Jonedi’s life was formed by Minangkabau tradition, which stipulates that young men must leave their home-villages in their late teens. This coming-of-age ritual, called “merantau,” literally translates as “emigration” – but in practice it’s something more along the lines of “go out and make yourself useful.” Jonedi left his home-village for the city of Bukittinggi…

This guesthouse cottage cost me $8.50 a night, breakfast included (dinner was an extra $1.75). It was located at the edge of the Harau Valley (the setting of my recent posts), and the neighboring cottages were arranged around a lotus pond, with rice-paddies stretching out in one direction, and the waterfall a two-minute walk in…

When I saw this Sumatran father steering his three sons through a Harau Valley village in a motorcycle sidecar I knew I’d have to flag him down and ask for a picture. The above photo was the result. Twenty years ago, when I was first traveling through Asia, I’d reckon this photo would have yielded…

I spent a week riding a motorbike through the equatorial highlands outside the Sumatran hill-station town of Bukittinggi. My overnight destinations included the waterfall-studded Harau Valley and the freshwater caldera of Lake Maninjau. Motorcycling in this part of the world is a crash-course in road intuition. One doesn’t study urban traffic patterns here so much…

I met these guys by accident, when a sudden rainstorm caught us all out in the open. I was walking back to my motorbike from a backcountry waterfall; they’d been tapping rubber trees in a rural grove near Sumatra’s Harau Valley. Siar motioned for me to join them as they jogged to a shelter on…

The above image offers a glimpse into my failed attempt to create one of those Instagram-influencer-style don’t-you-wish-you-were-me-in-this-beautiful-waterfall type videos. It all started out innocently enough, when I was riding my motorbike around western Sumatra’s waterfall-studded Harau Valley. I’m not sure what the name of this waterfall is. I initially assumed it was called “Dilarang Merusak…

Minangkabau Joe is not his real name, but he reminded me of my Uncle Joe back in Kansas – another effortlessly competent farmer-athlete who walked with a swagger not because he was trying to swagger, but because that’s the way he walked. I’m no expert in the intricacies of Sumatran cow racing, but I sensed…

One of the strangest and most fascinating spectacles I’ve witnessed here in equatorial western Sumatra is “pacu jawi” the harvest-festival cow races that the Minangkabau people have been staging each year for more than a century. The Minangkabau have a unique and faintly reverent relationship with bovines – their name literally translates to “buffalo champions”…

By the time Ari arrived at Lake Toba from Medan he had been on the road for 6 hours with a share-taxi minivan full of passengers. By the time we reached Bukittinggi he’d been driving for 24 hours. One of the reasons Sumatra gets far less tourist traffic than islands like Java and Bali is…

As I wander across Sumatra I plan to occasionally point out journey-details that don’t jibe with the “Instagram-perfect” travel aura that seems to frame most popular travel reportage (a trend that is likely as audience-driven as it is centrally designed). Two things that stand out about Sumatra after more than a week of traveling here:…

Boymen. After gazing at Danau Sidihoni (Sumatra’s lake-on-an-island-on-a-lake-on-an-island) for 20 or so minutes one starts to get antsy. Boymen and his friends were smoking cigarettes near their motorbikes on the far shore of the lake, so I went over to talk to them. Back home in the U.S. I probably wouldn’t randomly approach a group…