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Published: April 28th 2009
Well i love Sumatra. I arrived in Medan, the gateway to sumatra about 2 weeks ago and quite liked it form the off. There were not loads of scam artists and rip off merchants, i think as tourism has dwindled here so have the numbers of mosquito men that follow them around. Any scamming attempts were pretty lame and offered some free amusement. I was there for a minute outside the terminal before one old gut followed me and sat down next to me in the cafe that i went in to escape. He pointed to the tourist office and said it was his office, then handed me his card, which was a bit of notepaper with his scrawled contact details on, with ' Tourist ofise' written above it. He can get me to my hotel for a good price, he lives just by it. Hmm, I think your going to have to do a little bit better than that gentlemen, now if you please I have an appointment with cockroach to attend. I got an official taxi for less then the price the kind hearted gent had quoted and off I went towards Hotel Zakora. The currency is rupiah and you can get 18,000 of them for a quid. So the usual attempts to confuse with the amount of zeros are in evidence when change is given back, oh haha, sorry sir, yes, er, haha. Come on, hand it over, trying to rip me off for 15p indeed, i could buy an inedible meal for that.
My hotel was situated right next to Mesjid Raja, The grand Mosque. Or Moskue as my receptionist referred to it. It is a beautiful building. I took a walk in there and there was people just hanging out, sleeping, reading, doing a crossword or chatting. The temperature gets so unbearable in the city at midday and the moskue is really cool and tranquil.
In the early evening there was always a game of football going on in the grounds on the tiled floor between alot of the young guys who lived around about. I was invited to play by some of the lads who lived and worked in the hotel but I never got round to it. There would have been too much attention. And i'm crap. There tends to always be someone just staring or watching me at any given moment. Usually it develops into a Hello mistAH! or even a wheruhyoogo? but not always. It's never hostile though it can get on my coconuts sometimes. I was in a shopping centre, (i seem to be developing a dark morbid fascination for shopping centres despite the awfulness of them, just to see the zombies) and a group of schoolgirls followed me around until i gave then my autograph. .??.You tell me. I signed it John Barnes, of course.
I thought it was brilliant to have a place of worship, a spiritual centre point where people are so at ease and feel it is there place, for the community to congregate and not have to feel like they have to be all uptight and stuffy. I remember when i was about 12, I was playing football in a church yard on a small patch of grass and the police were called by the vicar and i got in loads of trouble when they sent a letter. Maybe if they weren't so intent on crushing young free spirits in a so called spiritual shrine, just to keep the grass pretty and maybe if every last bit of grass hadn't been swallowed up and sold to Tesco's or property 'developers', then maybe there would be no problem. I'm sure the police got alot of job satisfaction there though, bravely fighting the good fight.
The mosque was a fantastic sight form the roof of the hotel, especially in the early evening when you could see people going about there daily business, mental traffic and the humble wail of the call to prayers blasting out of the speakers, soaring over it all obliviously. It just looked so unbelievably Asian. I was on the roof one night with one of the guys who worked there who was form Aceh province, the northern most part. Booze is unstrictly forbidden, and he had some whiskey he volunteered to share. He was also smoking weed, one of the main exports of Aceh and important to their economy. He drank like a fish and turned a bit crazy, shouting randomly and telling the mosque to fuck off. So i made my excuses. Turns out he's like that every day, an alcoholic. He told me he lost his wife in the Tsunami after living in the jungle for 10 years (lots of settlements in the jungle.) After i escaped i ended up playing guitar in a bar with a load of Indonesian guys who played some fantastic sounding Indonesian songs alongside the rubbish i spewed out. It was ok until one of them said he was a United fan and that i was a hooligan as i am a Liverpool fan, so i killed him.
Dodi, the nutjob roof guy, told me Aceh was at war with the army for years. Some others told me say mass graves have been found, head-hunters, cannibalism and other appalling practices took place over the course. The Acehnese are the poorest in Sumatra, possibly Indonesia, and their land is about the richest in natural resources. It's all been fast tracked to Jakarta with the help of Enron for years and the Achenese aren't best pleased about it and want independence. If they were granted it most of Indonesia would gradually want the same thing and it would fall apart, which is not good for the worlds powers. So they prop up the crims. So popular opinion goes here in Aceh anyways. Alot of it was explained to me by an English women I met who has lived in Aceh for 10 years. The press is full of propaganda about the Aceh people being thick and lazy and stoned out of their heads all the time. Which i can categorically state is absolutely only partly true. The tsunami put an end to the war and it's been peaceful since then, meaning people like me have started to slowly come again. The economy is really struggling and they need more tourism. It's good for me that there are not any though, on a selfish level.
When in Medan i also went to nightclub, which was quite good, the music changed dramatically from intense techno to hardcore whatever housecheese and back again with drum and bass and other stuff. It was just so insanely dark, you could not see anyone or anything apart form lights. Maybe it's because i'm approaching 30. I asked him to turn it down and put some Phil Collins on so that must be it.
I stayed in Medan so long, mainly as I wanted to watch the scouse derby in the cup, a motive greeted with much bemused hilarity by the locals. Especially as the match started at 3 am , and finished at 6 am. And we lost. Oh well, time I got.
And then the night bus up to Banda Aceh. Freezing with the aircon, i hid under my blanket as chipmunk voice women did her covers of soft rock ballads the entire journey. From Brian Adams spectacular rhyming ability with words do, you , true and you over and over again to the scorpions request of being taken to the magic of that moment on a glory night, i was hugely enthused, my poetic eyes glistening as i dissected the deep meanings behind the words. It seemed like minutes and the 11 hour journey was over, and I was in Bada Aceh bus depot having had no sleep, with tuk tuk, or whatever they call them here, drivers trying to tell me it was several hundred pounds to the nearest hotel. And it was pissing down.
Well after i found a hotel and slept i took a walk around Banda, the main street is just mobile phone shop after phone shop, nothing else. Luckily i was looking for a phone charger and a sim card at the time, but if i wanted something else, such as water perhaps, or maybe a candle holder with a picture of an elephant on, i would have been disappointed.
Banda Aceh was about the worst place hit by the Tsunami. A huge freighter boat was thrown and dumped by the sea 7 km inland in the carpark of the hotel next to mine. Seven km. !
On Sumatra 100 000 people died in a few hours and even looking around at the area and seeing the scale of the area it's impossible to begin to imagine what it was like. Most if not all of the people who live here must have lost someone. The drive to the new ferry port (the old ones in the middle of the indian ocean somewhere) is through the heart of where the water came and its barren land mainly, bits of rubble and wood. It used to be a big middleclass neighbourhood with semi detached houses, all wiped away completely.
I went to Pilau Weh and that was all very nice and everything, but overrated i think by people here. There is not really any beach of quality. People go there for diving and annoyed me by talking in loud voices about what they saw in their expensive gear that they all compete to show off in. Then they compete about where they've been. The main dive shop was owned by Europeans who dealt in euros only. Slightly rude i think in indonesia. Stupid divers are flown there, ripped off, put it on the plastic, in euros, then get off, never talking to the locals or seeing anything. 25 euros for a night aswell. Fuck off. Lumba Lumba they are called and that's a crap name. . I mentioned to one of the local lads i was hanging round with how i don't like their attitude and he looked a bit sheepish and said none of the locals like them ,they never come along to any barbecues or volleyball games to get to know people. Capitalist exploiters of someone else's island, just cos the locals are so chilled out.
I'll tell you all about pilau weh later on, but i need a rest now, so thankyou very much indeed, love and peace, in the east, for now, Liam
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john
non-member comment
what a bullshit you are writing about iboih and gapang - you have no idea about indoensia and especially no insight what is or was going on in p. weh in the last 10 years - maybe it is not the best idea to write about places you stayerd a few days and not being capable to understand things. move on....