After the jungle at Bukit Lawang, we carried on to Berastagi — another long drive on Sumatra's roads, rough in patches but a little kinder than the last one. By the time we arrived we did nothing but relax at the hotel for the rest of the day. The plan was to take the next day easy too, then do a small volcano trip the day after. It didn't quite work out that way.
The cheapest haircuts of the whole trip
On our rest day, Line took Vitus down to get his hair cut — by what turned out to be a trainee, so it took a good hour, but it cost all of 50 rupiah, basically nothing. Later we met the others, had lunch, and wandered down into town toward a local market. On the way, Line spotted a hairdresser and popped in for a cut of her own — about 20 kroner, probably the cheapest haircut she'll ever have. Then we hit the market, which was wonderfully chaotic: piles of fruit and fish, new and second-hand clothes, shoes, everything. We stocked up on a stack of t-shirts for Noah (he needs them for boarding school back home), and he also grabbed two pairs of sunglasses at 15,000 rupiah each — about 6 kroner a pair. And we found a barber to cut his hair too — again, cheap as anything, 15–20 kroner.
A midnight dash to the hospital
Back at the hotel, Noah suddenly went downhill fast and didn't want to come out for dinner. It was bucketing down with rain and lightning everywhere, but Line, Jesper and Vitus still had to go and eat, so we headed out around 8pm. When we got back at 9:30, Noah was in a bad way — fever, chills, a headache. Because we'd been in a few parts of Indonesia with a small malaria risk, every bit of common sense (and every website and chatbot we checked) said the same thing: get him checked urgently, because if it were malaria it needs treating as fast as possible.
So we suddenly had a real scramble on our hands. We messaged our driver to ask for help, and he turned up quickly, collected Line and Noah, and drove them to a hospital about fifteen minutes away. Noah was admitted to the emergency room, put on a fluid drip and given something for the fever and stomach, and they took blood to test for malaria and dengue. It took a couple of hours — the driver sat and waited the whole time — and then the report came back: thankfully no malaria, and the bloods ruled out dengue too. Just an ordinary virus. So we could go home. It was nearly midnight by the time they got back, Noah still feeling rotten. Meanwhile Jesper had been busy contacting our insurance and messaging the guide to say we definitely would not be doing the volcano trip the next morning.
Instead we slept in. Noah was a little better by morning, so we gave him a travel-sickness pill and set off for the ferry down to Samosir Island for a few pure rest days. He managed the drive without being sick — though on a diet that was, frankly, all Snickers: a Snickers before bed, Snickers for breakfast, and a bit more Snickers for lunch. We stopped for a very safe lunch on the way down (soup, and instant noodles for Vitus — nothing too local), then waited for the ferry. The crossing took about half an hour. Somewhere along the way we passed one of the odder buildings of the whole trip: a house built in the shape of a giant golden fish, sitting incongruously against the jungle hillside.
Horas Family Home, Tuktuk
On the far side we were collected and taken to our homestay, Horas Family Home in Tuktuk on Samosir Island — and it was exactly what we needed. The hosts were lovely, gave us a proper introduction, told us to just help ourselves to anything from the kitchen and garden and to say if anything wasn't right. Our place was a big apartment with its own kitchen, two bedrooms and a little living room where we could plug in the Chromecast and watch something. And — for the first time in all of Indonesia, I think — hot water in the shower. Bliss.
The first evening we ate at a lakeside restaurant the boys and Line had set their hearts on because it had a real pizza oven — Jesper, not exactly a pizza fan, was outvoted. What saved the night for him was the table-tennis table, and he and Noah got stuck into that instead.
Doing very little, beautifully
And then we simply relaxed. Vitus spent hours fishing down at the lake — and actually caught a few — while Line read and sunbathed, and the rest of us pottered around Tuktuk, a quiet lakeside village dotted with traditional Batak houses and their dramatic saddle-shaped roofs. There was even a pool by the water for cooling off.
And Lake Toba itself — the huge volcanic crater lake that Samosir sits inside — was a lovely thing to just sit and look at, from the jetties and decks all along the shore.
Disc golf — right next to the water buffalo
The other half of "relaxing" was anything but. Jesper and Noah discovered a big grassy field on the edge of town that made a perfect improvised disc-golf course — and threw themselves at it, clocking up something like ten hours of disc golf over our days on Samosir (Vitus joined in for a couple of hours too). Hardly restful, but they had an absolute blast. The best part: the field is shared with a herd of enormous water buffalo, wallowing in the mud holes and grazing just metres from where we were throwing. You'd line up a shot with a half-tonne buffalo watching you from the next fairway.
A Batak cooking course
On our second full day here, Vitus and Line did a cooking course up at Juwita Café — and it was superb. It only took an hour and a half, but everything was made from scratch, starting with the prep: fresh spices to peel (turmeric root, for one) and blend into a paste.
The most memorable bit was the coconut milk, which we made ourselves: grating the coconuts on a special little stool with a blade fixed to the end, then pressing the milk out by hand and toasting the leftover grated coconut in the pan to use in the dishes.
We cooked three dishes: chicken rendang (a real local speciality, and delicious), chicken curry (which we've had many times here and would happily make at home), and sambal chicken, a tomato-and-chilli dish with pieces of chicken. It was just the right length — nobody lost focus — and then Noah and Jesper turned up to help eat it. All of it, with rice and water, came to 700 rupiah. Cheap, and brilliant.
Line hadn't slept well and had felt a bit off the evening before, so she was pretty wiped after the course — though while she was cooking she forgot all about it. Back at the apartment she started to feel properly rough, so she rested, went down to the water to read, and ended up asleep for a couple of hours on a sun lounger while Vitus fished and played Pokémon Go and Jesper and Noah went back up to the buffalo field for more disc golf. Jesper, meanwhile, had a work call to fit in: his Dell laptop has the webcam awkwardly low, so he propped it up on a rice cooker to get the camera level with his face for the Teams meeting — travel-office improvisation at its finest.
Tuk Tuk Pizza — and onward
In the evening we went out to eat at Tuk Tuk Pizza, which does both pizza and local dishes, and the food was excellent again. The boys had pizza and chips; Noah and Line had chips with a proper dollop of guacamole; Jesper had a chicken schnitzel with chips; and Line had an eggplant curry. All delicious. We sat and watched some TV in the evening.
One curiosity of Samosir that catches every visitor off guard: both the menu here and the signs around town openly advertise magic mushrooms — as pizza toppings, teas, shakes. They're very much illegal in Indonesia, but on this particular island you can apparently just order them in an ordinary restaurant. We stuck to the guacamole.
On our last morning we collected our clean laundry and headed back across to the mainland and on toward Medan. All in all, some really good, restful days here on Samosir Island — exactly what we needed after such a packed Indonesian programme and the jungle up at Bukit Lawang. After all the activity, it was just lovely to land somewhere with nice surroundings, a genuinely quiet, cosy spot, and time to do nothing.
Previously: ← Bukit Lawang — jungle trekking for wild orangutans
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