We booked a countryside day tour at Losmen Sibayak in Beristagi. After reading the guide books it seemed the best way to get around and see many things on the same day, as the “attractions” are scattered around town in different directions. The itinerary was the following:

Lingga village:

We were greeted by a local who explained us about the village and the traditional life there and guided us around the traditional long houses.

The village population is 2500, consisting of 650 families. 50 old men live in the village who are between 70 and 80 years old and who make traditional instruments (flute) and objects (medicine box, garlic box against bad spirits, box for pregnant women that also keeps off the bad spirits, calender to set the date for weddings) that they also sell to tourists. All these objects are made of bamboo with some nice carvings of bees, garlic, waves etc. We bought a calender and Kaarel has chosen the date of our wedding for July. The year is unclear at this point, as he still has to collect a few pigs, cows and cassowaries as bride price...

The people who live in Northern Sumatra are the Batak. There are 5 types of Batak (Karo, Toba, …). Here in the Karo Highlands the Karo Batak live and speak the Karo Batak language. They have 24 characters in their alphabet and traditionally do not use Latin letters. The alphabet is syllabic, syllables ending usually with 'a' e.g. 'ba', 'ka', 'ra'. If a word ends with a consonant, like “Kaarel”, they put a minus sign after the symbol for 'la', so that makes the consonant 'l'.

The language of Karo Batak is much different from the other four Batak languages so that they do not understand the others.

There are traditional long houses where 8 families can live together under one roof. Usually they are closely related. The house is actually not long, but rather rectangular and quite spacious. There used to be only one open space inside the house, no walls or rooms. Every family had an own fireplace inside and could use a given area in the house to sleep, eat etc.. Because of the lack of privacy nowadays nobody wants to live in these houses, so they are usually left to deteriorate. However, now people put up walls and doors, thus separating a small sleeping area for each family. In 2 of the 4 villages that Lonely Planet and Rough Guide recommend to visit there are no more long houses. They broke and nobody bothered to restore them. In the remaining 2 villages only a few are still standing and only one or two are inhabited. The architecture of the long houses is really interesting and has a lot of symbolics. The overall shape symbolizes an animist praying position: a men half way on the knees and holding the hands in a praying position in front of the forehead. Before the Kota Batak people became Christian, they used to have animistic beliefs. They worshiped 3 Gods who were equally important and believed in a sort of trinity that includes the head, the middle part and the earth. This trinity is also represented in the shape of the houses. The head (the roof) is protruding outwards, the middle part points again outwards (as the knees in the kneeing position) and the foot part protrudes inwards again, giving a zig-zag silhouette to the house when looked at it from the side. On the top of the roof there are water-buffalo horns that are believed to keep away the bad spirits. Interestingly, not only the houses, but the roof of some private family burial places also have the same shape and even some of the catholic churches. The bottom of the houses has colorful paintings and the sides some reptile pattern, gecko or snake. The latter shapes are actually formed by ropes that connect the wooden planks that make up the wall of the house. Traditionally they did not use nails, but only ropes to build the house. The attic is very spacious and is used for storage and to guide the smoke from the fireplaces out of the house. For the better ventilation the houses are built on stilts.

The burial customs are also interesting. They bury the dead on their own properties, e.g. in the middle of their cabbage field or orange plantation. Our guide told us that like this they mark their land, so nobody can take it away. On the other hand, they can only sell the land if they dig out the bones and put them into a public cemetery.

The people in the villages live on agriculture. The main produce is cabbage. They even have a cabbage monument in Berastagi, to emphasize its importance. The other monument in town is a war memorial. Cabbage and war heroes are important things here... Beside cabbage they grow amongst others orange, spring onions, chili, potato, carrot, passion fruit, maracuja (I thought the last 2 things are the same, here it turns out they are not: passion fruit is sweet, maracuja is sweet and sour), strawberry and corn.

After the village we drove to Kabanjahe, the administrative capital of the highlands and strolled around on the market. It was very muddy. Many people were selling tofu and fish, even sea fish, squid, crabs, rays. We saw many fruits and vegetables we did not know.

Lunch we had in Berastagi, in a local restaurant that served only one kind of menu (babi pedang): spicy meat soup, rice, roasted pork pieces with sauce made of pig blood and garnished with manioc leaves. Cost 10,000 Rp.

After lunch we visited the Sikulikap waterfalls, that is next to the main road to Medan. It must have been an important tourist attraction once, because there is a paved path leading there through the jungle, but now nobody seems to take care of the path, so it is overgrown with weed and bushes. There is also quite a lot of garbage along the path. The waterfall at the end is nevertheless quite nice and there is a nice view to the forest-covered valley the river runs in. Officially there is a 2000 Rp entrance fee, but there is often nobody there to collect it. At the waterfall, along the main road there are many restaurant kind of places, but they only sell boiled or grilled corn on the cob and drinks. Why only corn?

Our next stop was at the feet of the Sibayak volcano that was steaming: there are hot water springs and geothermal power plants on it and around it. It is also possible to take a bath in nice pools that use the same water. The water is sulfurous and has a lot of floating particles in it. As the climate is quite hot during the day, it is not that pleasant to sit in the hot water for a long time. At night, when the temperature drops it must be much better. Cost 3000 Rp. The road to the hot springs has a check point that charges 5000 Rp per car.

After the dip in the pools we stopped at a catholic church that was built in a similar style as the traditional long houses. So it is quite funny to see a church with buffalo horns on the roof. It was founded by Dutch priests and was finished only a couple of years ago.

On the way back to Berastagi we had a short stop in Peceran village, the only other village besides Lingga that still has a few traditional long houses. We have seen three, all in quite a bad shape. Still one has to pay 5000 Rp, for the visit (no guide or any information is provided for that money, unlike in Lingga). There is actually not much to see or do in the village, so we spent only about 10 minutes there.

Back in Berastagi town we drove up the Gundaling Hill, from where there is a nice view to the town itself and the surrounding highlands, with couple of volcanoes in the background. Along the road that is running up the hill in a spiral shape there are many cafes and souvenir shops and on the top a small park with walking paths and flowers.

The last stop of our day trip was at the fruit market in Berastagi. It was much smaller than the market in Kabanjahe and there were also clothes, animals (rabbits, hamsters), flowers and food sold besides fruits and vegetables. Here the vendors were very friendly, offering us to try different fruits for free. This is where we found out about the difference between maracuja and passion fruit. We also tried a fruit called “sale” that is similar to lychee: it has a harder outer skin and a big seed in the middle, but it is bigger and brown and quite sour. With that our day adventure ended.