More Lake Toba

I went for a walk, along narrow, winding road, past small houses with walls of wooden planks, windows merely a wooden shutter, open by day and shut at night. I came to a lychee tree with a flat roofed shed below. Two young Batak men on the roof were picking the spiky red fruits, that looked like clusters of tiny red hedgehogs decorating the tree. They were throwing them down to people standing below.
"You like?" they asked
"Yes I like"
So they threw some fruit encrusted twigs down for me.
Just then a Chinese tourist came by on a motorbike. He stopped.
"Can I buy some?" he asked in perfect English.
They threw some more down for him. He picked up a cluster, inspected it and dropped it.
"It's full of ants" he said "disgusting!"
He rode off. The locals burst out laughing. I ate his fruit and mine, blowing the ants off my fingers, thanked them and left, but not before being asked my name and nationality. They were surprised that I was going for a walk by myself.

Ahead of me the volcano walls rise steeply, though now clothed in a soft green cover of vegetation that turns into a thick band of forest towards the base.

Along the road, behind the occasional corrugated iron roofed house, there is a wonderful collection of tropical fruit trees, growing thickly together -banana, papaya, mango, lychee, durien, mangusteen, coconut and countless others that I didn't recognise. Then over to the right a stretch of luminous green rice fields. Behind me buffaloes roam free in the open fields.

I walked up a small grassy hill, from where I could see the lake stretching into the distance,  steep volcanic hills sloping down towards the water. Lake Toba is enormous. The eruption that resulted in this volcanic crater must have made the world dark for years and years. It must have been an eruption that went on continuously for years on end, if not decades.