Tuak Palm Wine

My evening was in danger of being uneventful until I was invited to join a table of three travellers (one from India and two from Germany) for dinner. We went to a bar to a try the local Batak palm wine (known as 'Tuak'). A Batak guy was sat out front and before we asked, he told us they'd run out of Tuak. His slurring and swaying gave us a clue of where the drink might have gone!

We asked where else we could get some and then invited him to join us and show us the way. After a 10 minute walk in the dark, we arrived at a little bar full of Batak people singing songs and all clearly very drunk. They all had a glass of white milky Tuak (which you can see in the photo). We each got a glass (15p) and it was horrible! It smelt and tasted like fermented egg water. Each time I went to take a sip, the smell of sulphur was difficult to stomach. Weirdly it didn't seem very alcoholic, so I'm guessing the locals had drunk gallons of the stuff before we got there.

There was a guitar and the locals sang (and shouted) merrily all sat around one big table. All except for one small guy (in the photo) who was sat on his own. He kept talking to us in broken English and we invited him to sit at our table. Seemingly out of nowhere he started to get agitated and at least one word in every sentence was shouted. Other locals calmed him down and he walked it off before returning and trying on these sunglasses.

It was definitely an interesting night. I'm not going to rush to try Tuak again though...