Rantau Prapat is a city in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Its main claim to fame is that it’s at the end of a railway line, which was what brought me there. There are things to do outside the city, but you wouldn’t know it from the railway website or Tourism Indonesia. And I’m going to rant about Google and Tripadvisor while I’m at it.
As a Southeast Asia geography nerd who has been to North Sumatra a few times, I didn’t know where Rantau Prapat was until I started studying the railways of Sumatra. Rantau Prapat is at the end of the longest rail line of the North Sumatra railway. I was compelled to visit in my quest to visit all the railways of Southeast Asia.
The train from Medan to Rantau Prapat takes about 5 and a half hours, so there wasn’t any point in going there and back in a day. I couldn’t find any information online about the city, so I figured I should find out for myself.
[Rantau Prapat Station.]
The station is about 20 minutes walk from the city centre, so I walked into town. I crossed a bridge near the town, and the surrounding trees are a mix of jungle and palm oil trees. This is modern Sumatra.
After crossing the river I arrived in to what looked like a tidy provincial city with a national bank and heroes monument.
After I dropped my bags off at my hotel I went for a wander around town. It appeared that the clocktower was the centre of town, so I went there.
The two main streets intersecting at the clocktower have some shops of architectural interest.
Jalan Jenderal Sudirman is a treelined street with some old shophouses.
These streets would look great with some restaurants or cafes. It would probably take a young Rantauprapatian who has returned from Medan or Jakarta to set up a cool cafe here and reinvigorate the main street.
It shouldn’t have to take a cool cafe to keep these shops alive, but they will end up just being run into the ground until they are demolished, then the street will look like the rest of the city. I wondered what might might have been if the old city shophouses were preserved.
Half a day here was long enough, but I had work to do the next day so I didn’t want to be sitting on a train again. These towns with nothing much to do are good places to schedule a work day. It was on this day off that I met an Indonesian English teacher, who couldn’t believe her luck to have happened upon a native English speaker. She asked if I would like to meet her language students that night, so with nothing else to do in this town I said yes.
We went out for dinner at a local restaurant and I chatted with the students for a while. This sort of thing happens to me almost every time I travel in provincial Indonesia (basically anywhere outside of Jakarta and Bali). My motto is to say yes in these situations (though always say no if a stranger approaches you at a tourist hotspot). I was in so many group photos that night that I didn’t bother taking any photos myself.
Things to do in Rantau Prapat according to Google and Tripadvisor
I’ve been to enough provincial cities like this to know not to expect much. I’m just happy to wander around, go to cafes, meet some random people.
[Cafe at Gunung Sari Hotel.]
I did wonder what else there was to do, so I Googled Rantau Prapat.
The Wikipedia link earns its first place ranking, but how Tripadvisor is still allowed to rank at the top is a mystery. There is no airport anywhere near Rantau Propat, and when I clicked the link for things to do in Rantau Prapat, it has a page with a single listing of a karaoke venue with no address. What is more annoying about Tripadvisor is that they employ the trick of auto updating the post title with the year.
Google recently made a “Helpful Content Update” which has annihilated small websites in favour of forums and established news sites. I’m all for nuking spammy sites off the face of the internet, but they should start at the top of the travel tree by nuking these empty pages that Tripadvisor publish. There are scripts that auto update titles with the years, so many of these results with the “Updated YEAR” is just a script.
The rest of the listings where the usual online travel agent sites with similar empty pages like Tripadvisor.
Regional tourism in Indonesia
Among the crappy listings from online travel agents was a genuine blog post about the Linggahara Waterfall near Rantau Prapat by a blogger from Sumatra. I used to tell people that they should have their blog on a self-hosted domain, but there is something to be said about finding random travel blogs on free blog accounts.
I looked up this waterfall on Google Maps, and I saw that there were more waterfalls in the mountainous area further inland. I didn’t see any travel agents in Rantau Prapat that offered any kind of tour, or any rental agency offering car or motorbike rentals. There was no tourism information at the train station either.
[Is there tourism gold in them thar hills?]
Indonesia’s tourism is embarrassingly lopsided towards Bali, to the point that some people think that Bali is a country in itself. Indonesia is trying to counter this with the 10 New Balis project, which will throw a bunch of money at 10 destinations in Indonesia to try and spread the tourism dollars around.
Perhaps in addition to these ten big-budget projects, there are surely hundreds of smaller places across the country that could be improved with more information and better access. They wouldn’t need a new railway or racetrack.
Tourism Indonesia should also team up with the national railway to promote places near railway stations. Unfortunately, the official railway website is a terrible user experience for the English section. I’m trying to access the KAI website now and it’s blocked (in Malaysia) so I can’t even tell you how bad it is now.
[Blocked access to kai.id (Kereta Api Indonesia).]
Onward travel
With no coordinated onward travel options from the train station, getting the train here isn’t a useful option for overlanding across Sumatra. The long-term plan is to extend the railway to Pekanbaru, which would form part of the Trans-Sumatra Railway, but that is years away from happening.
My next destination was to Lake Toba, but there is a mountain range between here and the lake, so I had to backtrack halfway to Medan to get there.
If you are looking for a train trip to do in North Sumatra, here is how to get from Medan to Lake Toba by train and bus.
Coming up next is my trip report for Lake Toba.