Amantiru, my Mentawai host on Siberut Island, processed sago flour using a technique not dissimilar to traditional wine-makers’ ritual of stomping grapes. He jokingly called it “dancing without music.” Whereas the world’s most iconic staple foods are rice (commonly associated with Asia), wheat (Europe and the Middle East), and maize (the Americas), the Mentawai diet…

One of the more startling features of Mentawai houses are the animal skulls that hang over the lintel of each family home. Some of these bones once belonged to wild pigs, others to flying foxes. Most unnerving to behold are the bones of “simpai,” the black-and-yellow primate endemic to the islands, which yield faintly human-like…

I suppose I’ve always known that there are men in isolated parts of the word who dress in bark-fiber loincloths and lace their arms and legs in animist tattoos, but it was a tad strange to meet one in person. During the days I stayed at Amantiru’s longhouse a part of me kept waiting for…

The Baderaeket River is the first step in reaching the Mentawai tribal villages on the Siberut Island. “Baderaeket” means “One Way” – and the river has this name because it’s the only way to get into the rainforest on this part of the island. After traveling 20 miles up the Baderaeket River by boat with…

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…

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…