Lake Toba
Volcanic pearl
The region around Lake Toba is one of the most beautiful areas of Sumatra.
Lake Toba itself was officially put on the map around 1850.
In Marsden's 'History of Sumatra' dating from 1811, we read:
'It is said that there is a huge lake in North Sumatra,
where exactly is not known.'
Numerous writers praised the beauty of the crater lake.
The Dutch writer Louis Couperus for example, in his travel journal
'Eastward' from 1923,
writing in the style of the time:
'It was the incredible beauty of an
ancient, volcanic world, which through her cataclysms stayed a paradise
of giants and gods. There is something gigantic in this nature and herin
lies Lake Toba as a blue jewel, luminescent between the pearl white,
straight rocks.'
(Couperus, L., Eastward, p. 89)
They loved to talk
The region south of the lake, towards Tarutung, (the centre of the
Christian Protestant Batak Church), streches along the ricefield covered
borders of Lake Toba. On the one hand we can see the mountain range of the
Bukit Barisan, rising to over 1500 metres, on the other hand the lovely
slope sawahs. The huge Batak graves along the road are striking.
The greater the tomb the more important the person was.
Mr W.Ph. Coolhaas was a civil servant during the thirties in the Batak
country. Sixty years later he had the best memories about the Batak:
'I found the excursions, when I stayed overnight in a village,
absolutely necessary to learn more about the people in their own environment
... When the evening came, everything that was male and above ten years old,
came to sit and talk. Women, at least superficially, were of no importance.
Very cheerful the Batak people were not, nor very friendly,
but they loved to talk. Every subject we talked about, which in general was
about things that villagers in an agricultural community are interested in,
was thoroughly discussed. Almost everyone, old and young,
thought it necessary to give his opinion loud and clear...'
(Coolhaas, W.Ph. Controleur Binnenlands Bestuur, p. 166)
The valley of Harionboho
W.Ph.Coolhaas looked at the land and people of the Batak through Dutch eyes.
The young Batak Sitor Situmorang came from a desah on the borders
of Lake Toba. He of course looked through completely different eyes to his
native region. As a son of local nobility, he was one of the privileged few,
who was allowed to follow Dutch education.
In the fifties he wrote down his memories in 'The old Tiger':
'In my youth, between 1924 and 1931, the people in the valley of
Harionboho were still excluded from the outer world; they lived from
agriculture and barter trade in the valley....
As a small child I had very little contact with my parents.
Above the age of two the village child is directly involved in social
activities with children of his own age; herding sheep,
fishing in the river and the lake, poaching, stealing fruit from the others
and in the midst of the crowds attending the adat ceremonies
when animals were sacrificed to the gods..'
(Sitor Situmorang, The old Tiger, pp. 14, 15.)
Mysterious outerworld
From the memories of Sitor Situmorang we get an impression of the
Batak country in the thirties. In 1931 he went to Balige, on the southern tip
of Lake Toba:
'The six hour boat trip to the south went via the waters west
of the lake. This was the first time I left the valley and the
first time I experienced the vastness of the lake.
Balige was also my first town. The Dutch school was founded in 1925,
in the same period that the Trans Sumatra road was opened from Medan to
Padang. As the landscape to the north of the lake was dominated by
groups of high steep mountains, Balige was also surrounded by mountain
ranges which rose higher to the east, towards Habinsaran, where the sun
rises, the source region of the Asahan stream.
... Behind that was a mysterious outerworld, just as this outerworld, for
centuries had considered the Batak countries a mysterious world, populated
by tribes with scary habits, with a fascinating adat culture interwoven
with legends and myths....'
(Sitor Situmorang, The old Tiger, p. 20)
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