I was blessed with the presence of two of my college friends, Kristina and Melodie. They arrived on October 17 and spent 2 weeks with me in Indonesia. The first few days I spent at Professional Development, and they battled jet leg by sleeping in, going to the salon and getting massages. My holiday started on Friday, and we flew off to Sumatra for 6 days of adventure.
We landed late at night and drove directly to Bukit Lawang, which is a village right on the edge of a nature reserve. The next morning we set out for an overnight trek in the jungle. The trek took us through the beautiful jungle. We walked, slipped, and clambered our way past massive trees, dense forest and of course the wildlife! We were so lucky to see over 10 orangutangs (the main attraction of the hike), a few white gibbons, some black gibbons, a Thomas leaf monkey, huge horn-bills (birds), and smaller (more annoying) grey monkeys. We got extremly close to 2 orangutangs and one gibbon that was swinging above our heads for about 5 minutes. It was such an incredible experience to see these awesome creatures in their natural habitat! We stayed the night in a hut near a river, and in the morning we took tubes down the river, back to Bukit Lawang.
The second part of our trip was spent at Lake Toba. It is a massively huge volcanic crater with an island in the middle nearly the size of Singapore. The landscape is beautiful with mountains and waterfalls, palm trees, fascinating buildings, and deep blue water. We spent some of our first day exploring the town and laying in the sun by the lake. The second day we explored the island on motorcycles. The roads were wide-open and the was so much fun burning around and taking it all in. We stopped by a museum (if you can call it that) and watched Batak (local people) dancing. We also went to a local beach, saw some old stone chairs, a tomb and made some purchases at a market. In the morning of our last day in Toba, so hiked to the waterfall we had been admiring for that previous 2 days. The first hour we took random paths and made a trails for ourselves until finally, we found the main path. We walked as far as we could and then headed back to enjoy one last day on the lakeside.
Bali was our next stop. Our first 2 days were action packed as we did a variety of activities in Ubud. We were able to accomplish: motorbiking to a temple and a shopping street, visiting monkey forest, watching Balinese dancing and eating a yummy dinner. The second day we went on a bike tour that took us to the volcano crater for breakfast, a coffee plantation, and biking down the mountain through rice paddies, past houses, temples, and friendly locals. The tour ended with an awesome breakfast and we even had enough time to shop in the market for 3 hours before we headed towards the beach. I figured we had to spend some time on the beach during vacation, so we thoroughly enjoyed the crashing waves, hot sun, and fresh fruit on the beach.
