I need to confess, as I come to the end of the Sumatra leg of these Dispatches, that the visual narrative of these posts is – perhaps inevitably – shaped by what I was able to photograph as a solo traveler on the island.
A few weeks ago I illustrated a mini-essay about the joys of travel-boredom with a selfie I took half-submerged in a jungle-stream on Siberut Island. It wasn’t until I posted it on Instagram that I realized how deeply movies can inform our visual assumptions about places. Though I didn’t think about it while I was experiencing the Indonesian jungle, posting the photo the photo on social media called to mind Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (or Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” MTV video) in the minds of many viewers.
This effect is, I think, the result of how informal travel-selfies work. Since I was traveling alone in Siberut (and since my guide Agus was elsewhere at the time) I was stuck with this arms-length narrative of how that moment played out. Thus, it feels like the most Instagram-ready travel-narratives require a travel companion who can frame the moment from a proper distance, and evoke a fantasy (if not a raw documentary reality) vision of how that moment is playing out in your head.
If there’s one twist to the selfie-ritual as it played out for me in Sumatra, it was that it didn’t happen in a travel-vacuum, since, Indonesians proved to be as selfie-obsessed as travelers are. Indeed, for every travel-selfie that self-consciously half-captured a moment in a jungle stream, I wound up with five selfies like this one (which was taken in the Medan airport as I was leaving the country) – selfies taken at the insistence of local Sumatrans, who seemed as keen to get a photo of me as I was keen to get photos of Sumatra.
This ritual is (as I implied in an earlier post) becoming more and more common with the ubiquity of smartphones in places like Indonesia. I’ll confess that – while the resulting photos aren’t as narrative and dramatic as jungle-selfies – I kind of like it.
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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