→ Bukittinggi

Day 13 — An idyll on the equator

After a 20-hour journey, we arrived in Bukittinggi from Muara Enim. We arrived before 6 a.m. when it was still dim, so many shops around the bus terminal hadn't opened yet, but even here taxi drivers kept calling out to us. First, after being cramped in a narrow bus for so long, we were hungry. So we decided to have breakfast at Simpang Raya, a reasonably priced Padang restaurant listed in our guidebook. I'm not sure whether it's because this is the home of Padang food or just because it was early, but the food and rice here weren't cold like what we'd eaten so far; they were steaming hot.

There were rounded mountains around the highland city of Bukittinggi. The photo below is probably the famous Mt. Singgalang.

We meant to go from the bus terminal to the town centre, but we completely misread the map and at first couldn't get there. There was a magnificent mosque, unlike anything we'd seen in the towns of Sumatra so far.

Is this a durian?

In a square where locals gather we found a huge climbing wall. Around here we finally managed to work out where we were.

This building with its distinctive roof is a traditional Minangkabau house, its shape modelled on buffalo horns. The Minangkabau are one of the world's rare matrilineal peoples, and apparently ownership of houses and so on all rests with women.

The town centre was bursting with life. It's a hilly town, with many stairways. Lots of souvenir shops lined the streets, somehow reminiscent of Kyoto, and the atmosphere was completely different from the towns so far. And the highland city of Bukittinggi is at about 900 m. So even when the sun is high, the temperature and humidity don't rise that much, and it's very comfortable.

Bukittinggi used to be a fortress town. The fort from that time is called Fort de Kock, and it's now a museum popular with tourists. This is a footbridge, but it's in a spot you can't cross without entering the museum. In the end we never went into the museum.

First we decided to look for lodging. Merdeka Homestay, listed in our guidebook, was only 300 yen each, yet the room was clean and spacious, with a hot shower (it turns cold after about 5 minutes)! As you'd expect of a tourist spot! As you'd expect of Bukittinggi!

After a rest at the lodging, we went back into town for lunch. Many of the houses were fairly nice, and a cat was napping on a windowsill. The cats in this town have good coats and aren't dirty.

Everything so far had been spicy, so all of us except KEN had kept having stomach trouble. So we said let's eat Chinese food, and went into a place called Monalisa. The interior was plain, with a famous oil painting of the Mona Lisa hanging on the back wall. Disappointingly, even though it was a Chinese restaurant, "chinjao rosu" didn't get through at all. The menu didn't list Chinese dish names either; it was written in Indonesian, so for some dishes we had to look things up in the phrasebook to know what was what. The food was all delicious and satisfying, but we were shocked when we saw the bill after the meal! Over 200,000 rupiah, nearly three nights' lodging. That's expensive... We planned to stay three nights in Bukittinggi, but we'd never come here again. And I thought that at places without prices on the menu, we must check properly beforehand.

After lunch we went to a travel agency and bought tomorrow's jungle trek, a rental motorbike for the day after, and plane tickets to return to Jakarta the day after that. We successfully haggled down the jungle trek and the bike rental, to about 2,000 yen and 600 yen respectively.

We got caught in the rain on the way back to the lodging. Heavy rain continued after that, and when it stopped in the evening we set off into town for dinner, and there were five or six monkeys on the roofs of houses and so on.

Dinner was at Texas Chicken, a fast-food place inside a department store in the centre of town. This set was about 400 yen. Not that cheap compared with other restaurants. It even had a proper mascot character.

After dinner we went to the square in front of the clock tower, the town's symbol, near the department store. There were street stalls in the square, and a man was playing with something like a glowing bamboo-copter. He wasn't playing seriously; he was showing it to children to sell it.

To the next day