Cruising across Sumatra

Hello bloggers

Here we are again with a new update! After we visited Indonesia and Jakarta, like you can read in our first blog, we are now travelling towards Cambodia. At the beginning of the next week we hope being in Cambodia but we first want to visit Sumatra. We left Jakarta very early this morning because we don’t have time to lose if we want to visit the 12 countries and end our journey in Lithuania.

Saturday, the fifth day of our journey, we took the boat in Jakarta at 7 a.m. We had been travelling for about 5 hours when we arrived in Palembang, the capital of South Sumatra and the second largest city of the country. We could immediately see that Palembang is a rich city because there were nice buildings. We found out that the city is the richest city of Indonesia because of the oil that is a real source of wealth. The economy of Palembang also consists of coffee plantations and rubber.

Palembang is also called ‘Venice of the east’ because the banks of the river Musi are covered with water and regular intervals. We didn’t have a lot time to visit the city because we had to move on quickly but we did visit the Ampera Bridge, which was very impressive because of its dimension.

It was quite easy to get around in Palembang because there are a lot of public busses and you can also hire boats to cross the rivers. But to move on to Medan, the capital of North Sumatra, we took a domestic flight.

We could see a difference between Palembang and Medan; Palembang was a rich city but in Medan, things were different. After the city’s independence, there was a quick growth and Medan had difficulties to maintain the infrastructure. There are problems concerning water, electricity and sewerage. Also pollution and flooding are big problems. But the good news is that Medan is working on his economy and they are building a new airport, which will be finished in June 2011.

We rented a car because we wanted to visit the Toba Lake, situated 176 km away from Medan. We were overwhelmed when we saw the lake because it’s the biggest lake in the world, situated 1000 m above the sea level. There is even an island with a small village!

It’s time to move on again. Tonight (Monday) we are going to take the boat and probably tomorrow in the afternoon we will be in Cambodia. It will be a long trip but we guess it will be worth it.

Keep on reading our blog so that you stay in touch with us!

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palembang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medan
http://www.indonesia-tourism.com/south-sumatra/places.html

Delphine Van Vooren