Sorry for the absence of blog posts over the past month plus. In early December my laptop developed a freezing problem. Its not that it got to cold in Indonesia, but about every three minutes it would freeze up and have to be restarted. Its hard to post blogs with a computer that behaves like that. I took it into a computer shop to see if it could be fixed. Every few days I'd call and ask if it was fixed. Each time they said, "Well, not yet, but we're still optimistic it can be fixed." This continued for almost two weeks until they told me that all the problems were fixed, at the tune of about $40 (actually quite expensive in Indonesia). When I went to pick it up, I thought I'd start it up and see how it ran. Within 2 minutes it had frozen up again. So much for getting it fixed. I learned a lot about how much I use my laptop, but decided I didn't want to go too long without getting a new one. The day after receiving my new laptop, I left for a 16 trip, visiting the cities of Madiun, Sarangan, Surabaya, Medan, Berastagi, Seberaya and Singapore (just in case you wanted to get your SE Asia Atlas out and start looking up city names!) I just returned yesterday and over the next few weeks will try to post some pics and stories from my adventures. Enjoy!
Seberaya is a small village of 500 or so in the highlands of North Sumatera. It may not be big, but it's home for two of my roommates in Bandung. Javen was the first person from this village to ever graduate with a bachelor's degree from a state university, as well as the first to get a Master's degree. After New Years I had the chance to visit his younger brother, Eko, who had returned for the Christmas/Idul Adha/New Year's break. We spent 3 days hanging out and doing what people in Indonesian Batak Karo villages do... not much but sit around and talk. There is a coffee shop about every other house, and they're almost always occupied by men, both young and old. In the customs of this culture, the women do most all the work and the men sit around and talk about it. Good deal if you're a guy. Most of the families make their living by farming vegetables and oranges (see pictures below), along with scattered livestock. Javen and Eko's parents run a small health center, the only one in town, that services all kinds of medical ailments, including birthing, which costs a mere $45 per baby. The above picture is the one and only paved street in home, which doubles as a highway wandering along to the next village.
The rain began when we showed up the first afternoon, and didn't stop until the next morning. We discovered a few leaks in our tents, but 3 out of the 4 at least held out a majority of the rain. On the second day we were refreshed by sunshine and a light breeze. It felt like a spring day in Kansas. But by 4:00 pm the skys were darkening, the rain began spitting down, and the wind started to blow a little harder. We all took shelter in tents, played guitar and cards, ate nuts, chatted, and relaxed to the sound of pattering raindrops on the tent rain-covers. By 5:00 pm the rain was picking up, as were the winds. By 6 pm the wind was howling through the trees, the rain was coming down in sheets, and our tents were threatening to collapse or fly away, depending on the style of tent. By 6:30 pm the winds were roaring. Trees were swaying back and forth, threatening to snap over under the force of the winds. At this time two of our fellow campers were literally scared to death, and so without telling anyone else, suddenly bolted from their tents and hightailed down the trail toward the village, seeking refuge in the a local prayer room. By 7:00 pm the winds ripping and roaring through the trees was deafening, reaching an conservative estimate of 80 mph. Rain pelted down without mercy. Tents stakes started pulling out of the ground. The decision was made to abandon camp and flee for our lives down to the nearby village to find shelter. I was actually grinning from ear to ear and reveling in the experience, and so volunteered to stay behind with my friend Mitch to guard our belongings and try to keep the tents from taking flight. We took shelter on the windless side of a large tree that appear that it wasn't too likely to snap over on top of us. The intensity of the storm only increased, and by about 7:45 the decision was made to hightail it out of there. Mitch, who plans to get married when he goes home from Indonesia, decided he'd rather not die first. We rapidly decended with one eye on the trail and another on the ominously swaying trees above us. On the way down the trail to the village we came across 6 large trees that had snapped off or uprooted and fallen over. This was apparently fiercier than the average storm faced by those trees, some of which were 50 years or more. Like true, hardcore campers we stayed the night at a small hotel, arising at 5:30am to return to the site of our destroyed campsite, were 3 out of 4 tents lay flattened, and equipment laid wind-blown and scattered across the ground. We gathered up our stuff, cleaned up the sight, and around noon headed home, still a little soaked but feeling a close-knit bond of having made it though a near-death experience to camp another day! 
