#2 Sumatra (ID) – Western Sumatra, Harau Valley

This post will be splited into two parts, first part about how we got there (did not worked as planed of course) and second part about the Harau Valley in general.

That post is quite long this time, so for pictures you htave to scroll a lot, but no worries, they’re there. 🙂

Part 1 – Getting there

The plan was simple, to take a ferry to Tanjung Balai Karimun (an island in front of mainland Sumatra) and catch the overnight car ferry to Buton on mainland Sumatra. From there we gonna figure out a way to go further on arrival.
However, it turned out that the car harbor in Buton is destroyed and this ferry is not going at all (we guess until the time the harbor is fixed), so we had to take the passenger ferry, which was leaving no sooner than next morning. Therefore we had to quickly figure out where to stay overnight. Luckily, everybody at the Indonesian immigration department was eager to help us, especially one guy, who could speak really good English. He organized us a hotel room next to the harbor for the night. It was expensive as for Indonesian prices for accommodation (290000 IDR, which is ~19 euros). Unfortunately behind outstanding price, there was no outstanding standard. Room was really small, not to say claustrophobic, without a single window and smelled like nobody opened the doors of it for a few months, at least. Bed sheets were steamed and felt moist, same for towels. Ughhhhhh 😛
After a night of sleeping in our clothes, covered only with our own towels, we went early in the morning to the harbor to get a ticket for the ferry. Sadly the cheapest ferry was not as cheap as the car ferry we planned to take. We also met our friend from immigration office again, he came to the boat departure hall to check on us and to say good-bye. That was really lovely.
We got on the boat, which was way smaller than the one we took from Singapore, but it had way more passengers. We put our backpacks on top of that boat, praying that we will see them again after that trip, because the boat was jumping on the waves like craaaazy. Around 6 hours later we finally arrived in Buton on mainland Sumatra. Sadly there is no bus going from Buton to any city, so we had to take ‘mobile travel’, which is some kind of a shared taxi and a common way to travel in Sumatra. We ended up sharing a car with an Indonesian man until Pekanbaru.
Pekanbaru is in the province of Riau, which is one of the biggest palm oil production areas in the world, so for 125 km, the only thing we saw were palm tree plantations. It is really sad, all those plantations are a real problem for the future. More and more rain forest is burned down to provide more space for palm trees. Please take a few minutes to read below article. It will give you lots of interesting facts about this problem.

Almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical forests, some of them quite recently (see map below). This environmental destruction threatens biodiversity and increases greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn drives global warming.
https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/biofuels/why-palm-oil-biodiesel-bad?fbclid=IwAR3oQAcKFcnN3ZVfqfVrSJuL_j5v4PJG7UH15EFsZgvSsGjYAy6tU-k5l-g

From Pekanbaru we took a labi-labi* directly to Harau Valley. We have been lucky and the only other passenger was a motorbike. At 9 pm we finally arrived on our destination, after a full day of traveling and the only thing we wanted was a proper sleep.

*Labi-labi or angkot – Are small mini buses and are the usual Indonesian forms of transport
LonlyPlanet

To sum up:
– in total we traveled almost 500 km
– it took us 27 hours (because we had to stay ovrenight in Tanjung Balai)
– it costed 58 euro per person (without hotel in Tanjung Balai)

Even though our first assumption about this trip was to keep our carbon footprint* as low as possible using only on-land transportation and boats, considering the distance, the amount of time and money we spent, we already know that the next time we definitely will consider taking a plane.

* Amount of greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide – released into the atmosphere by a particular human activity.
Takepart.com

From	To	Price (/pax)
Singapore ->	Tanjung Balai	43 SGD ~ 29 euro
Tanjung Balai Karimun ->	Buton	225000 IDR ~15 euro
Buton ->	Pekanbaru	100000 IDR ~6euro
Pekanbaru ->	Harau Valley	125000 IDR ~8euro

Part 2 – Harau Valley

Harau Valley, the so-called Yosemite of SE Asia. Expectations have been already high since we saw the first pictures. We stayed at the “Sijo art and guesthouse”, close to Harau Valley. It is a very basic and cheap accommodation (200 000 IDR for 2 ppl room), so perfect for us. The owner, Tiara was very friendly and she showed us around the area. We even got invited to an after-party of circumcising ceremony of two Muslim boys. They are doing this procedure not when the baby is a newborn, like in Jewish religion, but when boys are around 10 years old and decide by themselves that they are ready for it.
We joined only shortly for lunch, that was the first time we tried a delicious dish, salad from dried coffee tree leaves, chili, garlic, and soy sauce. It seems to be very local because we couldn’t find it anywhere else in Sumatra so far. After lunch we had a short photo session with all family members, we congratulated the boys and went further to see some climbing areas (there will be a separate post about it soon).
Harau Valley is a very beautiful place with a lot of waterfalls, cliffs, and viewpoints.
The optimal amount of time to spend there is between 2 or 3 days.
The best is to rent a scooter and explore it (around 50 000 IDR per day). Most information can be found in guidebooks or the internet.