Getting to Balige

I recently took a trip to Indonesia. The country is Southeast Asia’s (SEA) fastest growing economy and is presently the world’s fourth-most populous nation. Largely horizontal in geography, Indonesia is home to an immense range of ethnic groups. One such group is the Batak people in Northern Sumatra, an island located to the far west of the archipelago.

I learned about the Batak people from a friend that I met in Europe; he is half Batak Indonesian and half Danish. When asking about recommendations for places to visit in Indonesia, he recommended the homeland of his people: the region surrounding Lake Toba.

Lake Toba is the largest volcanic lake on planet earth. Seriously, it is massive and stunning (I highly recommend Googling it). To the south of Lake Toba is Balige, a small town that tends to be passed up by domestic and international tourists alike. By happy circumstance, I found myself in Balige after a bumpy bus ride through the mountains.

New Friends

The hotel that I booked in Balige was half an hour from the bus drop-off point. With Grab (the Uber of SEA) not present in the region, I decided to make the trek by foot. Funnily enough, two-thirds of the way through that trek, two motorcycles rolled up beside me on the road (note that while this might seem odd, I had become rather desensitized to the approach of strangers). They asked where I was going and then offered me a ride to my hotel.

I would later come to learn that, serendipitously, those two bikes were driven by the owner of the hotel at which I was staying and her friends. Earlier in the day, they had seen my Western name on the booking platform and so had been cued to look for a non-local face. Seeing me and my over-sized bag moving through the streets, basically the only Westerner in town, they knew I must have been the one.

The hotel owner’s friend, a man named Sabar, offered to show me around town after dinner—and, of course, I accepted. Dinner came and went, and then it was time to meet Sabar. He rolled up in a brand-new Toyota Highlander (a spiffy vehicle for the region), and I got in.

Batak Hospitability

We would go to four places that night: 1) the site of his new joint venture e-bike business, 2) the nicest hotel in town, 3) the home of his large and traditional family, and 4) the restaurant that his friend, a chef who had spend 20+ years in Germany, owned. For the sake of brevity, I will leave the below photo album to do the explaining (although little of the experience is actually pictured); if you would ever like to hear any of these stories in full, feel free to ask.

What most stuck with me were the ambitions of Sabar. To provide you context, Sabar is a Batak man who was raised in Balige, attended university in Jakarta, and then built a successful career for himself in the big city. Since achieving relative success, he has decided to return to Balige for a few months each year and help build the local economy.

We spent a good eight hours together across that day and the subsequent morning—when he offered his driver to bring me from my hotel to the airport. Aside from showing me the hospitability of the Batak people, Sabar gave me an unfiltered look into how things truly work in Indonesia.

Lessons on Global Development

I study international business. As part of that study, we read case studies and learn frameworks. A central theme of those readings is that of institutions, both formal and informal. Institutions are what enable countries to develop and maintain a certain quality of life for their citizens. When institutions do not function well, significant cost is added to any given action.

Sabar wants to build the economy of his hometown—a place with natural beauty abound. Truly, Bailge should, at minimum, be a domestic tourist hotspot; reaching that point, however, is not without barriers. A few such salient barriers that were made explicit to me in conversation with Sabar and those who he introduced me to are as follows:

• Poor infrastructure—e.g., roads, transport—means that there are heavy constraints on the inflow of people (read: tourists) and resources into the town
• Despite Lake Toba being a targeted development region for the national government, corruption and complacency within the local government stifle development; indeed, there is a prohibitive focus on vanity projects that appease officials in Jakarta without benefiting locals
• Access to private capital is severely limited; further, because of the region’s relatively low profile and poor infrastructure, attracting foreign direct investment is challenging
• Hiring competent people in a town where the most educated and successful become so by leaving poses a localized catch-22; for the region to improve, people must either be incentivized to return or educated and prevented from leaving

Through all of this, what became abundantly clear is that the challenge in Bailge is not just in building a business but rather in formalizing the institutions that ought to underlie a society. Development necessarily follows a relatively repeatable chain of progression, and that is because societal functions cascade into one another.  

Concluding Thoughts

I am deeply grateful for having been welcomed into the Batak community and for having been provided such potent lessons on what forms the bedrock of that which is often taken for granted. For having experienced what I have, I am slightly less ignorant.

Thank you, Sabar—and best wishes in building a better future for your people ~