Travel Stories: Nomor Enam

While backpacking through South East Asia when I was 19, my friend and I spent about 6 weeks on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. We spent a few days over Christmas on the island of Samosir on Lake Toba. Lake Toba is the largest lake in Indonesia (if I remember correctly) and Samosir is a massive island in the middle of it. Incidentally, there is another lake on Sumatra that was on our list of places to visit, a point that will come into play later in the story.*

On Boxing Day, we decided to take a little adventure and we rented scooters for the day, thinking we would take a ride around the island for a few hours.* The scenery and experience were amazing, to say the least. I still have some scenes forever locked in my memory of the forests, valleys, rice steps, shining lake, women carrying baskets on their heads, etc. It was the perfect day. Until our supposed 3 hour ride kept on going and going.

At one point, I got a fair way ahead of my friend, so I decided to stop on the side of the road and take in the scenery while I waited for her to catch up. And I waited. About a half hour after stopping, I decided something was decidedly wrong, she couldn't have been that far behind me. So, I decided to turn back and look for her. I rode back for who knows how far, but found no trace of my traveling companion. This is when the panic set in. Not knowing what to do, and assuming that I couldn't be that far from Tuktuk, the town we were staying in (I mean it was only supposed to be a 3 hour ride), I headed back to look for help, with the faint hope that somehow we missed each other and she was safe and sound in Tuktuk. 

As I headed back alone, stricken with fear and images of V lying injured in a ditch somewhere, the road took me up into the mountains, not down to a beach and familiar territory. The sun was setting, I was getting cold, and I knew my gas was starting to run out. There were no towns or even houses to be seen. And the road continued on. And the panic grew. To try and stay calm I screamed out "Amazing Grace" the whole way. I'm sure I was a sight to see to any passers-by.

Eventually, hours later, long after the sun had set, I arrived back in Tuktuk at the shop where we rented the bikes. The fact that my gas tank brought me the whole way home was nothing short of a miracle. The shop owners' English was limited, and my Bahasa Indonesian even more limited. As I tried to explain with simple words and hand gestures that I lost my friend and needed help looking for her, I only received blank stares and motions to sit and wait and drink some tea. After 20 minutes of agonizing attempts to communicate my problem, the shop owners clued in and I started bawling. Luckily, they were quick to act and an emergency vehicle showed up soon after and we were off into the mountains retracing my route. After driving quite a ways, we saw a couple of motorbikes up ahead. As we got nearer, both parties stopped, and that's when I noticed my dejected-looking friend on the back of one of the bikes. I jumped out of the SUV and gave her possibly the biggest hug I've ever given anyone. She was safe.

Epilogue:

When I originally lost V, she had gotten a flat tire and stopped in a village to get it fixed. I passed through this village when I went back looking for her, but she was in someone's house at the time waiting for her tire to get patched. When she left the village, she was given bad directions and headed the wrong way and drove out of her way for awhile. She headed back the right direction, but eventually ran out of gas. Luckily, she found some men that agreed to put gas in her scooter and ride back with her to Tuktuk. It is somewhere along the way after this that our paths crossed.

Days later, while looking through our guidebook, I discovered that I had mixed up some vital information. The other lake we planned on visiting*, Lake Maninjau, also had a recommended trip around it, but via bicycle. The bicycle trip around Maninjau was estimated at 3 hours, the motorbike trip around Samosir was estimated at 8 hours. At some point, I switched these numbers, believing the trip around Samosir was only 3 hours long.