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Put it next to the much famed Kohs of Thailand or the very chic, Bali, Sumatra will seem a humble tourist destination. And it doesn’t take long to figure that after you have landed here. You might be the only tourist queuing up for visa and wonder if you should have really come here. Even though accommodation and food is cheap, there are no hoards of backpackers passing months along in cheap hostels. Even the luxury travelers seeking lake cruises with sunset dinners don’t get here. There are no souvenir thrusting rows of shopkeepers (although plenty of artifacts to be bought at cheap prices because, you see, Bataks are excellent carpenters).  Nor are there any expensive restaurants to fine dine in and spend your cash. Sumatra, I must declare at the onset, is not for bling seeking, chic tourist with a cash load to splurge.  It is for the one seeking slow pace and the charm of the offbeat. It is for the traveler who can work a little harder than usual and accommodate in rooms that have bathrooms no wash basin. Home to millions of hectares of tropical rain forest, tribes that were cannibalistic until about 200 years ago, culture that worships breast and lizard, orang-utans who they say are the people of the jungle, the largest flower and the biggest snake in the world, Sumatra is the superlative island of superlatives. For the two weeks in one month we spent on Sumtra, we were held captive on the Samosir. The unassuming hospitality of our hosts didn’t help us escape either. Samosir is an island set on the caldera lake called Danau Toba formed thousands of years ago after a big boom happened that changed the face of the Earth. If you thought, Pyramids , Taj Mahal , Colosseum …