26 March 2010Catching a plane from Jogjakarta (which looked that rare thing: a nice, laid-back, historical, Indonesian city; see pic on left) we shot off to spend a few days at another top dive spot, Pulau Weh - a little dot of land off the end of Aceh province.
Aceh, and its capital Banda, were of course devastated by the 2004 tsunami and we were interested to see how the place had recovered in the years since. We landed at Banda airport and on the 40-minute trip into town we saw very little evidence of any destruction. We did however have a very sober moment as we passed a mass grave the size of a car park with a large concrete wave as a memorial. Lots of people died here.
Banda Aceh itself seemed largely rebuilt. Not one smashed building did we see. But the town's many shiny new mosques, housing developments and a modern-looking tsunami museum pointed to a lot of cash being spent in the area since 2004.
Not all of this is from foreign donations, it seems. Since the peace accord between the Aceh Islamic separatists and the Indonesian government, Aceh has been receiving a big chunk of the oil revenues the state produces - previously, Jakarta had pretty much nabbed the lot (as it still does Papua's gold). So ironically, the killer wave had left the state a richer place.
In our hotel (where I felt nice and safe on the third floor), we met an educated man in his late fifties, who had lost most of his family in the wave. He had been living in Germany until then, but he came back to dedicate his life to help restore the state. He said the worst thing about this was Indonesian bureaucracy, which made actually doing anything very hard indeed.
Banda is, of course, just another untidy, concrete-y Indonesian city (I'm sorry to keep saying this but they just don't have any idea what makes a good town. I suspect they don't really care about or plan for such frivolities. I do actually love and recommend Indonesia, by the way). So, we headed out fairly quickly via speedy ferry to Pulau Weh.
At the port, the taxis all tried to rip us off, so we squeezed into a motor rickshaw meant for two - four of us with all our bags! At the first big hill it was obvious this wasn't going to work; the engine just couldn't get us up. So the driver flagged down another rickshaw and we split up. What followed was one of the nicest journeys of my life.
Past little villages, pretty mosques, palm groves and sheets laid out with drying cloves that sent their fragrance drifting over the road, we twisted and turned the 20-odd kilometres to Iboih Beach where we lugged the bags and kids a couple of kilometres up a small path to Julia's Bungalows, where flying foxes raided the nearby fruit trees every day at dusk and I had many pleasant hours strumming my guitar in the hammock and with the boys who worked in the restaurant.
The only downer was a temporary plague of tiny pink jellyfish which tingled more than stung, but meant the kids didn't swim much while we were there. Still they found ways to have fun, as always.
Maja took the chance to take the Rescue Diver course at Rubiah Divers - an essential for anyone wanting to become a dive master or instructor. I had great fun one day playing a drowning diver at a depth of 5 metres, while Maja hauled me up and into the beach. It got less fun when she dragged me over some sharp coral fragments and gave me a really severe exfoliation.
The course was taught by an itinerant Egyptian instructor called Mohamed, a lovely guy who caught a really nasty dengue-like fever while we were there. We sat and nursed him the first evening and waited for the doctor who came and diagnosed him with... a bad stomach. Hmmmm. M. had high fever, aching organs, and pain in his eyes and all over his body, so I argued about the diagnosis a bit but since you can't treat dengue, I let it go.
While we were there a few other people came down with the same thing but it only lasted 3 days, which is short for dengue so it was probably something else. It was scary, nonetheless. M. was almost crying from the pain he was in. Being a hospitable Egyptian, though, he still got up and got me a chair when I arrived...
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