Anyone who has read the entries from my trip through Spain and France will be aware of my fondness for red wine. Bottles of plonk here in Sumatra are extremely expensive, taking up approximately one and a half times my daily budget and so it was almost two years before I finally parted with the cash for a bottle of merlot, on my birthday a few months ago. It was delicious and I happily quaffed the lot over dinner with Novi and regaled her with steadily more slurred and incomprehensible anecdotes that I am sure she delighted in. That evening reminded me of how much I missed the stuff and so when the Ramadan holiday arrived, I came up with a plan.
I headed to the only place in Medan that sold boxes of wine, closed my eyes tightly and handed over a small fortune for one. Next stop was the Chinese shop that sells the food items expats miss at prices that make them think fondly of home. I bought 250 grammes of cheddar and a small morsel of blue cheese for the cost of a three month cruise around the Bahamas, and a box of crackers (the type containing wheat and not plastic whistles and bad jokes). I phoned a hotel in a tiny fishing village at the north end of Lake Toba and booked a room, packed my bag with a few books, a pair of swimming trunks and mini hamper, got on my motorbike and headed for the hills.
Tongging is a few hours from Medan, up through the beautiful Karo Highlands, and so I took a leisurely ride, enjoying the scenery and stopping off in Berastagi for lunch and a couple of beers before arriving in Tongging late afternoon. The village was satisfyingly peaceful and the hotel, on first inspection, reassuringly cute. However, first inspection was all I managed to get; a confused-looking member of staff informed me that he knew nothing of any reservation I may have made and that they were full to brimming. Before huffing off I assured a pair of shrugged shoulders that I was head of a VERY large travel company and that they had just lost A LOT of business. It might be true one day. The only hotel with any rooms was next door and cost slightly less than a round-the world cruise on the QE2. With only a couple of hours of light left in the day and no other options I decided to make the best of it; it was a nice hotel and I could enjoy the evening there before heading to Parapat and Tuk-Tuk the next day for cheaper lodgings.
It can get a little nippy up in the hills and so I was pleased to see that the beautifully decorated bathroom had hot water; wasting no time, I stripped off and jumped under the shower to find that the taps had lied. I shivered under a torrent of cold water and, in my haste to wash, dropped the shower head which smashed against the wall and fell to pieces.
Still, I had the red wine and cheese to look forward to, so I grabbed a glass, a knife and a book and sat out on the veranda where a friendly dog decided to join me; he lay placidly by my chair with his head resting upon my feet. What a picture of peaceful bliss we presented. Unfortunately my new friend was not the only visitor to my private retreat; a large cloud of tiny black flies descended upon us. After inhaling a couple of lungfuls I decided that it was my black shirt that was attracting them and so went inside to change tops. I returned to see the dog running off with my blue cheese. I stood for a second or two watching the Danish blue that I had been salivating over all day escaping in the drooling jaws of a duplicitous mutt, before setting off in hot pursuit.
There were several vacationing Indonesians relaxing on their respective balconies that day, whose attentions cannot fail to have been attracted by a frantic white guy chasing a dog around the grounds while yelling unheeded threats and obscenities. They will have then witnessed the red-faced and sweating bule engaged in a tug-of-war with the hound over an unidentifiable object. And I am sure that those self-same spectators will have been cheered to see the loony westerner return triumphant with his prize, wiping doggy-drool from it and muttering to himself.
The damage to the cheese was not as bad as it could have been, I decided. The thief had only had purchase on the open side of the plastic packaging, and no canine teeth had penetrated the main body of it. I went into the bathroom, swilled off the rogue dairy product and amputated the drooled-upon edge of exposed cheese. Could have been worse, I thought happily, and stepped out onto the veranda to discover that the pilfering and hopefully lactose-intolerant mutt had made off with my cheddar.
After ordering fried fish with sweet and sour sauce and being served barbequed fish with nothing, I came to the conclusion that the day was best abandoned, so I went to bed. Minutes after I put my head down on the pillow, the twelve dozen people who were apparently staying in the room next door returned from wherever they had been hiding up until this point. Without a TV to entertain them, my neighbours giggled themselves into the wee hours with what can only be described as a farting competition.
Early the next morning, I left. In the rain.
“One of the many good things about Indonesian girls,” I blathered to a friend one evening, “is that they travel light. Unlike most of their Western counterparts.”
So I was a little taken aback when I arrived at Novi’s house to pick her up for our trip to Bali, to find that she had filled a huge suitcase; one that certainly wouldn’t fit in the overhead locker thereby dashing my plans of avoiding extortionate surcharges with Air Asia and a long wait at baggage claim.
“Cake,” she announced when I demanded to know why she was so encumbered. “For your sister and her friends,” she replied to my agitated inquiries as to why we would be taking cake to a place that I felt sure baked its own. Well I couldn’t argue with her sentiments and so I grunted her luggage into the taxi and hoped the girls were hungry.
My sister Victoria and her three friends, confusingly called Victoria, Sarah and Sarah, were on round-the-world tickets and their first stop was Bali. I’d promised Novi that I would take her there one day and so this seemed like a good opportunity. I had to admit that I was a little non-plussed about going to Bali itself as I have an aversion to places that attract hoards of people wanting to enjoy themselves, but I was looking forward to meeting up with my little sis’ who I hadn’t seen for two years.
We arrived at Kuta Beach late at night and checked straight into a hotel where, with great curiosity, I flung open Novi’s suitcase. Inside was one of the largest and densest fruitcakes I have ever had the fortune to see, all cut up into manageable slices. “They’ll have to have half,” I told Novi. This wasn’t just greed for retaining a share of my favourite product from her bakery; the thought of meeting Victoria at the beach the next morning and weighing her down for the rest of the day with two bricks worth of stodge seemed rather unfair. So, with everybody’s best interests in mind, I slumped on the bed with a couple of beers and some cake.
Needless to say, when we met on the beach the next day, the girls were delighted with their present and set about lightening their load immediately. The following day we hired the oldest and most gutless car that we could find, crowbarred ourselves amongst the luggage and headed off on a tour of the island. I must say that I was in my element; I was spending the next five days surrounded by five beautiful, twenty-something girls. I felt like Bosley from Charlies Angels.
I’ll bet Bosley and his angels wouldn’t get lost almost immediately upon their first day though. We did. And for reasons of my own personal safety I refrained from making one single comment about female navigators .... until now. Still, we ended up travelling through some beautiful scenery and ended up at a lake at the foot of a volcano, where we stayed the night. Most have us had a good night’s sleep but the Victorias were kept awake by a mysterious screeching creature under the bed. However, in the morning, the cake was still safe.
For the next few days we trundled around beaches and hot-springs and ate cake. We drank in bars and ate cake. We visited monkey temples and Hindu temples and ate cake. Lounged in pools, ate in fancy restaurants and ate cake. Novi learned to body-surf and we ate cake. I met up with half of the population of Ross-on-Wye (I kid you not, there were nine of us one night) and ate cake.
It was a thoroughly enjoyable time; Bali was much nicer than I expected and it was great to spend so much time with Victoria (the most time we’d spent with each other since she was five) and her lovely friends. And when we left, one week after arriving, there was still plenty of cake left.
