Lake Toba to Sipirok

Back on the bus for the ride from Lake Toba to Sipirok. It was a very long bus day. The group was getting very annoying and it was a fight to get a reasonable seat on the bus. This was probably the strangest and least sophisticated group we’d ever seen. It was a hodgepodge of guys who were here for the trek- complete with hunting knives and camo-clothing- and a few English biddlies here for the nature walks and two very obnoxious Canadians, Frank and “Larry” (actually “Larry” is Lisa, but we think she/he might have been a Larry in a previous life).
The day was broken up by a few stops- to see gold panning

and a stop at the equator.
When we finally got to Sipirok, we found a nothing town- and our hotel was outside any semblance of a town. The hotel staff put us into the “economy rooms” at the very bottom of the hill and we found that the water was seriously brown (not too many tourists moving through the rooms). So Adrian, the guide, for a mere $1/room upgraded us to the better cabins. Nothing seemed to run very smoothly at the hotel- including dinner- which had to be pre-ordered. Most of the staff seemed to be too busy watching television to worry about their guests. We did an early dinner and headed to bed to read and watch the CNN coverage of the NATO press conference on Kosovo…