The mostly leafy, beach series. Some shots in Banda Aceh. More street life to come. Click to enlarge.

Hiking to the beach near Lampuuk…

In Banda Aceh…

Another trip to the beach. This area was hit hard by tsunami. Friends say there wasn’t a crowd like this last year.

Near the village of Lampuuk, where the mosque withstood the onslaught. The fishing boats are beached for the windy season.

If you’re like me when you travel abroad, you find yourself working hard to earn the approval of local folks. It’s sort of like the first day of school with a bunch of people you don’t understand. I try not to talk too loud; I smile way more than I do at home; I’m constantly doing this gracious nodding motion; I strive not to be too competitive on the soccer field; I fumble with local words and goofy sign language.

Also, I don’t want to feed the myth that Americans are this brash, loud, trampling lot. I have a strong sense that I want us to be liked, as much as I want to be liked. And here in the early 2000s, the stakes for the collective us being liked seem to be even higher.

The free-spirited Acehnese have been mostly warm, showing me around this twisty city, teaching me snippets of the local dialect and even courteously asking what kind of things I liked to drink and smoke in the evening hours. Along the roadside, kids inevitably smile and call out “Hello, Mister,” the rough translation of the Indonesian familiar title “Bapak”. I’ve walked into regular tennis and volleyball groups and always been quickly ushered onto the court, as if they were expecting me. And even though I skip out on the national pastime here — smoking — the groups have always insisted I come back.

Not everyone is best buddy to the “bulek”. Some teenagers scream fiercely out of their car windows at me as they go whizzing by and at least one dude swerved towards me when I was running along the side of the road last week. Several ex-pat women have had their breasts grabbed by passing motorcyclists.

But in the face of an onslaught by Westerners with all the aid agencies (the streets are crawling with UN and NGO vehicles), the Acehenese seem to be quite accepting. They have never had a beef with the West; their independence movement even had sort of Western overtones — self-determination, economic prosperity — and they chased off the Indonesian Islamic radicalists when they once sought an alliance.

At times, this place can even feel like a bubble removed from Iraq, the adventures of W-ville and ugly Americanism. It’s refreshing to know that we haven’t completely blown our reputation everywhere.

Then I went to buy a tennis racket yesterday, at a small sports shop down the road that I have passed a dozen times but which took a local to help me find it. Inside, I honed in on a “Wilson” racket that they admitted was a knock-off made in Taiwan. An Indonesian guy hanging out there heard my English, and, finding out I was from the States, said, “I used to live in Kentucky. I can translate if you want to offer a lower price.” With his help, I managed to get it down $10 to $60. (They also agreed to string the racket but only to 58 pounds because they’re afraid the knock-off will break otherwise.)

Afterward the guy translating said, “I jumped ship in Miami and went up to work at a Chinese restaurant in Kentucky. I had a friend there. I took some orders you know. Then the WTC happened. I got really scared. People didn’t like Muslims and they were doing these sweeps you know. Immigration.”

“I got scared! I got out of there. My friend stayed and they came around and checked all the workers. He’s Ok. But I was scared! People don’t like Muslims and I look Asian…”

“Not everyone is like that,” I said.

“I know,” he said, smiling.

We agreed to play tennis sometime. I hope we can play a lot of tennis. After a while, I think he’ll like us.

Take care until next time,
Oakley

It’s been an amazing first week, full of hospitality from foreigners and locals alike, and marked at different times by the beauty, wildness and tenuousness of this place.

We’ve been welcomed in by Hayley’s director, Mark, and are currently camped out in his guest-room on a quiet street not far from the center of town. Banda is a mish mash of bustling boulevards crammed with shops and motorcycles and whistle-blowing parking attendants, hard by lazy little side streets where chickens and cows amble in long grass and people sell candy and Coke out of makeshift stands and wash their clothes in putrid canals. From our current home, we can mark time by the prayers wafting across a narrow river from a nearby mosque (they bookend the day at 5am and 10pm) and by the increase in two-stroke mopeds blubbering by during rush hours.

Hayley’s been diving in headfirst to all things development (we may have a post from here sometime soon). Meanwhile, I’m trying to get the lay of the land. With a lot of help and some blind luck, I’ve found a coffee shop with wifi, the grocery store where the “bulei” foreigners shop and the local tennis gang who play rotating doubles three times a week and smoke long, clove infused cigarettes between matches. There’s the fruit stand that won’t rip you off, the meat stand that reeks of low tide (haven’t actually bought anything yet), and — key — the guy to rent a motorbike from.

On Monday, while H. stepped into her first day of work, I was taken to that crucial point of reference: the beach at Lampuuk. I went with John, a friend from Portland who now also holds down the fort for his aid working wife in Jakarta. Lampuuk is about 20 minutes south of Banda and it took a brutal direct hit from the tsunami. It faced three waves, the middle and largest 90-feet tall. The third wave swept 4 kilometers inland and didn’t recede for more than five hours. (Apparently you could see the tide mark on the surrounding hillsides for many moons).

On the way there, we drove over the flat flood plain that had been washed over by the waves. It’s now chock full of hundreds of new cement houses painted a cheery yellow. Here and there huge cement chunks still sit in open rice paddies but for the most part it’s pretty clean.

Near the beach, the rolling dunes described in the guidebooks are gone, replaced by new saplings planted in the rebuilding efforts. On Monday, a few people hung around a small river mouth, but only a handful were on this spectacular coral-sand beach. It stretched maybe a mile and half around a point to some cliffs (Pictures to come!) At the point, among a collection of small fishing dories with lofting prows, an old man sanded down a plank to replace a broken sideboard. He smiled and waved as we passed.

A couple of kids rode their motorbikes onto the beach and jumped in the water — most fully clothed. ( Bathing suits don’t fly with the Sharia morality police.) When we finally got in, the water was bathy — maybe 80 — but still cooler than the hot, heavy day. Waves kind of frothed around the offshore reefs and broke lightly on the shore. But on the way out we spied a solitary surfer dropping in on a six-foot peak. I hankered for my board — which is in transit.

Later in the week, H. and I came back with a group to hike north from the village to a secluded beach a few miles away. We headed up into the lush green hills on a well-trodden track, some of it concreted. A few locals on their motorbikes came past and every now and then there was tin-roofed shack off to the side in a small clearing. But I’d venture to say no locals were out for a jaunt on foot.

We turned off on to a narrow foot track and the forest closed in on either side. Huge hardwoods with broad canopies (we needed a naturalist!) liana’s hanging down, dense underbrush,( including a thorny plant that got two of group tied up at once) and giant, stinging bee-like creature that also nabbed two people.

A British guy who’s a rabid explorer around here said that the trails were recently used by the local separatist movement (they’re under a peace agreement at the moment with Jakarta). I tried to look more innocuous for the remainder of the trip. The trail crested over a saddle and dropped steeply down towards the water. The waves pounded in the distance, though it was another twenty minutes before we stepped out on a long, empty beach bounded by rock points. It was so rough — eight foot swells dropping right on the shore —— that we all stayed out, save Graham, an adventurous Coloradan who told his wife before he went in that she should feel free to remarry if he got swept out to sea. H. and I battled some severe fatigue on the trail back (dehydration and jet lag dish a mean one two punch). But pizzas at this cool little open air bistro back in the village refilled the tank.

If it’s idyllic here (where else in the aid universe can you go to the beach? H. has been saying), we are also sitting on a fault line and near several others. Friday afternoon we got a reminder. I was at the main open air market, pasar Banda, next to the city’s central mosque, the grand white Baturrachman mosque, with two of Mark’s house staff, his son and a driver.

We had just walked through the dense stands of shoes and toys and colorful traditional shirts that fill a blocked off street there, and I was sidling in to a small jewelry store. An explosion rocked the concrete store — a truck coming through the wall?— and we all were stunned for a split second. Then the ground began to roll and women began to scream and we got swept up in a brief tide of people running toward the open street next to the mosque. The owners of the jewelry store struggled to pull their metal security fences closed (to stop looters if things started to disintegrate, I think).

Then it the ground stopped moving. People calmed down some. We walked quickly, hearts pounding, out to motorcycle taxi we’d come in. And we talked in choppy words of Indonesian and English about whether or not to stay. Some people leaving looked terrified. But some of the vendors were joking with each other. Nothing physical was damaged or even out place. Was this normal life here or not? If I was immediately thinking about the tsunami, other people must have been as well. Our driver, who’s also a volunteer fireman, assured us everything was OK. Mark’s son Hawk judged himself fine (at 6.3, this was the biggest quake he’d experienced; he called it a “bomb”).

And so we did another turn in the market. But every time we walked under a concrete overhang at the edge of the pasar, I thought “How many steps to get out from under here?” A slightly deranged guy walking around caused some women to run scared through the market. Not long after, we left. On the streets, the cars honked at each other and motorbikes barreled around, just as they do on other days. (H. had just started a community meeting in an open sided wooden shelter when the quake hit. The shelter wobbled and everyone ran out from under but they regrouped and went on)

So as we go house hunting in the next few weeks, we’ll be a little more wary of second stories. We’re learning the right level of caution in the relative tranquilty here.
Take care until next time,
Oakley