I am by nature an introvert – and this instinct can really kick in when I’m around people who don’t speak English. Usually, in a place like Asia, someone will come over and try to strike up a conversation, but these women did not. At least, not at first. I took this picture not long…
Travel has a way of making you imagine yourself living alternate existences. Sometimes these daydreams are the result of genuine cross-cultural empathy. Just as often, however, they are pure fantasy. I saw this little island on the high-speed ferry to the Mentawai Archipelago from the Sumatran mainland. It seemed perfect somehow, with its white-sand beach,…
When we recount our travels to other people, it is common and understandable to leave out those throwaway afternoons when a simple task goes awry in a banal way. Misadventures, of course – those spectacular and at times melodramatic failures of the expected – are the bread-and-butter of travel writing. But it’s less common to…
By Peter Hessler Originally published in The New Yorker, July 24, 2000 (an excerpt) “Do you want a big rat or a small rat?” the waitress asked. I was getting used to making difficult decisions in Luogang, a small village in southern China’s Guangdong Province. I’d come here on a whim, having heard that Luogang had…
I met Toikot on Siberut, the largest island in the Mentawai Archipelago, off the western coast of Sumatra. Toikot is 78 years old. Like most Mentawai men his hair has remained jet-black into old age, and his lean, ropy muscles would put even Iggy Pop to shame. His full-body tattoos mark him as a shaman,…
Of all the travel-instincts I’ve built up over the years, few compare to the hard-won skills I learned during my two-year stint as an English-conversation teacher in South Korea. As exhausting at that job could at times be, it taught me how to interact with people who have yet to master spoken English. It made…
Hello Guesthouse in Bukittinggi has an unassailable word-of-mouth reputation among backpackers who’ve been to this part of Sumatra – in large part because of Ling, who co-owns the place with her parents, and knows a little bit about everything there is to see and do within a 100-mile radius of the city. The work that…
More often than not travel writing (and, in particular, travel Instagram) leaves out those necessary but far less glamorous moments of travel that are nonetheless essential if the travel — and travel writing — process is going to happen. I’m thinking of those small moments of running errands, doing laundry, waiting in line at train…
Here’s a real-life travel parable for you. It happened to me in the western Sumatran city of Bukittinggi, when I was hungry and wanted to find a place to have dinner. Having been in the Bukittinggi area for more than a week, I wanted to try a local specialty. Ever since I’d visited the pacu…
1) Make the scene three-dimensional in the reader’s mind There is Flaubert’s rule that you need three particular things in the room for the room to become three-dimensional in the reader’s mind. So that if we establish this box of Kleenex, that bottle, and that lamp — not in one sentence, but over a few…
About a week after embarking on my winter journey through Asia, I wrote the following passage in my journal: “More than steak or bourbon I am dying for a decent map to Sumatra.” Indeed, as much as I have celebrated the joys of motorcycle travel here in Sumatra, the journey has been complicated by the…
