Mar

20

This morning I rolled out of bed in Lake Toba recalling an Indonesia visa expiration in three days after two wonderful months in Borneo, Sulawesi and Sumatra. I packed my bag, tidied the $10/day room that includes two meals and a massage, and left for the mountain ferry to the mainland to reach immigration before the expiry.

On the first step out the door, a glance at my visa reads '60 days' starting January 23, and yet the 'expiration date' is a month beyond on April 23, 2011. An embassy bureaucrat two months ago goofed, or warmly provided an additional month after losing the door key and helping me crawl through a side window for the visa. I weighed the options in mid-stride, turned into the room, and unpacked.

Lake Toba is the third of selected global Shangri las in a new career as a peripatetic ex-patriot after being the first California sub-teacher to be canned surrounding a 'playground war' two years ago, and the best. The first two were four months each at Iquitos, Peru and San Felipe, Baja.

Toba has it all: 300-meter waterfall cascading outside my window, hand hewn canoes paddled on an idyllic bay, healthy food, cheap accommodation, good internet, expert massages, and the Batak descendants from the Toba Catastrophe Theory. This volcanic island is somewhere between Robinson Crusoe's atoll and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island.The overstay is welcomed, yet a week ago the massage ladies boycotted me.

I used to stroll the single Toba lane and call into one of a dozen windows to the woman of the house cooking or cultivating rice in the back yard, 'Massage?…' It went smoothly for one month, until a week-ago altercation in a market with a popular matron who forgot the calculator. She took offence at my polite math, snubbed me in the town of 150 (2/3 female), and the call 'Massage' is ignored. This is unprecedented in a down market 3rd world land that time forgot, and is a tribute to the Batak people.


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