Lake Toba is a lake and supervolcano, 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide, and 505 metres (1,666 ft) at its deepest point. Located in the middle of the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra with a surface elevation of about 900 metres (2,953 ft), it is the largest volcanic lake in the world. In addition, it is the site of a supervolcanic eruption that occurred 74,000 years ago.

There was nothing essential this day, it’s another half-day in Prapat, a quarter-day in Pematang Siantar, and a night at Berastagi doing nearly nothing. We spent most of our time on the road laughing and screaming to make ourselves happy while crossing the borders which happened to be so lenghty and exhausting. The infrastructure was terrible and unmaintained but we …

First of all, I want to say that I have made myself a record! How on earth can I have one blog post each day? Hahaha. I guess this was due to the fact that I had nothing to do but to eat and sleep during my abundant free time. On the other hand, I just could not help seeing my laptop intolerably unoccupied thus blogging was what I did.

Departing from Kabupaten Asahan, we entered Kabupaten Tapanuli Utara, a region where Batak Toba people originally came from. This region is situated at the centre of the Province of North Sumatra and contains many small “kampung” (huta) which, some of them, were named after the Bataknese family names who resides in the areas. I bring up the term “Batak Toba” …

We spent the whole day in Rantau Prapat, the capital district of Kabupaten Labuhan Batu. The district is comparably small that we could drive west-to-east in 30 minutes. The road is wide with relatively low number of vehicles. There is only one shopping centre called Plaza Suzuya (that’s an odd name and sounds very Japanese to me) and located in …

Yesterday was my first day of my Tano Batak Trip. I flew with Garuda Indonesia, departing at 07:00am from Soekarno-Hatta Jakarta and arriving at 09:00am at Polonia Medan. The plane departed 30minutes late but I did not really care about that (of course, at least until I live somewhere where everybody is punctual. Hahaha).
Garuda Indonesia was nice in general. The …

It’s been more than 2 months since my last blog post and surely many have happened. In April 2009, I graduated from the BSc Chemical Engineering program of Institut Teknologi Bandung and was accepted by Imperial College London to enroll a MSc Petroleum Engineering this October. United Kingdom suddenly look much more tempting and challenging than The Netherlands for me.

April 9, 2009. 07:00 am. I will walk to the TPS near my house, I will use my right as a legal citizen to vote.
Do you care enough to vote? I do. I often grumble about stuffs in this country; I even blog about that. Here comes the time for me to do something, to make a change. What’s the …

OK. Here’s the deal, we’re going to have a national general election on April 9th, 2009; it’s going to be big and is already scandalous. The thing is: we are all about to be given an enormous A2-sized A0-sized paper with approximately one hundred names on it; and among those one hundred unknowns, we are obliged to pick a name. …