One curious aspect of my stay at Sumatra’s Rimba Ecolodge was the fact that, during my tenure there, I was the only guest who was not there to observe wildlife. We all ate meals together in the dining lodge, and while I enjoyed the company of my French and Dutch and German fellow-travelers, they would often dash off in the middle of a conversation to photograph the birds or monkeys or lizards that appeared in the beachfront wilderness around us.
The other guests at Rimba were all globally well-traveled, and their travels inevitably centered on photographing animals. This meant that a given dinner conversation about Sumatran wildlife would veer into an excited sharing of animal photos from prior trips to Papua and Komodo and Taman Negara. A French woman named Dominique (pictured here) and her husband Alain had spent the prior three weeks in the jungles of Borneo, and they had developed a knack for spotting macaques and hornbills out in the trees a good five minutes before the rest of us could see them.
I’ve always been faintly jealous of – and flummoxed by – people who travel through the lens of a very specific passion. The week before I arrived in Rimba, when I was taking the high-speed ferry to Siberut Island from the Sumatran mainland I hung out with a pair of surfers – Roger, a chill half-Japanese weed-harvester from Alaska, and Silver, a fit young Estonian student who’d left Europe nearly two years prior, discovered waves in Bali, and had yet to return to his university.
Roger in particular had remarkably confident travel instincts. Getting on the ferry at Padang, he didn’t really have a plan for Siberut, but after thirty minutes of conversation Silver had talked him into joining him at his friend’s Pulau Masokut surf camp and splitting costs. I shared a lunch of rendang chicken and Sumatran coffee with both surfers when we arrived at Siberut, and I was impressed by their curiosity about all things Indonesian, their fearlessness with improvising and traveling cheap and testing out their nascent Bahasa language skills.
As with the birders of Rimba, however, the surfers of Siberut had – for all their savvy pertaining to their obsessions in Indonesia – a weird blind spot when it came to local areas that didn’t cater to their interests. Roger and Silver had no plans to visit iconic inland Sumatran destinations like Lake Toba, or the hill-country near Bukittinggi (in fact, they’d never even heard of either place), and they both admitted to getting bored at cultural places like temples and markets. Similarly, the birders had little patience for Asian places that didn’t involve wildlife.
Spending time on the road with all of these people left me feeling a tad jealous of their travel passions, even as it made me glad that I’m more of a chameleon generalist when it comes to where I go and what I do. It helped me appreciate that there’s no single way to travel – that there are countless lenses through which you can see a place for what it is. For Anthony Bourdain, it was food; for Kevin Kelly, it was (as he told me on my podcast a couple years ago) photography. Any of these passions – including simple, open-hearted curiosity about a place – feel like a great strategy for finding happiness on the journey.
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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