My guide in the jungles of Siberut Island was a Mentawai fellow named Agus, who was a walking example of how cultures everywhere creatively adapt to a globalized word. Agus wore Western garb, had a university linguistics degree from the Sumatran mainland, and spoke great English (his fourth language, after Mentawai, Bahasa, and Minangkabau) – yet, during the time we spent together, he exuded a palpable love for the traditional Mentawai culture that still thrives in the Siberut jungle.
Agus didn’t grow up in the jungle; he grew up in a village, where his jungle-born father found work as a boat driver and plumber. His first travels took him across the Indian Ocean straits to Sumatra, where he attended college in Padang. He recalls longing for the taste of sago in college, since mainland Sumatrans ate all their meals with rice.
It was during college that Agus befriended Europeans for the first time, and began to journey inland to parts of Sumatra that felt a world apart from his Mentawai homeland. He can still remember the fear he felt on his first airplane flight to Bukit Lawang on the northern part of the island. “What the fuck am I doing” he recalls asking himself as the plane began to take off, “and how to I make this stop?”
Agus’s interactions with foreigners on the Sumatran mainland inspired him to create his own travel-guide business back home on Siberut after he graduated from college. At first he was a surf guide, since most of the islands’ 7000 or so annual visitors come for the waves – but in time he realized he preferred taking trekkers into the Mentawai jungle villages his grandparents called home. Trekking wasn’t always as lucrative as surfing, but Agus came to love it. His ambition is to build a guesthouse to serve as a hub for jungle-bound trekkers.
The Mentawai aren’t as well known as other hunter-gatherer peoples in Indonesia – the Dayak of Borneo, or the Asmat of Papua – and Agus takes pride in sharing their culture with the outside world. He recounted for me how his grandfather was intrigued by the first tourists who visited his jungle village – how they didn’t seem very smart, but their plastic water bottles struck him as exotic and wonderful.
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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