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 my trekking guide Agus, we spent the next five days slogging from village to village in mud that could at times be calf-deep. Indeed, there is no such thing as a conventional trail on Siberut – just sloppy, viscous mud-tracks, and the occasional lacework of logs to help tribespeople cross rivers and swamp-forests.
Agus is one of a dozen or so Mentawai who make a living taking foreign travelers into the jungle. Apart from a few surfing outfitters on the western edge of the archipelago, professionalized tour operations don’t really exist in the islands. On Agus’s advice I brought very little gear into the jungle, and what I did bring quickly became slicked with muck.
On the first day of the hike we had three porters – two women and a man, all of them somehow related to Agus – and they provided a humorous (if occasionally dispiriting) contrast to my struggles on the trail. Often, as I gasped in the jungle humidity – my boots slipping off rain-drenched logs into a mud that went up to my shins – I would hear the two lady porters cheerfully chatting to each other a few behind me.
Eventually I told them to go on ahead of me. They wore food-laden wicker backpacks that weighed five times as much as my daypack – yet they could walk twice as fast as me. In bare feet. I eventually learned that the Mentawai don’t care much for shoes; since it’s easier for them to “feel” where they’re going when nothing stands between their feet and the logs and the soggy jungle soil.
I soon learned to thoroughly wash off my boots and pants whenever I arrived for the night at a new tribal longhouse, so that the mud would not accumulate and harden. I did the same with my white athletic socks, rotating two pairs (which are now and forever a deep grey-brown color) so that I could preserve my other three pairs for the future weeks of my Asian journey.
It is no doubt due in part to these travel privations that traditional Mentawai jungle culture – cut off from any semblance of convenient access by bus-tourists and meddling Indonesian officials – largely survives intact in the jungle.
Note: “Dispatches” are short vignettes, profiles, and mini-essays written and posted from the road, often in tandem with my Instagram account. For more full-formed writing, check out my book Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, or the Essays or Stories archives on this site. I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page.
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