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; $7.10 for a one-day motorcycle rental (gas included); $1.78 to launder all my clothes.
There’s this common assumption that long-term travel is prohibitively expensive — and it can be, I suppose, if you get into the habit of throwing money at conveniences in expensive parts of the world. Come to a place like Sumatra, however, and you can travel super-cheap in a transport-and-hospitality economy aimed at local travelers (and the occasional backpacker).
My room on the shore of Lake Toba is not particularly fancy — the shower doesn’t have much water pressure, the walls are an ugly fake wood-grain, and there’s no furniture apart from a bed and a rickety wardrobe. But aside from the balcony I haven’t spent much waking time there — and who, after all, even a luxury traveler, would want to come to a beautiful part of the world and waste time lingering in their hotel room?
Getting here from the Medan airport entailed a bone-jarring $10 share-taxi ride that was supposed to take four hours but it ended up taking six hours due to a landslide blocking the biggest highway in this part of Sumatra. The final hour of the journey involved taking a slow, rickety ferryboat from the town of Parapat to my guesthouse on Samosir Island. Not a convenient way to travel — going overland in Sumatra rarely is — but hey, you get this view for $11.75 a night.
In short, traveling on the cheap for long periods of time is often just a matter of going slow, knowing your options, gathering local knowledge, and sacrificing a bit of comfort to win the privilege of spending time in some of the most beautiful and culturally fascinating parts of the world.
But I don’t want to make this post all about how cheap it is to travel here. In recent days I’ve been reflecting less on budget than simple gratitude. A little over one week into my Asia journey – and 20 years to the month after my first Asia vagabonding journey – I have been reminded, again and again, of how lucky I am to be out here on the road again. Sometimes getting out on the road – or back on the road – involves sacrifices, doubts, discomforts, leaps of faith, but I’ve always found it to be worth it.
Ironically, one of my chief travel-compulsions at Lake Toba has been being still, gathering my thoughts, savoring moments, dreaming of possibilities, transitioning from task-minded home-days to open-ended road-days. I spent a lot of time being still on the balcony of my Lake Toba room – and the ability to sit still and take in a place is one of the best rewards of slow travel. I have things I want to do here in Sumatra, far-flung landscapes I want to see, but these first few days have been mainly about breathing in and appreciating the extraordinary view.
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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