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…

Here’s a post that will appeal primarily to geography dorks: Danau Sidihoni (pictured above), which I reached by motorcycle during my Lake Toba sojourn, has the distinction of being a lake that is on an island (Samosir) that is on a lake (Toba) that is on an island (Sumatra). Perhaps someday an enterprising Sumatran developer…

Santi. I’m not sure what Santi does for a living, or where on Samosir Island she lives, but I do know that she was remarkably cheerful for someone who’d just gotten her scarf caught in her motorcycle wheel. I didn’t have a tourist map to Samosir Island, so apart from Lake Sidihoni (more on that…

I found the above sign — and its whimsical rundown of tourist options — at Lake Toba, Sumatra. Apparently a gold-capped variety of magic mushrooms grow on the mountain slopes of Samosir Island, and it is locally legal (in the de facto sense, at least) to harvest and sell them. Many of the restaurants in…

This is the view from the balcony of my Lake Toba, Sumatra guesthouse hotel, which is costing me $11.75 a night. Since I got here I’ve been putting in-house expenses on a tab in a paper ledger at the front desk: $1.42 for a fried-rice-and-chicken dinner; $0.71 for a cup of locally grown Sumatran coffee;…

Ganda. Short for “Propaganda,” a word his mother found in a magazine the week he was born. Propaganda never had a problem with his name until his 20s, when he got a job on a Holland America cruise ship. The word “Propaganda” on his nametag befuddled English-speaking passengers and made his bosses nervous. Now he…

Twenty-five years ago this month, when I was about to embark on an eight-month van journey around North America (my first-ever vagabonding sojourn), my sister gifted me this copy of Let’s Go USA 1993. At the time I had only the dimmest conception of what indie travel-guidebooks were. That first journey taught me that travel…