If I’ve talked to you at all in the last two years, you may have caught on to the fact that I kind of like Padang food. To put a finer point on it, my love affair with Padang food is so ardent as to even rival the flame of the eternal torch I bear for buttered tortellini. There is, however, an additional acrid top note of desperation layered onto the former, knowing as I do that our remaining time together is painfully short.
I’ve tried to take preemptive steps to mitigate the inevitable ache of loss. I’ve run Google searches on Indonesian food in Seattle, for instance. Seattle has a flourishing Asian community; surely there must be tons of places! My search results yielded an in-depth review of what Yelp considers the best Indonesian restaurant in Seattle, written by a woman who lived in Indonesia for six months. Her overall assessment: the flavors are nowhere near the same, but if you miss Indonesian food, what other choice do you have? I also talked recently with a girl from Seattle and was telling her about my mission to find Indonesian food back in the U.S. “Oh, I’ve had Indonesian food in Seattle!” she told me. “It definitely exists. Just…you need to go into it with a realistic attitude. It’s like eating Chinese food anywhere outside of China or British Columbia.” This was not heartening to hear.
I’ve even gotten so desperate as to actually look up recipes online for Padang food (only desperation could drive me to consider cooking). Sure, the online recipes say, rendang is easy: just throw some meat in a pot and slow-cook it for hours. But how will I ever get the spice proportion right? That’s the real magic, and I’m guessing it’s probably inimitable. As for ingredients, I don’t think I can get cassava leaves at home very easily, and those perfect green chilis that make that perfect green sambal, cultivated in the foggy highlands of West Sumatra? Well, yeah, I don’t see how I’m getting my hands on those. So really, the only recourse I’m left with is to eat as much Padang as I can now, and accept the mourning process later.
Time for a little background information. I’ve tried many different Indonesian cuisines, and I’ve liked them all. Besides Padang, Javanese is my favorite. Every dish, right on down to (and especially) the simplest fried rice or nasa pecel is sheer perfection, and if Padang food weren’t a thing, I’m sure I’d be writing paeans to Javanese food here instead. But Padang food is a thing, and somehow it’s just the most delicious thing I know of in the world. (Other foods I put at the top: buttered tortellini; anything that comes out of a Moroccan tajine; a dish of berenjena con miel (grilled eggplant drizzled with honey) that I had in Spain; Argentine bife de chorizo…)
I was hooked from my first taste, when my pre-service training host family took me out to a Padang restaurant one night and I had baked chicken and steamed cassava leaves with green sambal over rice. Later, when I moved to my permanent site in West Java, I always got excited when my host mom would bring home jackfruit curry from the Padang place next door for dinner. But my innocent enjoyment didn’t tip over into the desperate madness of obsession until I visited West Sumatra itself.
Everything happened extremely quickly. It was the end of June of last year, and I was on school vacation. An announcement came out that the Ministry of Religion, one of the two government ministries that oversees education in Indonesia, was looking for a Peace Corps Volunteer to lead a teacher training in Padang, West Sumatra, the following week. Back in pre-service training I had heard about Volunteers getting to travel to other islands to lead trainings. I had wondered if I’d ever get the chance myself, since all of the trainings seemed to be put on by the Ministry of Religion, who usually only requested Volunteers who teach at a Ministry-of-Religion-affiliated school (i.e., an Islamic madrasah, as opposed to the ‘regular’ high school I teach at, which falls under the purview of the Ministry of Education and Culture). However, this posting advertisement was open to all Volunteers, and so I quickly applied.
I was really excited by the prospect of getting to visit Sumatra, probably getting some good Padang food (oh, but I had no idea…), and getting to put on a teacher training. I had done a few teacher trainings before, in and around my town, and they were some of my favorite programs I had done in my service: the teachers were wonderful people whom I loved talking to; they were so enthusiastic; and I felt like I was actually able to be useful to them, by giving them games and activities for their classrooms. (Personally, when I attend teaching workshops and someone shows me a new game I can use, it feels like getting a golden ticket.) I was excited to get to challenge myself professionally and design and lead a larger workshop than what I’d done before.
The day after I applied, I was informed I’d been selected—this was a Friday—and I was supposed to leave on Tuesday. My itinerary only got finalized on Monday, and I had received practically no information about the structure of the training itself. Luckily, I was able to reach out to my friend who had also led a Ministry of Religion teacher workshop in Padang months earlier, and she gave me tons of invaluable information about how her experience had gone. What really caught my attention out of everything she told me was that, if my training followed the format hers had, I would be presenting for around nine hours. What?!
Throughout my long trip to Padang—a flight from Bandung, to Yogyakarta, to Padang, with a six-hour layover in there—I feverishly came up with sessions I could present and PowerPoints to accompany them. My teaching motto is that it’s always better to have much more planned than you actually need. If I don’t plan enough for one of my high school classes (which rarely happens; see the motto above), I always have a mental binder’s worth of games and activities to fall back on, so it’s really no sweat. But presenting to a room full of teachers, I absolutely did not want to be grasping around for ways to fill the time. Nine hours! Would everything perhaps take longer than I imagined, even to the point that I’d be forced to cut things; or was there the possibility that I’d run out of everything I’d prepared with, say, four more hours still to go in the day? All I could do was ready a lot of material to have at my disposal, and hope that I’d end up with excess. In the end, I made six PowerPoints, totaling 80 slides. I had, and have, absolutely no regrets.
I arrived in the city of Padang at one in the morning, absolutely exhausted, and was picked up from the airport by Mr. Hendri (or was he Hendi? Or Henri? Everyone referred to him differently, including in writing, so I guess I’ll never know for sure). He took me from the airport straight to a restaurant for dinner, like any good Indonesian host. But while I absolutely wanted to try Padang food right at the source itself, I’d already eaten in the nightmare that was the Yogya airport (six hours, not a single available seat to sit in…had to camp on the floor, packed in along with most of the people there), and I needed to sleep, not eat. We finally arrived at the Ministry of Religion’s head office in Padang, which was a compound that included dorms. I was given my own dorm room, nice and simple but made luxurious with its own AC unit.
Despite my exhaustion, I could barely sleep (eaten alive by mosquitoes all night), and got up at 5 am to put the finishing touches on my PowerPoints. Yes, I was tired, but my adrenaline rush at the prospect of leading a nine-hour workshop by myself kept me plenty wired and focused.
Now comes the part you’ve all been waiting for: my first Padang meal in Padang! There was a dining room, staffed with cooks, in the Ministry of Religion’s office complex, and I had breakfast there. This was nothing like the Padang food I’d always had in restaurants on Java. Sure, there was the requisite rice base (and I’d like to note that Padang rice is actually different from, and superior to, all other rice—it has a softer texture), but it was topped with noodles and vegetables in a wet broth and pink kerupuk (tapioca crackers). It was tasty, but above all it was unlike any other Indonesian food I’d had up to that point. I was getting exposed to a totally new cuisine!
After breakfast, I was shown to the room where the training would be held. It was so nice. It was a classroom, with thirty chair-desk-combos arranged around the perimeter. There was a projector, a sound system and two hand-held microphones, a whiteboard and markers, a half-dozen flip charts stocked with paper and markers, and excellent AC. (Padang, by the way, is right on the Indian ocean. Climate: hot and muggy.) Everything was perfect.
I got my laptop set up with the projector, and then the teachers arrived. The teachers were madrasah high school teachers from all over, including Jambi, the Riau islands, and other areas very far away from Padang. Their training was for five days (I was just one day of that), and they were also staying in the Ministry of Religion’s dorm. They had a required uniform for the duration of the training: black pants, white shirt, black tie for the men, and black skirt, white shirt, white veil for the women. (I’ve probably mentioned this somewhere before, but matching clothing is a big deal in Indonesia.) There were thirty teachers, including just five men, and they were all much older than me. Mr. Hendri, my contact, told me that some of them had over twenty years’ teaching experience. Good to know the participants’ backgrounds, but also, yikes. I didn’t like being in the position of a young person with barely a year of teaching experience under her belt lecturing to much older, professional, experienced teachers (especially given the cultural context, where age/seniority/hierarchy are so important). How did I even find myself in this situation?! Oh yeah, that’s right—because I’m a native speaker. Native-speaker privilege… It’s a crazy thing.
One thing Mr. Hendri told me alongside the fact that some of the teachers had 20-30 years’ experience was that none of them had ever met a native speaker before. I came to realize (unfortunately too late to be able to re-structure my sessions to reflect this) that I had been brought in not so much as a presenter, but as a treat for the teachers, to give them the opportunity to talk to a native speaker and get to have that kind of cultural exchange. Despite that I hadn’t structured my sessions for this, they asked plenty of questions that opened it up for cultural discussions and exchange, and I also tried to compensate by having good conversations with them during our tea and lunch breaks. (Oddly, I was apparently supposed to eat alone in a separate room from them during break times. They were shocked when I joined them instead, and thanked me profusely for this effort, which made me a little sad.) They were all extremely curious and enthusiastic, and it was a true pleasure to get to meet and talk with them. The vibe was very cozy. They’d had three days already together to become friends, and so they had their own group dynamic, inside jokes, all that. Very fun people.
I presented about games and activities, positive discipline, and lesson planning. For lesson planning, I talked about the Peace Corps model, which is by design very simple. Indonesian teachers are actually required to have lesson plans; at the beginning of each school year they submit lesson plans, each around 20 pages long, to the school principal and the government, for every class they will teach the entire year. There can be a disconnect, however, with teachers often not actually using the lesson plans they’ve spent so many hours creating. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it’s what I’ve observed. My session on using the Peace Corps model was meant to show how the government-required hulking lesson plans could be adapted to a slim, manageable format for actual use in class.
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| Priceless contribution from Group 3. You had to be there. |
You know when you’re a teacher and you can feel your lesson bombing? That’s how I felt during this session of mine: staring out into a sea of skeptical frowns, people raising their hands to comment that it must be nice to be a teacher in the U.S. and not have to submit lesson plans to the government… Not only did people seem to find it completely unhelpful and removed from their own work, but I felt like I wasn’t even succeeding in explaining it. So it apparently crashed and burned, but oh well; it was only an hour, and then we had a tea break to mix things up. But then, to my surprise, a small group of teachers came up to me as the others were filtering out the door. “That was the most helpful thing I’ve learned all week!” one declared, eyes shining, as the others nodded vigorously. “Oh—I’m glad!” I said, totally taken aback. I do still tend to think the majority disagreed with them, but it was great to hear that some people at least had gotten a lot out of it.
On a related note, I’ve talked before with teachers (notably, my parents) about the difficulty in teaching of knowing how good a job you’re doing. But this workshop happened to be one time when I actually got feedback…. I came back from the first tea break in the morning and noticed a stack of evaluations had appeared on my desk at the front of the room. I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to look at them, or if they’d been gathered there for someone else to come take away. As the day wore on and the stack of evaluations got higher and higher (I never saw the participants filling them out, but apparently they had to for every session), I assumed they were meant for me, and started flipping through them. What I soon realized was, even feedback isn’t necessarily feedback. There was the person who marked “100” for everything, and then a “90” for one thing…what should I make of that? There was the person who marked “75” across the board with no comments. One person would rank something relatively lowly, and I would feel bad, until I read the next person’s sheet, where they’d rank that same thing the highest, and something else lowly. It didn’t wind up being helpful data for me at all. Despite seeming arbitrary, or at least very idiosyncratic to each evaluator, I was still interested in the idea of it—don’t we all wonder sometimes how others see us? Some of the rubric was about the session material, but a lot of the axes were pretty personally specific to me—rank how “ethical” the presenter is; rank how polite she is; rank how knowledgeable she seems; even rank the tidiness of her appearance (that one I found pretty hilarious, though when I got less than perfect marks from a few people on it, I found myself wondering what they could be referring to—was it because my shirt didn’t have a ready-pressed finish, having been unpacked from my suitcase, or because my curly hair can get a little wild in heavy humidity, or…?).
We closed a long day with picture-taking (absolutely mandatory for any Indonesian event), and then I was walking back to my dorm room, feeling exhausted and ready for a cold bucket bath, but elated that I was finished, when I ran into some of the teacher participants, coming out of the dorms. “We’re going to the beach right now!” they told me. “Do you want to come with us?” The honest answer was no—I’d been presenting all day, running on about two hours of sleep, and being around people for long periods of time wipes me out regardless. But I really liked the teachers, and I figured I could stand to push myself just a little bit more. I ran to my dorm room, changed my pants and shoes, and met them back outside on the porch.
I had seen on Google Maps that the big, famous beach in Padang was walking distance from the Ministry of Religion’s offices. We took cars there and it was only a five-minute drive. Many of the teachers knew Padang as their home turf, and this beach especially so. The beach is actually most famous for its sunsets, and we arrived just around a quarter to six. The sun was enormous, metallic gold over the waves, just magical. The water was wonderfully warm—had I been dressed differently, I would have loved to swim, or better yet, try surfing, like many of the people silhouetted in the waves. As a group we walked along the sand, rolling up our pants and walking in the surf, venturing out along a jetty. The teachers were really some of my favorite people I met in Indonesia. We had such great conversations, and regardless of the age and cultural differences between us we had a very fun time together as friends.
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| The "merpati" (dove) sculpture |
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| The teachers having fun on the jetty |
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| Boats and umbrellas |
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| Matahari terbenam |
When I got back to the dorms a few hours later, I found that Mr. Hendri had been waiting for me, with a surprise: he was going to take me out to dinner at the best Padang restaurant in, well, Padang. All my dreams were coming true!
Now, to an explanation of Padang restaurants:
Most Padang restaurants look pretty similar. They are clean and simple, with long white tables and rubber-cushioned chairs. You sit down, and a little metal bowl of water is brought to you, along with a pitcher of lukewarm water. The bowl is for cleaning your right hand with, to prepare for eating, and the water in the pitcher is lukewarm as “proof” that it has been freshly boiled and is thus safe to drink. A giant metal bowl of rice is brought out, and then the real fun begins: a waiter carries fifteen or more medium-sized white ceramic bowls stacked expertly on a single arm, and unloads them along the length of your table, stacking some at the corners so they all fit. (This is the universal sign of a Padang restaurant, by the way: the stacked white bowls in the front restaurant window that show off what’s available that night.) You get to see everything on the menu, and then you choose what you want to put on your plate (and are then charged for on the bill). Cutlery is available, but it’s so much more fun to eat it with your hand.
(Aside: before coming to Indonesia, I really couldn’t eat with my right hand—I was incredibly clumsy with it, while with my left hand I was expert. This, I knew, would be a slight problem for me, given Indonesians often eat with their hand, and the only hand that can be eaten with is the right one. [There are a few exceptions to this, including if you have something like bony meat that requires two hands to pick apart, in which case, no problem; or holding snacks with your left hand is fine as well. The key is only the right hand can bring food to lips.] It drove me crazy when I first came to site when people would force me to eat with my hand, watch me closely, and then laugh about how “of course the American is so clumsy at it”—and all I could think about was how good I could be if I were using my other hand. However, practice makes perfect, and I wound up becoming very capable at eating with my right hand. When I eat Padang food, there’s no other way I’d have it.)
There are some staples of Padang restaurants, and then there are lots of other dishes that vary from place to place or from day to day. The gem of Padang cuisine is rendang. Rendang is usually either beef or buffalo meat, slow-cooked for hours in spices and curry juices. People have told me that the color of the rendang is not necessarily an indicator of its quality, but I’ve personally always found the color very telling: the darker, the better. The best rendang I’ve had melts, texture-wise, in your mouth, and flavor-wise, the closest comparison I can think of is to Mexican mole. Several times I’ve had too-salty rendang; my favorite stuff, in contrast, isn’t salty at all.
My second-favorite dish, after rendang, is the “gudeg,” savory jackfruit in a curry juice. Then there are the steamed cassava leaves, sweet and mild, and the second gem of Padang cuisine, the “sambal hijau”—green-chili paste. The sambal hijau varies wildly in its spiciness dimension. I’ve had my mouth lit on fire to the point that my eyes and nose won’t stop running for an hour after I’ve eaten, and I’ve had other sambal hijau so mild that I can eat it directly by the tablespoonful. I enjoy the full range of spice, and the surprise factor of visiting a new Padang restaurant and not knowing how hot their particular blend is going to be.
Besides these staples (my classic order at any Padang restaurant), there are tons of other dishes, usually including fish, chicken, and fried hardboiled eggs, all in different curries. Many of the curries are eye-popping shades of yellow, light-green or orange, and make for an exquisite display when they’re all laid out on the table.
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| What's on this plate? The dark meat is rendang, the green-orange vegetable around the spoon is the jackfruit curry, the light yellow in the middle is random curry juice I spooned on, and the medium-shade green is the green-chilli paste. |
You eat your fill, and then more little metal bowls of water are brought out for you to clean off your fingers in. (Most of the foods are oil-based, so the water in the fingerbowl doesn’t fully do the trick at cleaning off the greasiness, but it helps.) Lastly, a waiter comes by, inspects the bowls on your table with a shrewdly-trained eye, and calculates out your bill.
A Padang meal has the fun factor of choose-your-own-adventure, while being in a laidback environment, and it’s always beyond delicious.
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| Thank you, Mr. Hendri! |
So, Mr. Hendri took me to Lamun Ombak, apparently the Padang locals’ favorite Padang restaurant. It looked like any other Padang restaurant I’d been to on Java. There were lots of mystery curries, all of which I was eager to try, and there were the staples: jackfruit, cassava leaves, green sambal, and, of course, rendang. At that point, I hadn’t eaten any meat for over a year, since I’d arrived at my permanent site in May of 2017. I debated with myself: was I really willing to eat an animal just for the fleeting gratification of taste? Ultimately, despite my guilt, I went for it: this was my only chance to try what might just be the greatest rendang in the entire world. I ate the rendang. The room swam before my eyes. Reality was pulled inside and out of itself. It was, without doubt, the most incredible thing I had (or have, to this day) eaten in my life.
The flavor was rich and complex, but not “intense”; it wasn’t showy or statement-making. But it filled up my entire mouth with layers upon layers of flavor combining into something completely unique. I could feel it hitting all the different pleasure centers on my tongue and in my brain. I’ll say it here: it’s worth visiting Padang if for no other reason than to eat the food.
However, there are lots of other interesting things going on in Padang, too. The dominant ethnic group of West Sumatra is the Minangkabau people, who are famous as the world’s largest matriarchal culture. All wealth and property are passed down the female line in families. Here are some interesting articles on this. I had a discussion at one point with two people, a man and a woman, whom I befriended at the Ministry of Religion, who told me a bit about their unique culture, including that traditionally a man would change his name when he got married, maternal uncles have a particular role in families, and there's a clan system.
One effect of the matriarchal culture is that because the men in the family don’t inherit, they have traditionally had to make their fortunes for themselves, which has historically meant a culture of entrepreneurial spirit and emigration (there’s a special term for this, “merantau”). People I met in Padang told me that even to this day there are more Minang people outside of West Sumatra than in the homeland itself. This mass emigration is the reason that no matter where in Indonesia you go, no matter how far-flung a village you find yourself in, there’s guaranteed to be a Padang restaurant nearby. I think of my own town as being very homogenous, near 100% Sundanese Muslim, and yet I can think of five Padang restaurants offhand that I would pass in a ten-minute walk down the street.
The traditional Minang architecture, which is absolutely everywhere in West Sumatra, is gorgeous. It features spiky, pointed roofs with fascinating geometry that are meant to resemble buffalo horns. (The word Minangkabau is derived from "victors of the buffalo," which comes from a popular legend about a spiky-horned baby buffalo.)
A building that I put high on my list of most beautiful structures I’ve ever seen is the new grand mosque of Padang, only a few years old, which happened to be right across the street from the Ministry of Religion’s office. It’s a gigantic, modern take on the buffalo-horn style, different from every angle you look at it, brown-colored with ornate gold designs on all sides and lots of windows. At night, all lit up from within, it’s simply magical.
The day after the workshop, Mr. Hendri drove me to a point along the main road where I could catch a bus to my next destination. My same friend who had led a workshop in Padang months earlier had also given me lots of recommendations for traveling in the area, which I was so grateful for, given I hate researching trips myself, and I had so little time before I left to do any research anyway. I was off to the city of Bukittinggi (“bukit tinggi” means “tall hill”).
I squeezed into the backseat of a bus slightly bigger than a minivan, and got lucky with the window seat. The ride alone was one of the highlights of the trip for me. It was three hours through the Sumatran countryside, from the hot shore of the Indian Ocean up to the cool highlands. What I saw of the scenery looked similar to Java, but overwhelmingly more wild. Dense, lush jungle everywhere. It was breathtaking.
I arrived in Bukittinggi around lunchtime. It was overcast and threatening to rain. My hostel (following my friend’s recommendation) was a dream, and I got to stay in a “capsule” bed, which was really a brand-new self-contained spaceship, a plastic pod with built-in TV, radio, headset, fan system, blue lights, reading lamp, alarm clock, and mirror.
After I’d showered and rested, I went out for a walk around the city. I enjoyed the buffalo-horn architecture everywhere, including on the gate to a very cool bridge that changed colors at night.
I went to the main square, ringed by shopping, whose central showpiece was the “jam gadang,” the famous Bukittinggi clock tower that is a mix of Dutch colonial and Minang design. It was also lit up at night in changing colors.
The city of Bukittinggi is built on a high point, and from the main square I could look down and across a wide valley to a volcano, Mt. Marapi, opposite. I had come to Bukittinggi planning to climb Mt. Marapi, as my friend recommended, but when I’d gotten to my hostel, the woman there had told me the forecast was rain and lightning for one of the possible days I could do it, and overcast for the other (no view, no point). So that was out.
For dinner I chose at random one of the billions of Padang restaurants lining the street. I chatted with the men running the restaurant and some of the other diners. I found it roll-my-eyes hilarious how the first question I was asked, after it had been established that I spoke Indonesian, was “Do you speak Minangkese?” In West Java, the first question I’m asked, often before my name, where I’m from, or even if I speak Indonesian, is “Do you speak Sundanese?” I couldn’t believe I was getting the same question here, if in a slightly different form, and just after I’d explained that I was only visiting the area for a few days, no less. How on earth would I speak Minangkese?
The next day, I went hiking in the gorge near the town. The woman at my hostel had given me a map and detailed instructions for getting there. I had to go far down a steep, switch-backed hill from town to the very bottom of the valley.
Then I was in the gorge, which was soft, loose gray rock. I followed a trail along the river, and when the path ran out I just walked alongside the gravel riverbed. The river was maybe twenty feet wide, fast enough that you would be swept along by the current if you tried to swim in it, but not too strong or deep that you couldn’t have crossed it if you needed to, provided you were willing to get wet up to your waist. It was hot and muggy in the gorge and the river sparkled despite the overcast lighting. The opposite bank was lushly green hills, with several visible limestone caves. I passed several water buffalo out grazing freely, something I’ve only seen once on Java.
It was pretty, but it had an eerie feeling to it. Rather than a shiny tourist attraction, the gorge felt neglected and seedy. The few buildings around the gorge were shabby and run-down; there were some motorcycles parked in the weeds near the river but their owners were nowhere to be seen. I thought of the man who had run down the steep hill to catch up with me as I’d made my way to the gorge, who had engaged me in conversation and seemed like he was just interested in talking to a foreigner, until he aggressively made it clear he wanted to be my paid tour guide. I became acutely aware that I was all alone in a hidden, secluded area, with the only way out of the gorge the straight path I’d come in on, essentially a sitting duck if anyone wanted to do something to me (memories of getting robbed in Chile came back to me then). I had been walking probably forty minutes and could see what looked like the end of the gorge in the distance, so I decided I’d eat my packed lunch there and then turn around and head back. After awhile I noticed I wasn’t alone in the gorge anymore, but there was a family following me, some adults and a group of children. They tried to get my attention, but they were so far back in the distance, I didn’t want to wait forever for them to catch up, and besides, I wanted to be alone. I didn’t like that they were just slowly following me, for a good twenty minutes, but I tried to ignore them.
I reached the end of the gorge, where it sharply curved and narrowed, and I would have had to cross the river somehow if I wanted to continue. I sat on some gravel and ate the bun I had packed, as the family creepingly, inexorably, neared. Suddenly, a wondrous sighting: a giant black lizard! Being bad at gauging things across distance, I wasn’t sure how big he was, but I guessed around iguana size, shaped like a miniature komodo dragon with sleek features. Monitor lizard, I thought automatically, and then wondered how I knew what a monitor lizard looked like—one of those things I didn’t know I knew. He walked along the opposite shore, and without breaking his stride slipped into the river, paddling across. The way the river so immediately dragged him downstream I realized the current must be stronger than I had thought. He swam diagonally across, and then got out and kept moving, all without pause. (Later, I looked it up, and he was an "Asian Water Monitor," or, in Indonesian, “biawak.”)
The family finally got close enough to me and started calling out to me, beckoning. I was pinned at the end of the gorge and had no choice. I came to them and saw there were two young women, probably my age, both carrying babies, with four or five young children. One of the women started talking to me, clearly asking for something, but she was speaking in pure Minangkese and I couldn’t understand a word. “I can’t understand you, can you please use Indonesian?” I said. She kept speaking in Minangkese. I shrugged, repeated that I didn’t understand what she wanted, and finally she got out, “uang” (money). I was actually completely taken by surprise. I had never been approached and asked for money in Indonesia. Even roadside beggars are rare, compared to every other country I’ve been to, which I’ve always seen as a testament to the remarkable networks of community support here. The woman rubbed her fingers together and mimed feeding her baby. I gave her a bill and then set off at once at a brisk pace back the way I’d come, realizing that while she had only been asking for money, again, I was a sitting-duck in the gorge, and anyone could have approached me and demanded anything they wanted. When I finally reached the bridge that marked the entrance to the gorge, I was glad to be out of there.
After my walk, I hiked back up the switch-backed hill to the town, and paid to enter the “panoramic” viewpoint area looking down over the gorge. The view was nice. Less nice was the fact that I was swarmed by men who wanted to take me on various tours, mostly the “Japanese cave” which was apparently some old military bunker. I shook them off, but was irritated that I couldn’t be left alone in peace anywhere, and climbed up a tower in the complex to get away. From the higher point, I could see that the lookout area was apparently right up against a cemetery. I watched some monkeys running along the tin roofs of the souvenir shops along the walk.
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| Can you find the monkey? |
I can’t remember if I stayed in Bukittinggi another day or not, but then I paid my hostel for a shuttle to Danau (lake) Maninjau. The “shuttle” was actually a van loaded up with sacks of vegetables and other groceries that two guys were transporting to there. It’s a roughly two-hour drive from Bukittinggi to Danau Maninjau, and it’s one of the most famous routes in Indonesia: straight down, something like 49 switchbacks which are all numbered. Danau Maninjau is a stunning caldera lake, perpetually covered in fog, which gives it an otherworldly, out-of-time feel. A few small towns ring the lake, surrounded by vertical cliffs of thick jungle.
My hostel was right on the lake, gardens and sitting areas up to the water’s edge. The hostel itself was kind of weird, with too many old, crass Englishmen sitting around being foul; it wasn’t cheap, but the room definitely was, made of floor-to-ceiling slatted wood that you could see through, totally infested with insects. At least there was a balcony, and since I was the only one on the second floor, I had it all to myself. I could sit on a chair outside my room and just stare out across the lake. Nothing was going on out there, but it was very peaceful.
Soon after I’d arrived, I changed into my swimming clothes. (Swimming for a woman in Muslim areas of Indonesia, by the way, means swimming fully clothed.) The water looked beautifully clean and inviting. The lake was right there, but oddly there were no steps or ladders. I wondered how I was going to get out once I’d gotten in. I figured the side was low enough to the water that I could hoist myself out, and without much more deliberation, jumped straight in.
The water was a perfect temperature, cool and refreshing but not bracing. I put my head under, dog-paddled a bit, lay on my back… There wasn’t anywhere to swim to (I had no way of guessing how far the opposite shore was, and anyway, I would never dream of attempting it), so after cooling off and enjoying myself for maybe fifteen minutes I was ready to get out. Now came the question of it. I went over to the concrete edge of the hostel gardens. Actually, it was definitely too high to get out onto. The other option, which I had also considered before getting in, was a nearby mangrove tree. There were some slats of wood nailed to the trunk in places that could function like a ladder. I figured I could climb up the roots till I could reach the slats on the trunk, I could climb up the ladder to the tree’s lower branches, and from there, I could jump to the land.
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| Bless the mangroves for filtering the world |
The roots were very slippery, and the lowest slat of ladder was several feet up. I made a kind of leap of it, got up to the lower branch, but didn’t stick my landing—it was so slippery, I fell right off! I fell backwards into the water, which was shallow and rocky there, and got a little cut up. It was a stupid thing, and I’m lucky I didn’t mess myself up badly. I steadied myself, tried again in a more deliberate way, and successfully jumped from the tree to the land. I didn’t need to swim a second time that day, though. That night the sky was clear and I had incredible stargazing.
The next day, I asked my hostel host about hiking in the area. He said there was a waterfall up in the jungle nearby, and gave me directions to get there: go down the street until you get to the big green mosque; take a right there, and you’ll see a path; follow the path up. I walked down the street, found the mosque I assumed must be the one, and saw what might have been a path on the right. I followed it. It quickly disappeared. But I was walking along open rice fields, stepped very steeply against the hillside, and could easily see where I’d come from, so I decided to keep going up until I hopefully found something.
After a while, the “path” I had been following wended into the jungle. It was thick forest, with slippery leaves and mud underfoot. I was going up alongside a river, though, so I figured I’d find the waterfall eventually. I was a little worried about falling or twisting my ankle on one of the slippery roots or vines, but I wasn’t too far from civilization that I couldn’t grab a stick and hobble one-legged back down the hillside if it came to that.
To my surprise, after a long time of making my way up blindly along what looked like animal trails or no trails at all, I suddenly came upon what was clearly a human trail. It also happened to be bounded by stinging nettle seven feet high on both sides. I was wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt. There was no way I could walk through that. Well, that was the end of my hike!
I walked back down the hill and went to a Padang restaurant for lunch. The main road of town was narrow, with everything built next to and following the curve of the lake. I wasn’t sure why—did they get fewer foreigners, was it the fact that I was alone, or was it just the culture?—but the level of attention I got every time I stepped out of my hostel was way beyond what I had ever gotten on Java. It was everylast person, from youngest to oldest, calling out to me as I passed. Almost everyone was friendly, but it was exhausting. This is in part why I love train and bus rides so much in Indonesia: looking out the window, I finally attain what I always wish I could be in Indonesia—someone who can look, without being looked at. Somehow I had thought that on vacation I might also get a break from the attention. I guess that’s why foreigners like Bali so much.
In the evening, as I sat writing by the lake in the garden, another foreigner hostel guest approached me. We talked, and it turned out he was a (Catalan) Spaniard. He was struggling at speaking English, but one of his first questions to me happened to be, “and what did you study in college?” As soon as he heard my response, he smiled satisfactorily. “Ah, excellent. We’re just going to speak Spanish, then. My English is bad and I’ve got a headache from having spoken it for the last two weeks I’ve been traveling.” I was excited to speak Spanish, but I did have a suspicion it might not go so well. Suspicion confirmed. As has happened to me many times before in similar situations, I couldn’t keep my languages straight. I had to speak very slowly to make sure that every word that was coming out of my mouth was Spanish, and as soon as I would relax and start speaking quickly, it’d come out half in Indonesian. Please don’t judge me, Spanish guy! I used to be really fluent, I swear!
After it got dark, there was a wild storm. Torrential downpours lashed and lightning lit up the whole sky every few seconds. I sat out on my balcony for hours watching it, listening to the Englishmen shouting downstairs at a football match on TV. In the morning, everything was washed clean and fresh, and the lake had an opalescent quality to it. I watched men balancing on bamboo frames out on the lake, working to fix their fishing nets that had been disarrayed in the storm.
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| Before |
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| After |
The next day, I went back to Padang, this time in a real shuttle that picked up and dropped off people all the way. Mr. Hendri was so kind and picked me up from my drop-off point, which was right in front of the grand mosque. The Ministry of Religion was letting me stay in their dorms again. In the afternoon, I walked to the beach I’d gone to at sunset before. It threatened rain the whole way there, but I was wearing a rain jacket, so I didn’t care. The beach was deserted. I love the ocean on a stormy day. It started drizzling when I arrived. I got to walk along barefoot in the sand and rolled up my pant legs to wade in the water.
I stayed half an hour, and then on my walk back I really got caught in a downpour. An amazing sighting: another monitor lizard! He was standing in an open sewer not five feet from me. As soon as we made eye contact, he disappeared in a flash into the darkness, but not before I’d gotten a good look at him. Up close this time, he was a lot bigger than the lizard I’d seen in the gorge had seemed from a distance. He was quite a bit bigger than an iguana. Very impressive, very cool.
