Hi everyone,

Since we are currently holed up in the hotel room unable to move, I thought I'd update on the last couple of days in Brastagi.From the guide book's description we'd imagined Brastagi to be a small village up high in the mountains. It is high up in the mountains yes, but small it is not!In some ways we were slightly disappointed when we turned up but it's the volcanoes surrounding the town we came to see, not the town itself!The journey from Bukit Lawang took only about 6 hours as opposed to the 8 we had estimated (although it did involve two very overcrowded buses, one which had a puncture and the other where we sat behind a bag of chickens), so we spent the afternoon chilling out in out hostel.

As it got dark we walked over to a small hill just outside the town, where we could see the volcanoes in the surrounding area (the Karo Highlands), including the one which we climbed today - only then did we realise quite how big it was!!There isn't a brilliant choice of restaurants here so dinner was interesting - an ok-ish chicken curry with rice, served with veggies that tasted like dried fish…we had a banana pancake in the hostel on the way home!!

Today we got up early and caught the local bus a couple of kms down the road to the very official payment office (shack/café) where we paid our 1,500Rp (about 10p) for the privilege of hiking up the mountain.Gunung Sibayak (Mt Sibayak - the volcano we climbed) is the second largest in the region and reaches 2094m at its peak.The first hour involved following the road along further up from the payment office (infact we're pretty sure we paid for the bus to take us up there!) From there it was another precarious hour's climb up some 'steps' (their idea of steps here is the occasional rock that looks man-made and is otherwise just a tiny path that seems to lead to nowhere).Once we reached the crater, we walked around the rim and then down into the crater, although the lovely sulphur smell meant we didn't stay around too long!You get a fantastic view from the top of all the surrounding villages and other volcanoes, including Gunung Sibanung, the tallest in the region at around 2800m.

We'd read in our fantastically accurate lonely planet guide that there is another path down the volcano which leads to some hot springs (infact there are 3 all together although the last can't be attempted without a guide).We'd read that the path was "narrower and in poorer condition" than the one we'd come up but just involved finding some steps down from the other side of the crater.Well I'm afraid lonely planet either climbed the mountain back in the 50's when the steps were actually intact, or the researcher never actually walked that path!We ended up spending the first half an hour descending down a rock-face that was near-vertical in parts and when we eventually found said steps, only about 1 in 4 was still intact so we spent the next hour sliding down through the jungle in the mud!

Unfortunately it seems that the Indonesians are pocketing our 10p entrance fee rather than putting it towards keeping the trails open as near the bottom we found an enormous tree trunk blocking our path that had taken out half the mountain side.With the only other option being to go back up, we climbed over the tree and scaled down the lianas that had grown on it to get to the bottom.All very Tarzan-esque but I think we were both missing the nice well-maintained paths in New Zealand!Apparently the authorities used to put signposts up to help you find your way around but the local guides just take them all down to keep their trade - standard Indonesian logic!

Eventually after over 3 hours of educatedly guessing our way up and down the mountain we arrived at the hot springs.Not going to pretend they were the best we've ever been to but to be honest we both fancied a rest and it was only 30p to get in!

We've now realised that most people take a bit longer to make the climb, so the public buses don't actually start running until later in the afternoon.Looking at our rather rubbish map that the hostel had provided, we concluded that it wasn't far to walk, so rather than waiting around for the bus we'd walk back to Brastagi.It honestly did not look far (even on our not to scale map) but the walk took us nearly three hours.Very unimpressed! although to be fair the first buses from the trail-end only started passing us about 5 minutes from town.So despite the fact that the climb took less time and was easier than we'd thought it might be (ignoring serious lack of steps/path etc) we are now completely knackered and shall be getting an early night!

We did really enjoy the climb though and got a greater sense of achievement given the longer walk (trying to find something positive about the walk back!) - We're going to google-map the distance when I can make the internet work.It was 12km just for the climb so I hate to think how far we actually walked today - will let you know!

Off to Lake Toba tomorrow to soak the aching muscles (if my legs will take me there!!)

Love Katie and Martin

(Martin has just googled it - we think its about 25km - ouch!)