Hidden Gems and Local Secrets in Lake Toba
Part of the Lake Toba travel guide — see every topic in All Lake Toba Guides.
Lake Toba's visitors concentrate on a single peninsula, Tuk Tuk, which occupies a tiny fraction of an island the size of Singapore in a lake a hundred kilometres long. Everything else — the highland interior, the western shore, the southern towns, the caldera rim — is ordinary Batak country with no tourism infrastructure and no other visitors. Almost all of it is reachable on a scooter or a short drive.
The island's interior
Samosir's centre is a highland plateau reached by a steep climb from either coast, with rice terraces, villages and Lake Sidihoni — a small lake on the island in the lake, which is a pleasing geographical nesting and a genuinely quiet spot. The road across is spectacular and rough in places. Along it are viewpoints looking down over the whole caldera, saddle-roofed houses in working villages, and the kind of unhurried encounter with people that the Tuk Tuk strip does not produce.
Pangururan and Pusuk Buhit
On Samosir's west coast, Pangururan is the island's main town and is joined to the mainland by a bridge at a narrow isthmus. Just across it, hot springs run off the flank of Mount Pusuk Buhit, the mountain Batak tradition holds as the origin place of the people — several bathing pools of varying temperature with a view back over the lake, used mostly by locals. The mountain itself can be climbed. This side of the island sees a fraction of the eastern shore's traffic.
The southern shore
Balige, at the lake's southern end near Silangit airport, is a proper Batak town with a large market, the Batak Museum at the T. B. Silalahi Centre — genuinely good on Batak history and material culture — and traditional houses along the shore. Nearby are the tombs of Batak kings and Sisingamangaraja XII, who led resistance to the Dutch until 1907 and is a national hero. Almost no foreign visitors reach this end of the lake, and it is where a lot of the culture is.
The northern rim
Sipiso-piso waterfall drops around a hundred and twenty metres off the caldera rim into the Toba basin, with a viewpoint looking down the length of the lake — one of the great views in Sumatra and usually seen only as a brief stop on the drive. The Karo highlands above it hold traditional Karo Batak villages with a different and very distinctive house architecture, at Lingga and Dokan, and cool fertile plateau farmland that produces most of North Sumatra's vegetables.
Hidden Gems and Local Secrets at a glance
| A lake in a lake | Lake Sidihoni, in Samosir's highland interior |
|---|---|
| Hot springs | Below Mount Pusuk Buhit, near Pangururan |
| The origin mountain | Pusuk Buhit — where Batak tradition begins |
| Best museum | T. B. Silalahi Centre at Balige, southern shore |
| Best view | Sipiso-piso waterfall on the northern caldera rim |
| Different architecture | Karo Batak villages at Lingga and Dokan |