Sawahlunto sits in a steep green bowl in the hills of West Sumatra, and until the 1890s there was nothing here but forest and a few villages. Then the Dutch found out what lay beneath. A Dutch geologist, Willem Hendrik de Greve, surveyed the Ombilin valley and reported a huge coal deposit in 1868, and the colonial government decided to exploit it, building a mine, a railway down to the coast at Padang, and a town to house the workers. The first coal went out in 1892. The town grew around the mine, with European quarters, a power station, a hospital, a mosque and houses laid out on the hillsides.
The human cost of that history needs to be told. Many of the labourers were convicts, brought from Java and elsewhere and known as the orang rantai, the chain men, who worked in the dark tunnels in terrible conditions. The Mbah Soero tunnel, named after a foreman of the convict gangs, can still be visited. UNESCO listed the Ombilin coal mining heritage of Sawahlunto in 2019, with the railway and the port, for its testimony to the way colonial industry shaped the landscape and the people.
Sawahlunto now has the air of a town that has reinvented itself. The mines closed, and the old buildings have been turned into museums, including a railway museum and a goedang ransum, the old mass kitchen that fed the miners, and the old locomotives are a favourite attraction. The little town is quiet and clean, with hills all around and a fresh breeze, and the pace of life is gentle.
The road from Solok, about ten kilometres to the west, is a pleasure on a bike. It runs past Lake Singkarak, a large, deep lake in a volcanic basin, with fishing boats and views of misty hills, and climbs and falls with plenty of bends. Traffic can be heavy with trucks and buses, and the road surface varies, with patches broken by rain. The dry months from May to September offer the best conditions, though showers can come at any time in the tropics.
Solok, with about forty-eight thousand people, has fuel, restaurants and hotels, and the town of Sijunjung, farther east, is smaller. Try the local fish from the lake, and the rice dishes of the Minangkabau kitchen, hot with chilli.