitizing his cuts and bruises to avoid unspeakable infections. He is still alive, but short a pair of pants and sandals.

2 aerial photos of Banda Aceh before and after the 2004 tsunami

This mosque near downtown Banda Aceh was dubbed the "miracle mosque" for obvious reasons. This photo was taken right after the tsunami.

A 12,000-ton power plant ship that was dropped 3 miles inshore in downtown Banda Aceh during the 2004 tsunami. 5 years later, playgrounds and houses surround the tsunami monument.

Can you find Emmy?

The "sidewalk" that Amos discovered late one night in Banda Aceh. After emerging from the city sewer, covered to his waist in green mystery muck, he went back in to search for his sandal. The sewer was too deep and the liquid was too thick for him to find it.

Our last stop in Indonesia was Pulau Weh, an island paradise two hours off the coast of Aceh. Monkeys scampered across the only paved road as we arrived on unspoiled Gapang beach, famous for its coral reefs and underwater canyons. Pure turquoise water kissed white sand and palm trees, and there were only a few piles of trash.

The Saturday beach "crowd" at our beach on Pulau Weh.

Amos completed his "open water" SCUBA diving certification, learning to "pop" his ears and survive SCUBA diving calamities under 60 feet of water. Unfortunately, he always used up his air twice as fast as Emmy. "Amos," said his instructor, "your breathing sounds like Darth Vader." We cringed at giant moray eels, startled sting rays out of hiding, goggled at six-foot tuna fish, almost fell on scorpion fish, and swam through schools of beautiful sea creatures we had only seen before as bloodied corpses in the pungent fish markets. On the last dive, Amos ran out of air 20 feet underwater and successfully stole air from Emmy to reach the surface, proving to his diving instructors once and for all that he was a reckless, well-trained Darth Vader. Pulau Weh was our last gasp in Indonesia.

Day 1 of his SCUBA certification, Amos fearlessly heads into the ocean with his dive instructor.

The Aceh fish markets, where we saw our fishy friends from Pulau Weh.

For Week Five, we travel to rural northern Thailand for a strange "ghost festival", then to Laos and the great Mekong River. We'll try to update you again soon!