Monday, June 29, 2009

Hop, Skip and a Painful 8 Hour Flight to Melbourne

I went to Melbourne and back and took not nearly enough photos.. And they're up on Facebook. But here are things that stood out for me:

  • Leaving a piece of luggage in the cab. Ah! Always check you have all your luggage before giving boyfriend a massive hug! If the nice cabby ever ever stumbles upon this, I am the girl who ran down Franklin St at midnight in my red coat and I would still like my bag back.
  • Seeing Tulloch, Suggy, Bec, Nikki, Liz, James, Dani, Marissa - learning more about tall Paul and seagulls, a certain infatuation for a musician and EATING TIBA's again!
  • Salt Pepper Chicken Ribs...
  • Giant dinner with the most random of crowds: Vong? Mark Hoo? Grace? May Lin? Tas? Stephen? Prateek? Jon? Allen? ... you got to admit it's a strange mix to be in Taco Bills
  • Yummy breakfast where i was told that i'm "lucky" to be allowed into the group. I MADE THE GROUP!!! (not over that yet)
  • Perusing the NGV... art galleries are the new in, yo.
  • An amazing double date day which involved lunch at my fave Pellegrini's, churches and the mesmerising Fitzroy Gardens
  • Dali exhibition where i found out that Dali is a sick, twisted, erotic man
  • Playing a few new games... It's lovely to not be pretentious and have to go out to be cool and have fun. What's wrong with good company and a gritty mental challenge?
  • The fellowship of the fitball and the Ladder theory - most definitely a highlight!
  • Watching all the goals in a Aus v Japan World Cup qualifier from near goalside. =D
  • Lunch at the pizza place. More cute guys and awesome canneloni. (Thanks Maybelle)
  • My favourite juice bar and the South American secret recipe juice...
  • Emasculating Aaron and Parkes at Madame Brussels followed by THE BEST SIEW YUK in Anada Tapas restaurant.
  • Cute Bartenders at Anada and Black n Pearl - skinny Robert Downey Jr.
  • Reliving IH bar with peppermint patties *yum*
  • Another AWESOME breakfast with the boys. Everyone must love English breakfasts!
  • Chatting with Pushpy, KK, Adrian, Evan... was good times being back in 301! and the antics never end, although you feel like an ah ma
  • Furious foursome Bang-ing after a nice home cooked meal in front of the tv at CC's place
Gosh, i miss melbourne already! Not least because there are no paranoid people screaming swine flu. A return is on the imaginary cards. Now to get over my fear of tiny uncomfortable Air Asia seats for long haul flights... Photos on FB

Friday, June 05, 2009

Chronicles of Aceh - Part Trois

Yay! Not a one week delay between day 2 and 3!
Sorry to burst your bubble but those drying nets there? Yeah, that's how your ikan bilis is made. Hahaha.. Not exactly the most hygienic of ways but 100% pure natural goodness! Also, probably a good reason to remember to wash any salted fish you buy!

This little old lady has been drying fish since ever. She was really cute and spunky! I dunno if i could stare at those little fish all day every day. And Indon culture lesson, ikan bilis is known as ikan tri.

This is probably my favourite picture the whole trip. Love the blue blue sky.

You will not believe how many nets of dried ikan bilis there were...

The restaurant and lodge from yesterday? This is a view of the "cliff" that it was on. To the left of the picture, there's a tree that sort of stands alone? They say the wave nearly covered the top of that during the tsunami.

Now this is Really, REALLY fresh fish.

Left the project site at Lhok Kruet and on the journey back. This is a piece of the bridge foundation for what used to be the main road. That got destroyed during the tsunami. The current road is about 2 km in, but there are still bits of it that are treachorously close to the water's edge.

Haha.. really. Would you drive over that? It's held strong so far, though!

Here's a better view of the river 'ferry' service. 3 boats tied together with a platform on top. These engines were stronger than the earlier one as it was crossing the river mouth, nearer the sea. Inceidentally, rafts are called 'raket' in Indon (like 'rakit' in BM) but i was curious as to why they would name themselves a racket, which it really is. The 'raket' racket. Hur hur hur.. i am so funny with my puns (-_-")

Not just any lady using a parang (machete) to straighten a nail on a plank... She's actually sitting in one of a row of stalls that has popped up at either end of the 'raket' rackets. Whole communities actually exist on the traffic that uses the rafts! Hats off to them, i say. Anyway to earn a living.

So after a slightly scary journey on bad roads in a 4wd in the rain, we made it to our next project site called Krueng Tunoh. There's something about the air right after rain. So fresh, and makes for beautiful misty hills! And green somehow tends to look greener too.

The mangrove trees that we helped to fund. They're planted along the fringe of the ponds which are used to grow prawns. Beyond the pond, sort of where the hills converge? Just past that is the coastline, which is why the water came rushing in come tsunami.

You don't really get kampung food much more authentic than this. Note the lack of cutlery other than serving spoons. And the best kind of table mat - a floor mat!

Okay, looking back at this photo, i really wonder WHY i ate anything with sauce that looks like muddy water. But you know, all sense sort of escaped me. I have a STRONG suspicion that this is the dish that left me with debilitating food poisoning the next day.

The lady at the back is the kind host who cooked us that nice (- food poisoning crabs) meal. Her husband is on the right and the dude on the left works for our project partner. Anyway, story of being told off for not being pure enough. It was time for solat after the meal and when they asked if i wanted to, i said no. And i think being a predominantly Muslim country, this was pretty alien to them. The farmer (husband on right) said: "Oh, once upon a time in Aceh, EVERYONE had to pray. Now it's alright though. But they would have to cover their heads and make sure their clothes covered their wrists. Also, here, women who want to be married have to be able to read the Quran. *gulp* Back in the olden days, women had to have a white cloth lain under them on their wedding night." *double gulp* I couldn't help but feel that that was directed at sinful, immodest me.

Anyway, this is round the other side of earlier pictured ponds. At the base of the cliff you can spot a tiny bit of sea spray. Basically the sea formed a sort of pincer around a hill. And the village is right behind the hill. Water rushing in from all sides so that about 2 km of land got washed away

More mangroves...

Me posing in front of the pond. Hahaha... Look, i was already dressed decently okay? Just minus the headscarf. I don't think i deserved that lecture about the good wife!

This is Pak Wahab and, apart from being a bit too rigid Muslim for my liking, he is a real star. He lived in a small house next to the pond and was farming pre-tsunami. He had a wife and a few kids ranging from 5 months to 8 years. They were all at home when the tsunami came in and he remembers holding on to his 5 months old baby and trying to outrun the waves. Sadly, his whole family perished. In the following 3 months, he hand dug the ponds that you saw above. He's since remarried and has a daughter, and is a real champion for our project. It felt almost sadistic to hear his story, because he said you never forget about the family you lost. Especially on festive days, when there used to be so many people and they could share all the food together but now it's a lot quieter. We cannot even begin to imagine what some of the Aceh people have gone through.

On the way out of Krueng Tunoh, passed by this contraption which i found interesting. There's a fishing net underwater and at night, they switch on a light suspended in the middle to attract the fish. They then pull the net up and voila! Easy catch...

A visual for you to show the before, during and after tsunami photos. See the greenery that was lost? Not just that, but most of the soil is still salinated from the sea water and that means you can't grow anything on it til the salt's slowly gone out.

This is pretty much the same view as above. All those patches of sand were once covered in vegetation, if i'm not mistaken.

And here's a shot of that large USAID- funded American highway that runs through the Aceh towns. What a disconnect! I mean, they're blowing up hills and tearing down mangrove forests that were JUST PLANTED post-tsunami just to fit this monstrosity in! Plus, the project started 2 years ago, and with the state of portions of its road, I won't be surprised if it's not done 2 years down the line. Ggrrr... the amount of misused funds and abandoned projects!! So disheartening.

Anyway, another mandatory sunset snap. In my defence, most of these pictures were taken from the car so they're not perfect.

Another snap of those lovely dried fish. Not very good but you can see they hang the fish/sotong from the roof to dry. This lady's just collecting them as the sun sets. But it's really quaint - they're flattened out so they all look like pomphrets! (incidentally my fave sort of fried fish)

You can just about see the tiny fishing vessel here. It's called a 'bagan' and is a large net in the middle with a small boat attached so that you can leave the bagan out while ferrying yourself and hired help back and forth from land. (Plus the catch too)

And there, the sun set on day 3. This is probably the last photo-heavy day and I would have loved to have some more free time the next day, but the muddy-water sauced crabs decided to strike. And it was food poisoning of the throwing up sort. Ew.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Chronicles of Aceh - Part Deux

Righty-o. A week later and continuing where i left off. It may take me a while to complete these chronicles of Aceh.
This is the view from inside the car on top of a raft crossing the river. Those planks on the riverbank then get attached to the raft for the car to drive onto land. It costs about 20,000 Rupiah to cross (USD 2) and whole economies of the raft sort have popped up since the tsunami washed out bridges (and they either haven't been rebuilt or makeshift bridges get washed away with the next big flood). Anyway, raft ferries - definitely an experience!
The headless survivors of the tsunami. You can see the waves went way over the treetops. And that stretch of water between the rocks and the trees? That used to be beach. But the water never quite subsided so a lot of the coastline has been lost to the waves.
Parts of a bridge that was destroyed in the tsunami. 4 years on and left to rust. (That wouldn't happen in Malaysia - they'd have taken the metal for scrap! But this is about 3 hours drive from the city...)
Just one of the temporary houses that were given in the immediate post-tsunami. Apparently they pack neatly into a box - sorta like an Ikea house. Some people are STILL living in these houses. Others have sold them to be used as shops while some have just connected them to their new permanent houses for an extra wing in the house!
This is what remains of a restaurant and lodge situated on a cliff. It got hit pretty hard as this was the furthermost point of the coast so it took a pretty bad beating. The cliff isn't too short, either.
View from the cliff. Even now the waters look scary. This is meant to be the calm period in between monsoons!
Fish cages that we helped to fund. Each little hut connects to cages that can house about 1,000 fish! See the planks? We were told upon arrival to walk along the sides as the middle bits were old and crumbly. Now imagine bow-legged walking in fear of dropping down. Quite funny.
This is an improvised fish hatchery. One of the fish cage culture people decided he didn't have to wait for fish hatchlings from outside and took it upon himself to breed his own little fish hatchlings. I wish i was full of the same initiative.
Just so you know i'm not talking about empty pools of water. See? Fish hatchlings!
Pak Abu - he of the indomitable spirit. He is such a champion. One of the driving forces of the fish culture project, he was there when the tsunami hit. He lost all 8 of his family members and was only saved because he had been up in the forest collecting wood. Of the 8, he only found the body of his younger brother. But now he's married, has kids and has learned to move on.
The mandatory sunset shot.
The more unusual cows on the beach at sunset shot.
Shoo shoo! Home with you cows. But apparently they sleep by the beach. What a life!
Some of the kids in the tiny village. How sinful did I feel when even the little children said 'I have to go home now. It's time for Solat!' Not being Muslim in Aceh is a little discriminatory. I felt like a harlot for not covering my head and saying my prayers. (i was told off - but more on that in the next set of photos)
And this i was very amused by. Aren't these the most gorgeous dried sotong you've ever seen? Hahaha.. a row of them could work as beaded curtains almost!

Here are some of the crabs from our project. Very much alive in the morning.

But not so much later on that night. Now this is kampung cooking at its best. Kuali over a wood fire outside the house.

Largest crab i had ever eaten. I could only manage 1 half (the one with the giant claw, of course!) hahaha. The masak lemak sauce was TOOO tasty! If we were at a restaurant, i'd definitely tapau.

And that's the end of day 2. No nightlife in the kampung so nothing to it but to retire to my pretty pink mosquito-netted mattress. Fit for a kampung princess! I am definitely not suited to the life. No a/c is alright, but no fan either! Just the noises of the cicadas, people chatting outside and goats. Yeah. Goats.