Goodbye Paulu Weh, Hello Banda Aceh

This was the view from our restaurant on our last night

And this is me at 6.30am waiting for our ride from the place we were staying to the harbour to catch the ferry to Banda Aceh (about a 45 minute ride) and it was raining!

Well, this is the epicentre of the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake (8.9) and Tsunami, 61 000 died.  Our Becak (tuk tuk) driver, Little John, lost 5 brothers in the Tsunami, and had a steel girder fall on his arm, so his left hand/arm doesn’t work properly, but what a wonderful happy positive man!  We decided to hire him for the day, taking us round the sights (first of course was the public library, then the Tsunami museum, a shopping mall, and coffee that’s made from animal droppings!)

The Tsunami Museum

You walk into the tsunami museum through a tunnel with water pouring against a wall either side.  It was quite eerie, a very evocative entrance to a tsunami museum!

These are the before and after photos of the city…

A couple of the famous photos…

         

some more before and after photos showing the shore line completely changed, you will need to click on the photos to get a full screen to really see the difference.

   

They did 3-d models to show before and after

     

and they did a model of the tsunami coming

There are stones in a circle around the bottom level with country names that helped with the clean-up, Andre is sitting on it, but I couldn’t get a photo that showed the name…

                       

Banda Aceh is a pretty ULTRA-FRIENDLY city, very hard to tell what happened 8 years ago.
After the museum, it was time to change the pace, so we went for the most expensive coffee in the world.

Kopi Luwak gourmet coffee actually passes completely through the digestive tract of the exotic Indonesian Palm Civet (Luwak) without being digested by the animal.  The Palm Civet, long seen as a pest on coffee plantations, eats and eventually passes the undigested coffee cherries in it’s waste. The beans are then patiently harvested from the forest floor near coffee plantations and carefully roasted. The digestive juices of the animal are said to very slightly ferment the beans without harming them, adding a gentle nutty flavor to the roasted beans that is highly prized by the discriminating coffee gourmet.

It is supposed to be the worlds most rare coffee and it has quite a mild taste, another tick in the box.
The animals eat the red berry of the coffee bean (which is all glucose) but they will only eat it when it’s perfectly ripe.  apparently us humans still can’t get it quite right, we pick pretty close, but the animals won’t eat it unless it is exactly right, clever animals!

And now for some views of the city from our hostel