April and I had a pretty packed week leading up to our trip: three soccer games, tailgating with some great friends, trying to prepare our work email for six weeks of absolute neglect, and making sure we had packed properly. Luckily everywhere we are traveling will be hot and humid so all of the clothes we packed are lightweight. “Luckily”. The night before we flew out, we watched the US Women’s National Team play Japan with my mom, Lauren, and Mike. It was a packed game (as national team games always are), which can bring its own frustrations. I’m glad that people come out to support the national team but it is annoying to sit in the stands and listen to people who don’t know anything about soccer loudly argue with other people who don’t know anything about soccer. That said, it was a beautiful night and we got to spend it with family. We were flying out of Denver at 8 AM, so rather than head back up to Longmont and then back down to DIA 7 hours later, we stayed at the DIA Westin. It’s a nice hotel but we were there long enough to sleep for 7 hours and then walk over to the security line at the airport.
We flew from Denver to Los Angeles and settled in for a 5 hour layover. We were unable to check in for our Singapore Airlines flight out of LAX for an hour and so we overpaid for some food from Wolfgang Puck Pizza. When we wandered back to the Singapore Airlines counter (four hours before our flight was scheduled to leave, mind you), the line was 40 people long. When we finally got up to the counter, we were offered a chance to upgrade our seats to Premium Economy for the flight to Tokyo and connecting flight to Singapore. April and I locked eyes for about 3 and a half seconds before deciding. I had been hoping they would upgrade us for free since it’s our honeymoon but it seems like that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore. Instead we ended up paying a few hundred extra dollars to be more comfortable for 20 hours of flying, which turned out to be a great use of money. Premium Economy on Singapore Airlines gave us extra legroom, a very comfortable seat, and surprisingly good food.
We had a 90 minute layover in Tokyo that would see us reboarding the same plane for our flight to Singapore. Tokyo to Singapore is a 7 hour flight and it was the first flight we were going to let ourselves sleep on. In our attempt to acclimate ourselves to the time difference as quickly as possible, we waited until it was night in Indonesia before sleeping, which meant we were up for 24 hours, 22 of those during daylight as we were chasing the sun across the Pacific.
Singapore was our long layover at 5 hours. We wandered around the airport for a while, April paid to take a hot shower, and then we found some comfy chairs to camp out in. The Singapore airport is like a giant mall with airplane parking but even the best malls slow down at 2 AM. There were still some open stores and restaurants but we were both pretty beat and so left most of our exploration for when we come back through in three weeks.
The flight from Singapore to Medan was quick and uneventful, which is how I like my flights. We landed in Medan at 8 AM and, as soon as they opened up the doors to the plane, felt the heat and humidity. We made it as far as Immigration before we hit our first roadblock. I look nothing like my passport photo anymore and we Indonesian immigration officials apparently look at that stuff (spoiler alert: Malay officials don’t). I got pulled into a back office for about 10 minutes so that they could take a picture of me and compare it with my passport photo. Either I look enough like my passport photo or they felt like the 15 days I’d be in country were not enough to stop me from getting my stamp, but they let me through.
At this point, April and I had been traveling for almost 40 hours and did not actually know how we would make it to our hotel in Lake Toba. Looking online, I had determined that it should cost about 80,000 rupiah per person (that’s about $6) for the five hour car ride from the airport to Parapat (the town where the ferry to our hotel leaves from). As soon as we got our bags and stepped into the public terminal, a man approached us and asked where we were going.
I need to step out of this narrative for a second to say that I knew he would be charging us more than we could find if we went looking. I’ve been to enough countries like this now to know that anytime someone’s first words to you are, “My friend”, they want your money and will keep harassing you until they get some. All of that said, we were tired and had been traveling for a long time.
We told him that we were going to Parapat and he offered to drive us there for 600,000 rupiah. In my sleep-addled state, I thought he was offering to drive us there for 60,000 each. That was a screaming deal. Except that it wasn’t. He followed us around the arrival hall trying to get us to use him and April finally got him to agree to 500,000 rupiah. While that was well over what we expected to pay, it was still only about $37 for someone to drive us for 5 hours. He agreed to 500k and we walked upstairs to get into his car. Which is where things went wrong.
Once we got in his car, he started handing us ads for places to stay at Lake Toba and later in Bukit Lawang. We had already booked our places, so we told him no thanks. Then he handed us a rental car ad. We kept telling him that we didn’t want to rent a car, that we just wanted him to drive us to Lake Toba for the agreed upon price of 500k rupiah. Then things got worse. He kept saying, “Yes, Lake Toba. 7 percent.” Which confused us as he still kept saying yes, we would pay 500k rupiah. Then April realized that he was saying “7 person”, not percent. He said that he would have to go back to his office and find five more people to make the trip with us. Which meant that we should have been paying much less that 250k rupiah each, but he didn’t need to negotiate now that we were in his car.
April and I were done with this guy at the same time and we told him that we didn’t want him to drive us to Parapat, that we’d take the bus instead. Take us to the Amplas bus station and we’ll take a bus. Yes, we know the bus will take longer. Yes, we know there will be more people on the bus. We knew all of this and would rather take the bus than ride with this guy. He took us to the bus station for an outrageous 150k rupiah, which I gladly paid to get out of his car.
We got to the bus station just in time to catch the bus and only had to pay 40k rupiah per seat. The bus was full, there was almost no airflow, and we spent a large portion of the trip passing people in oncoming traffic. But it only cost $6. The bus dropped us off near the ferry landing and the ferry only left 45 minutes late. Romlan Guesthouse, where we would be spending the next four nights, is right on the lake and has its own ferry stop. The boat dropped us off on the shore and we could finally set our bags down for a while.
All told, it took us 46 hours and 12 minutes from leaving Denver to reaching our room on Lake Toba. It was tiring and frustrating but I had the best company possible for it all.