Monday, December 7, 2015

The rain did clear up yesterday, and I went for a short photowalk late in the afternoon. I went down a familiar market street through the fish district and then to the river. The streets were somewhat quiet. I assume that was because it was Sunday. The riverside, however, was very busy. There were more people there than I’ve ever seen, and some of them were clearly from out of town. I think people from the surrounding area come here to have a snack and a drink by the river. Some of them hire small local boats to take them around the fleet of fishing boats. Whenever I’m there, men in these fishing boats wave at me and indicate that they want to take me on a tour like that. I’ve never taken them up on that offer mainly because I don’t want to get into a discussion about the price. It’s clear that they’ll try to charge me ten times the normal rate because they see me as a rich foreigner. And I just don’t want to deal with that sort of thing.

I had something of an interesting encounter at a police station. This is the same police station I visited when I first arrived in Tanjungbalai. On my first visit, the men there had kept insisting that it wasn’t a police station, and one of them had shown me the first hotel I’d stayed at. Thinking that the men I saw would be the same men as I was passing yesterday, I popped in to say hello. It turned out that they were different men. These men were more senior in some way and one or two of them spoke enough English to communicate with me. They invited me to sit down and they offered me a bottle of water. From them I learned that they were the marine police – essentially the Coast Guard. These men were very reasonable and intelligent and nice. They were also wealthier and more educated. So perhaps my impressions from the market people had more to do with income and education level than with cultural differences. I suppose that makes sense. If I went to a local dive bar in Canada, I’d come away thinking that Canadians were drunk morons. If I visited a university, I’d think they were nice, intelligent people. From that perspective, people like me do a disservice to the countries we visit. By people like me, I mean people without much money. We stay in cheap hotels and eat at the cheapest restaurants. We travel cheaply, too, so we aren’t insulated by taxis and such things. We essentially choose to associate all the time with the poorest people in the countries we visit. And so that becomes our reference point for the whole country. I talk about the noise and the chaos and that sort of thing. But if I were staying at the fancy hotel (I still don’t know where it is), it would be quiet and very pleasant. When I go out for a walk, I’m driven insane by the attention I receive and the noise around me. But if I went to the tourist town of Bukittinggi and went on a guided tour, I’d have a very nice experience – protected and insulated from the more aggressive elements of the society. Obviously, staying at the fancy hotel and going on guided tours would be quite boring for me. It’s not something that particularly interests me. I remember having the same thoughts in the Philippines. As I cycled there, I would occasionally pass a very expensive house. I would think that it would be very nice to meet the people that lived in that house. But there would be a high wall around it with barbed wire at the top and a big steel gate at the driveway. The people who lived there would come and go by car, and I would never have a chance to meet them or interact with them. The people I did meet were the ones like me – out on the streets. So my perceptions of the country would be influenced by the low-budget nature of my daily life. It’s not really fair to the country when you think about it like that.
Not much else to say about yesterday. I liked the pictures I took, but I was also disappointed in them. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures of people in a portrait style, but they’re all the same – just simple head shots. They’re boring. There must be a way to make them more interesting. I also noticed that my camera doesn’t take pictures of black objects very well. They come out light grey. That’s annoying. I took some pictures of some bags of homemade charcoal. The charcoal was a deep, rich black. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t capture that with my camera. I think that is a weakness of the small sensor in my camera. Makes me think I’d be better off with a camera with a larger sensor.
 

Tags: Sumatra Part 01