View our location map at Bukit Lawang
We arrived in Bukit Lawang at around 3pm, and within a couple of hours we had seen 2 kinds of monkeys in the trees outside our house and a scorpion in our room (yes, in our room – a little unsettling after the centipede incident!). This really is the jungle.
Our past few days have been basically chilling and nursing Dre’s foot, watching some DVD’s and walking around the island. We had an amazing whole fish bbq’d in banana leaf, and topped off our final day by scoring the best ‘view’ seat in our favourite restaurant and some delicious Indo fare. This morning the swelling in Dre’s foot has gone down enough that he can loosely wear a shoe, which is good timing as today we are heading to Bukit Lawang to see wild Orang-Utans. Woohoo!
We have had a funny couple of days with every person we walk past asking why Dre’s foot is swollen / why he was only wearing one jandal (when it was so swollen that his jandal wouldn’t even fit on) or how he is feeling. We have received advice from everyone and it has been intriguing how almost every local we have talked to has also been bitten by one of the Sumatran Giant’s and each has the ‘best’ cure that if Dre had used the swelling and pain would be gone by now. So, the definitive list on how to cure a bite from a Sumatran Giant Centipede is this:
- kill the centipede and crush it innards and smear over your wound
- rub ‘special oil’ on the wound every hour
- walk around constantly to massage your foot
- get a knife and cut out the poison (sounds particularly appealing)
- wrap leaves (of unknown kind?) around the wound
- get plaque off your teeth and mix it with raw chewed peanuts and smear on the wound (also appealing!)
- enbalm the centipede in oil and spread on wound
- get water spinach and add salt to taste, then make into a powder, and put on wound
- rub lime or lemon juice into the wound
- tie string around limb so the poison doesn’t spread, and then squeeze poison out
- soak wound in salt water
- and of course, the doctor’s recommendation “you need an injection, otherwise you will always be in pain”
So there you have it, should you ever find yourself in need, the Batak people of Lake Toba can cure your centipede bite faster than you would otherwise be able to.
For the past few days, Dre has been saying that he wishes we were seeing more giant insects and crazy animals. I keep reminding him that in a few days we are going into the jungle where we are sure to see plenty of creepy-crawlies. I think he forgot to wish that when he saw a Sumatran Giant Centipede, that he would only see it, and not be biten by it! Yesterday afternoon only a few hours after again saying it would be cool to see some giant beetles or large insects, we went up to our cottage for a few minutes, and the split second that Dre put his feet back on the floor there was one of these Sumatran Giant Centipedes about 25cm long (which apparently grow to 30-35cm and eat bats!) underneath his right foot which promptly have him a poisonous bite. After medical consultations with some locals, who gave us some herbal medicine which smells like petrol to put on the wound every hour, and a trip to the doctor who wanted to give Dre an injection (of what, we have no idea – of course we declined), Dre spent the night pacing the floor because if he stopped moving his foot would throb in intense pain. His foot is still sweating profusely out the top, and the petrol stuff does seem to be working somewhat, so now apparently we just have to wait 2-3 days before it will stop throbbing. Nothing like some drama to add excitement to life!
Our experience of Sumatra has been very different to Bali or Lombok so far. There are far fewer tourists, and no touts at all. The people are very friendly and we are never hassled. If we leave the area of Tuk-Tuk, and go elsewhere on the island of Samosir, we are the only white people we see. We have had an entire classroom of school kids rush outside to gawk and wave at us, a local man stop on the side of the road for us because he want’s to help us (we had stopped to take a photo) “Please, there must be something I can do for you.” In the end we agreed that he could show us his village and have a coffee in his house. There have been kids rush into the street as we ride past to give us a high five, and a wide-eyed small girl gasp and cover her mouth at the sight of us white-y’s. We have learned that for our driver, “If I no eat chilli it’s like I no eat.” And we learned that the reason they cut down the big trees is because “There are too many ghosts when the trees are big.” It’s been quite surreal, and very cool. Here are a couple of pics of our lazy days here.
View our location map on Lake Toba
We are absolutely loving Lake Toba. True relaxation has set in and so far in the past week we have established sort of a routine – get up at 5am to see the sunrise and work, have breakfast, go for a run, go for a swim, realise it’s 8am and you have the rest of the day to do whatever. We’ve spent our time after 8am scootering around the island, swimming, reading, admiring the view, relaxing, eating amazing food and napping. It doesn’t get much better than this! Our photos are here.
Singapore Zoo definitely lived up to our expectations. We were surprised how close we got to a lot of the animals, they seemed to be really big on not having lots of barriers. The jungle setting was amazing too.
We loved seeing all the different monkeys and especially the Borneon Orang-Utans and Sumatran Orang-Utans. The white Tiger was another highlight. Our photos are here.
Our last few days in Singapore have been just the luxury we wanted. We would split our time between the free food and drinks at the executive lounge, some gym time and playing music in our room (soon after we moved in we found out that not only did we have speakers in every room – we had 3 subwoofers too – one in the lounge, one in our bedroom, and one in the bathroom!). We loved playing our music on awesome speakers – quite different to playing stuff on the laptops!! We also had a fantastic 6 course dinner at the Szechuan Restaurant. Our photos are here. All in all a awesome few days and great pitstop in between the last month in Indonesia, and the next month in Indo as well. Tomorrow we are off to the Zoo…
View our location map at Fairmont Singapore
A week before Dre’s mum left for Singapore, we emailed her telling her we had arranged a surprise for her and that she needed to go to Fairmont Singapore at 3pm on 9th July to collect it. She didn’t know that her surprise was us! We arranged for them to meet us at our hotel so that we could hang out in our room and also as Raffles Hotel is across the road, we went there for the obligatory Singapore Sling. The whole afternoon and evening was great and we were so glad that neither mum nor grandma had an inkling that we might be the surprise, and seemed really pleased that we were. Photos of the afternoon and evening are here.
View our location at Padangbai, Bali
We chose to spend some time at Padangbai because it had one thing that most of Indonesia did not: high speed internet. So we able to spend time most days working on our business which was really good. Sitting in our private garden courtyard while using the internet next to the beach in Bali is definitely a good way to spend time working! We also did the usual other stuff, swimming, eating, etc. Karen finally found a circumstance when sitting down to pee is far superior – when you need both hands free for swatting mosquitos! A few pics of our time in Padangbai are here.
