The Missing Ingredient: Notes from the Streets of Southeast Asia: Dumai, Padang Indonesia

After a pleasant and uninteresting boat ride across the straight of Malacca I arrived in Dumai Indonesia. Sumatra is the 8th largest island in the world and after looking at my maps I knew that getting through this island quickly was going to be a challenge, I was not prepared for the challenging nature of the roads. Dumai is not much of a city, a spread out dusty port city with few things to offer except a great restaurant and the scent of coconut everywhere. The smell was a great foreshadowing of the food to come because when I stepped off the boat it was next to a coconut oil refinery. So with coconut in my nostrils and on my plate I dug into Indonesia head first. Indonesia is gigantic, diverse and spread out. There is no way any human can explore it all. Plus, there are not enough roads in the country to get everywhere. After a wonderful lunch and an impromptu English lesson I booked a night minivan to Padang the biggest city in Sumatra. Little did I know that I would not be sleeping for the next 18 hours as the little mini van avoided gigantic oil trucks bringing oil out of the center of the country near Pekanbaru. This means there are sometimes 7 to 8 miles of oil tankers on a version of a country road which is the national highway. For such a big oil producer, the infrastructure is appalling. So to avoid the trucks on a literal one way road for 18 hours we drove on the shoulder which was made out of dirt and sometimes mud. I was told that during the rainy season which was the time I was there, there is normally no shoulder to the road and that the journey sometimes takes two or three days. I was lucky with only an 18 hour drive.
I arrived in Padang and found a funky hotel and started walking around. I was surprised, walking around the market, how many people were open to me taking their pictures. You will notice that there are many portraits in this series of photos, it just turned out that way. This just happens in Indonesia, the people are really friendly and welcoming and in this part of the country they don't seem to be blitzkrieged by tourists all day. Plus the food has coconut in everything which I can't complain about. Although the trip through the middle of the country was really uncomfortable the people made up for it.

One of the national dishes beef rendang

Sambal

Another sambal but with green chilis

Pickled cabbage salad

Coconut gravy

Crispy things


They brought all this to the table, you pay for what you eat so be careful choose wisely

Students for the day


A lot of starch in a coconut gravy, plus pink shrimp crackers on top

Wild kids

While walking around Padang so many people were asking for their photos, some bodybuilders on the second story of a building called me up to take photos of their gym. Here one.