Bukittinggi, stink flower, and a crater lake

Like many visitors, we decided to use Bukittinggi--a medium size town with about as many mosques as it has city blocks--as a sort of base camp to explore the sights in the highlands of West Sumatra. After several rounds of Hearts and having arranged transport for the following day, we went to bed but were soon woken by the beautiful and eerie and LOUD incantations from the neighboring mosques. Most mosques in Indonesia have several loudspeakers just below the minarets, and because it is still Ramadan, for hours on end all through the night cities fill with the sound of melodic prayer. Throughout this trip, our sleep cycles have been highly contingent on our proximity to local mosques.

The following morning, a friendly young guy drove us (early-to-mid 90's mixtape blasting) to a nearby preserve to see the rafflesia bloom, the world's largest flower and a big tourist pull here. After a 30 minute trek into the jungle, we encountered, first, the enormous phallus of a rafflesia bud and then the amazing flower itself. Its petals are tough and rubbery, like a succulent's, and it stinks of garlic çheese and fermented cabbage. People call it "corpse flower". Like the foul-smelling durian fruit, I think the rafflesia's odor is nature's attempt to mimic rotting flesh, which attracts pollinating flies. Rafflesia bloom once (and only for a week or so), then die, and guides have to keep tabs on where they are sprouting up in the jungle in order to sustain the region's eco-tourism.

Our guide then took us to a nearby woman's house and we drank Civet Coffee, a local specialty. After selecting and eating the best coffee beans, civets (picture a big ferret) digest them using a special enzyme in their stomachs and then shit them out, at which point people collect the beans and grind them into a coffee that, according to connoisseurs all over the world, is really good. None of us thought so, but if you're curious you can order directly from this lady online. we have her card.

Moving on...

After 46 hairpin switchbacks into a crater lake, we arrived at our next destination, Danau Maninjau, a village on the shore of that lake. We rented scooters and did the perimeter. Many segments of hte road (and several houses) are overrun with boulders and mud, evidence of the quake the rocked the area this time last year. Bouncing over the rubble it was perhaps inevitable that one of us would get a flat, and we did. A local fixed it by finding the holes and melting thick pieces of rubber over them then filing it down. the whole process took an hour and cost a dollar.

While we were waiting, a man passed pushing a wheelbarrow full of coconuts with a chained monkey on top. later we watched a different chained monkey climb a palm and twist off coconuts for another man pushing a wheelbarrow. Back at our bungalow, Sarah and Mark swam 30 minutes through wavy water to a small island, and later we chilled with a charming young local boy named Yogi, who showed us magic tricks.

We were virtually the only tourists Danau Maninjau, and this will become a theme for the remainder of Sumatra as well. Many touristy things now defunct. A combination of a string of natural disasters and the sinking world economy has left much of Sumatra with far fewer visitors than before. we see evidence of this everywhere.