Batak

and answer the question, what is one amazing thing you've done, by simply saying the word, lived.

But most noteworthy about his time in the United States was his continuation of Batak-inspired art, which in 2013, he began sharing with what he hoped would become a wider audience.

Starting his second and most prominent page back on December 31st, 2013, Ricard would dedicate his self-titled channel to this art form that he loved so dearly, posting various videos of himself producing tattoos with that traditional batak inspiration.

These videos were all meant to be part of a larger-scale project that he was working on called DJADJAK, which can be seen referenced in practically all of his early video titles.

I rode my pony into the crack and looked down hundreds of feet to a great valley stretching away for miles, its level floor spread with thousands of acres of gray-black sand.

From the middle of this vast sea of sand There rose abruptly the chopped-off cone of the volcano of Batak.

Behind and a bit to the left of Batak was the gray smoking crater of Bromo, with its steep furrowed walls.

Back of this, ridge after ridge of other crater rims faded off to a purplish gray in the distance.

Towering above all the others was the perfect pyramid of Smeru, the giant of them all.

The pepper is in the form of berries, which are first green then red and when ripe they are yellow after picking they are dried on mats in the open air when dry they turn black some of the best pepper plantations are in the land of the bataks a big tribe of semi-savages who live in the hills south of achin these people are malays intermixed with dyaks of borneo and with hindoos they are taller than our filipinos darker in complexion and more heavily haired many of them have beards in the wilder portions of the country they are very savage those bataks who have come in contact with the dutch are semi-civilized and many of them can read and write they have preserved ancient writings on palm leaves which show that they once had more civilization than they have today Little was known of these people until after the middle of the 19th century.

They had a bad reputation on account of the stories travelers told of their cannibalism.

According to them, the Bataks ate their aged relatives, not to get rid of them, but from pious motives.

And his wife jumps into the aisle and she shouts out to me, help my husband, help my husband.

And she said, my husband is the fourth generation of of the people who killed and ate the first missionaries to the Batak people in North Sumatra.

And he said, this has been coming upon them.

They had actually been facing demon possession.

I belong to Jesus Christ.

I'm a servant of the king.

Now, there were Batak women all around about, big, big women, and they were trying to hold this little woman down and they couldn't.

But we took authority in the name of Jesus Christ and This is an authority that God gives to ambassadors.

It is drop dead...

Yeah, it is beautiful to get there.

Uh, and the, the local people they, they're, they, they're called Bataks, uh, and they live in these traditional houses, uh, which have got really big distinctive roofs which are curved upwards.

Uh, they look sort of like a, a boat's hull.

Um, but the other unusual thing about this area is most of the people there are Christian and there aren't a lot of places in Indonesia, um, that are basically Christian.

And it's known as Tuak.

And it's deeply tied to the culture of the Batak.

But yeah, he was quite keen to show us all sorts of things.

And towards the end of that road trip, before we got back to his sister's guest house, He said, do you want to come up a volcano with me tomorrow morning?