Northern Sumatra, part 1: Makassar to Banda Aceh

I went from no break for the national testing to being gone for 2 weeks and then having half a week of relaxing when I returned; oh Indonesia! I’m certainly not complaining though, as northern Sumatra was one of my favorite trips in all of Indo. A big part of that was that I didn’t do as much as I usually try to fit in, in fact most of the time was just relaxing with the other ETAs, but even more it helped that other people organized things, leaving me free to just enjoy for a change! That is one thing that Indo has taught me: to lay back and just do what other people organize, even if it isn’t exactly what I want to do. Basically it’s taken a bit of the control freak out of me, and even when I do ‘plan’ I find myself doing the Indonesian thing: ‘let’s see the condition’ then decide. It’s the only way to get anything done here.
Anyways onto the trip. I went down to Makassar Thursday morning and met a friend of a friend who had studied a semester at Oregon State. Andi is originally from Makassar and now works at a hospital in Mak; he seems like a very motivated and well connected guy. I ended up spending the whole day and night with him (at his insistence). It was a pretty Indonesian experience: I meet a guy for the first time and proceed to go around with him all day as he insists on feeding me and then we go sing karaoke before I end up eating late night street food and spending the night at his friends house.
After less than 2 hours of sleep he then dropped me off at the airport where I somehow managed to deal with the ridiculously childish and impatient people in the check-in line (I really thought one woman was going to throw a temper-tantrum) and get onto my flight before I passed out (don’t even remember take off).
I eventually got to one of the few cheap places to stay in Banda Aceh (Uncle’s) and in some AC. After lunch and a nap I headed downtown to go explore. One unexpected highlight was enjoying an A&W Rootbeer; I used to love rootbeer, but that was probably my first one in a decade. As I was walking along sucking down my rootbeer, I suddenly realized how clearly western I looked (as if being a tall white person wasn’t enough!) in a city that less than a week before had captured 2 terrorists with supposed ties to Al-Queda (sorry mom decided not to drop that little tid-bit of info until I got home safe and sound).
Needless to say I sucked down the rootbeer really fast and chucked the cup even faster! In all honesty though, throughout my time in Banda Aceh I felt that it was as friendly and safe of a city as I have found in Indonesia. During my afternoon wanderings I talked to many locals including a water from a local gold shop owner and his friends and at least an hour chatting about sports, politics, and just about anything else with one older guy and his friends at a local coffee shop (Acehnese coffee is supposedly particularly good, though I couldn’t really tell after all the sugar they added, but it was fun to watch them make it: straining it through fine mesh and pouring it from up-hi [similar to Malaysian teh-tarik for anyone who has watch Anthony Bourdain]). It seemed like as soon as I told the locals that I was a teacher acting as a tourist and not affiliated with an NGO they warmed up substantially. I certainly don’t want to diminish all of the incredible good that NGO’s did post-tsunami, but they certainly did have some negative impacts as well. In particular they drove prices for everything in the area to ridiculous highs because they would come in and pay whatever was asked (you have to spend all of about 2mins in Indonesia to realize how ridiculous that is). It got so bad that the locals couldn’t even afford to buy houses or rent building spaces; one or two months of an NGO using the building was more than a year or more of a normal local rate.
While I’m on a bit of a NGO rant, I also had very mixed emotions about what the NGO’s constructed and how the money was spent. Clearly Banda Aceh owes many NGOs and governments a great deal (a fact they seem to fully realize judging by the number of placards thanking various groups); just walking around the city demonstrates that. Banda Aceh is one of the, if not the cleanest and best laid out cities I have seen in Indo (starting from scratch will do that) and it is remarkably well established considering the devastation of 5.5 years ago. With all that said, some of the planning seems a little out of place and over the top. For instance, there was a park I walked through that was clearly western designed; it favorably-made me think of home until I started to look closer: the center piece, a lake, was half full of water, and completely full of trash and about the only people using the park were washing in the drain off from the lake. So I guess what I am saying is that it seems like the NGOs came in with a lot of money and just started throwing it around: doing and building things as their western minds found logical. That’s great, fantastic, the city was rebuilt very quickly and has some fine infrastructure you won’t find elsewhere in Indonesia. The problem is much of that isn’t being used, wasn’t completely finished, or simply seems completely out of place. Not to mention the incredible amount of good that could have been done if that $13billion+ that was donated by the world had been spent frugally and spread around all of Indonesia. Again I’m not trying to be negative, I was just surprised by how I felt and what I noticed. My opinion was also influenced by the locals I talked to that seemed less than pleased with the NGOs, though most of the NGOs have recently pulled out and prices are starting to return to normal.
Back to the feel of the city though. Aceh (the province) has a reputation as being a very strict Muslim community. For example, in the National Geo article about Indo they mention that there are police going around enforcing head coverings and forcing men to Friday Prayer. Uh…no! I was there when Friday prayer was being called…no police. And I saw all of one burqa (full body cover) in my 2.5 days in Aceh; that would be 1 less than I saw in the 20mins I spent in the bus station in Makassar on my way back. I was also pretty amazed by the amount of touching and flirting I got from the women asking me for pictures (though to be fair, I think some of those were Indo tourists).
All in all I found Banda Aceh to be one of my more favorite cities in Indonesia, though it’s not much of a tourist location to be honest: the Mesjid Raya is gorgeous in the evening, the history of resistance by the Acehenese against the Dutch is interesting and has some sites, and the tsunami sites: a 350-ton boat in the middle of the city miles from the ocean, a fishing boat on the roof of a house, several mass graves (the one we visited purportedly entombed 47,000 people), the architecturally interesting but still un-finished tsunami museum, are somewhat interesting, everything can be seen in one long day.
Maybe that was part of the charm for me though; we know how I like to get away from the other bules…which was a bit of a problem at our next stop: Pulau Weh.
That will wait until the next posting though.