Hi Everyone,

We decided that as the internet was so cheap here we would do the blog and photos as we have so many nice pictures and we didnt want to risk losing them all. We will write about Lake Maninjau and Lake Toba together, as we visited them side by side and because its easier! They are to different places and 23 hours on a bus apart! We decided to do a day trip from Bukittinggi to Lake Maninjau which is 45 minutes down the road because if we didnt book seats on the bus to parapat the next day we wouldnt get out because of Ramadan. We drove down through beautiful scenery and 44 hair pain bends to the lake. We had lunch there and i had a swim in the lake, which was like bath water, and then watched a group of puppy dogs playing in the gardens. After a relaxing morning there and discovering ginger tea with honey (with proper fresh root ginger in it!) we headed back and were dropped off at the bus station where we had to wait for an hour. The bus journey from there as we said earlier, took 23 hours!!!! it was only supposed to take 14 but the roads were chockablock with car jams like you couldnt have imagined. i would have taken a photo but at that point we coudlt have cared less we just wanted to go to sleep! The kind driver helped by blaring out very loud indonesian pop music all night and turned it off in the day! mind you if it kept him awake i wasnt gonna argue, he looked ready to drop when we got off in parapat and he still had 4 hours to Medan ahead of him. He did stop twice for us to eat in padang restaurants (our favourite). We had fish curry and rice for breakfast! yum!

Anyway after getting to the harbour in Parapat, we had a cup of tea in a cafe and met Dylon, who would then tell us about his hotel and take us there on the Ferry. As it was the end of Ramadan and the chinese had come for the holidays we timed our arrival just as the prices of hotels went into orbit (sod's bloody law) but we managed to stay in Tony's Hotel for same as we were used to paying. It was very laid back on the lake, just what we needed after our bus journey... one day we just sat on our balcony with a pitcher of tea and cadburys chocolate (god did we savour it!) while watching the rain and thunderstorms. It did rain a lot here but it was nice to have a change! We also went on a day trip to see the monkeys and feed them bananas, see a pineapple plantation and have all we can eat pineapples that tasted so sweet it was like eating honey dew melon! Yum! then visited a waterfall. See pictures. Hayley also learned how to make the best chicken curry in the world as the lady in the restaurant let her go behind the scenes and taught her as she cooked our dinner. Proper bo! We watched a lot of films too. After 4 nights there we hopped on a very crowded and over priced minibus for a four hour ride to Medan.