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In 1948, my father was enlisted in the Royal Dutch Army and stationed in Medan, Sumatra, Indonesia. In September of that year, he travelled
to Lake Toba, a volcanic lake and island deep in the mountains of Sumatra. My father labelled his photographs with the place, the date, and the time.

In September 2008, exactly 60 years later, I made the same journey. I stood in exactly the same place as my father had 60 years before me,
on the same date and time, and matched the photos he had taken.

The photos on the left are my father's from 1948, the ones on the right are mine from 2008.

Het Paleis von de Sultan / Maimoon Palace
De Moskee van voren / Mesjid Raya

De Minuret / The Minaret
De Rex Bioscoop / The Rex Theatre (now the Restaurante Rio)
Toba Meer / Lake Toba
Verlof soengeipoethie Toba Meer / Kayaking in Lake Toba
Verlof soengeipoethie Toba Meer / I couldn't find the same hotel my Father stayed...

Samosir Island viewed from Parapat...at the time of his photo, only the Batak tribe and a few Dutch missionaries were on the island / Pulau Samosir
Verlof soengeipoethie Toba Meer / Listening to music on the balcony...a record player now replaced by an ipod
Prapat / The harbor of Parapat
Verlof soengeipoethie Toba Meer / Swimming in the lake...dad's friend and my friend
Verlof soengeipoethie Toba Meer / More swimming

I have a difficult time imaging what it was like for him...to be so far from the Netherlands in such a
wild and remote place...the tribe on the island had only given up cannibalism a few years earlier.
I wonder what was playing on that record player.

My dad is gone now, and I remember him best by the things and people he left behind.
But here I remembered him through an experience he once had,
as if that road from Medan to Toba were part of another type of legacy,
an intangible curiousity and wonder about the remote corners of the world.

The journey passes from father to son.

Scott Hessels 2008