Tip: Keep Photocopy of Passport in Wallet

That's a bit odd. I can recall only the very, very occasional time in Indonesia when a policeman randomly asked to see my passport, and I've never had a hotel in the country want to hang on to my passport. That includes lots and lots of time on Sumatra. But passport photocopies are a good idea if you are getting that kind of hassle.

How have you managed to visit multiple train stations on the island?? There are very few trains on Sumatra that are actually convenient in any way.

the country where you never have to get your passport out except at the airport - and not necessarily even there, if it is an internal flight - or at an immigration office, is the Philippines.

in Thailand and Malaysia I always or almost always had to show it at hotels and also whenever I got dropped at a roadblock on a motorbike, I would have been in hot water had I not had my passport or a photocopy of it on me. In the Philippines they don't care. They never ask to see it in any circumstances.

So I did a little experiment, and I started showing a photocopy of my passport instead, and everyone has been fine with it. (I don't know if it matters, but I use a high-quality color copy to make it look as official as possible, and I replace it with a fresh one before it gets wrinkled or old.)

For me that's my default mode of operation when traveling. Success strongly depends on the destination/situation.

I always carry a laminated photocopy, never gets wrinkled or worn and lasts as long as my original passport.

Yes, the random checks by police on the street haven't happened a lot. But it was frequent enough that I started avoiding streets when I saw police on them. This mainly took place when police set up temporary checkpoints to stop drivers and fine them for lack of helmets and things like that. There were sometimes so many police assigned to these checkpoints that they had nothing to do and got bored. So when I walked past, they'd strike up a conversation and then ask to see my passport.

I'm not sure if it is a standard policy or law, but quite a few of the hotels I've stayed in (low budget places) asked the Indonesian guests to leave their national ID card at the front desk. I'd see the staff in the morning shuffling through a stack of these cards as they handed them back to guests as they checked out. It was these places that would ask me for my passport and then try to hold on to it. When I refused to leave it there, I ran the risk of a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Apparently, the police would come in at some point and review all the ID cards of guests at the hotel. Since mine wasn't among them, the staff would wake me up and I'd have to come down to the lobby and show my passport.

It's true there aren't a lot of trains, but I stayed in Tanjungbalai, Kisaran, Medan, and Siantar for a fair amount of time, and a train line connects all these towns. I took the Siantar Ekspres between Medan and Siantar quite a few times, and I had to show my passport when I bought my ticket and when I passed through the turnstiles to go to the train platforms. I was also asked for my passport when I rode on the Railink airport shuttle train to Kualanamu and back. I don't think that had anything to do with security, though. They just needed my name to put on the ticket. If I had had a business card with my name on it, that would probably have served just as well. I think they ask for a passport just because they are familiar with that form of ID and know that foreigners carry one.

It got to the point where it felt like I was producing my passport constantly. I forgot to mention three times when my hotel was raided in the middle of the night by some kind of special police task force. They came in large trucks and swept through the hotel waking everyone up and checking IDs. As it was explained to me, they were making sure that all the couples in the hotels were married. They were generally taken aback to find me in the hotel, but they still checked my room to make sure I was alone and then they took pictures of my passport with their cell phone cameras.

Of course, anything I did in a bank required showing my passport. I bought a couple of items online, and I had to pay for them by depositing money into an Indonesian account. That required my passport. I deposited money into a friend's bank account on a few occasions, and I had to show my passport each time I did that. And with immigration there was a Catch-22 when I applied for a visa extension. I had to leave my passport with immigration but then go to the bank to pay the visa extension fee. But to pay the fee, the bank wanted to see my passport - which, of course, I didn't have. After a few phone calls and chats among supervisors and managers, the bank let me pay that fee after showing a photocopy of my passport. It was actually that experience that gave me the idea to always try to use a photocopy, and that has worked out pretty well.

I always carry a laminated photocopy, never gets wrinkled or worn and lasts as long as my original passport.

Making a laminated copy of my passport is a great idea. I'll definitely do that the next time I see a shop that offers laminating.

I wonder what kind of hotels you've been staying in... ;-) I've been woken up plenty of times in Sumatran hotels before, but never by police! And I thought it was only in Aceh where there was an issue of sharing a hotel room with someone other than your wife (though some religious hotels in the country demand to see a marriage certificate before allowing couples to stay). It seems like you're staying in particular places where the police are particularly alert about outsiders in their towns; either that, or a lot's changed on Sumatra in the last couple of years.

I've never taken trains at all in the north of Sumatra - only in the south. I've also never spent any longer in Siantar than I absolutely had to. And I've never had to go to a bank to pay for a visa extension - I've always paid at the immigration office itself, generally at a special counter which they have there for payments. Was your extension in Medan?

Those hotel encounters with the police were definitely interesting. I was totally confused the first time it happened. I was sleeping with ear plugs inserted, so I guess I didn't notice the first few times they banged on my door. Then they got serious. There were two large hinged windows beside the door, and the police swung those windows up and then tried to stick their arms through the bars. They pushed the curtains aside with their fingers and swung their flashlights all around the room and started shouting. This woke me up, but I was still half asleep and stumbling around inside my mosquito net and trying to figure out what was going on. It took me some time to get dressed and make my way to the door and open it. By then, half the local police force appeared to have assembled there. I'm not sure who was more stunned - me or them.

I didn't really know what was going on until much later. None of the police on these raids spoke English, and no one at the hotel did either. The hotel staff certainly never made an appearance or offered to intercede. I think they just kept their heads down and let the police do their thing. I just happened to know a detective on the local force (from when I reported having my smartphone stolen), and she explained how the police were making sure that couples in these hotels were married.

I'm not sure if just these hotels were targeted specifically or if the police went to all the hotels on a schedule or something. There was nothing particularly unsavory about the hotels I was in. They were on the low-budget end of things but still quite nice, I thought. At least I knew what was going on after the first time it happened. The other times, I could hang back a bit and just enjoy all the activity. The hotels appeared to be cleared out and empty after these raids except for me. People were either loaded onto the trucks and taken to the police station or went to other hotels. It was all very strange.

The other times I had the most encounters with the police were in coastal towns like Tanjungbalai. I had actually arrived in Tanjungbalai by ferry, and my luggage was torn apart and searched carefully. To do this, they took me to a private room and they asked me tons of questions and even went through my smartphone looking at the pictures I had taken and that sort of thing. As far as I could tell, they were looking for proof that I was the tourist I claimed to be. They wanted to see the selfies and photos of tourist sites that a true tourist would take. Luckily, I had a fair number of those from Malaysia.

I spoke to the police a number of times after that, and I learned that there was a lot of smuggling by boat on this coast between Sumatra and Malaysia (smuggling of goods and illegal workers). And so they were quite alert to anything out of the ordinary. And I guess I fit that bill everywhere I went.

No, my extension was at the immigration office in Siantar, not Medan. The moment they handed me the payment form to take to the bank, I knew there would be trouble. I asked the immigration officers if I would need my passport at the bank, and they assured me that I wouldn't. I doubted that, and, of course, the first thing they wanted at the bank was my passport.

A laminated color copy of the passport is a brilliant idea and would be perfect in cases like yours!!!

I am really puzzled by the amount of mishaps you went through...i guess you have been around places and people who were very keen to see a foreign passport!!!