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