Reaching Lake Toba: My jaw hit the floor

May 5, 2015

The police counter-terrorist raid turned out not to be as bad as I might have feared. It was just a couple of policemen, one of whom seemed relatively smart as he asked a few questions. The other seemed less blessed with intelligence as he struggled with the task of writing down my details from my passport. He studied it intently with a fierce concentration, and did successfully write down most of the information, including the town in which I was born and the dates on which my passport was issued and when it would expire, but crucially he omitted one piece of vital information - my name.

We were at least allowed our sleep after the cops left and it was a good sleep too. I woke up refreshed in the morning and was keen to get going before anyone showed up to pay us a morning visit. As usual I was ready first and decided not to wait for Tom as he would just catch me up anyway, so I headed off and cycled the first ten kilometres to SBB alone. Here I stopped outside of a gas station to take a wash in the toilets and wait for Tom but after fifteen minutes there was no sign of him so I went on a bit further to get food. Another half an hour passed and I was on the brink of cycling back to look for him, guessing that his tyre might have perhaps finally given up, when he finally came along the road.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh the guys came and I had a coffee with them.”

“But you’ve been ages.”

“ Well, yeah, and then I stopped at the gas station to have a wash.”

My jaw hit the floor.

We had to turn left just after SBB so that we could take a small road to the town of Muara on the shores of Lake Toba. I was cycling ahead of Tom now, because I, as the hero of the story, was in charge of directions. I knew we were coming up to the place where the turn should be, but then Tom suddenly burst ahead of me and sprinted off in front.

“Wait, you know we have to turn left, right?” I shouted, regretting the confusing final word of the sentence. I don’t think that Tom heard me anyway as he shot ahead and straight past a gravel side road to the left. I stopped and asked a man who told me that this little road was the way to Muara.

Standing there watching Tom disappear into the distance I wanted to let him continue going the wrong way because I was so annoyed with him for having just gone ahead stupidly like that, but at the same time I didn’t really want to go on alone myself. I considered it for a moment, then decided to sprint after him. I gave it the full whack, top speed sprinting for a couple of kilometres, fuelled by my anger at him for being such an idiot. I screamed his name as I got close to catching him up and finally caught his attention just as he was coming up to another left turn. He turned around to me.

“Did we miss it?”

“Yes,” I said, showing my annoyance, “Let’s go.”

And I turned and started cycling back the way we had come.

Tom followed of course and we both cycled back to the turn and took it. It was lovely. There was no traffic at all and it was going away from all the habitation. It seemed like it was going to be a great road. At least it did until we rounded the first corner and found some construction workers and a dead-end. Oops.

The workers told us that we had to go back to the main road and go on a bit further to the next left turn. The one where I had just made Tom turn around. Oh dear. I felt very silly. I’d been the one to make a stupid mistake. But the thing was, Tom wasn’t annoyed or angry at all. He just shrugged and said “These things happen.” He was so laid-back. I wondered if it was his ten-day silent meditating retreat that had given him this inner peace. I’d got so annoyed with him for making a mistake, and yet when it turned out that the mistake was mine he had no problem with me. I was humbled and I realised that I could really learn something from this guy.

So we had to repeat the ride on the busy main road but when we reached the real turn we finally did find ourselves on a great little road heading for Muara. It started out as the widest road we’d cycled on in the whole country, which was strange because it had no traffic on it, but soon narrowed to a more appropriate width. Still we climbed up, past more churches and children walking to school in their uniforms, until we finally reached the highest point.

And then we had a moment that made the whole arduous journey absolutely worthwhile as we looked down upon the extraordinary sight of Lake Toba for the first time. And it was a genuine breath-taking moment, the huge crater lake stretching out over an area of hundreds of square kilometres far, far beneath us and surrounded on all sides by volcanic cliffsides. In the centre was Samosir, an island the size of Singapore. It was beautiful.

The road down to Muara was one of the best I’d cycled on in a very, very long time. We zig-zagged down the mountainside with the stunning backdrop of the lake below, with every turn providing more sensational views. Simply a stunning ride.

Getting tired of photos of the lake yet?

From high up we had been able to see that the road that continued around the edge of the lake from Muara was likely to be very difficult, climbing up and over the cliffs which dropped steeply into the water. We had heard rumours of a ferry directly from Muara to Samosir that would save us this trouble, and as soon as got down to the lake we made enquiries. Unfortunately the ferry only went once a week and we weren’t lucky enough to have arrived on the right day. But there were some boats, and with the tantalising goal of Samosir so close neither of us fancied another whole day cycling on difficult roads, so we struck a deal with one of the local men to charter a boat to take us across the lake to the island.

The hour-long boat ride was similarly breath-taking. We got a completely different view from the lake surface, but it was incredible to look up and around now at the mountains from which we had just descended.

And the great day continued when we got to Samosir, which actually had a flat road going around it, and where the people were very friendly and all shouted hello to us. I’d been thinking that the mood would change because of Lake Toba being quite a tourist hot-spot, but the people were as friendly as ever to us. And because there was hardly any traffic Tom and I were able to cycle next to each other and talk, and created a game of seeing who could say hello in the most different accents/languages and get a response from the locals. It was a fun game. I even managed to have a short conversation with one woman in French. She didn’t know she was speaking in French, but she definitely was.

Lots of homes and buildings had these curiously shaped roofs

Tom seemed like he was looking forward to getting to our destination of Panguran, which I had told him would be a tourist town. “So we will meet some nice backpacker girls tonight!” He grinned. Ah, now I understood! The reason why he’d stopped to wash that morning had become apparent!

We had to cycle about forty kilometres to get to Panguran and at one point Tom thought he spotted a shortcut. The road that we were on followed the edge of the lake around in a C-shape, but there was a rutted track at the edge of a field that looked like it would cut a more direct route straight across. We decided to give it a go, and weren’t even deterred when the people working in the field tried to tell us to turn back. ‘We’ll show them’ we thought, and just kept right on going.

I think it was when the track ended and became a boggy, marshy area, that we began to have second thoughts for the first time, but it was too late, we were committed, and pressed on, squishing and squelching our way through. Next up we had to navigate our way around an angry bull, but luckily Tom did quite a good impression of a bull too, and got the better of the animal. Our final challenge was a ditch filled with a filthy grey sludge. It had a wooden plank across it, but unfortunately that had broken and fallen in the sludge. But, luckily for me, Tom seemed quite happy to get his feet dirty, and took one for the team, standing in the muck and helping my bike along as I pushed it down into the ditch, leapt across, and pulled it up the other side. Well, what are hapless sidekicks for?

Bull versus Tom, who will crack first...

These kids were playing drums, Tom joined them for a bit

The skies had been growing darker since we had arrived on Samosir and, bad luck for us, the heavens opened just three kilometres from our goal of Panguran. Even worse, the town was not at all what we were expecting. I’d done my research very poorly and my assumption that this was a tourist town proved entirely inaccurate. It was a bit of a dump and we struggled for a long time even to find a hotel. When we did it was overpriced and not that nice, but with the deluge getting worse we didn’t have too many options and so checked in for a night. Another night of fried noodles and no nice backpacker girls, just each other for company once again.

I used the wifi in the hotel lobby to read a bit more about Samosir.

“Oh sorry Tom, all of the tourist stuff is in a place called Tuk-Tuk on the other side of the island. We should have gone the other way. My mistake.”

“No problem, man. We’ll just go there tomorrow. No worries.”

Today's ride: 73 km (45 miles)
Total: 40,559 km (25,187 miles)

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