Island Life
Trip Start
Jan 17, 2009
1
25
49
Trip End
Ongoing
Sabang,
Aceh,
Indonesia
Friday, June 19, 2009
The trip was supposed to be non-stop executive but in reality we stopped at anyone showing a remote interest in getting on. Also, they had 'Predator' on the television at the beginning, which is a quality movie but someone must have taken a vote and it was stopped half way through and replaced with a karaoke video of Indonesian pop hits. Add in a seat that kept falling backwards, no leg room and a stop at the mosque at 5am for prayers and it turned into a long night.
We got to Banda Aceh around 8 in the morning and got another becak to the ferry port. It was a bit dumb really but half way on the bus trip we realised that we didn't check anything about travel recommendations to Aceh. It was just when we were reading about the separatist activity here over the past few decades we thought we should have check up.
Executive class on the ferry!
In the end it didn't matter because there was no specific warning for the area and a peace deal that was brokered after the tsunami is still holding. So we got the ferry across to Pulau Weh island and got a taxi to a village called iboih and straight away thought 'we're never leaving' because the place was gorgeous. Just a tiny little village with a dive shop, a few cafes and shops and wooden bungalow huts perched above a sea that was the colour you only see in post cards. We found a room for 40k rupiah (around £2.50) a night which has been our cheapest yet, dumped our stuff and jumped into the water. After around 24hrs traveling from KL we'd felt we earned it. The price of the room showed though and the following day han woke up with bites all over from bed bugs so we moved to another room. A few hours later the room was taken again. Laid back here? Not a bit.
We weren't actually going to go to Weh at all until we met a Welsh guy in Singapore who said it was amazing diving there so that was the reason we went. Later that day i signed up to do my advanced scuba course and han signed up for a dive the following morning. We spent the next few days diving and snorkeling. The diving was amazing but really you saw it all by snorkeling too and it was all from the beach too. During one dive we had 2 grey reef sharks circling us for a while. After a few days of this we felt brave enough to tackle the night bus back down south to medan so off we went again. Won't go into detail, but same story again pretty much. Now we were beginning to understand how large sumatra was and how long it took to get places. Vowed to never consider night bus again if at all possible.
Before we left though, we had heard they built a tsunami museum and so tried to visit it. It turns out it wasn't open yet so set off for the bus station but the becak driver was saying something we didn't get but he obviously wanted to show us something. We said go for it and he turned down this road towards what looked like a factory or something but turned out to be a huge ship that had been washed inland 7kms. I hope I'm able to get this photo up to show the size of it cause we couldn't believe it was real. Banda Aceh lost 60,000 people in the tsunami the books said but this ship made it feel way more real than any stats in the book. It was frightening, but it didn't stop the ice cream stand and the soft toy stand setting up shop outside the ship. Opportunists ha?.
