VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
I love a good museum, and I try to make a habit of always visiting the local national or regional history and culture museum when I arrive in a new country or city. This gives me some background information for understanding the people, the food, the places, and all the experiences I’m going to have there.
I thought that was doubly important for the city of Banda Aceh, because most foreigners associate this city with two things: Sharia Law and the 2004 Tsunami. For that reason, if a foreign visitor goes to a museum at all, they will likely head straight for the Tsunami Museum. That is the most well-known attraction here.
Yet, as I talk about in the video, the Tsunami Museum is largely about the destruction of the city and the loss of life. But to truly understand that destruction, don’t you need to know something about WHAT was destroyed and about the people who died? I think having some understanding the region, its history and its people would deepen your understanding of the 2004 Tsunami and its impact
So before visiting the Tsunami Museum, I wanted to visit the Aceh Museum first. I was very glad I did.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I’ve arrived. That’s the museum over there. Right over there is a traditional Rumoh Aceh. Really stunning. Really well worth a visit just to see the architecture. Absolutely gorgeous. Really something to see.
Good morning. Welcome back to Planet Doug in Banda Aceh. And quite a few things have suddenly changed. The main thing that changed is the rain stopped. If you’ve been following the news, you know that Southeast Asia was hit by heavy, heavy rains. To me, it feels like it’s been raining forever. Just like every day, just non-stop rain through the day, through the night. And my neighbourhood in Banda Aceh where I was before, the road did get flooded, some yards got flooded, the power went out for like 24 hours, things like that. There was no running water in the hotel, no internet, no electricity. So yeah, life changed quite a bit. But then suddenly the rain stopped and let me show you the world out there. Can’t see a whole lot of it, but look at that sky. Blue sky. Sunshine down there. So the rain finally stopped.
There was some pretty severe flooding around Aceh Province, North Sumatra. I’m sure you’ve probably seen some video of that online if you’ve been paying attention. But I’m not aware of any like terrible flooding here in Banda Aceh itself. Like nothing, no buildings were coming down, things like that. At least not that I’m aware of. But man, it is so nice that the sun finally came out and life can kind of get back to normal.
And the other big thing that changed is I changed hotels. I did that yesterday. I didn’t take any video of it. I just packed up at my old hotel and I walked here. It was about three kilometres to get here. And yeah, what a change. I liked the old hotel. I was staying at the Residence Cikini something or something like that. And it’s an old building, very worn out. You know, during the rain the leaks were coming through the roof everywhere. My room was pretty beat up, pretty old. Everything was kind of broken down, really dirty. I spent like half a day myself with soap and a scrubber cleaning down my whole bathroom because it was really unlivable even for me. I had to give it a good scrubbing just so I could live there. So yeah, a pretty rough-and-ready place, but it cost $5 a night.
And the bathroom of course was just a big bucket with a tap. Sometimes water came out of the tap, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes the water was like dark brown and black even because of all the dirt and stuff coming out with the water. You had to run it for a long time to finally get clear water. So yeah, pretty rough kind of place, but I enjoyed the neighbourhood. The building was really funky. Nice people staying there, running the place. So I had a good time there.
But now I’ve moved to the Mulana. It’s another, it’s like a collection of, Banda Aceh, formerly Hotel Mulana, and it may or may not still be an OYO hotel. I’m not sure. It has OYO branding on the walls and on the sign outside, but the bed doesn’t have OYO pillows or OYO stuff. So I don’t know what their situation is now. It feels like a family-run hotel. And this one is a bit more expensive. I got it at a good price. Like I said, I was paying $5 a night, which is like 80,000 rupiah at the other place through Agoda. Here I managed to get it for 130,000 per night for five nights, and that’s $8. So I went from $5 a night to $8.
But for my extra $3 a night I got a lot. I mean, here, I’ll spin the GoPro around. So this is the room. Much bigger, much more spacious. I don’t have it on the bed right now, but it actually comes with a duvet, like a really nice comforter, like a duvet here which is really thick and heavy, really comfortable. Really nice pillows, beautiful sheets. Everything’s really, really clean. Nice big bed, desk with a chair, and there’s even a lockable cupboard over there for storage, put your things away. There’s the OYO branding that I mentioned. Beautiful window over there, window over there. Look at all this space. A mirror with a sink. There’s actually a sink with running water. Seems to be running all the time, which is very cool.
Here’s the view out of this window. And of course air conditioning, brand new air conditioner. And the bathroom is a bit of a revelation too because I didn’t realise it until this morning. There’s no bucket bath or anything. It has an actual shower and it has hot water. So this is not just for show in this direction. You get hot water and cold water. So all day yesterday I was just taking cold showers because I assumed that’s all you got. But this morning I just thought, “Oh, I wonder,” and I moved it over here and hot water came out, like blistering hot water. So you can adjust it and get the perfect temperature. Nice roomy bathroom. They supply towels. My old hotel, the $5 a night, you didn’t get towels there. You didn’t get anything. But here you get towels and soap in the bathroom. So yeah, really, really big step up in the world for me to move into a hotel room like this. And yeah, $8 a night at the moment. I think it’s often a little bit more than that, like 150,000 per night is the normal rate, but if you check in on Agoda from time to time you can get it for 130,000 per night, $8. So anyway, between $8 and $10 a night for this room. So that’s pretty amazing.
So my plan right now is to go to a couple of museums, maybe just one, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I’m going to start with the Aceh Museum and I’ll talk about that on my way there. I’m going to walk there. And rather than make the whole video about the museum, I thought I would show you my new hotel.
This is the hallway outside my room. I think they gave me the good room in a way, room seven, because it’s the corner room, so it gets two windows instead of one, and it’s way down at the end which makes it nice and quiet. So I appreciate that. The one downside is that I think this is the router over here for Wi-Fi or something like that, and the Wi-Fi doesn’t really reach my room. I get a trickle of internet there but not very much.
And look at this, right on my floor a big common area, tables and chairs where you can sit with windows and fresh water, as much water as you want. You can get it from here, hot and cold. That’s very, very cool. They even supply some cups and things.
There’s the view from the Hotel Mulana, temple right beside it. And look at that, that’s one thing I really wanted to point out. Directly across the road an Indomaret. That’s very, very handy for people like me. For us foreign visitors it’s always nice to be right beside a convenience store. Yeah, look at this place. Very, very nice.
And then the downstairs area is very, very similar, very wide open and spacious and family-run. As I said, I think it has very much a family atmosphere because I think the whole family that runs the place, they sleep in these rooms down here. I see family members pouring in and out. And I think they have their family meals around these tables here. So this is like the family living room in a way. This is their own dining room. Yeah, interesting place. So here’s the main floor. Really nice service when I showed up for check-in and all that kind of stuff.
Outside of the hotel, I actually visited this hotel quite a while ago. I was walking around Banda Aceh before the rains hit and I decided to check out some other hotels. To be honest, this was actually the hotel where I intended to stay long ago when I first came to Banda Aceh. I clicked on this hotel, I thought when I booked my room, but I accidentally, I guess I clicked on the wrong one. So even though I intended to stay here at the Hotel Mulana—oh, here it’s Mulana, not Mulani—Mulana, I ended up somewhere else entirely.
And this is really great too. Right here there’s a juice stand. In the last video I was shooting I was talking about how I missed all of my juice from Tang Balai because everywhere I went in Tanjungbalai I would see like a beautiful juice place. You can get mango juice, avocado juice, banana smoothies, you could get them everywhere. But here I didn’t see them in Banda Aceh. But my hotel, right here, juice-smoothie place right there and an Indomaret right here. So pretty convenient.
And I discovered yesterday that there is a food street like maybe half a kilometre, 300 metres in this direction, a big main street packed with restaurants. There’s an amazing mie Aceh box place there, that’s where I had dinner last night. So, and there are restaurants around here too. Hello.
But here we are in friendly Sumatra right out of the gate, people saying hello. The river is right here. There’s a river park. So this is the way I’m going to walk. There’s big coffee shops and restaurants right here. Getting across this intersection, I probably should do it one street at a time. It’s not very easy. Yeah, I think if you cross this one first and then that one. The first time I did it I was just blindly walking out across here and you have vehicles coming at you from all directions. Best to do it one street at a time.
Yeah. So right here is like a big eating spot here. There’s a big coffee shop over there.
There’s quite an interesting place right up ahead on the right. So as we walk this direction you could cut over to the river, walk along the river. There’s a path here, but there’s a—yeah, there’s a really fascinating little, I think it’s an old bus station, a bus terminal I think, but I don’t know what it’s used for now. But anyway, I’ll show it on video when I get there. I didn’t notice that until just now, right on the river.
So long coffee. If I wasn’t on my way somewhere specific—the museum closes at noon and they’re very serious about afternoon prayers here in Banda Aceh, so everything closes for two hours. So if it closes at noon it’s not going to open again until two or sometimes even three. So I don’t want to dilly-dally. I do want to get to the museum before, yeah, leaving enough time to explore and relax. So I’m not stopping for coffee is what I’m saying.
But yeah, let’s pop across the road here. If you haven’t seen this in my previous video, it’s kind of cool to check out the river over here. Yeah, the water level went way, way up during the rains. I don’t think this river went over its edges, so I don’t think this river flooded. It would have to come up really high to flood Banda Aceh. So I don’t think it even reached the top of this area though, it might have. I wasn’t out here at that time. You can still see it’s running pretty high, pretty fast on the river right beside my hotel.
When I walked out I walked alongside, I think, a tributary to this river and all along the edges the monitor lizards had come out. I saw six of them in a row. And as I was walking along they would sense me coming and then they all went into the water one by one by one. They were quite big ones, maybe six feet long, couple of metres, maybe not a full two metres long but maybe some of them may have been that big. Beautiful animals.
Okay, here’s what I was talking about. I’m pretty sure this was a bus terminal. I came in yesterday from the other side and I saw a sign that said something about terminal something or other. But then when you go in, seems like they still use it as a transportation hub. Like these vehicles here, I don’t know where they go exactly but they seem to use it as a gathering point to pick up passengers.
And then I guess back when it was a real bus terminal these would have controlled buses going in and out. But it looks like people live in them now. I’m not really sure. When I saw them people were like inside. You can see like that one there was like a house. It’s got all the laundry on the outside, a lock on the door. So I think people, the squatters kind of live there now. But yeah, you can see this was like entry laneways for buses, probably regional buses, and then they would all park over here and take on passengers, but it’s all not operating anymore.
And then over here there’s a kos, like lodging house, long-term lodging, inexpensive rooms by the month. Students stay in a lot of those. But yeah, check this out.
When I came through here yesterday it was in the evening. Yeah, looks like these were the toilets for the bus terminal. I have no idea whether they’re functional or not anymore. I’m not going to go over there to investigate.
And this looks like this would have been part of the—there’s someone over there yelling at somebody who doesn’t exist. So I’ll move in this direction. People like that, if they see a foreigner they do like to engage. So it’s best to not make eye contact and just sort of don’t go in their direction when you see them.
But yeah, look at this. It’s just like a nice, almost like a park in a way. All these trees giving a lot of nice shade. I don’t know why I find it so fascinating. I guess abandoned buildings interest me, abandoned places, things that had a function but they don’t operate anymore. Like this bus terminal. And I think a little market grows up here at night. They can put up some lights and sell things. Yeah, little restaurant there. Good morning.
And the kos. Hello. Yeah, places like this kos would be fascinating if you could like wave a magic wand and just get the story, the life story of every person living in that kos. Like who are you and what are you doing here? How, you know, your life in this kos? It would be pretty fascinating. But as a foreigner, yeah, language barrier and figuring all these things out, it’s not very easy.
Yeah, it looks like there’s still a little bit of a transportation area still. Becak pick people up here. No, just a jalan. Jalan.
No, just a walk, walk, walk. It’s okay. No, thank you.
Yeah, he sees my GoPro. Hello. And he’s like suggesting, “Hey, you want to film the city? Hop in my becak.” Hey, hello. Good morning.
So I’m going to walk along the river for a while. The Aceh Museum is a history-culture museum. Of course it’s the state museum of Aceh Province.
I always like to start with a museum like that. Gives you a sense of where you are. I think many foreigners or maybe all foreigners associate Banda Aceh with the 2004 tsunami, the destruction and the rebuilding and recovering. And of course I think they would head straight for the Tsunami Museum where I plan to go as well. But I was thinking that the Tsunami Museum is all about the tsunami destroying the city and then the rebuilding-recovery process. But to fully understand the tsunami, don’t you have to know what was destroyed? If you see my logic. Sure, it’s one thing to think about a giant wave destroying much of a city, but shouldn’t you start by knowing, well, what city? What kind of a city was it? Who lived there? The history of it, the people who lived there—that might be important information to understanding the tsunami event itself. So anyway, I thought I would start my understanding of the tsunami in Banda Aceh with a visit to the Aceh Museum.
There’s the river.
If you’ve followed my channel for a while you know that I have a strong personal interest in this kind of thing. Not to retell the whole story, but I was in the city of Tacloban in the Philippines when a super typhoon hit that city. And an interesting thing that not a lot of people in the West know about a typhoon is that it creates its own version of a tsunami. They call it a storm surge, but in many, many respects there’s not much difference between a storm surge and a tsunami. So essentially a tsunami hit Tacloban City while I was in a hotel just 300 metres from the shore and I ended up experiencing all of that—all of the destruction, all of the people who died, the body recovery afterward—and I stayed in Tacloban for nearly two months.
Heat. Heat.
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think—
I did not jump.
Oh my God.
Yes. Yes.
Good morning.
So hot. So hot.
I’m going to play—
Ironically or luckily in a way, just before the typhoon and the storm surge hit Tacloban I had just extended my visa. Like in Tacloban City, that’s why I went to Tacloban, was because they had an immigration office and I went to the immigration office, got another 60 days on my tourist visa, and then right after I got that 60-day extension the typhoon hit. So I had 60 days on my tourist visa. It feels a bit odd to think, okay, in the middle of life-and-death destruction of a city— the numbers go as high as like 15,000 people died in Tacloban—so it was a big deal. So you think in the face of that, worrying about your tourist visa is a bit irrelevant. But no, you’ve always got to worry about your visa. It dominates your whole life as a foreigner overseas. So the fact that I had 60 days on my tourist visa meant that even though the city around me had been destroyed I didn’t have to leave right away and I actually stayed in Tacloban and watched the entire rebuilding and reconstruction process and all the aid, the international aid that flowed into the city. I was like a firsthand witness to all of this and I’ve never stopped thinking about it. So much food for thought just constantly going around and around in my mind.
So when I’m here in Banda Aceh, a place that was hit by a tsunami and went through a very similar thing, I have my own perspective on it. So I find it quite fascinating.
Yeah, things like right here for example. I talked about this in my previous video that this river goes right down to the shore over here and the tsunami would have come up this river. And there’s a lot of video footage online that you can see of bridges like this one where the tsunami is coming up the river and it’s pushing a massive collection of debris—boats, cars, houses that have been shattered into thousands of pieces of wood—all being pushed up river and then it jams against the bridge, all this debris. And this is one of many, many things that I learned when I was in Tacloban. And you see it in the videos all the time. But when you watch all the documentaries—there’s a lot of them, like there are a lot of documentaries about the 2004 tsunami hitting not just Sumatra, not just Banda Aceh but many cities around Sumatra and other countries. The tsunami hit Thailand of course. Because there were a lot of foreigners in the beach resorts in Thailand you do get a lot of video there because there were tourists there taking video of their holiday and they caught a lot of video of the arrival of the tsunami and the destruction. So you see a lot of video from Thailand. In a way you see a lot more personal video of the tsunami from Thailand than you do from here because not as many people were taking video with their smartphones and cameras and things like that.
There is an incredible story from Sri Lanka you can look up online where there was a train, a crowded passenger train on a journey on the train tracks, and when the tsunami hit the train stopped because there was word of danger ahead on the tracks, something going on, and then while all the people were in the train the tsunami hit the shore and then carried right over the train.
So you got stories from all over Asia where the tsunami hit, not just here in Sumatra. And in all of these videos you can see how much debris there is in the water. And yet I don’t think I’ve yet come across a single documentary that points out the significance of this because so many people drowned in the tsunami here in the Indian Ocean. But in Tacloban where I was, yeah, the main cause of death was drowning. And then you think just as an outsider just sort of thinking about it, you think, well I’m a strong swimmer. I mean when I look out at this river and I think, well I can swim across this river no problem. And during a tsunami a big wave comes in and the river rises—well I’m not going to drown because I can swim. It doesn’t matter that the water is deeper. But it isn’t the water that was the problem. It was the debris in the water. And when you see those videos yeah you start to understand it: that when you’re engulfed by this it’s almost like a landslide made out of wood and metal and it’s just churning. And I don’t care how strong a swimmer you are, you get caught in all that debris you’re going under and you’re going to drown.
And a really good example of this is the movie—I think it’s called The Impossible—is a movie, like a Hollywood film that was made about the tsunami hitting Thailand. One of the beach resorts. It’s a story of I think a British family that was—it’s a true story—and this family was on vacation staying at a beachside resort when the tsunami hit. And it has the most graphic illustration of the effect of being caught in this flood of water that is filled with debris. I mean it’s absolutely brutal. It’s a hard watch that movie, but it feels very accurate to me based on my experiences in Tacloban and watching as much online tsunami video as I can get my hands on, where what it would be like to be caught in a raging flood but not just a flood of water but pieces of wood, sharp wood, nails, metal, everything just churning. And yeah, it just cuts you apart, holds you underwater, breaks your limbs. I mean that—but no documentary has ever mentioned that that I’ve come across: the effect of the debris in the water and the debris afterward. Like in Tacloban the entire city was impassable because every street was just like five to ten feet deep of debris. All of that had to be cleared out before you could even—like rescue and relief efforts couldn’t even get into the city because there were no more roads and all that debris that clogged the roads had to be moved first. It was a very fascinating process. But I find an analysis of the debris in a tsunami—I’ve never seen a documentary about that. Not yet.
Something else I’ve been thinking about since I’ve arrived in Banda Aceh, which again I haven’t seen mentioned in any movies or documentaries yet, is how flat Banda Aceh is. It feels to me so flat. Yesterday when I moved to this new hotel I went out looking, just exploring my neighbourhood, I went for a walk and it struck me again that it was just like prairie flat, like Canadian prairie flat, just sort of sloping—not even sloping—just like a flat plane heading all the way to the ocean. And this flatness of Banda Aceh, it seems like a very low city and very, very flat, that if a huge tsunami hits—and again this is something else about tsunamis that a lot of people don’t realise—it doesn’t look like the Hollywood version of a tsunami. It isn’t like a giant wall of water that somebody could surf on the way in. It’s not really like that at all. It’s like a massive thick wall of water that just pushes inland, just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. And it’s more like an incoming tide. Like if you watch a tide coming in on an ocean, that’s kind of what a tsunami looks like. And yet the tsunami tide just doesn’t stop. It reaches the shore and then it just keeps coming and coming and coming and then it just goes inland a far, far distance. And it’s like a fast incoming tide rather than a wave per se. And here in Banda Aceh I can see one of these tsunamis hitting the shore and because this area is so flat and it remains flat for such a long distance I can just see this flood, this incoming tide just surging inland, unstoppable, because there’s really nothing here to stop it.
But again I haven’t heard anybody talk about how the flatness of this land mass here and how low it is contributed to the devastating effect of the 2004 tsunami. Maybe there have been some specialty geographers’ videos that talked about it or analysed it, I’m not really sure. But yeah, something else I’ve been thinking about.
Stunning day. Absolutely gorgeous. I guess a week or ten days of non-stop rain really makes you appreciate it when you have a day like today.
I stopped here on the river because right across the road you can see the name of that on the sign there: Iskandar Muda. And I believe that’s a military base of some kind, a military complex. And the name Iskandar Muda, it’s going to come up when we go to the museum. I’m getting close to the museum I think.
Right over there is the main mosque of Banda Aceh. I haven’t visited the mosque yet. Perhaps today, a beautiful day like today would have been a good day to go there, but we’ll see.
Yeah, the mosques are a very important part of the story of the tsunami as well because this mosque and several others—hello—are quite well known because they survived the tsunami’s impact when a lot of other buildings did not. And I did see some documentary discussion about that, about how the architecture and the engineering and the design of them was such that the tsunami could kind of go through the mosque without tearing the whole thing down because the building was supported on pillars. So the water didn’t just hit a wall, destroy the wall and bring the building down. It would actually flow through the mosque and not have as much effect on the pillars. So they were much stronger structures. And the fact that the mosques survived the tsunami gave people a lot of inspiration that God had spared the mosque from the destruction of the tsunami and they became centres of hope and rebuilding for the local people.
So there’s some—one in particular I know, there’s probably one of the most famous photographs to come out of the tsunami is of a mosque on the coast that is just sitting all by itself in a field, the only building still standing and everything else around it had been completely flattened and just wiped off the face of the earth and the only building left was the mosque. So the mosques are a big part of the tsunami story as well.
So I think the museum is up ahead on the left there, kind of in perhaps a park setting.
Got to get across this intersection bit by bit, lane by lane. Looks like I can walk alongside another—this isn’t the main river anymore, I left it behind. This is a small tributary but it looks like it has a little bit of a tree-lined park going alongside it.
Got a sign here. It’s one of those signs that’s so big you have to be far away in order to read it. I have no idea what it says. Kota Pusaka. Very nice though. Gives you a sense of how attractive the city of Banda Aceh can be.
Any city that has this many rivers running through it is a very lucky city. You get to have all of these riverside parks. I’ve talked about that a lot in the past in my life, where there are some places around the world that have the most amazing waterfronts, either ocean or river or lake, and yet they squander them. All they do is take like a busy road like this and build it right to the edge of the water so it basically cuts the river off. Like normal people can never access the river in any way. But then you get some cities that either were smarter or through historical chance ended up preserving a lot of the riverfront for parks and pathways. And I mean this one is a little bit in between I suppose. You got the big busy road right there which is essentially blocking most people from getting to the river. But they managed to keep this narrow strip right here right beside the river, little bit of a walkway. And you can see on the other side looks quite nice. All of these houses have a front yard basically that touches the river and they build little shelters here. They probably serve coffee and drinks there at night. Yeah, rivers are amazing in a city. This is quite a nice pathway. I’m in the shade, all these trees.
I’ve arrived. That’s the museum over there. Right over there is a traditional Rumoh Aceh. I think that particular Rumoh Aceh is quite old. I think it dates back to like 1915 or something like that, could be wrong about that, but it was built somewhere else and then they moved it here to be part of the museum. So I don’t know how many buildings are involved. I see one here that says museum on it. There’s this one that’s probably the main building and then the Rumoh Aceh over there. What a beautiful, beautiful setting. That is really nice. It looks like they have a little bridge across the river for access. Cannot get any nicer than that. Oh yeah, a gateway right there. It says Museum Aceh.
Let’s see what we can learn about the history of Aceh Province and Banda Aceh in particular. Wow, look at this. This is much bigger deal than I expected. Look at the sign, the size of it: Museum Aceh.
What an incredible walkway too, an entrance. There’s the sign. They’ve got a café apparently.
And if we just walk across here, can we get a nice view of the entrance? Yeah, look at that. Much, much bigger, much nicer than I expected.
I went to their website and I noticed they had an option for buying an e-ticket and I was wondering if I could buy the e-ticket and pay for it using an e-wallet, like using QRIS to pay for the ticket, but they sent me an email with my e-ticket in it but I never saw it. It hasn’t arrived.
Yeah, look at this. Isn’t that gorgeous? What a setting for a museum. The setting alone is worth coming here.
And over there I imagine a lot of school trips have passed through here. If you look at all the photos online you see a lot of very well-dressed, like on Google Maps listing for this museum you see a lot of group photos of people in their best clothing, school uniforms, all posing for pictures.
So okay, let’s see how the process works. Must be a window over here to buy a ticket.
Ticket there. Okay, thank you.
So here is the ticket office. I guess the guard pointed me in this direction. Museum Aceh. This is the library of our history.
I hear footsteps coming up behind me. Might be a school group wanting to take a selfie with me. Let’s see if they catch me before I disappear into the ticket office.
Okay, here we are. Tickets and information café. And there’s the Rumoh. Look at that. That is a gorgeous building. From a distance I saw that it was all exposed underneath and I thought, “Oh, maybe it’s not a true Rumoh.” But all the rooms, the living space is all up at the top there. The whole thing is up on stilts. Beautiful.
And here’s a beautiful model.
And another one over here, the main mosque.
There’s the pricing for children, anak-anak 3,000; adults 5,000; and foreigners 15,000. Okay.
Satunya Canada.
So here at the Museum Aceh they have a QRIS symbol and I’m going to pay with an e-wallet.
Lima belas ribu. 15,000.
So there you have it, you can use your Touch ’n Go e-wallet to pay for a ticket at Museum Aceh.
Right out of the gate we’ve got a fascinating exhibit. This is all about the history of the great mosque Baiturrahman. So the great mosque of Banda Aceh. And I guess this was the original mosque dating all the way back to 1873. This was before the great war between the Dutch and the Acehnese. So this is the original design of the mosque from 1873. Very simple, very traditional. And then it moved on to this. I guess the old one was torn down completely. And this is from 1879 where they added a high dome. So it’s a completely new structure in 1879 and they’re calling it built by the Netherlands Indian government. And then moving on to 1936, Governor Van der—yeah, it’s a Dutch name—so he would have been a Dutch governor. And they added two domes, one on the left, one on the right, and they kept the central dome. And then the final model doesn’t have a date on it but that is how it looks today with five domes and then the two towers. So yeah, very, very cool to see the history from very local, very simple, jumping ahead to a single dome, three domes, and then five domes here. This is all at the entrance like where the ticket counter is.
And it looks like that building over there, that’s the permanent exhibit building right there. And then off on this side is the Rumoh. So I’m going to start with the Rumoh Aceh.
I’m very familiar with the concept because these communal like family-based or clan-based buildings are very common in the Bukittinggi area with the Minangkabau people. And I believe from what I read online that bell was a gift from the emperor of China back in the days when the Aceh Sultanate was a regional power, controlled a lot of trade in this area, a lot of military conquests, a lot of cultural development. This was all taking place back in the 1600s and 1700s. And I believe this bell was given as a gift from the emperor of China. I only know that because I read about it online. So far I don’t see any information about it here which is unfortunate. Yeah, there’s nothing here describing the history of this bell but yeah, I think it’s quite an important symbol of the connection between the Acehnese sultanate and the empire of China.
And that building there houses temporary exhibits but I don’t know whether there’s any temporary exhibits ongoing or not.
So Rumoh Aceh. I’m not sure if we’re allowed to go inside or not. I see a lot of footprints. I’m heading up the stairs but it appears to be closed, so we’ll see.
Yeah, reminds me very much of the Bukittinggi area, the Minangkabau Rumah Gadang there. I’m trying to remember the name there. It’s like Rumah Gadang I think is the name in the Bukittinggi area, Rumah Gadang, something like that.
So we have some history here for me to read through. Oh, looks like this is the entrance here. So we can go inside. I see people coming out.
And this exhibit discusses the construction of the house, including a lot of tradition and ritual involved in how it was built and some practical ideas as well. It’s oriented in certain ways to point towards Mecca for prayers and also to resist heavy winds during the storm season and things like that. Colours and shapes and the number of pillars are all dictated by history and tradition. Yeah, very interesting.
Anyway, I popped my shoes off because I’m assuming you have to go in here barefoot and I’m just going to go up and take a look around.
Welcome to Aceh House.
Thank you.
Okay. Rumoh Aceh, the Rumoh house. Your ticket.
Oh, sure. I don’t know if it’s Rumoh house ticket. Museum ticket.
Museum ticket. Okay.
Yeah, little English.
Beautiful on the inside, just as nice as the outside. Look at the woodwork. Very nice.
So I guess this is the front veranda for prayers facing in the proper direction. Yeah, it’s a very nice man there welcoming you to the inside and you sign in at a little book there and show your ticket. Yeah, it’s nice and cool.
Much more elaborate than I was expecting, particularly with the furnishings. It would have had to have been quite a wealthy family that would have a bed like that I would think.
And then another airy veranda area on this side as well. Wow, that is really nice.
The kitchen. Oh, I’m surprised they actually have a cooking area up here. I would have thought all of the cooking would be down below at ground level underneath. Perhaps this was just put here as an exhibit and they didn’t actually do the cooking in here. Feels like that would be something they would do outside.
So this area is known as the front veranda and it’s an area to receive guests and a dining area for extended family and a place for prayer, Quran recitation and study and discussions, things like that. So yeah, this part of the building they call the front veranda and I guess guests can also sleep here overnight in this part of the Rumoh Aceh.
In this central area is for the main family and interestingly enough from reading through here the daughter seems to be the most honoured member of the family. So this elaborate sleeping area is for the daughter of the house. And even when she’s married it says that her husband will sleep in a—they will sleep together but he often sleeps in a different area, more of a study house for studying the Quran is where the husband would sleep. Very interesting.
And the furniture they have on display at this side is a traditional seating area for a bride and groom. When they get married they would sit here to receive guests and blessings, things like that. And I’m assuming that when this house was like being used by a family there would be kind of curtains separating them because that would be considered one room and this would be considered a separate room. And then this door is like a connecting space between the front veranda, the family’s living area, and then the rear veranda. I think that’s called the west veranda.
Yeah, this is the central veranda. So it’s the private area for the homeowner.
And then this area I noticed on my first walk through that it had a kitchen at this end and I wondered whether that was realistic or not, whether they would actually be cooking inside the building. But according to this, yeah, they did. This was the kitchen where the cooking would take place and it was situated here because of the wind direction so that the smoke doesn’t blow into the main house. And one fascinating aspect that they talk about here is that the roof is held in place by a very clever set of ropes, fibre ropes, palm-fibre ropes. And they do that for safety reasons. If there is ever a fire and the roof catches fire they only have to cut one rope and the entire roof comes off so that the fire doesn’t spread to the main building. Very clever.
And this is another resting area, bedroom for other family members and for storage for crops and farming tools and things like that.
Beautiful building. Really nice. I think in real life of course it would have much more of a lived-in feeling. This is set up much more as a museum display. But yeah, look at that beautiful bassinet for a baby. Yeah, in real life of course there’d probably be kids running around, jumping and playing. It would have much more of a rougher lived-in feeling. But yes, really stunning. Really well worth a visit just to see the architecture.
Looks like a very natural kind of construction as well. These are the pillars and these huge beams are simply resting on top of the pillar. And I noticed that right here where the roof joist is going across they have like holes that they drilled and then rods, like wooden rods, just stick through the holes to hold the wood in place. So it’s not like they’re hammered together with metal nails or screws or anything like that. It’s all natural joinery, very simple joinery I think.
Yeah, right there it looks like there’s a square post that the main pillar is carved down to a square and it goes through a hole in the beam that goes across. Again very simple construction but looks to be quite effective.
And even here on the veranda on the outside you can see that the big planks that support the roof just go through a hole that was cut through the wood there. And then some thin dowels I guess you would call them are inserted through the holes that are drilled there to keep them in place. Yeah, very nice construction.
And here we get a closer look at what I was talking about where the pillar is carved into a square shape and then it is inserted through a hole to hold everything together.
This is the top of the stairs coming in. Has a very heavy door that closes over top. And then the stairs very steep and narrow. So definitely want to be careful and holding on going down here.
And I noticed on my way in there was this large traditional container here and this is for holding rice. Crops are stored in here and this is part of the typical Rumoh Aceh construction.
Yeah. So here’s the building from the outside. Absolutely gorgeous. Really something to see.
This is interesting. This gives the history of the museum. And as I suspected, this Rumoh Aceh was the first building at the museum. In fact this building from 1914-1915 was the entire museum. This building was the whole museum on its own. And I guess it was set up as a display, an Aceh pavilion, and it was set up at an exhibition not here but somewhere else in Sumatra, won all kinds of medals, and then it was suggested that they transported this pavilion from the exhibition centre to here and create a museum. So there it is in 1914 the original building, and after the exhibition as it says here that was moved to Kotaraja—that’s the old name for Banda Aceh—and then it was relocated again in ’69 to where it is now.
Okay, so the temporary exhibit I think it’s closed. It turns out this temporary exhibit, sort of special exhibit area, is open. So I came inside and I went all the way through it but I went in the wrong direction. I turned to the right and then went around in a circle back here. But then I just realised this is where you’re supposed to start. So I should have come in and turned to the left.
And here it begins with the history of the Aceh Sultanate going back to the 1500s. And there is a documentary playing over there but yeah I have to sort of talk over top of it. But yeah, it does have a very interesting history, distinct from the rest of Sumatra and the rest of Indonesia I think.
And one of the key figures that I know about, I recognised the photo instantly. This is—and there’s the name down there—Sultan Iskandar Muda. And he ruled from 1607 to 1636 and he brought the Acehnese, the Aceh Sultanate into what they call their golden age where they were quite a powerful force in the region, controlling much of Sumatra, Peninsula Malaysia, controlling trade, fighting against the Portuguese at Malacca, and he brought in a lot of academic study and cultural growth, scientific knowledge, things like that. And then after him came other sultans. But they had a very unusual time period in the 1600s. I think they call it the period of the four queens. And these are the four women you see here—one, two, three, four—and they were four women who were the sultanas of Aceh. So this region was ruled by these four queens for about a century that they were in charge, not the men, the sultanas as opposed to the sultans, the four queens.
And then of course we get into the period of the arrival of the Dutch and this whole exhibit talks about the Dutch colonial period and the resistance to Dutch rule.
And then finally when you get towards the end that’s when you get into a little short history of the tsunami that hit. But yeah, you see some interesting photographs. These are my favourite things at museums where you can actually see photographs of the people, how they dressed at that time, how they lived, and then even transportation, you know, horse-drawn wagons like that, the architecture, the farming. You can read all you want but until you see photographs a lot of what you read doesn’t really make sense, you know what I mean? So yeah, it’s really cool to see all of these photographs.
This is the harbour out at Sabang, Pulau Weh back then.
And this is where I came in. I actually, like I said, came in from the wrong direction. This is the direction I was supposed to come in.
By the way, everything here is in Indonesian so there is nothing in English here but it isn’t a big problem really. I don’t know if a lot of people know about this but if you take Google Translate there’s a camera on it and if you click on the camera button you can actually aim it at the display—you see it switched the whole thing into English. So I went through the whole museum and I could read that in English, then move on to the next section and it translates the entire paragraph into English. So I read it on my phone and then go down to the next one. It’s all in English. Same thing with the captions on the photos. You can use Google Translate like this to translate all of the captions into English and then you can understand what the photos are about. So anyway it doesn’t matter that there’s no English as long as you have a phone, Google Translate and an internet connection.
And these photos are of particular interest to me because of what I was talking about earlier, my own experience in the Philippines when a storm surge wiped out the city of Tacloban. All of these images—this one I can’t get close to, it’s like one or two hundred dead bodies—and those bodies, the condition they’re in is exactly like the bodies that were all over Tacloban at that time, hundreds of them. And it’s quite an experience if you’ve never seen something like that for yourself—how, not to be graphic, but how quickly a human body starts to decompose and transform into something completely other—it’s a shocking experience, it really is.
But yeah, I can’t get too close to that picture. But then we have what I was talking about, how the mosques—I believe this is the central mosque Baiturrahman—and it remained standing while everything around it was utterly destroyed. Right, you can see all this debris, everything was flattened but the mosque stayed up, which is quite interesting.
And this is the other mosque that I mentioned, the quite famous one—this isn’t the famous photo of it but this is the mosque in Lampuuk where it remained standing. And part of the reason for that is all the openings, right? So when the tsunami hit the water rather than hitting a flat wall went through openings and then all the pillars maintained the structural integrity of the mosque and it remained standing.
And then there’s information here about the international relief efforts: a US helicopter carrying medical supplies; two soldiers from Australia trying to move that boat. And here again you can see the level of destruction from the tsunami. And that was certainly something else I learned in Tacloban—the power of water—because you would think cement and steel would be stronger than water. But you saw cement buildings everywhere that were just completely flattened. And even all the steel rebar, all of the metal beams, all of it was just twisted into spaghetti by the force of the water. So yeah, it really is quite something.
So yeah, an interesting exhibit. I’m glad that I came through here. But as I said you got to go in from the other side, start with centuries-old history and then work your way through until you reach the tsunami information exhibit.
I just exited from there. Very interesting to go through.
And then over here is the café. Very nice. The History Café and Restaurant.
I can smell some good coffee. Hopefully they’re still open even when the museum itself closes because I’m actually running out of time. As I said they close at noon and then they don’t open for two hours and it’s about 11:30 right now. So I only have 30 minutes to go through the main exhibit. I haven’t even gotten to the main exhibit yet.
So the main exhibit building is over there. And one thing I noticed, kind of a pro tip: you basically have to register at every exhibit. So when I went into the Rumoh Aceh here they asked to see my ticket—very casual, very friendly—but they say yeah show your ticket and then you can sign in on the ledger if you want. But then at the temporary exhibit they also asked me to show my ticket. And I’m assuming at the main exhibit over there I’m going to have to show my ticket again.
I’m just taking the roundabout route to get there just to show all the various buildings. So there’s the administrative building. Yeah, there might be more exhibits up top there. I haven’t even made it that far yet. So yeah, I’m being very slow as always.
Oh, the main exhibit right here. So the permanent exhibition: geology, biology, ethnography, archaeology, history and technology, on and on and on. And they do have a bunch of like snack stalls out here, hot and cold drinks and some snacks. So yeah, let’s go in.
I’m inside the main exhibit now and I’ve gone through a big part of it. I think there’s a couple of main exhibits left at the end and I haven’t walked through but I don’t have a great deal of time because they’re closing soon. But here at the beginning you get an introduction to the natural habitat of Aceh, the animals and wildlife. And one thing that jumps out at me is how often you see elephants in the history and in photographs and in paintings but you don’t really see a whole lot of elephants in modern times. Like I don’t associate Sumatra with elephants in the same way that you do Thailand. So I wonder if elephants, the population has dwindled drastically here. You know, it just makes me curious what is the history of the elephant species in Sumatra.
And up here we’re getting back into the old history of Aceh, the Aceh Sultanate. And there is our good friend.
In terms of takeaways from this museum I think the things you can take away is this man because he is so important. You have to remember that name: Sultan Iskandar Muda. And you’ll notice that the airport in Banda Aceh is named after him. And he was the leader that set the tone for the golden age of the Aceh Sultanate.
And the other name to take away from this is this because you’ll see this all over Banda Aceh: Darussalam. And that was the original name for the Aceh Sultanate. It was known as Aceh Darussalam. So you’ll see Darussalam all over the place. I think a big university here uses that name, streets, buildings. So whenever you see Darussalam you just have to remember that’s the old name for Aceh. The Aceh Sultanate was also known as Aceh Darussalam.
And then there are a lot of exhibits here from that time period, various objects and things.
And down at the end there’s something quite interesting. And in the museum you’ll see references all the time to the 16th century because that is the period of time of Iskandar Muda when the Aceh Sultanate grew stronger militarily and in all other ways and they actually made connections with other countries like with the Ottoman Caliphate. And the Portuguese played a key role in the growth of Aceh and Darussalam and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
It’s again I think the main takeaway from this museum, something you can learn, is the relationship between the Portuguese and Aceh Darussalam, how one influenced the other.
Speaking of the military of that time of the Aceh Sultanate, this talks about the war fleet during the time of Sultan Iskandar Muda. Says that he had 40,000 male soldiers equipped with complete weaponry. They had a conscription system and it says here that they had this system before European countries became familiar with that concept. Well-trained archers with poisoned arrows, 900 elephants, 200 horses and a maritime fleet which really surprises me: 200 galleons or galleasses, 100 large ships. So he had quite an advanced military and navy and he fought the Portuguese at Malacca at the time with his navy. So you see some cannons and ships and things like that here.
But something that I noticed from all the way across the room was this object. This is actually a replica, it’s not an original, but it’s a replica of a tomb for of course sultans and the royal families or wealthy people. Quite impressive as a piece of art and a piece of history.
So the next floor shows a huge timeline of the Aceh Sultanate from as you can see the 16th century 1511 all the way up until modern times. And this is all in Indonesian so you’ll need to use Google Translate to translate this and understand it. But one of the main takeaways for me was the role of the Portuguese: that when the Portuguese took over Malacca as a trading centre a lot of the Muslim traders went looking elsewhere and they came to the Aceh Sultanate and that is how Iskandar Muda—one of the ways he turned the Aceh Sultanate, you know Aceh Darussalam, into a major power because he took advantage of all the Muslim traders leaving Malacca and brought them over to here to Aceh, to Aceh Darussalam, and it became a centre for international trade and that led to a lot of the growth and a lot of the power that he had.
Next floor is like an in-depth look at the ethnography I guess: all the languages, cultures, different ethnic groups, music, art, all those sorts of things related to the Aceh Sultanate. Yeah, it’s quite nice up here too. The clothing and the fabrics, everything like that, household objects, utensils.
So that is what you learn up here. And for kids or for anyone really they have these stamps everywhere. They don’t use ink, you put a piece of paper in there and then you can clamp down and it creates this image in an indentation in the paper. So if you bring—if you come here with kids, give them a piece of paper and they can run to all of these and then collect all the stamps from all the different exhibits.
And I only have ten minutes until the museum closes for two hours so I’m moving along. I already came through all this exhibit and read up on everything but just wanted to give you a little bit of a glimpse of it. It’s quite nice.
And there’s another exhibit down here on the main floor kind of circling back to the main entrance. I haven’t been through here yet so I don’t know what it’s all about. Oh, looks like it’s all about cooking and spices, which would be very important of course because Aceh Darussalam was all about international trade and that’s why the Europeans were so interested in this part of the world and trying to take over everything—it’s because of the spice trade originally. Yeah, very nice room.
I was wondering how you exit from this room but it looks like yeah head up here and then go through here. Yeah, look at that, that’s a beautiful exhibit. I don’t have time right now to dive into it all unfortunately.
And then we’re here at the exit.
There it is, the main exhibit. I kept expecting a big room dedicated to only the tsunami but there really wasn’t anything in there at all that I saw. I saw people refer to learning about the tsunami here but they must have been referring to the small exhibit in the temporary exhibit. I think that’s the only references to the tsunami that I’ve seen. They don’t have an exhibit here dedicated to that.
But yeah, very interesting. I enjoyed that quite a bit.
And the grounds here are a highlight for me, being on the river, this incredible park setting, lot of space, very beautiful, a lot of shade trees and even this little cemetery display here. I don’t know if this is an original cemetery or whether these tombstones or the tombs were moved here. I don’t know.
Yeah, as you can see they’ve already closed the information centre and the ticket booth for afternoon prayers. Yeah, that’s—I don’t know what’s up there, that’s closed for now as well.
Now the thing is the coffee shop, is that closed? Let’s see if I can end my visit to the museum with a cup of coffee at the History Café. I love their logo, History Café and Restaurant. It’s very nice. And they appear to be open from 8:00 until 11 in the evening every day.
Hello. Hello. How are you? What can I get for you today?
A coffee. Maybe a Sanger ice.
Do you want Sanger ice?
Yeah.
Okay.
And I think that brings me to the end of my Aceh Museum tour.
Planet Doug verdict: two thumbs up. Double thumbs up. Really nice museum. Stunning setting on the river, that park-like setting that I’ve been talking about. Really beautiful. Even on a hot sunny day it’s nice and cool because of all the shade. The addition of a nice coffee shop is always welcome. I’m always disappointed when I go to a big national museum and then when you’re finished with the museum they don’t have a coffee shop or a restaurant where you can sit down and relax, but they have one here.
I’ve got the traditional local Sanger coffee iced. Yeah, that’s really nice. That’s a good cup of coffee. I recommend the Sanger coffee, it’s really good.
And for the exhibits in the museum also really nice. Like a real nice mixture because you get the normal stuff you would expect at kind of a national-style history museum about the history of the country or at least the Aceh region of Indonesia. But here you also have the Rumoh Aceh, the traditional house from a village setting. So that’s a really great place to start, gives you a real sense of village life here, countryside life, living before modern-day Banda Aceh. So I love that.
The temporary exhibit was really interesting particularly because it did have an exhibit related to the tsunami. So you do get an insight into that part of the history. And then you can move on to the main exhibit which goes through all of the geography, the ethnography, the colonial history, the pre-colonial history, modern Indonesia—all of that is there as well. Beautiful exhibit on the spice trade. Didn’t film very much in there but I went through it quickly.
And as I said some of the main takeaways include this idea that Aceh was called Aceh Darussalam. So as a visitor when you see that name everywhere you’ll know what they’re talking about. And then of course the most famous sultan, Iskandar Muda. If you come away from the museum and you remember those two facts and the idea that Iskandar Muda brought Aceh Darussalam into a golden age of international trade, military conquest, science and cultural learning—all that kind of stuff—you’ve learned a lot.
And from here you know you can move on to the Tsunami Museum. And now that you understand the region better, you understand the people better, perhaps you’ll have a better understanding of the impact of the tsunami in 2004.
And the one thing I didn’t mention so far—I don’t think I even brought it up in the museum—was the strong regional identity that they have here in Aceh. And that led to their independence struggle, that they felt that they didn’t have a voice in the central government of the modern independent Indonesia and that set off the independence movement here and the fighting between the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian central government and the army. So that defines Aceh Province, the fight that went on for many, many years between Aceh and the central government. And then you learn how the tsunami played a key role in ending that conflict. And Aceh even achieved a more independent role for its own region, its own government compared to other parts of Indonesia. So it’s a very special part of Indonesia.
So two thumbs up. Come to the Aceh Museum if you’re in town. It’s a very nice place, well worth visiting.
And as always as I’m shutting down the video I’ll remind you that you can find Planet Doug in lots of different places online. Planet Doug on YouTube right here, Planet Doug Behind the Scenes for long-form podcasts, Planet Doug on Instagram, on Patreon, on Buy Me a Coffee and on Substack as well. So you can find me everywhere on the internet.
So that’s it. Shutting down. See you in the next video.
Hey, hey, hey.
Just as I was leaving from the museum grounds the security guard at the gate indicated that I should go this way, that there’s a whole other section of the museum that I missed. And apparently a lot of people miss. And so he wanted to make sure that I was aware of it.
So I came in this direction and we’ve got a lot of military hardware on display here: cannons, artillery pieces.
And now that I’m here I think this is also where Sultan Iskandar Muda is buried. His official burial spot is either over here or I think it might be over here underneath that building. So I think that’s what the guard wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this part of the museum. I’m not entirely sure what’s here. So this could be the burial ground for the sultan. I’ll get a little bit closer and find out.
There’s a big sign over there. So I think yeah, this must be it. He has a beautiful tree to mark his spot. Very nice. Nothing like a good tree like that. And the shade makes everything so much more beautiful and comfortable.
Yes. Here we are. Sultan Iskandar Muda.
So this would be where he is laid to rest. Amazing though when you think back we’re talking about four hundred years ago that this man was alive and shaped modern Aceh and modern Indonesia.
Here’s the Makam Pahlawan Nasional Sultan Iskandar Muda, Banda Aceh.