16 Mar - 20 Mar 2012 Banda Aceh

Republic of Indonesia
Jalan Jend. A. Yani 19
Hotel Wisata +6265121834
Spacious and clean double room (no. 334) with private bathroom and river view for IDR 120,000.- or US$ 13.00 per night. Homoeopathic wifi on each floor.
Beer-free environment due to the strict enforcement of Sharia law (“…infractions upon the locally perceived interpretations of Sharia law may result in arrest by the Sharia police with physical punishment and public ridicule imposed upon an offending Muslim..."); Happy Detox, dear traveller!


Click below for an interactive road map of the Hotel Wisata in Banda Aceh and for directions:










Covering our arms and legs (quote from a sign for infidel visitors: “…think globally, dress locally…”) and exploring the this-worldly and other-worldly highlights of ultra conservative Banda Aceh, e.g. (i) drinking famous and halal Aceh coffee together with local fishermen at the new, post-tsunami fish market aka pasar ikan, located on the eastern bank of Sungai Krueng Aceh and one of the liveliest in Sumatra, and listening to their sad stories about the horrible 2004 tsunami, and (ii) visiting the Grand Mosque aka Mesjid Raya Baiturrahman whose brilliant white walls and charcoal-black domes are the most famous landmark in Aceh (built by the Dutch colonial masters in 1879 CE as a conciliatory gesture towards the Acehnese after the original one had been burnt down).



Noticing the haunting legacy of two overwhelming floods which hit Banda Aceh in its recent past and which have changed the lives and values of many local people: (i) the flood of water and mud which followed a horrible tsunami from an earthquake of magnitude 9.3 (the epicentre was about 250 km off the coast of Banda Aceh), which stroke the coast on 26 December 2004 and killed about 150,000 people, and (ii) the flood of attention, affection and help from up to 850 international aid agencies and NGOs which swamped the area after the tsunami with large aid funds (enough to finance the bombastic Aceh Tsunami Museum, a self-congratulatory and embarrassing memorial for the international aid industry) and with megatons of interesting merchandise and booty (now being called “tsunami assets”), both with the side-effect of inflated and fanciful expectations among the locals towards foreign beneficence.



Hiring a side-car becak (IDR 2,500.- per person, one way) to Desa Lampulo, Kota Alam, and gazing in amazement at the famous 20-ton wooden Boat on the Roof which had been boarded by more than 50 people during the ongoing tsunami - who all eventually stranded in safety on top of Misbah’s residential house - a few kilometres on shore.



Taking the black minibus/opelet (locally known as labi-labi) no. 5 from the opelet terminal in Banda Aceh to the new, post-tsunami ferry port Ulee Lheue (IDR 6,000.- or US$ 0.65 per person), thereafter the slow car ferry KMP “Tanjung Burang” (“We Bridge the Nation”) in economy class to Balohan on Sabang Island aka Pulau Weh (about 15 nm, 2¼ hours, IDR 18,500.- per person, +6265149977) and eventually hiring Putra's side-car becak, +6282168572420, for the final roller-coaster leg to Iboih Beach (32 km, ¾ hours, IDR 35,000.- per person), a rather rugged shanty town of cheap and mostly dilapidated but romantic jungle/beach shacks which caters for Sumatra’s best dive/snorkel sites and which harbours Pulau Weh’s friendly and highly professional Acehnese diving brethren Ismayudi, Iskandar and Isfan from PADI’s Rubiah Tirta Divers +626523324555, the longest operating dive shop on the island: SalĂ©um, Pulo Weh.”



Click below for a summary of this year's travels
2012 Map Konni & Matt


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12 Mar - 16 Mar 2012 Medan


Republic of Indonesia
North Sumatra aka Sumatera Utara
Jalan Tengah 1
Small but adequate and clean enough twin room (no. 402) with tiny private bathroom for only IDR 60,000.- or US$ 6.50 per night.
From the hotel’s written rules and regulations: “ …unmarried couples are not allowed to sleep in the same room... “


Click below for an interactive road map of the Residence Hotel in Medan and for directions:










Exploring sprawling Medan, the big and chaotic capital of North Sumatra and the third-largest city in Indonesia, where seedy Dutch colonial buildings “adorn” the affluent older suburbs while jerry-built lean-tos house the bulk of today’s population of about two million Chinese, Javanese, Batak, Minangkabau and Indians, which all contribute to thousands of mouth-watering dishes found in every corner of the city (our favourite eatery: H. Azmy Chatib’s rumah makan Putra Raya with great Padang food +62617362997), and where we noticed the same social dichotomy as in many other countries and cities in Southeast Asia: “owned” and politically/religiously controlled by a nationalistic majority, but “run” and developed/propelled by a clever and hard-working Chinese minority (often discriminated as “Jews of the East”, thus suffering regularly pogroms with anti-Chinese riots, e.g. Medan in May 1998).



Taking one of the battered red minibuses (angkot, no. 41) for IDR 2,000.- or US$ 0.20 per person to Medan’s provincial Polonia International Airport and flying with Sriwijaya Air (“Your Flying Partner” and a longstanding member of the List of Airlines Banned in the EU) in a vintage Boeing 737-300 to Banda Aceh’s Sultan Iskandarmuda Airport for only IDR 290,000.- or US$ 31.60 per person, one way, plus the departure tax of IDR 30,000.- or US$ 3.30 per person, based on an all-inclusive special/promo air fare for flights on Fridays during the Islamic main-prayer time at 01:00 p.m. (luckily, with Chinese pilots at the sticks), and thereafter taking the convenient airport bus (IDR 15,000.- per person) right into Banda Aceh’s beer-free city centre, thus arriving at Indonesia’s northernmost province and the most staunchly Muslim part of Sumatra: “Assalamoe Aleikoem!”



Click below for other blog posts about interesting cities in Indonesia

Click below for a summary of this year's travels


Facing Sumatra
© Konni & Matt


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09 Mar - 12 Mar 2012 Bukit Lawang


Republic of Indonesia
North Sumatra aka Sumatera Utara
Mboy Guest House +6281370895186 bukitlawangtour@yahoo.com
Clean and spacious double room ("honeymoon suite") with private bathroom and a big balcony, great river and jungle views, for only IDR 100,000.- or US$ 10.90 per night.
Beer: 620-ml bottles of reasonably cold Carlsberg and Anker beer for IDR 20,000.- or US$ 2.- per bottle from any of the nearby food stalls.


Click below for an interactive road map of the Mboy Guest House in Bukit Lawang, which we would recommend, and for directions:









Exploring the ATM-free settlement of Bukit Lawang which exists almost solely to service the cynically greenwashing tourist industry and where semi-wild or rather semi-tame Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) play a doubtful part in order to attract both domestic and international, Euro/Dollar/Pound-paying customers for the vast number of “rainbow boutiques”, “one-world curio shops” and “eco guest houses” as well as for the 200 plus guides and wannabe guides who lure the apes down from the trees and feed them for the amusement of tourists.
“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”


Learning that orang-utans share 96.4 % of our genes, that there are less than 7,000 Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) left in the wild (the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the Sumatran species as “critically endangered” on their IUCN Red List) and that the population is declining every year with the main reasons for the decline being (i) oil-palm plantations for “bio fuel”, (ii) unsustainable logging (both legal and illegal), (iii) large-area forest fires, (iv) habitat fragmentation leading to isolated populations and (v) hunting/capturing for the illegal pet trade.



Hiring one of the obligatory, free-lancing nature guides who work in the Gunung Leuser National Park (a 45-year old, non-cannibalistic Batak man [in 1890 CE the Dutch colonial government banned cannibalism amongst the Batak tribes], for IDR 125,000.- or US$ 14.- per client for the half-day charade of searching for "wild" orangutans, including money-back guarantee), hiking together through the secondary rainforest on the west bank of the river and making two hits, almost immediately and allegedly "by pure chance": (i) after c. 30 minutes at a well-used, trodden clearing a sad-eyed 25-year old, good-naturedly posing orangutan together with his hiding human handler, and (ii) after c. 90 minutes at another widely used feeding point a stage-experienced female with her baby ape, who forcefully approached Konni’s blue daypack for a second serving after she, the female ape, had been fed from our guide with bananas from his own blue backpack.



Joining around a dozen of sweating western tourists for the daily farce of feeding the semi-wild/tame orangutans at the Gunung Leuser National Park’s official feeding station (entrance for the one-hour long animal show: IDR 20,000.- per person and IDR 50,000.- per camera) and having a close, zoo-like encounter with three female apes and their cute babies who obviously enjoyed, lip-smackingly, their breakfast bananas with some pans of milk.



Spotting rare lar gibbons (Hylobates lar) aka white-handed gibbons (their hands and feet are white-coloured, likewise a ring of white hair surrounds the black face), in the treetops of the tropical rainforest and Thomas’s langurs (Presbytis thomasi) aka Thomas’s leaf monkeys in the shrubs along the river bank, thus learning about the distinctive feature between apes and monkeys: absence or presence of the tail.

Taking a Fa. Pemb. Semesta rust bucket from Bukit Lawang’s Gotong Royang bus station back to Medan’s Pinang Baris Bus Terminal (90 km, 2 ½ hours, IDR 17,500.- or US$ 1.90 per person) and thereafter one of the ubiquitous yellow minibuses (angkot, no. 64) for IDR 5,000.- or US$ 0.55 per person) back to our hotel where we discussed the orangutans’ paradox: these apes might have been rescued from logging plantations and from the pet trade but the impact of human tourism (e.g. feeding the orangutans in the jungle encourages dependence, touching the orangutans makes them susceptible to human illnesses, close encounters with humans make the gentle orangutans forcefully demanding and even aggressive) seems to spoil their future as a species, and ours too.

“We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.”



Click below for more blog posts about orangutans
26 Sep - 04 Oct 2013 Sintang
11 Jul - 01 Sep 2013 Kuching
30 Jun - 07 Jul 2009 Kuching

Click below for a summary of this year's travels
2012 Map Konni & Matt



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06 Mar - 09 Mar 2012 Medan


Republic of Indonesia
North Sumatra aka Sumatera Utara
Jalan Tengah 1
Small but adequate twin room (no. 402) with tiny private bathroom for only IDR 60,000.- or US$ 6.50 per night. From the hotel’s written rules and regulations: “ …unmarried couples are not allowed to sleep in the same room... “
Beer: 620-ml bottles of ice-cold Bintang beer (in deep-frozen glasses) for IDR 28,000.- or US$ 3.05 per bottle at the beer-garden like Corner Cafe Raya, conveniently located right opposite the Grand Mosque, from where we heretics could raise our glasses to the practitioners, cheers!


Click below for an interactive road map of the Residence Hotel in Medan and for directions:










Being rudely awakened at 04:30 a.m. by our first ever Sumatran, very powerful prayer call from the nearby Grand Mosque’s croaking amplifying equipment and exploring the vicinity of our hotel by foot: (i) the 1906 CE Grand Mosque aka Masjid Raya Al-Mashun (built in Moorish style), the biggest and allegedly most beautiful mosque in North Sumatra, and (ii) the 1888 CE Maimoon Palace aka Istana Sultan Maimun Al Rasyid (entrance: IDR 5,000.- per person), a sloppily restored heritage site where gigantic Dutch tourists squeezed themselves into traditional Indonesian costumes in order to have their souvenir photo taken.



Purchasing an Indonesian SIM card from Telkomsel Flash for our laptops, with unlimited but not-so-broad broad-band internet access for a 30-day period, for altogether IDR 60,000.- or US$ 6.50, catching up on admin work (travel blog and photos) and enjoying tremendously many looong Skype video calls with our friends and family both in South Africa and in Canada.

"And there are no letters in the mailbox
and there are no grapes upon the vine,
and there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in the mine."



Bracing ourselves for the monkey business of viewing wild Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) in the Gunung Leuser National Park, one of the apes’ last remaining strongholds, leaving our luggage in the hotel in Medan, taking one of the battered yellow minibuses (angkot, no. 64) for IDR 4,000.- or US$ 0.45 per person to the Pinang Baris Bus Terminal, Medan’s long-distance bus station for north/west-bound busses, from here taking an even more battered Fa. Pemb. Semesta “big bus” to Bukit Lawang’s Gotong Royang Bus Station (90 km, 2 ¾ hours, IDR 15,000.- or US$ 1.65 per person) and walking thereafter for about 30 min to Mboy Guesthouse, located on the east bank of the Bohorok River aka Sungai Bohorok, almost opposite the entrance to the Gunung Leuser National Park, a 7,927sqkm-large national park in northern Sumatra with a wide range of ecosystems, named after Mount Leuser (3,381 m).
 


Click below for more blog posts about other interesting Asian cities

Click below for a summary of this year's travels


Facing Sumatra
© Konni & Matt


Recommended books - click below for your Amazon order from Germany:

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