Big Adventure

Well, it was a fun and illuminating 2 months in North America, but now the real adventure (arguably) began! And however things would turn out when we arrived, the journey was most definitely an adventure.

The plan: fly from Raleigh-Durham to New York, then 4 hours later fly to Abu Dhabi, then 8 hours later take a flight to Jakarta, then (after a night in a hotel) take our last flight to Silangit, a tiny airport in North Sumatra, where we would take a 90-minute taxi to the port of Parapat, and then finally a small ferry would take us directly to our guesthouse on Samosir Island. Daunted, but ready, we set off to the airport.

Snag #1: after checking in nice and early for our flight, we get a notification that it's delayed by 3 hours, meaning we'll probably miss our transfer. A few hours, 2 chaotic calls to customer service and multiple chats with the bored airport staff later, we managed to get our flights rebooked for the next day. New plan: fly to Boston, 10 hours (!) later fly to Doha, 8 hours later onward to Jakarta.

Ok. Fine. The airport provided hotel room is acceptable, and one more uneasy sleep later we're back at the airport, and we make it to Boston. Which, by the way, is lovely! I'm so glad we decided to explore the city rather than wait in the airport. We had some delicious food in Chinatown, wandered around some historic sites and even had time for a quick beer before heading back to the airport for our flight to Doha.

Since our trip would be travelling across 11 time zones, to mitigate jet lag we were following the instructions of the Timeshifter app which told us when to sleep, wake up and drink coffee. We knew it's schedule would be punishing, but better than the alternative. So on our red-eye flight to Doha, we tried our best not to sleep.

Arriving in Doha, we were by now irritable and tired, but we knew we had many, many hours of our trip left. For the first time in our lives, we decided to book ourselves into a business lounge - we reasoned that after subtracting the cost of the meals, it's not _that_ expensive, and we would need some rest for what is coming. Of course, rest only meant sleep if the app said we could sleep. Must. Trust. The app.

Well, rest turned out to be only somewhat restful, although the food was excellent (and it was so good to have access to showers). And here we came to snag #2: sitting at the gate waiting for our flight to begin boarding, it turned out there was a problem with the plane, which (after some chaos and miscommunication) shook out to an extra 4-hour delay. Fine. We are fine.

EVENTUALLY, we made it onto our plane, and an eternity later arrived in Jakarta. Delirious from tiredness and thoroughly ready not to be doing this anymore, we wandered around looking for the airport hotel Anara. Where is Anara? We only see signs for Hotel Bandara. Asking passersby only returned baffled looks. It took us far too long to realise that Hotel Bandara is just the Indonesian for "airport hotel", and the signs were actually for us. Fine. No problem. We can do this.

So the last day of our journey arrived, us feeling somewhat more fresh. Our flight to Silangit was only an hour delayed (not bad!), but when we arrived we felt a little dodgy - maybe something we ate, or maybe the jetlag was beginning to sink its teeth in. A swarm of taxi drivers came to ask us where we are from and where we're going, but to the most insistent one at the front of the pack I firmly said "no thank you, we're not interested" and we went to sit down and gather our thoughts.

A tea and a short rest later, we were ready to proceed. Returning to the taxi stand, we found only a single taxi driver left - the one I'd not-so-kindly told to go away. Sheepishly, we loaded our luggage into his car.

The next leg was relatively smooth: the car drive was beautiful and arrived into the port of Parapat, and an hour or so later our boat left the harbour for TukTuk. Travelling across Lake Toba at sunset was rather magical.

We arrived at TukTuk, and after a fairly gruelling 45-minute walk carrying our suitcase over a bumpy stony track, we finally, finally arrived at our guesthouse. We made it!! I am never doing that again.

-AlexRead more