ET TRAVELWORLD: April 2008

The first day in Indonesia, after an all night bus ride, we were told that this day would be the only one to see the Raffelisia flower before it died. So into the jungle we trecked and were able to see the worlds largest flower... and we saved you the trouble of the treck by showing it to you. It is supposed to smell very bad, but we did not stick our heads in to smell the decaying fly flesh the flower consumes.

This is us on a bridge.... thats all we got. It leads to a very sad zoo and a very sad fort left by the Dutch, but the bridge had very pretty views.

This is the traditional Minangkabau house of Western Sumatra. They are a matriarchal culture and property is passed down through the women. They were at odds with Java (the island) because they were patriarchal society and wanted Sumatra to follow suit. To solve the problem the government set up a bull fight and if Sumatra's bull won they would get to keep their culture. Sumatra could only find a baby bull in order to fight the full grown bull of Java... so to compensate, they starved the baby and fitted it out with knife horns and metal teeth. When it saw the adult bull, it went crazy with hunger and tried to suckle from it... killing it with its new toys. Soo... the Minangkabau remains a matriarchal society. (history lesson) The roofs are meant to be like the bull horns.

We met a teacher that took us into her home for three days. Eti tought english in a small town outside the city. We rented motor bikes and followed her as she showed us around the Harau Valley and a few other places.

The Harau Valley was beautiful, with three waterfalls that we saw. One of which had an actual pool, cemented pool, at the bottom in order for everyone to go swimming. One thing we began to appreciate about the Indonesians is that everywhere they went, be it the jungle, a small town, or a waterfall there were always numerous choices of stalls to eat at (all serving the same thing).

We spent 10 days sitting by Lake Maninjau. We walked into town a couple times, swam, ate, slept and listened to the locals play music at the cafe every night... and that is all we did for 10 days. We loved every minute of it.

Our friend Danial wanted a coconut juice at the cafe. They told him that he would have to climb the tree because they were out of coconuts... so he did. About 20 minutes later, and much exertion on his part there were coconuts galore. Much to Danials dismay and our shock Yok, who worked at the place we were staying, sprinted up the tree in about 15 seconds, laughing the entire way.

This was our bus ride to Lake Toba... we sat at this one spot for about 10 hours and we think that you can see why. The only way to get up the hill was to be pulled up, and there were hundreds of cars, buses, trucks, and motorbikes in line.

This is Lake Toba, where we spent the remaining time in Sumatra Indonesia.

We rented a motorbike to ride to the "hot springs", which were just pools of extremely hot water. We did a little walking on our own and found the source of the hot water. There were volcanic hotspots entering into a steam. Two hot waterfalls joined into one to filter into the stream near the village, which was then piped into the various pools for commercial use.