Indonesia Archives - 4corners7seas

Liberty Wreck Dive, Tulamben, Bali

The USAT Liberty wreck in Tulamben is up there with the SS Yongala (Queensland, Australia) as the best diving I’ve done. Unlike the Yongala, though, access couldn’t be easier – it’s actually a beach dive!

This came about because the ship was initially wrecked (after being torpedoed by a Japanese sub in 1942) on the beach itself, only later being pushed into the sea in 1963 by the lava flow from a volcanic eruption. Thanks to that eruption, we have a spectacular dive site right off the beach in Tulamben.

No-one perished when the ship ran aground, so it’s not a grave site and you can penetrate the hull, insofar as the hull remains intact anyway (the ship lies in multiple pieces scattered on the seabed). You don’t exactly get to swim through the corridors, but its still pretty cool following your guide though portals and portholes in & out of a few segments of the ship.

What really makes it a great dive though is the sealife around you – there’s a lot of it, large & small, and it’s quite a show. Huge schools of jackfish ball and spin, or seem to form guards of honour for passing divers, the sunlight glinting off the rippling walls of swirling silver scales around you; an otherworldly experience that stays with you long after. We were also treated to the momentary but astonishing sight of a passing sailfish, perhaps the single most beautiful creature I’ve seen at close quarters on a dive. As for turtles, I lost count!

It’s an awesome dive, and really quite amazing that you can just gear up on the beach, wade in, and immediately be at the wreck and surrounded by fish. In addition to the wreck there are a couple more dive sites in Tulamben also accessed from the beach, Coral Garden and Drop Off (a wall dive, as the name suggests). The dive resorts in Tulamben are lined up along the beach, and have all the gear available to rent and in-house guides ready to take you down. I stayed at Matahari Tulamben, which had lovely rooms and a nice bar with good food, and I can happily recommend it. For other options in Tulamben, search here.

Have you been diving in Tulamben? How was it? Leave a comment below!

See here for more scuba posts, and see my main Indonesia page here

Make sure you’re covered for diving – World Nomads is my go-to for travel insurance, check out their scuba cover here

These are affiliate links i.e. if you use them to book accommodation or purchase insurance, 4corners7seas will receive a commission – this commission comes out of their profit margin at no extra cost to you. I’m recommending them because I know and trust them from personal use; thank you in advance should you choose to use my links.

Robert Plant’s Lemon Juice: surviving the Trans-Sumatra Highway (Sumatra to Java overland)

Indonesia, Music, Overland travel, Travel tales

Sumatra to Java overland: view of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci), Sumatra — A view of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci) across the tea plantations, West Sumatra: the best thing about my journey to Jakarta!

I flopped into a chair and ordered a plate of nasi goreng and a bottle of Bintang, now running on empty and entirely on autopilot. The nasi goreng was to satiate my hunger, the beer to celebrate my having survived the Trans-Sumatra Highway; it was hot and humid even in the small hours, and as I sipped the deliciously cold beer my faraway eyes were drawn to the TV screen, a DVD of live concert footage of Led Zeppelin in the 1970s (I think it was this one), Robert Plant exhorting me to squeeze his lemon, to squeeze it until his juice ran down his leg…

It was my second visit to Sumatra, but now I was making my way to other parts of Indonesia for the first time and I’d just spent some 36 hours or so travelling from Sumatra to Java overland, from Sungai Penuh in Sumatra’s Kerinci Seblat National Park, mostly on a banged-out old clapper of a bus flagged down on the Trans-Sumatra Highway (following a long initial minivan ride to the highway!) – and that was after the previous day’s 10-hour journey from Bukittinggi to Sungai Penuh (with a change of minivans in Padang). Exhausting stuff by its very nature, but made even more so when you’re fearing for your life the entire time! Finally arriving in Jakarta at 2 in the morning, I dumped my shit in a cheap hotel and stumbled down the road like a weary seadog finally back on dry land, or maybe more like a good old-fashioned zombie. A hungry zombie, looking for some quick food before finally collapsing into bed.

The National monument in Jakarta — Jakarta

The first day’s minivans from Bukittinggi to Sungai Penuh had been reasonably pleasant (bar a lot of faffing around changing vans in the city of Padang), with some cracking scenery including views in Kerinci Seblat park of Gunung Kerinci (Mt Kerinci, Sumatra’s highest) and the tea plantations surrounding it (I detoured off the Trans-Sumatra Highway in order to visit the park, but really it needed a longer stay to be worth it). But seriously, that highway bus ride down to Jakarta on days 2 & 3 was absolutely ridiculous. There was only one driver, one driver the whole way from Bangko (at least, I think that’s where I switched to the highway bus) to Jakarta, and I think the bus had actually originated in Padang (or perhaps even further north than that), and I think he’d been the only driver from there too, meaning that same one guy drove, singlehanded, for at least 30-something hours with just three 90-minute meal breaks per day – breaks during which I observed him nailing a plate of food and then power-napping for an hour, running to the prayer room to quickly pray (for our survival?), and then calling everyone to board again.

Jakarta's skyline as seen from the National Monument — The Jakarta skyline

As if that wasn’t mental enough, the Trans-Sumatra Highway is a real mountain roller coaster in places and our man had a penchant for overtaking logging trucks on blind corners, pulling back in just in time to avoid a head on smash by a whisker – but not before I’d soiled my pants (again).

How he achieved this feat of endurance without killing us all, I will never understand. The one enjoyable bit of this Sumatra to Java overland slog was the ferry crossing, when I passed out for a couple of blissful hours in one of the deck chairs out on deck under the stars, the only useful sleep I could snatch on that terrifying journey.

A group of Indonesian tourists I chatted to in Jakarta — A group of Indonesian lads (tourists from Sulawesi) who stopped for a chat in Jakarta

So there I finally was in this cheap restaurant in Jakarta, a decent plate of food before me, a decent beer in my hand, deliriously tired but alive; I devoured my nasi goreng in short order and all I wanted was to go to bed… and yet I was utterly transfixed by the TV screen, rooted to my seat. Led Zeppelin cast a spell on me from four decades in the past, and I was mesmerised. Somehow, I’d never really seen or heard any of their live recordings before, never appreciated how god damn fucking tight they were, with how much heart and soul they played the blues:

…or how seriously fucking incredible Bonham’s drumming really was:

…but what the fuck was Plant on about with all the lemons, anyway? Actually, it’s a lyric borrowed from the one and only Robert Johnson, one which Plant loved to use:

Seems strange to say it now, especially as I was and am so into both heavy rock and the blues; but for some reason, Led Zeppelin had never really blown me away before. I guess I’d never listened to their stuff closely enough, perhaps due to the familiarity one automatically has with their more famous (and, Stairway aside, imo generally less interesting) numbers.

Well, they blew me away that night and I finally saw the error of my ways. I sat through the whole DVD, knocking back a few more Bintangs, and eventually staggered to bed at perhaps 4am. I then proceeded to sleep all day, only stirring in the evening when hunger roused me to head out into Jakarta’s bedlam. And over the following days and weeks I worked my way through Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue, devouring it as I’d devoured that nasi goreng.

Thinking about it, I suppose I would always have eventually realised how awesome Led Zeppelin were; their brilliance would have demanded it. But we often attach certain songs, albums, and bands to episodes and periods in our lives (and I personally find this to be especially true during periods of travel), and I love the way that now, thanks to the way I really got into Led Zeppelin for the first time, whenever I hear Robert Plant singing about his lemon juice it transports me back to a 3am plate of nasi goreng in Jakarta, back to that feeling of exhausted relief at having survived the Trans-Sumatra Highway in between seeing the many wonders of Sumatra and Java.

Any thoughts or questions on either Led Zeppelin or the Trans-Sumatra Highway? Leave a comment below!

For more Indonesia posts, click here

Also see my Indonesia overland travel guide

(This page contains an affiliate link i.e. if you follow the link from this page to the DVD on Amazon and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from Amazon. This commission comes out of Amazon’s profit margin at no extra cost to you. Thank you in advance should you choose to do so, and the DVD is money well spent!)

Palm Oil and the Plight of the Orangutan: visiting the orangutan sanctuaries of Sumatra and Borneo

Indonesia, Malaysia, Southeast Asia, Wildlife

Orangutan means ‘man of the forest’ in the Malay and Indonesian languages. But where does the man of the forest go when the forest is gone? There are a number of places in Southeast Asia where you can see both the answer to this question and the reason it must be asked in the first place, while coming face to face with these magnificent creatures. Two of the easiest to visit are Bukit Lawang (in Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra, Indonesia) and Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre (Sabah (Borneo), Malaysia).

Palm oil and the orangutan

Orangutans are found on these two different islands (in two different countries), but face the same problems in both; their natural rainforest habitat is being destroyed to produce palm oil and by illegal logging. In their natural states, the islands of Sumatra and Borneo were covered in dense jungle, the world’s greatest deposits of rainforest after the Amazon and Congo basins, with the accompanying wealth of flora and fauna that includes (but is far from limited to) the orangutan. These days, however, most of it is gone, surviving mainly in the protected pockets of national parks like Gunung Leuser, or in the deepest depths of the islands’ mountainous interiors where logging roads have not yet reached. The rest was felled, the timber sold off, the forest cleared to make space for the oil palm plantations.

Travelling along the highways, it’s actually quite awe-inspiring (and not in a good way) to see the miles upon miles upon miles of oil palms standing in their neat and anything-but-natural lines; the scale of the endeavour is immense, all those thousands of square miles of mighty rainforest transformed into straight rows of evenly spaced palm trees. Perhaps it might seem that oil palms are at least a better replacement for rainforest than cattle farms or city blocks would be; they are trees, after all. However, it’s estimated that only ten to fifteen percent of rainforest wildlife successfully adapts and survives the transition from rainforest to palm plantation. Furthermore, for the wider issue of climate change, oil palm plantations can’t remotely fill the role of the rainforest as a carbon sink, and nor can secondary growth forest; once virgin rainforest is gone, it’s gone. And for the larger fauna like the Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhinoceros, and the orangutan, the loss of the forest is nothing short of disaster on an existential scale.

Sadly, for the Sumatran tiger & rhinoceros it is probably already too late; the orangutan clings on (the Bornean orangutan is listed as endangered, the Sumatran orangutan as critically endangered), and might very well even be able to adapt successfully to life among the palms were it not for the farmers’ guns. But to the oil palm companies, these great apes are little more than great pests, beasts which eat their product and reduce their yield; the simplest solution? Shoot them.

Cutting down on palm oil

So what is palm oil and why do we need it? Well, simply put we don’t need it; but it is a most useful and flexible product – palm oil is found in the majority of cosmetics and confectionary produced the world over, and is present in around half of all items on the supermarket shelf. A Mars a day may help you work, rest, and play (or more likely develop type II diabetes), but prior to 2014 it also killed the rainforest and pushed the orangutan closer to the brink. Somewhat encouragingly, in response to public concern and consumer pressure, Mars introduced a palm oil policy in 2014 with the stated aim of using sustainable palm oil in all its products. Palmolive shampoo? Honestly, fuck that shit. Is your silky hair more important than the survival of the orangutan? Maybe you do think it is, and if so I’m unlikely to change that; but the majority of people, if really forced to choose, I’m confident would not wish to wipe out these creatures for the sake of cheap beauty products and chocolate bars. Palmolive have been slower to respond than Mars, but have at least made a commitment to switch to sustainable palm oil by 2020. And this is the thing really – alternative ingredients can be used, but the alternatives are more expensive; sustainable palm oil can be used, but that is more expensive to produce and NGOs question whether even the so-called sustainable palm oil is genuinely sustainable – certified sustainable palm oil is hopefully better than uncertified palm oil, but it’s surely still better to find a product which is palm oil free, full stop (if you can). So what it all really boils down to is the profit margins of multinational corporations, and our wallets as consumers. To cut palm oil deforestation, either we have to pay more, or the companies have to make less.

Since visiting Sepilok in 2004 (and then Bukit Lawang in 2008), I’ve been making a conscious effort to reduce the amount of palm oil I purchase. And you know what, it’s bloody difficult; the damn stuff is everywhere. Here’s a WWF list of products that contain it, and I’d be willing to bet good money that every single one of you reading this has used or eaten something on that list in the last couple of days.

So how do you avoid it if it’s in everything? Well, here’s another list, this one of palm oil free and sustainable palm oil products. They do tend to be more expensive; but if you give a shit, that’s the choice you have to make and it’s the main tool you have available to try to influence the big companies – the Mars policy linked to above shows that they do hear this. Vote with your wallet. Of course, you can go further and try to pressure them through emails and letters, and I would strongly encourage you to do so – see here for more on that.

Spending a significant amount of time overseas as I do though, there’s also the matter of being able to even read the labels, and in fact whether the labels even fully list the itemised ingredients in the first place. But after visiting Sepilok and learning about all this, I knew I had to try from that time on to help the orangutan in any way I could; hence I haven’t eaten one single Mars bar since 2004 (though have started eating the odd Snickers again since 2014), and hence this blog post. If I can persuade even one person who reads this to make an effort to seek out palm oil free products, or at least products using sustainable palm oil, the time writing it was time well spent.

Visiting the Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary

The Sepilok Orangutan Sanctuary and the Gunung Leuser park offer areas of protected virgin rainforest where orangutans can safely live without crossing paths with the palm oil companies; they ask the companies not to shoot any orangutans straying onto their property, but to instead call the park staff who then go and sedate the orangutan and move it to the park. In Sepilok’s case, it’s actually a rehabilitation centre for orphaned orangutans that you visit; a gradual process is required to get them healthy and back out to the forest, reducing their dependence on humans and encouraging them to return to natural behaviour as far as is possible. During the rehabilitation process they do become used to humans and come to rely on them for food, especially those who are very young when they arrive; so it’s far from an ideal solution, and Sepilok readily acknowledges this fact. But it’s still a better solution than the farmers’ guns.

The sanctuary has a feeding platform in the forest, to which the orangutans can come back for meals after their release from the rehab centre; though they initially do rely on this, the idea is that they will gradually move further and further into the forest reserve, and come back less and less for meal times at the centre. Apparently this usually works quite well, though certain individuals never manage to break their reliance on the centre – again, it’s usually those who are very young when they first arrive.

For visitors to Sepilok, it’s these feeding times that enable you to see the orangutans (there are around 80 orangutans living in the sanctuary, with around half a dozen coming to the feeding platform at the time of our visit); and just as there is a feeding platform where the staff lay out the food for the orangutans to dine, there is a neighbouring viewing platform for us homo sapiens to jostle for the best spots to snap the best photos. And to be honest, it is a bit of a zoo, but one where we are the exhibit – you do wonder what the orangutans make of us all. I got fed up with all the elbows after a while and went to chill out at the back of the platform, when this little one suddenly dropped out of the tree right next to me:

I had a good 30 seconds to quietly marvel before everyone else cottoned on and rushed over to get a close-up, at which point she scratched her arse and climbed off into the trees again. Seeing the orangutans this way may not seem like an ‘authentic’ experience, but then the whole thing is by its very nature unnatural; orangutans don’t normally live in such dense populations, and it’s much better for them to fear humans than to see them as a food source, but the orangutans are here because they’ve lost most of their natural habitat, and this place is helping them as best it can. It is a complete tourist gong show on that viewing platform, but by going and taking part in it you’re helping the sanctuary to continue to exist and to continue the good work they do to save these animals. The sanctuary also does a great job with educational materials and presentations, offers guided walks along the forest trails, and if you’re visiting Malaysian Borneo you can easily include it along with an ascent of Mt Kinabalu (the day we descended from the summit we were able to jump on a bus to Sepilok from the Kinabalu park gate and visited the orangutan sanctuary the following day). If you also plan to go scuba diving at Sipadan, then Sepilok is a natural place to stop between Kinabalu and Semporna (the town for Sipadan).

Gunung Leuser national park, Sumatra — Gunung Leuser National Park

Jungle hiking in Bukit Lawang

The setup at Bukit Lawang in Sumatra is a little different; Gunung Leuser National Park covers a much larger area than the Sepilok reserve, some 8,000 square kilometres (it’s one of the largest tracts of surviving virgin rainforest in Southeast Asia today, though still just a tiny portion of what it once was part of), and the rehabilitation centre isn’t open to visitors. Instead, you can arrange guided jungle hikes into the park where you can hopefully encounter some orangutans – these are semi-wild animals which have been released from the rehabilitation centre but continue to live in the forest close by. There are around 5,000 orangutans living in the park, from a total estimated population of just 14,000 Sumatran orangutans in the wild.

For tourists, the towns of Bukit Lawang and Tangkahan are by far the most accessible parts of the park (and pretty much the only accessible parts if you’re not going full Indiana Jones and mounting an expedition); Tangkahan is also famous for jungle hiking, but if you want to see orangutans your odds are better in Bukit Lawang.

Unlike at Sepilok, the apes aren’t coming to you; you’re going to them, and it’s up to your guide to figure out where they are and help you to find them (and there’s no surefire guarantee that you will do so). This, combined with the fact you’re only in a crowd of however many are in your hiking group, and also the effort you put in to hiking and sweating through the jungle, makes it a more rewarding way to actually see and encounter orangutans. We spotted four altogether (two solo apes, plus a mother & child), and two of them actually came down from the trees to greet us; and, sadly, to beg for food. That’s the downside to the less organised nature of these encounters compared to Sepilok; there are regulations on not feeding the orangutans in Bukit Lawang, as the idea is for them to find their own food and get back to as natural a lifestyle as circumstances allow, but apparently many guides break these feeding regulations in order to help guarantee sightings, thus damaging the good work being done by the centre. Our guide was actually a bit of a creep, in that he was was constantly trying to use rubbish pickup lines on the single girl in our group, but he did have excellent forest knowledge and a very principled approach to the orangutans – he wouldn’t feed them, expressed anger and frustration with those guides and tourists who do, and made very clear to us that we were not to offer them any food either. He was also adept at pointing out all the other wildlife around us, especially tropical birds (he could mimic many of their calls) and two species of monkeys (one inquisitive and running all around us, the other shy and easy to miss).

Bukit Lawang was almost entirely destroyed in 2003 by a flash flood (itself the result of illegal logging), but has since rebuilt itself as an attractive riverside town. You can also do river tubing, though it’s a harmless bit of fun rather than the notorious tubing of Vang Vieng infamy.

Access to Bukit Lawang is by road from Medan. In my experience, this can be a rather interesting journey! (The road is apparently being repaired now (2017), so hopefully will be a smoother drive in the near future)

As an overall travel experience, I’d say a jungle hike in Bukit Lawang is better than a visit to Sepilok, and any orangutan encounters there are more likely to be up close and personal; but as an educational experience and a chance to directly contribute to a worthy cause, Sepilok is excellent. I would certainly recommend including Sepilok as part of any Borneo trip or Bukit Lawang as part of any Sumatra itinerary, and visiting both of them if you are visiting both Sumatra and Borneo. And more than anything, I want to leave you with these three (four) words: fuck (unsustainable) palm oil. You don’t need palm oil more than the orangutan needs the forest. Look at this company scorecard and this product list (for the UK) for the best product choices, failing that look out for products with RSPO certification (not a clear-cut sign of sustainability, but surely better than nothing), and make your purchasing decisions accordingly.

Other orangutan sanctuaries

In addition to Sepilok and Bukit Lawang, there are a number of other orangutan sanctuaries and rehabilitation centres you can visit including the Semenggoh Centre just outside the city of Kuching in Sarawak (the other state of Malaysian Borneo), and several in Kalimantan (the Indonesian portion of Borneo) – this page has a good map showing all the rehabilitation centres and sanctuaries in Borneo and Sumatra.

Have you been to Sepilok or Bukit Lawang? Any comments or questions about palm oil? Leave a comment below!

A Crazy Journey to Bukit Lawang

Indonesia, Overland travel, Travel tales

We got off the ferry from Malaysia, cleared immigration, and made a mad dash across Medan (North Sumatra, Indonesia), just catching the last minivan to Bukit Lawang by the skin of our teeth.

An orangutan in Gunung Leuser park, near Bukit Lawang

This was one of those minivans where there are 12 seats but the driver’s taking however many people need a ride; and it’s the last bus of the day, and a lot of people need a ride! Leaving Medan we have a good 18 butts on our 12 seats, and the van stops at town after town, picking up more passengers at each, the extra people clambering on the roof to sit on our luggage which was lashed up there, or clinging to the back and sides of the van. We estimated there to eventually be about 30 people in total riding on and in that 12-seat van. Obviously, that was pretty ridiculous in and of itself and absurdly uncomfortable to boot – but that wasn’t the crazy part.

The crazy part was that our van didn’t have functioning lights, which soon became apparent as we drove into the gathering darkness on a terrible road through the palm plantations (the Sumatra rainforest is already sadly mostly a thing of the past, fallen victim to the palm oil companies supplying the world’s taste for cheap cosmetics and confectionary).

I asked the driver if he was going to be turning his headlights on soon – no, he said, he didn’t have any, but it was okay because his friend was going to help at the next village.

Oh, ok, good. But our assumption that this meant his friend would be fixing the lights proved to be well wide of the mark. Rather, his assistance took the form of riding on a motorbike just in front of the minivan, with the van driver navigating by way of the motorbike lights out in front!

So there we were in convoy, a bike out in front lighting the way closely followed by a headlightless minivan with a dozen people clinging to the roof, bouncing along over the ruts and swerving round the potholes as we rattled through the night. It was completely ridiculous and I was simultaneously laughing at the stupidity of it, shitting myself when we kept almost crashing, and cursing the painfully cramped position in which my body was contorted what with all the extra people on board.

This madness went on for several hours (the supposedly 2.5 hour journey took us 4 hours), it was totally crazy, and yet it worked – somehow we made it to Bukit Lawang in one piece. The same can’t be said for my phone though – for some reason I’d made the schoolboy error of leaving it in my big backpack which was strapped to the roof (instead of in my small bag on my lap as usual), and one of the passengers up there must’ve taken it, probably alighting at one of the villages en route. Ah well, lesson reinforced.

The heavens opened just in time for our arrival and we walked through a veritable wall of tropical rain to find a guesthouse, arriving soaked, hungry, and exhausted. But it was one of those nutty journeys that despite leaving you feeling like shit, also leaves you feeling a victorious sense of achievement to have successfully reached your goal, and this goal was well worth the effort – the next day we did a jungle hike in the beautiful Gunung Leuser national park, one of the last surviving tracts of virgin Sumatran rainforest, to see the magnificent yet tragic population of displaced orangutans living there. These beautiful creatures find sanctuary in Gunung Leusur national park after being rescued from the palm plantations which have destroyed most of their natural habitat – the alternative solution to these ‘pests’ is the guns of the oil palm farmers. Seriously, fuck palm oil; screw your cheap chocolate bars and screw your cheap shampoo – if you give a shit about the continued existence of the orangutan, avoid products containing palm oil if possible, or at least opt for products using RSPO certified sustainable palm oil. Unfortunately avoiding palm oil is easier said than done, as it’s in most popular confectionary and cosmetics, but see here for more on how to do so and also details on visiting the orangutans of Bukit Lawang (and Malaysian Borneo’s Sepilok orangutan sanctuary).

Visiting Bukit Lawang and coming face to face with orangutans should definitely be on your Sumatra itinerary and was an unforgettable experience – and I’ll also never forget that ridiculous journey to get there!

For more Indonesia posts, click here

Also see my Indonesia overland travel guide

Sumatra Overland Route

Indonesia, Overland travel, Southeast Asia

Lake Maninjau, Sumatra — Stunning Lake Maninjau, near Bukittinggi, Sumatra

When I first visited Southeast Asia in 2004 en route to Australia with my mate Danny, we’d had no real plan to visit Sumatra (or anywhere else in Indonesia). We flew in from India to Singapore, and were flying out from Bangkok to Australia via Brunei. What we did in between (and how long we spent doing it) was to be played by ear and limited only by our (far from unlimited) funds, though the Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand route is fairly self-explanatory and we knew our path more or less.

But we were also open to whatever spur of the moment decisions might come our way, and ended up heading to Indonesia on the basis of a conversation with a random English bloke sat at the table next to ours at a roadside eatery in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown.

Bukittinggi's Sianok Canyon — Sianok Canyon and Mt Merapi, Bukittinggi

This guy had just come from Sumatra and waxed lyrical about the amazing scenery, friendly people, fascinating cultures, and general awesomeness of the place. On the strength of his recommendation we decided to take a 10-day detour through Sumatra to check it out, and it proved to be every bit as awesome as we’d been told.

Our route in Sumatra was basically Bukittinggi -Lake Maninjau- Lake Toba-Berastagi, with a ferry at either end from and then back to Malaysia.

Minangkabau style footbridge in Bukittinggi — Footbridge in Bukittinggi

We started with a ferry from Malacca to Dumai and minivan from there to Bukittinggi, where we spent a very chilled few days of hiking across Sianok canyon to Kota Gadang (a village famous for silver jewellery), going down the Japanese WWII tunnels, munching on satay skewers and sampling a range of fiery local dishes, exploring the local countryside, and evening beers at the roadside restaurants. It’s a fairly ramshackle town, but it really charmed us with its surrounding natural beauty, its ready smile, and the fascinating culture of the local Minangkabau people.

The Minangkabau are the people of the West Sumatra Highlands, usually called the Minangkabau Highlands after them; though they are officially Muslim, they follow a blend of Islam with local traditional animism (and are certainly partial to a beer or two). This practice was left undisturbed under the rule of Suharto (Indonesia’s former dictator) when all Indonesians were required to choose a monotheistic religion to follow in place of animist beliefs – a choice forced upon all Indonesians who were not already doing so at the time (with Balinese Hinduism managing to satisfy the requirement by portraying its polytheistic pantheon of gods as different facets of one supreme god).

Minangkabau houses on the shore of Lake Maninjau — Minangkabau houses with their bull-horn roof design, on the shore of Lake Maninjau

They traditionally live in longhouses, shared living spaces for large numbers of people, and these are passed down matrilineally i.e. down the female line, as is all their property & wealth as well as their family names. The women live in and run the villages, while the men go off to hunt, work, or find their fortunes, and the main male parenting role for Minangkabau children is actually played by their uncles rather than their fathers.

The name Minangkabau means ‘winning buffalo’ in their language, and their beliefs revolve around the water buffalo, the animal they have always depended on for their livelihood. We visited a buffalo market where the traders wear ponchos, standing side-by-side to haggle by means of hidden hand signals physically relayed from hand to hand under the secrecy of the ponchos; our guide for the day (our guesthouse owner) explained that for many Minangkabau a good buffalo is still preferred to a bank account. Minangkabau houses are designed with curved roofs to emulate the horns of the buffalo, and interestingly their mosques often incorporate the bull-horn design (surely blasphemous in the eyes of stricter interpretations).

A traditional bull fight in Bukittinggi — The start of a bull fight in Bukittinggi

They also hold regular buffalo fights – these are bull vs bull rather than the matador bull fights in Spain, and the bulls are not killed. Rather, the bulls are led to each other and lock horns, wrestling until one of them admits defeat; the locals crowd around to watch the action, or perch on fences at the back, betting on the outcome by buying tickets from the bookmakers working the crowd. The most exciting part of the action is when a bull quits – he turns tail and runs, and the victor gives chase. These are big animals, and when two of them come stampeding towards you you get the hell out of the way! It’s a chaotic scene as the bulls charge through the crowd, people diving for cover or falling backwards off the fences into the mud, the bulls then disappearing into the jungle; we hear the sounds of these heavy units of muscle smashing and crashing through the undergrowth, and the shouts of their handlers as they try to catch up with them and calm them. Eventually the uproar dies down and the handlers return to the arena with their bulls, sedate once more, the bookies pay out the winning bets (we’d bet on the larger bull, but he lost), and the stage is reset for the next bout. It was all brilliant fun, and while I remained a bit uneasy with the actual idea of pushing animals to fight like that, it’s not a blood sport and it was also clear that the bulls’ owners treated their animals with the same kind of care and respect with which a racehorse is treated.

A huge stag beetle in Sumatra — This guy showed us some amazing plants and insects

Water buffaloes weren’t the only impressive animals we saw there though – being located just 20 miles south of the Equator, Bukittinggi has an abundance of wildlife. Walking through the jungle when we visited the longhouse village, we spotted the biggest spider I’ve ever seen (or likely ever will, I expect), a beautiful creature with vivid blue and yellow markings on its black body, with a legspan that must’ve covered 12 inches, just chilling in its web; we were told their bites are seriously dangerous, but very rarely happen and only by accident. Hiking through Sianok Canyon to the silver village we bumped into a bloke picking plants to make medicine for his ailing mother; he showed us the way to the village, and also showed us a range of enormous insects and beetles he picked out from under various leaves (he evidently had great knowledge of the jungle). Even in town there were super-sized insects flying around – one that flapped past my face was so large that I initially took it for a bird, then a bat (due to the erratic flapping motion), before finally realising it was a massive purple butterfly (again, the largest I’ve ever seen or ever expect to). The mosquitoes are also monsters unfortunately, and it’s a malarious region – make sure you’ve got your prophylactics and repellents.

(One word of caution to nature lovers though – do not visit Bukittinggi zoo. The conditions are dreadful, and the emaciated elephant we saw chained up in there was a particularly heartbreaking sight; we went there accidentally, not realising that when we paid for entrance to Fort de Kock (the main tourist site within the town itself) we were also entering the zoo. In other words, if you don’t want to pay money to a dreadful zoo, don’t go to the fort – missing the fort isn’t missing much anyway)

To be honest I’d never even heard of the Minangkabau people before visiting their home region, so finding a people so open and eager to share and show their unique culture, combined with the beautiful surrounding nature and wildlife, made it a really memorable few days in Bukittinggi.

Everyone in Bukittinggi told us that before leaving the area we also had to visit Lake Maninjau, an hour away in a little world of its own, and so we did exactly that. It’s a remarkable place, a pristine lake in the caldera of a collapsed volcano, its fresh water crystal clear and perfect to bathe and swim in, the one road into the crater taking dozens of dramatic switchbacks from the rim of the crater down to the lake, and one road going around the 20-something km circumference of the lake linking up the handful of towns (which we tackled on rental mountain bikes), and the locals seeming to live almost oblivious to the world beyond their crater. We only spent a few days there, but you could easily forget about the world outside and spend weeks chilling by that lake, sipping beers and dipping in the waters and doing a lot of very little.

View of Lake Maninjau from the access road — Lake Maninjau viewed from the road over the crater rim

It’s not the most famous lake in Sumatra though – that honour goes to the far larger (though perhaps not quite so magical) Lake Toba in the Batak Highlands of northern Sumatra. Toba is another caldera lake but on a much greater scale and with a large island in the middle called Samosir, another place you could easily spend weeks forgetting about the world at large.

Boats ferrying passengers to Lake Toba's Samosir island — These boats ferry you across Lake Toba to Samosir Island

It’s a beast of a night bus from Bukittinggi/Maninjau to Toba though, which I’ve done in both directions (having been back to Sumatra again since that first visit); there’s a luxury bus and a local bus. Definitely take the luxury option, it’s seriously worth the extra dollars! The local bus was completely packed out, people sleeping in the aisles, someone puking in the stairwell all night, crying babies… it was a rough trip, and the bus broke down for a couple of hours to boot. The only issue on the luxury bus was the fierce aircon – make sure to layer up.

Sunset over Lake Toba — Lake Toba at sunset

Another thing you could include on your route is a visit to Nias Island (Palau Nias) or the Mentawai Islands; Palau Nias has great fame in the surfing community, while the Mentawai Islands are home to hunter gatherer tribes still living their traditional lifestyles. There are a number of independent guides in Bukittinggi who’ll find you in the guesthouses to offer their services (volcano climbs etc), and if you want to visit the Mentawai tribes they can make the arrangements and take you to the islands as your guide and interpreter. Of course you have to be a bit careful about visiting them and the potential pitfalls of tourism in such undeveloped places, and we decided not to go; but the Bukittinggi guides were all good guys to hang out with even though we didn’t engage their services and I did feel they would’ve handled things sensitively had we gone. Boats to Pulau Nias leave from the port of Sibolga, which is located between Bukittinggi and Lake Toba; boats to the Mentawai leave from Padang city, near Bukittinggi.

Batak longhouses at Lake Toba, Sumatra — Toba Batak roofs, with their patterned gables

Lake Toba and Samosir Island are the heartland of the Toba Batak people, another highland ethnic group that has blended their older animist beliefs with an imported monotheistic religion – in this case, adapting Catholicism to their traditional practices. The Batak people traditionally built longhouses with images of deities under the gables and over the doors, and in the Toba region you see churches with the same kind of gables and carvings – again, something that would perhaps be considered quite blasphemous by mainstream Catholics!

A church on the shores of Lake Toba with Batak design features — A church on the shore of Lake Toba – note the Batak-style gable over the front entrance

The Batak people are renowned in Indonesia for their artistic and musical skills, and it certainly seems like anyone and everyone there can sing & play guitar. Their handicrafts are also of famously high quality, especially the wood carvings like those you find in the shops on Samosir. I have an absolutely gorgeous hand-carved wooden Batak chess set at home, it’s a real work of art and though it was a total pain in the ass to carry it home it was worth the effort.

Batak guitarists jamming by Lake Toba — These guys were good!

From Lake Toba we made one more stop to climb the Sibayak volcano in Berastagi (in the Karo Batak Highlands), a straightforward hike affording great views and the chance to walk through the crater at the top. For some reason we skipped Bukit Lawang (famous for the population of rescued orangutans living in the Gunung Leuser nature reserve) and went straight to Medan for the ferry to Penang (I think we did this because we were already planning to visit the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre in Malaysian Borneo a few weeks later).

On my second visit to Sumatra, we basically did the same route in reverse i.e. from north to south, but visiting Bukit Lawang instead of Berastagi (and had a wild journey to get there from Medan); seeing the orangutans there was pretty incredible (yet tragic), and I’d definitely recommend including both Bukit Lawang and Berastagi on your Sumatra itinerary. After that we went to Lake Toba and Bukittinggi, from where my then-girlfriend and her friend had an onward flight; I proceeded to visit Lake Maninjau again, and then did this insane 2-day bus ride to Jakarta. While I can’t recommend Sumatra highly enough, I’d strongly advise against going by bus from West Sumatra to Jakarta; it was mental! (though there was a silver lining – it left me with a newfound appreciation for Led Zeppelin)

Recommended Sumatra overland route (approx 2 weeks)

Note that the Medan-Penang ferries ceased operating a few years back due to competition from budget airlines, but the Malacca-Dumai ferries still run so you can do the following, flying in/out of Medan (flying in or out of Padang is also an option if you don’t fancy the boat & bus trip over from Malaysia or Singapore, and Bukittinggi is 2 hours from the airport in Padang):

Sumatra recommended route map — Ferry to Dumai (or flight to Padang) – Bukittinggi – Lake Maninjau – Lake Toba – Berastagi – Bukit Lawang – Medan (or vice versa)

Have you been to Sumatra, or do you have any questions about it? Leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

For more Indonesia posts, click here

Also see my Indonesia overland travel guide