As I walked the two kms to the bus stop I passed plastic sheets of rice, drying in the sun in front of people's houses. Then I came to a rice de-husking machine parked on the side of the road. It was just unloading three sacks of rice (presumably de-husked), before driving off. I suppose these farmers, who grow small fields of rice for their own consumption, employ the travelling de-husking machine to remove the hard, external husk from their rice crop.
The bus was playing Batak pop music so loud that the base was distorted. I cornered a window seat so that I could stick my head out of the window to escape the cigarette smoke and got off the bus at Simanindo, to visit the museum. It was housed in a traditional Batak house, with a thatched roof sprouting a small forest of ferns. Examples of Batak weaving, old carvings, woven baskets and various other artifacts were poorly displayed behind dirty glass in dusty cases, festooned with cobwebs. Streams of ants were running across the back wall of one of the display cases, threatening to consume the exhibits. The museum was dark, with no illumination, there were no explanations and no historical background.
Back on another earsplittingly loud bus to Pangururo, all the way along the coast of the island, past hundreds of traditional Batak houses, with intricately carved wooden facades and rusty corrugated iron roofs. It hardly ever occurs to anyone to paint the corrugated iron to stop it rusting. They seem to regard these roofs the same way they do the thatched roofs, which they leave to rot and replace when they disintegrate.
I didn't realise I was in Pangururo until people started asking me where I wanted to get off. It's a scruffy dump with pot-holed roads, rubble instead of pavements and a miserable assortment of dilapidated shacks and sheds. I headed in the direction they pointed, followed by peels of laughter. I hired a motorbike taxi, one of the Indonesian style rikshaws with the motorbike on the side. As he raced along the bumpy, twisting track for mile after mile, I began to realise why they had been laughing - it was a long way to the hot springs. Eventually we arrived at a rather uninspiring set of buildings.
"Where are the hot springs?" I asked inside the nearest bar.
"I have swimming pool" the woman said, pointing down some steps.
At the bottom of the steps I found several small rooms, each with a concrete bath into which spurted boiling water, then an entrance way led to a small pool of turquoise steaming hot water. The pool was completely surrounded by seven foot high concrete walls, not very inspiring, but very private. I was the only person in the place, so stripped off and put on my swimming costume. The water felt too hot to get into at first, but I got used to it quite quickly, alternately immersing myself and dousing myself with cold water.
As I left I noticed building works all around. Maybe other people are building pools for the mysterious tourists. Several cafes and bars were empty. I hitched a ride in a lorry back to Pangururo, and just as I was struggling to get my foot high enough to climb into the cab, Nick and Anna came by on a motorbike and waved. I guess they will have the hot pool to themselves, just as I did.
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