Medan, Indonesia, Day 1

So my whole family went for a vacation last week to our neighbouring country, Indonesia. Well, we booked the tour before the haze hit Malaysia, it's not like we deliberately wanted to escape the haze :P Haha, but anyways, Medan's air is actually much fresher than Malaysia. You can say that there's no haze at all. 

We reached Medan's airport at approximately 10.00am (Medan time, Malaysia is one hour faster). And was quite shocked when the tour guide/driver said that he'd bring us for lunch. at 10.00am?! Not long later only we understand why the rush. The roads in Indonesia are very small. (Read : Very) There's only 1 lane roads and the amount of cars and motorcycles are amazing. As you know, Indonesia is one of the highly populated countries around the world. It actually took 2 hours just to get to our restaurant lol.

After satisfying ourselves with Minang Melayu (Malay cuisine) at Simpang Tiga, one of the more famous restaurants there, we head off to a 4 hour road trip to our destination for the day, Lake Toba. Lake Toba was what used to be a super volcano and had the largest eruption ever known. It is not a volcano anymore, but thanks to the huge eruption, it turned into a lake! It's the largest volcanic lake in the world. How big is this lake? As big as Singapore, well, used to, until Singapore embanked some land and ended up becoming bigger than Lake Toba. Here's a random picture that I took.

As Lake Toba is situated at the top of a mountain, the temperature is actually cooling, it's still at 20+ degrees but when the wind blows, it's cold instead of warm, which is quite surprising to me :P

The tour guide stopped the car and let us down as we reached the town named Parapat. My brother was tempted to taste the water because it's not sea water, meaning it shouldn't be salty at all. But after looking at all the kids swimming around...he had second thoughts lol.

Well, after that, we head back to our hotel and grabbed some rest. Odd enough, this particular trip, our tour ends daily almost about 4/5pm which is considered early to me considering that all my trips to China, our day only ends at about 9pm or after dinner.

Chilling out at the hotel. Watching HBO with bro and sis XD

Since we had sometime before dinner, we decided to take a stroll around the hotel. Our hotel, Hotel Niagara has an amazing view of lake Toba. Has nice facilities and good food! Their dinner set was nice :3

And so we ended the day after having our dinner. Went back to our rooms, watched more stuff on HBO channel, and retire for the night. 

Next entry -> Day 2!