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The Curse of the Horse Lady - a Travel Tale

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I went to Lake Toba in North Sumatra with my girlfriend for the Christmas and New Year holidays last year. If you don't know Lake Toba, it is the biggest volcanic crater lake in the world and it is a very peaceful and relaxing place to spend your holidays. We didn't book a room but still managed to get one of the last rooms available in a hotel in Tuk-tuk, as it gets pretty busy during the holidays.

The next day I woke up and sat on our balcony admiring the beautiful view of the lake. Our neighbors were sitting outside - a mid-thirty-ish woman and two young girls who I thought initially were her daughters, but she later told me they were her nieces. She spoke a bit of English, so she asked me the usual questions: “Where are you from?” and “What are you doing in Indonesia?” She came from the city of Penyabungan in West Sumatra. Then she said her nieces wanted to learn English, so she asked me if I wanted to join them for a game of scrabble. When she got up to get the game, I noticed her extremely long hair that went down to her feet. I had never seen anything like it before. Later, when I was talking with my girlfriend, I couldn’t remember her name, so I started referring to her as ‘the horse lady’ because her hair reminded me of horse’s mane.

I have never been a great scrabble player, but I still felt proud of myself for winning two consecutive games, even if it was against someone who didn’t speak a lot of English and two kids who were still in elementary school. As the ‘horse lady’ was setting up for another game, my girlfriend said she wanted to go and eat breakfast.

Later that day when I was checking my email at the hotel’s computers, the horse lady came over and asked me for my email address. She checked that my email address was working with her mobile phone. She then invited me (us?) to play scrabble together later that evening.

I went out for dinner with my girlfriend and some friends from Germany. We sat around drinking and talking and it was quite late when we got back to the hotel. When I opened the door of my room I noticed that a letter had been tucked under the door. It was from our friendly neighbor who wrote quite an angry letter asking where I was, why I didn’t join them for scrabble, how long they had waited for me and how disappointed her nieces were. My girlfriend said didn’t like the ‘look’ of the woman and that she probably practiced black magic. I thought she was just joking but she was pretty serious and said I should be careful of the woman.

We managed to avoid the horse lady and her nieces for the rest of the trip as they changed to another room. I don’t believe in curses or black magic voodoo, so maybe it was just a coincidence, bad luck or stupidity on my part as to what happened next.

We caught the ferry back to Parapat and then a bus to our next destination, about an hour away from Medan. When we got to the hotel, the receptionist asked if they could make a copy of my passport. I opened my backpack where I always keep it and then my heart sank as I realized it wasn’t there. I keep it in a money belt type of pouch along with my credit and ATM cards. I searched frantically through my bags, while my girlfriend called the hotel in Lake Toba and the bus company.

The search came up dry and then I thought of the young guys who were hanging around our bags on the ferry. I thought it must have been them that stole it and I felt so stupid for not watching my bags more closely. I tried to remain calm and called the Australian Consulate in Medan. Of course noone answered the phone. It was just before New Year so of course everyone was probably already on holiday. I wondered, what was I going to do without my passport and no money.

Just as I was thinking the worst, we got a call from the bus company who said they may have found it. It must have somehow fallen out of my bag when I was taking something out of it on the bus. They were going to send a driver from Medan to give it back to me. We waited for hours beside the highway. It was hot and dusty and we hadn’t eaten all day. The driver was still a long way off, so we decided to eat at a small restaurant by the highway. The place wasn’t clean, but I was starving and ordered some friend noodles. They tasted ok, but they did have a peculiar fishy taste to them.

We sat waiting for the driver in the hot and dirty restaurant and watched a loud Bollywood movie. Finally the driver arrived and he had the pouch with all of my valuables. I gave the driver a well-earned tip. I had never felt so relieved in all of my life. We then met up with some of my girlfriend’s friends for a proper meal and a couple of beers.

I was feeling ok up until then, but then suddenly I had the urge to go back to my hotel. Those fried noodles that I had eaten earlier had come back to haunt me and I spent the rest of the night on the toilet.

I felt like I had never had such bad luck in one day before. Yes, I felt like I had been cursed – the curse of the horse lady from Penyabungan.

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