Sumatra - Padang and Bukittingi

We gave up our plans to go to Bandarlampung at the bottom of Sumatra, since all the cheaper accommodation was booked out, so we decided to skip the 30 hr bus trip and fly straight to Padang about halfway up Sumatra and on the west coast.

We only stayed a few days in Padang after visiting the information centre and realising that most of the tourist attractions are well outside the city. The city has some distinctive architecture from the local Maningkabau culture but other than that is like many other Indonesian cities.

It's a beach city but we didn't go swimming due to the strange colour of the water and large amount of rubbish floating around. From the tourist literature the beach resorts 20km to the north and south of the town are nicer.

One thing Padang is well known for is Padang food, which is sold all over Indonesia. You just sit down at a table and the waiter brings you some rice and numerous bowls of different curries and dishes, and you eat what you want. When you've finished you pay for what you ate. It's a good way to try different food without knowing what it is.

From Padang we traveled by minibus (basically a minivan that they cram as many people as possible in) to Bukittingi, a town in the hills about an hour's drive inland. It's a nice compact little town with lots to do. The location is scenic, surrounded by three volcanoes (which we never fully saw because of the clouds) and there is a large canyon that passes by the town. Bukittingi has some military history, with an old dutch fort (Fort De Kock) and some WWII era tunnels that the Japanese built (that is, they forced the Indonesians to build them). The zoo here is surprisingly good given it's a reasonably small town in a third world country.

While in Bukittingi we hired a guide to take us into the rainforest to see the world's largest flower, the Rafflesia, which was luckily blooming. The one we saw was 70cm wide. Each flower takes around a year to grow and blooms for only a week. There aren't many around and they are found in only three locations in Indonesia. (The flower is named after Sir Stamford Raffles, governor of Indonesia when it used to be ruled by the British several hundred years ago, who took an interest in botany. Later on the British lost their control of Indonesia and Raffles went on to found Singapore.) The journey to the flower was interesting, first on the back of motorbikes down to the canyon followed by a trek through the rainforest.


Sumatra is much emptier than Java, with 1/4 the population and 4 times the land mass, and looks much greener. As we've found elsewhere in Indonesia the people are very friendly and the large bus that we caught into town from the airport even made a special stop for us at our hotel.

From here we plan to go to Lake Maninjau and Lake Toba - Internet looks expensive and slow in both these places so you might not hear from us for a week or two.