VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
On this short flight to Banda Aceh in Sumatra, I didn’t fire up my GoPro until I’d already landed and had stepped outside of the airport. I’d taken video of all the stages of getting to KLIA in Malaysia in past videos, and I thought I’d leave that part of the journey undocumented for a change. And that, along with my flight being delayed by an hour plus the one-hour time difference with Malaysia meant that when I finally did hit the “record” button on my GoPro, it was already dark. And that contributed to a somewhat confusing and disorienting arrival. The disorientation was even more pronounced because I’d somehow made a reservation at the wrong hotel, and I found myself going to a completely different part of the city than I’d planned.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
All right, I just landed in Banda Aceh, just outside of the airport. It’s a short flight from KL, maybe an hour, hour and a half. And yeah, lots of small adventures along the way. But yeah, really beautiful. Flying in was like… Banda Aceh is like a city of like 300,000, 250,000 people, but it feels like a village. When you fly in, it looks quite beautiful from up in the air with the rice fields, village kind of atmosphere, though it’s really quite beautiful.
So but now the sun has set, so can’t really see much. And yeah, there’s the airport. Can’t really see it from here, but if you saw it from the runway, it’s a very old traditional building. Yeah, I can’t really see it from here, but you can see these towers here. Looks almost like mosque sort of architecture.
And I’m hopping in a taxi to take me to my hotel. So I’m going to take the easy route. There’s no airport bus here, no airport train or anything like that.
I’m sorry. I’ll have you. Yeah, sure. Okay. Do you mind being on video a little bit? Is that okay? Okay. Okay. This one I take with me. That’s okay.
Where? Come on. Oh, up here. Oh yeah, this side. I have wife and children. Okay.
Here we are. Banda Aceh. Banda Aceh. Welcome to Banda. Thank you. In the dark. I’m happy to get here.
He’s got to beep out with a card of some kind.
What is your name? Rizal. Rizal. Yeah, I’m Douglas. Douglas. Douglas. Douglas. Yeah.
Yeah. It’s so dark out here. Not many lights on the street.
Yeah, maybe as we ride into the city, I can tell a couple of stories. Yeah, I arrived at the airport in KL with two passports, an old passport and a new one. But that led to some trouble. So they had to bring me to an office and ask me all kinds of questions, you know, and change over everything from my old passport to my new one. And that took a while. And the flight was an hour late, one hour delay. And then when I arrived here in Banda Aceh, for some reason they said my visa did not match my passport. Your passport? Yeah. They said the number doesn’t match. But then they showed me my visa and the passport and the number was the same. Exactly the same. But they kept saying, “No, it doesn’t match.” And I said, “Well, it does match here. P126.” You know, it’s exactly the same. And they kept saying, “No, no, no. It’s different.” But I have no idea what they were talking about. So they took my passport and my visa and went off somewhere else on a computer, did all kinds of work on a computer, and then they came back and said, “Oh, it’s okay. No problem.” But I have no idea what that was about either. And you probably can’t see me at all. But they also have this system here in Indonesia where you register your phone with customs, the IMEI number. And I’ve had a lot of issues with that system. And this time I went into the customs office to register my phone thinking, well, it’s already registered, but maybe here at customs they can unblock it or re-register it. So I went into the customs office and I was waiting there about 20 minutes. And then a man came in and said, “Well, how long are you going to stay?” And I said, “Well, 30 days.” And he says, “Oh, you don’t need to register.” I tried to explain to him that my phone was already registered but it was blocked. But he couldn’t understand what I was talking about. Oh, there’s some of the farming country that I was talking about, like villages, all kinds of rice fields. The airport is surrounded by rice paddies. You can’t see it from here, but yeah, it’s very beautiful flying into Banda Aceh.
So we’re on a much larger road now heading into the city. You can see there’s some of the nightlife.
And I don’t know if you can make this out on Google Maps, but there’s the airport on the right, Sultan Iskandar Muda International Airport. It’s kind of way out in the countryside. The blue dot over there on the left is me in the taxi, and we’re trying to get over to that red dot. That’s where my hotel is located. That’s another story because I accidentally booked the wrong hotel. There were two hotels here with almost identical names. It’s very confusing. And I’m 100% sure I clicked on the right hotel on Google Maps and reserved a room there. I’m positive I did it. But then when I looked at my Agoda listing, I was booked at an entirely different hotel about three, four, maybe five kilometres away. Not nearly as good a location, but anyway, I tried to cancel it, but I couldn’t. So that’s where I’m staying for now. Yeah, here we are in the dark.
Yeah, because of the one-hour time difference with Malaysia, it feels like it gets darker here a lot faster. So in Malaysia right now it’s 7:00 p.m., but here in Indonesia it’s 6:00 p.m. So this is what it looks like at 6:00 p.m. here, the same as it would at 7:00 p.m. in Kuala Lumpur. So it gets darker a lot earlier here. And it gets lighter a lot earlier in the morning.
We are slowly zeroing in on my hotel. Yeah, I talked to a lot of people about my hotel and nobody knows the name of it. Nobody recognises it. It’s too small. And Rizal doesn’t know. Yeah, he doesn’t know the hotel either. But I typed the name of it into his phone, so he has mapping directions to get there. But you get a lot of these roads in Indonesia that are divided and you can’t turn right because the road is blocked. It’s got a cement divider running all down the middle. So you have to go all the way to the end, do a U-turn, and then come all the way back again, which is what we just did. So basically this is sort of my neighbourhood now. So I can look around me to get oriented, things that I need. There’s an Indomaret over there. Bukalapak right there. There’s a Bukalapak place.
But we’re actually still pretty far from my hotel in a way because we had to go so far in order to do a U-turn.
Hopefully there’s a set of shops right near my hotel. That will be convenient. We’ll see. It’s going to be a big surprise. So yeah. Here’s the street that goes to my hotel on the left. Oh, got an archway up here heading into this neighbourhood.
And assuming the pin on Google Maps. That’s it. Such a long complicated name. Even the computer was having trouble getting it all out. Yeah. Look at this. Pitch black back here. Very little in the way of lights.
The road should turn a little bit to the right here and then should be around this corner on the right.
Okay. What a quiet neighbourhood.
Yeah. My first choice was right in the heart of downtown, like in a really busy downtown area. So that’s where I wanted to stay, but by accident I ended up out here. So we’ll see. We’ll see how this turns out.
Getting close. Okay, there it is. Hotel. Yeah, there’s so many different names. Even the name on the sign is different. Tsacita Residence. That’s different from all the other names. I’ve arrived. I recognise the layout of the building from Google Maps, the listing. That’s kind of… yeah, very interesting place.
Yeah, that wasn’t how I normally like to arrive in a new country. I like to have things very slow and yeah, very deliberately paced, but everything was kind of chaotic as soon as I landed. Going all the way back to KL, of course. Everything was chaotic when I was there as well. This whole trip has been sort of out of control to an extent. And then when I landed at the airport, yeah, everything just sort of felt out of my control. And of course as soon as I stepped outside, it’s such a small airport. You can’t really hide from all of the taxi drivers. So as soon as you step outside, there’s just lots and lots of taxi drivers, you know, shouting at you, getting your attention. And then of course now you feel like you should be moving faster. People say you can just walk out of the airport and then walk down the street and summon a Grab and that kind of thing, but I don’t have internet access. I can’t summon a Grab, anything like that. So I just hopped in the taxi. And I normally would have taken a lot longer to get my bearings and slow down. And I like to arrive when it’s light out. I was hoping the flight was supposed to land when it was still light and then you can get your bearings, but yeah, because of the one-hour delay. Yeah, this is what it looks like. There’s the sky. It is dark. Cool-looking place though. My kind of place. Kind of old and traditional style.
And here we are. That’s the front desk. Kind of a comfy lounge area over here. There’s one of the rooms. Room 102. Oh, hello. And kitchen area. Name Douglas. Yes, Douglas. Yeah, that’s me there.
Douglas.
Up we go.
Wow. Very spacious place. Look at all this room everywhere.
Okay, cool. Thank you. Thank you.
And here we are. Home sweet home. I booked this place for five nights to give myself a nice soft landing when I got here. So yeah, twin room is what I ended up with, whether it has one big double or two twins. I actually kind of like having two twin beds like this. Yeah, very roomy place. Very old house, very old building. But it looks like that air conditioner is new, which is nice. A lot of space. Yeah, this place has got character. It’s got old bones.
Bathroom. Your basic… Let’s see if we have water.
We do. Going to let that fill up so I can take a bucket bath shower.
That short flight from KL to here really, really did me in. I don’t have much energy and I’m really sort of scattered right now. I normally, the first thing I do when I move into a new room, I just unpack instantly and I settle in and get organised. But I haven’t even had the energy to do that. But yeah, I’m going to head out into the streets. I want to find the nearest Indomaret because at the very least I need to buy water. So I’m going to head out into my local neighbourhood and go for a walk and then see if I can track down some water. So let’s go do that.
Okay, now that I’m outside my room, going to go get some water. It’s time to kind of just settle down. Get back into the normal rhythm. Slow and steady. That’s my normal pattern. Whoa. Holy mackerel. Look at that. That is the biggest mirror I have seen in a very long time. Wow. If I wanted to do the newest TikTok dance trends, you know, this is what the kids would use for all of that. Wow, that is something else. Oh, stairs heading up. I always follow the stairs. I have a feeling it’s going to be blocked up here. Maybe not. More rooms and a rooftop, I guess. Yeah, fascinating old building. So I guess they’ve got some rooms up here as well. Wow, much bigger place than I thought.
Balcony out here.
Huh. So there’s my neighbourhood. Very, very quiet, as you can tell. Very quiet. Oh, there’s a screen here. Wonder why. And got to get my bearings, figure out where the main road is. Turns out there’s an Indomaret not that far away. Maybe half a kilometre. Oh yeah, screen here too. Huh. Maybe they had issues with birds, like pigeons getting in here or something.
And I think the Indomaret is open 24 hours a day. So yeah, man, what a crazy, crazy building this is. See what else we can uncover.
Here’s the stairs that I came up. Oh yeah. Another balcony over here or veranda, whatever you want to call this.
There’s a stairway but it’s kind of blocked by… Whoa, scared me. Yeah, typical rooftop where all the junk goes to die or junk goes to get abandoned and yeah, it’s a nice view out over the city. Have to come out here in the morning, get a nicer look. I think it’s a very friendly city though. The longer the taxi ride went on from the airport, the busier and more urban it felt. Like when I first arrived at the airport I thought I was landing at a village based on what I saw outside the airplane windows. But then as we drove into town and the traffic was really chaotic, couple of near accidents. We were in quite a few near accidents just in that short ride, but got busier and busier and busier. So it started to feel more like a major city. But from up here right now it looks more like a small town than a major city. Just this neighbourhood. And yeah, I think it’s a very quaint, very friendly place. So is there anything else up here?
I wonder what these rooms are like. Whether these are like the much, much cheaper rooms that they don’t advertise. That’s often the case where a foreigner like me, like a foreign visitor, ends up in rooms that they advertise on Agoda, but then there might be local people staying here and they’ve got much, much cheaper rooms that they don’t actually advertise, but look at this area. That is so crazy. Looks like it used to be a zoo. I’m glad they’re not anymore. So I guess they escaped. Oh, got a lot of leaking. Yeah, the floor is pretty wet. That’s why they got the bucket there. So is this how I came up? Yeah, that’s my room over there. 203 right there.
So I think this is how I go down.
Oh yeah. Here’s the main lobby right out here. Like I said, they have so much space here that they could do something with if they needed to or wanted to. A whole dining area over here. No cooking facilities though. Just a sink. And then… Oh, they have water. Ooh, actual drinking water. Yeah. So that’s good. I didn’t realise they had that.
So let’s go outside.
Yeah. So there’s the name of this place. Very cool place. Very interesting. Has character for days hotel. Tsacita Residence. And then yeah, that’s the picture that you see on Google Maps. Look at that building. That is classic. And yeah, I think I can head this way. This road leads to a river and then I can follow kind of a creek or stream, something like that. And then from here I can turn, head back to the main road. Lot of big houses here. Look at that. So it’s a good chance that this belonged to a rich family, like it was a mansion for a wealthy family.
Very cool place.
I may learn to love this neighbourhood. It’s always fun to get to know a new neighbourhood. Got to find out where the best mie ayam bakso is. Things like that. Local coffee shops.
Yeah. Right here. Ayam penyet place looks good. Oh yeah. Okay. There’s life. There’s life in this neighbourhood.
Hello. How are you? Little shop here. Neighbourhood shop.
Another little restaurant over there. Has a lot of eateries right within a single city block. Very convenient. Not surprisingly, I went in the absolute wrong direction. I turned down the wrong road, but that’s okay. I found all these places too. There’s like an actual mie ayam bakso stall right there. So it was a happy accident to turn right instead of left. See a little bit more of this neighbourhood. I got to turn around and retrace my steps. No wonder I missed the turnoff. Look how dark it is. There’s like… Yeah, it’s pitch black, but this is the way that I wanted to go. This will take me over to a small river and I’ll walk along the river till I get back to the main road. Yeah, go up here, turn right, and then left at the main road.
Couple other interesting things about my trip to get here. I noticed when I was getting on my flight to here, of course as far as I could tell I was the only foreigner on the plane. I didn’t see any other Western tourists or visitors, anything like that. And I noticed a large number of women, like more than I would normally see. Most of the passengers on the plane were women, and they all seemed to be on their own. Like they weren’t with their husbands or with family. They were all with other women. So some sort of a big group. And I was wondering who are these women exactly. And they all seemed to be of the same age, you know, middle-aged housewives, that kind of person. And then a young woman sat down beside me. I had a window seat. And then this young woman, very friendly, very, very well-dressed, very nice, very well-spoken, sat down beside me. And it turned out she spoke English. Not only that, she was very self-confident in speaking with me and I was really happy about that. Gave me somebody to talk to because normally a local woman like that from Banda Aceh might be a little bit more reserved, a little bit more hesitant. But so I was chatting with her and then she told me in our conversation that she was the leader for a group of women going to Saudi Arabia for Umrah, a major Islamic pilgrimage going to Saudi Arabia for Umrah. And she works for a company that organises these tours and she was a leader of this group. It’s like ah, and that kind of made sense to me because all the women suddenly made sense. They were all going there for Umrah and there were a whole bunch of older women as well, like so elderly that they were in wheelchairs, they couldn’t walk on their own and they of course had been dreaming their entire lives of going to Saudi Arabia for Umrah and been saving money for it. I asked the leader how much it cost and she said the whole package was nine days long and includes the flight, includes accommodation, includes food and tours like tourism activities as well as the pilgrimage itself and it came to 25 million, which is like $1,500. So that can be a lot of money for someone to save up here. And yeah, so that’s what she was doing. I thought that was quite interesting.
I made it to the river. Oh, I have to remember where I turned. So if I’m coming up the river, there’s this house here with the gate and the cars in it. This is where I turned left to find my way back to my hotel. Of course if I don’t remember, that doesn’t matter these days since I have the power of Google Maps. Never used to be that way though. This reminds me of the old days where you really did have to leave yourself mental breadcrumbs. Especially if you arrived at night in an unfamiliar place in the dark and then you go out walking, you take one wrong turn and you’ll never find your way back again. And you had to remember every single corner. Make a mental note of where you turned left and right. Otherwise you’ll be lost forever. But yeah, here’s this river that I mentioned. It’s flowing. I can actually see the water flowing along.
I love a good river neighbourhood. Things open up around rivers. You can see more. So yeah, tomorrow when the sun is out I imagine I’ll be out here with one of my cameras, walking around in daylight just to explore this neighbourhood.
Coming up on the main road, the busy road, and the Indomaret should be off here to the left. The main reason I’m going to Indomaret is because I can top up my local e-wallet. Right now I have an OVO e-wallet and oh look at that little coffee shop over there. Baltic coffee and drinks.
And so I’m going to top up my e-wallet because I can use my e-wallet to buy data packages for my Indonesian SIM card. I’m assuming all of this is still working from my last visit. Who knows? Maybe my phone isn’t even blocked anymore, but I won’t know until I buy some data. And then once I have data I’ll know whether I can connect to mobile internet or not. So that’s my big adventure for tonight. Got to find this Indomaret. I think it’s up here somewhere.
I found the Indomaret. I got some water and some milk.
But I forgot about a couple of key factors about the modern world. Right now I’m not sure how I get past this. It’s like in order for me to put money in my e-wallet so that I can access the internet, I already have to have access to the internet, if you know what I mean. Because I go in there with my e-wallet on my phone and then I try to say, “Oh, I want to put 100,000 rupiah on my e-wallet.” I have to do it through the internet. So if I can’t connect to the internet I can’t buy the credit, and without the credit I can’t get on the internet. So it’s a catch-22. I run into that all the time. Like how do people deal with these things?
A funny side to my arrival here is that when I agreed to go with this taxi driver, he wanted to know the name of my hotel. Like where do you want to go? What’s your hotel? And I’m trying to tell him the name of the hotel, but as far as I know, like what I booked online and the pin on Google Maps, it says Hotel O Banda Aceh near the big mosque, like whatever. I can’t remember the name of the mosque right now, but the official name of the hotel according to Agoda is Hotel O Banda Aceh near the big mosque. So I tell him the name of the hotel. It’s the Hotel O Banda Aceh. He’s like, “Well yeah, I know that. You just landed at the Banda Aceh airport. I want to know the name of your hotel.” So I say to him, “Well, it’s the Hotel O Banda Aceh. That is the name of the hotel on Google Maps.” He, “No, no, no, no, no. I need the name of the hotel.” And I’m like, “I don’t know what else to tell you. That’s it.” And what I was trying to do when I was in the taxi was give him a local landmark. Like he doesn’t have to drop me off at the hotel. He’s just got to get me near the hotel. So I’m racking my brain. I’m looking at Google Maps and I’m trying to find a big landmark. I can tell him, “Oh, take me here.” And then drop me off and then it’s like half a kilometre. I can walk the rest of the way to my hotel. But because I don’t have internet on my phone, no SIM card, no data, I couldn’t find anything. It was like I’m zooming in on Google Maps but Google Maps wasn’t populating. Like none of the names were coming up. So I couldn’t even give him the name of something. And he was like, “What’s the name of your hotel?” And I’m like, “It’s the Hotel O Banda Aceh.” He’s like, “No, I know, but which one?” Anyway, that was really funny.
But anyway, I thought of that story because as I’m walking back to my hotel I noticed this hotel right here, 17 Hotel. And this, of course, that’s where I should be staying. Obviously that’s where normal people stay, the 17 Hotel. Much nicer new hotel. I didn’t know this hotel was here, but if I knew about that hotel I would have told the taxi driver, “Oh, take me to 17 Hotel.” And he would go, “Oh, I know that hotel.” Like “Don’t give me any of this O Banda hotel.” Like that’s not a real name. Well, it is. But anyway, if I’d had Google Maps available, if I had an internet connection, I could have told him, “Take me to 17.” He’d drop me off there and then I would just slink away into the dark and make my way to the hotel, you know, the hotel that I can actually afford. So yeah, that’s funny.
And there’s some sort of a shopping mall, like a shopping mall over here as well. Getting to know my neighbourhood in the dark. Oh, I think that might be the shopping mall right up there with the dome. This is the river that I walked over to get here to get the water.
Yeah, I’m going to miss my bicycle, that’s for sure. I’d really love to have a bike here. I’ll figure something out. Figure out a way to get around.
I’ve called up the name of my hotel. So my hotel is actually called Hotel O Banda Aceh near Masjid Raya Baiturrahman, formerly Wisma Tsacita. That’s the official name according to Google Maps and according to Agoda and Booking.com. So that’s a real mouthful. And if I remember right, my hotel is down here somewhere.
I’m going to walk just a few feet further. Just curious what’s right over here. Oh, look at that. Mie kungfu, Thai get ayam geprek for 10,000 rupiah.
Anyway, I think this is as far as I’m going to go. I’ve done enough. I’ve done enough today. I really have. So it’s time just to go back and settle into my room and unpack. Still haven’t unpacked and gotten organised.