Lake Toba and on to Bungus and on and on and on...

 Lake Toba, in the centre-north of Sumartra provided our most scenic internet posting yet! Liza demonstrates by writing to people...

 Our hotel was on an island on the lake.... a beautiful place where the height again provided some escape from the heat.

 This is in the 'Batak' region where unlike most Indonesians, they are christian. They have a distinctive architecture which they stick to even with corrugated iron.

 Lake Toba is the 5th largest lake in the world.... A massive extinct caldera surrounded by high mountains.

 It is the worlds most beautiful swimming pool with the swimming temperature just perfect ... so we did a fair bit of testing.

 They even take the design through to the grave..

 I took this so I didn't have to bother to explain it's formation....

 Ancient & Modern!

 These old meeting chairs are circa 1500s

 I liked the old stone staircase too!

 These large signs are everywhere here, they are wedding celebration notices.


We spent about 3 days at the lake then traveled on to Padang on the west coast. A 2.00 pm ferry followed by a tuk-tuk to the bus station, a 2 hour wait and then a 16 hour bus ride to Padang. Indonesian roads are just terrible, climbing and falling along single track mud through a very wet night. Broken paved roads full of potholes are by far the worst and Sumatra seems to have nothing but. I worked out that the 16 hours covered about 450km, and this only had two 20min stops....

We found a very nice place to stay 20 km further south, here is the view from our room.

 And this is our place, how our standards have changed, a squat toilet  and the shower a big bucket with tap.... Liza still complains about having to wash her hair in cold water but they have slackened considerably and timing washing to the heat of the day makes it quite pleasant.

 We took a walk to the pictured (just) waterfall.... The walk once we entered the jungle was a real strain and climb.... we actually didn't make it all the way, driven back by the steep mud encrusted path and the leeches!

 We continued our journey down the west coast of Sumatra, wow it's beautiful with another stupendous bus ride. another 2.00pm start... we went about 3 miles in the wrong direction to get to this garage to fill up.

However like all the garages in town it was out of fuel hence the picture, we were stuck here for about 5 hours waiting for a fuel delivery, which eventually arrived... we then filled up and had another 16 hour epic to Bengkulu. Another 400km journey we seem to be getting good at traveling at about 30 km an hour!