After Bali I flew to Padang, Sumatra hoping to get out to the isolated Mentawai Islands and spend a few days with their indigenous rainforest people. Luckily there was a boat leaving the following morning- unfortunately it took 24 hours to make the 7 hour trek because of tides and stopping at different ports but I survived and showed up at this desolate island region completely unprepared!
I didn’t have enough money, or a mosquito net in this malaria rampant place or a guide set up before hand… But I somehow managed and secured a few nights with a Mentawai medicine man named Samen in his jungle home. In order to get to his house we had to take a 3 hour boat ride up the jungle river in a wobbly canoe loaded down with about 7 people and then trek for around an hour through shin deep mud in the most horrible, brutal jungle you can imagine.
Their home is a long thatched roof hut built on stilts around 3 feet high above another mud pit. Three families consisting of 16 people live in this house along with 8 dogs, 4 cats and several chickens. They are the only ones living in this section of the jungle- the next family is several kilometers away.
Mentawaian adults decorate their bodies head-to-toe in tattoos. Black ink wraps around their arms, legs, chest back, buttocks and breasts crisscrossing and outlining the contours of their bodies Most of their time is spent sitting around and smoking cigarettes
non-stop. Even Samen’s wife breastfeeding their sweet 2-month-old baby always had a cigarette dangling from her lips.
Once or twice a day the adults and any able-bodied child leave the house and go searching for fruit through the dense jungle. They walk barefoot through the mud, over roots and across makeshift bridges with grace and ease. I felt like a clumsy oaf trying to keep up with their swift pace. Samen walks with a razor sharp machete wearing the traditional loincloth made of twine from trees and a Reebok fanny pack around his waist containing his precious tobacco. He has 7 sons that shimmy up the trees filling several baskets full of delicious ripe fruit that they will gorge on back at the house.
Other than tropical fruit the Mentawai’s diet consists of fish, rice and a really awful, bland, dough-like food made from the bark of a Savo tree- and yes I ate some of this tree food. Everything is cooked over an open fire using the hollow centers of bamboo trees to hold the food. Waste is shoved through the floorboards of their home and the pungent smell of rotting fruit, wood and garbage seeping through the floorboards is overwhelming. Every afternoon a group of wild boars come up to the house and slop around looking for food. I wasn’t interested in turning out like little Stuie from the old movie “The Thorn Birds” so I avoided them at all costs.
It seemed like such a romantic idea to go deep into the jungle and live with the rainforest people. Gather food, bathe in the river, deal with the elements in a very raw way but the truth of the situation is it’s a brutal life and frankly extremely disgusting. I’m not a very squeamish person but I was thoroughly repulsed several times. I’m baffled at how they 
live beyond the age of five and am not surprised that the children are in a constant state of sickness. Everyday a different child was burning up with a fever or crouched over with stomach pains- which Samen cures with headache medicine- but amazingly somehow the following day they would be fine running around with an abundance of energy like most children do… I’d be amazed if I don’t get some sort of nasty virus. I’ll spare everyone most of the gruesome details but one small instance involved the children playing with a dead bird which they passed to each other around the house, put on the table and then continued to eat fruit with their bare hands.
Anyway, the Mentawai are one of the few remaining indigenous tribes in Indonesia. Their culture has been preserved mainly due to the isolation of the tiny island region but like most indigenous cultures their ways are dying out. The Sumatra government has made it illegal to tattoo their bodies in the customary way and banned other timeless traditions. They have also decided to start cutting in to their beloved rainforest for logging purposes.
I may have been disgusted, totally uncomfortable covered in dirt sleeping on a hard wood floor and miserable fighting the dogs for tree shavings but I’m grateful for the experience. It’s amazing people still live this way- it was definitely an authentic and eye opening 2 days- and although the jungle life may not suit this Jersey girl it’s sad to think that one day a bulldozer might come tracking through the quiet, secluded home of Samen and his family.
