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 Ling does is, in fact, the legacy of (at least) three millennia of innkeepers and hostel wardens collecting, curating and disseminating recommendations and warnings for the travelers they host. In the epoch before guidebooks, these people – who sought the latest travel news from all guests coming and going – were an indispensable resource for travelers.
In our information-saturated twenty-first-century travel moment, when many backpackers use smartphones (rather than local resources) to plan their travels, Ling stands out not just for her willingness to talk her guests through quirky local travel options (like the pacu jawi cow races) – but for the fact that she understands the indie-travel mindset, since she’s a vagabonder herself.
Years ago, Ling was accepted into medical school in Indonesia. In time she found she didn’t care much for medicine, so she went back to help her parents run a Chinese restaurant. In her spare time, she strapped on her backpack and hit the road – first to Southeast Asian countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and later to places like Japan, Nepal, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands. The more she traveled, the more she came to realize that Bukittinggi – her hometown – didn’t have a guesthouse that catered to the kind of travel she loved.
This realization – along with the fact that running a restaurant had become a strain for her aging parents – eventually blossomed into Hello Guesthouse, which Ling opened in 2012. Clean, simple, and centrally located, Hello was the only guesthouse in Bukittinggi to feature bunk-rooms, and Ling soon began to partner with like-minded businesses to expand indie-travel options for the backpackers she hosted.
In my case this meant I was able to rent a motorcycle on a multi-day, out-of-city basis, which allowed me to sidestep guided tours and static bus routes and explore the Sumatran highlands on my own terms. I ended up motorcycling through places like the Harau Valley and Lake Maninjau for upwards of a week.
I for one would be thrilled if more cities in this part of the world had backpacker-hub guesthouses like the one Ling runs. As world travel becomes a less exclusively Western endeavor – as more Chinese and Sri Lankans and Indonesians embrace vagabonding in the way Ling has – I’m sure that will happen.
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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