DESCRIPTION:
I haven’t had much luck when it comes to visiting the large Tsunami Museum here in Banda Aceh. It has been closed every time I’ve tried to visit. It’s not entirely clear why, but I think it was closed on this day because of the electrical blackouts that were common in the days and weeks following the floods and landslides in late November and early December. Luckily, I was still able to enter the grounds of the museum complex and see the building itself as well as a display of photographs that was set up outside.
From there, I walked to the PLTD Apung 1 museum, which is a museum inside a large ship that was carried ashore by the 2004 tsunami. I wasn’t able to give that museum the full Planet Doug treatment either, because I arrived quite late, and I had only a half an hour to check the place out before they closed at noon for afternoon prayers.
When I shot this video, I had no idea that there was an actual museum inside the ship. I thought the ship itself WAS the museum and that simply seeing it and being able to clamber around on top of it would be the whole experience. To my surprise, there was what looked to be a set of excellent museum exhibits on the inside. I didn’t have enough time to take it all in, so I decided to just look around briefly and I would return on another day when I had more time.
I did return on a different day, and I had the chance to examine all the exhibits and shoot an in-depth video about all the fascinating information there. That video will be posted to this channel soon.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I think this is the main mosque. Yeah, we’re actually very near this mosque here in Banda Aceh and it survived the tsunami as well. But you can see in the grounds around it all the debris from the nearby buildings.
Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug. Today is a very special morning here in Banda Aceh because I’m visiting the Tsunami Museum. You can see it there behind me. My first impressions are, wow, what a large structure. I can’t believe how big it looks from across the street. So, I’m told that the architect designed it to look like a wave. I’m not quite sure from what angle. Maybe from the front it’s supposed to look like a wave as well, but there you see the sign. Museum Tsunami Aceh opens at 9:00 in the morning. I believe it’s about 9:30 right now. I think it costs 20,000 rupiah for a foreign visitor and it closes at noon and then reopens at 2:00 in the afternoon. So depending on how much you love museums, you might want to get here at 9 in the morning to have a full 3 hours before they close at noon or I’ll be inside before 10:00.
Before I head into the museum itself, I’m just going to take a little bit of a stroll out here to collect my thoughts and think about the experience of going into the museum, kind of what my expectations are. I took a Grab car to get here and normally I would walk and while I walk here I sort of get into the proper mood for whatever it is I’m going to be doing but I took a Grab car so I’m a little bit, you know, I booked the car and I don’t usually do that. I did it because I’m shooting a video about using Touch ‘n Go here in Indonesia and I wanted to test paying for a Grab car with Touch ‘n Go and so I had a lot going on in my head at the time and when I booked the Grab car he showed up in seconds so I thought I’d have like 3 or 4 minutes to get organized and then I said book the car and boom he was like right there. So, I was like, “Ah, got to get this. I got to get on my phone. I got to shoot video.” You know, so anyway, I need to just sort of relax a little bit before I head into the museum. And there’s no better place to relax than a park right across the road here.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about visiting this museum for a long time. And as I’ve mentioned quite often, I have a personal interest in tsunamis, floods, storm surges, that kind of thing.
Looks like, I don’t know, there’s a man down there just kind of waved at me and said, “No, no, no, no. You can’t come in. You can’t come in.” And I’m not sure why, but anyway. Just walk along the sidewalk, I guess. Maybe the park is closed for construction or renovations. I don’t know. I think that guy was waving me away because of all the construction. I mean, look at the, I seem to have wandered into a construction site. The sidewalk here is being completely rebuilt. So, he might have been waving at me that I’m not supposed to be up here. Not sure what’s going on. That’s what happens on Planet Doug. I can’t even take a stroll through a park without it turning into quite a drama. So, I don’t even know how to get into the park anymore.
Anyway, I was just saying that I have a personal interest in this topic because I happen to be in a city in the Philippines called Tacloban when a super typhoon hit. And with a typhoon, you often get what they call a storm surge, which for all intents and purposes is the same thing as a tsunami created in a different way, but it’s essentially a massive wave that wipes out the city that it hits. And that’s what happened in Tacloban. So I have some personal experience of the effects of a tsunami, of a major flood. And then I stayed in Tacloban for nearly 2 months afterwards sort of watching the city rebuild and watching the local people deal with the effects. And of course I was there in the middle of it. So I have all these ideas of what it’s like to be in the middle of something like that. And I want to see what the tsunami museum here, what kind of what it says about the experience.
And anyway, I jumped down from the construction sidewalk over there and I’m inside the park now. There’s a lot of people in here. So, I think that man, he wasn’t waving at me to say I couldn’t come in the park. He was waving at me to say I can’t walk down the sidewalk. It’s too dangerous. But hey, I’m down in the park now.
So, one of my goals for going into this museum is to see if I can learn anything new because I know a lot about the tsunami that hit Banda Aceh. There are a lot of documentaries made about it. A lot of very long documentaries. You can see them all on YouTube. I’ve watched all of them over the years and I’ve rewatched a number of them in recent days just to refresh my memory. I’ve done a lot of reading about the topic. So, I don’t know that this museum is going to show me anything new or teach me anything new. I think it will more or less repeat things that I’m already aware of. But we’ll see. I might come across new ideas, new themes, new ways of thinking about the disaster, new information.
But at the same time there are a number of things that were part of my life when I was in Tacloban after the flood after the storm surge and the things that I experienced there I don’t see reflected in all the documentaries about the tsunami here in Banda Aceh and I’m wondering what that is and yeah just to give you an idea of some of the things I’m talking about and it might be because where I was located in Tacloban, my hotel was 300 meters from the shore. So I was right beside the ocean when the wave hit. So I was basically right downtown and the city of Tacloban is much smaller than Banda Aceh. So the city was largely wiped out and everything disappeared. So there you were just living your life. You’re in your hotel room. There’s restaurants all around. There’s stores all around. There’s police. There’s security. There’s government. There’s people in charge. There’s electricity. There’s internet. There’s banking, drinking water. Everything is there. And then this wave hits, wipes out the whole city. And in an instant, all of civilization was gone. And you really felt it when you were there in Tacloban. Water was gone. Of course, water stopped flowing. Electricity was gone instantly. Transportation vanished because the shoreline of Tacloban all the way around the city was lined with shanty towns. Thousands and thousands and thousands of little houses on wooden stilts lining the shore of the city of Tacloban. And they were the first things hit by the storm surge and they’re a little bit weak construction and they were just wiped out. Just like scraped the earth clean and all of that wood, all of that cement, everything that was there in these vibrant, very large communities became a debris pile that filled the roads completely. You basically could not move. Nothing could get in and out of the city because the roads didn’t exist anymore. The government didn’t exist. It just vanished. Police didn’t exist. The whole police force was gone. Security was gone. There was no food anywhere. No restaurants were operating anymore. And it’s hard to describe without living it how everything vanished. Like even in my hotel, the owners of the hotel, like anyone in the city who had the means to get out got out. So, for example, when aid started to arrive at the airport within the first 2 or 3 days, like giant C-130 transport planes would show up sponsored by the US government or some other government and then people who were at the airport trying to get out would load into the C-130s. So, like the owners of my hotel left town. Like I knew, I’d stayed there for a while. I knew the family members. I knew the owners and they just disappeared in the first couple of days. So like anyone who had family anywhere else in the Philippines and they could get to the airport, they all left. And so essentially the city stopped functioning on every level you can imagine. And on the very first day I was faced with this, well I need water. Where can I get water? Where can I get food? You can’t leave the city. There’s no transportation. I was on my bicycle and the roads were impassable. No electricity, no communication with the outside world. You were eventually reduced in seconds from a man living in the civilized world to a hunter-gatherer just waking up every morning and trying to survive. Like, where am I going to get water today? Where am I going to get food? And security was a big problem too. I remember that. The very first night in my hotel, the other guests in the hotel, there were some people staying there who knew the typhoon was coming. I was kind of out of it a little bit. I didn’t even realize that a super typhoon was bearing down on the city. It kind of came as a surprise to me. But the Filipinos were aware of it and some of them had left their homes, moved into the hotel because they could get on the second or third floor and then their house would be flooded. They knew. So they basically got out in advance. And they brought weapons with them. So they brought guns with them to the hotel just in case. And then it turns out the typhoon did wipe out the city. Police were gone. Looting was taking place. And there was a real climate of fear in the air. Everyone in the hotel that I talked to, the other survivors basically were freaking me out because we could hear gunfire and they were telling me that, “Oh, this is so dangerous. You better barricade yourself in your room and don’t go outside. There are men with guns. They’ll kill you.” I mean, there was so much fear in the air in the initial days to the extent that that night, the very first night, all the men who had guns built a giant bonfire in the courtyard of the hotel. Again, no electricity, no lights because it was completely dark as soon as the sun went down. And then my hotel had a courtyard with a gate and a wall. So they closed the gate, built a big bonfire in the middle of the yard, and all the men took turns standing guard, and they thought they were literally protecting the hotel from robbers and gangs, like looting gangs, and that if a gang tried to break into our hotel, they were going to fight them off. I mean, it was a crazy time and a crazy experience. Whether all that fear was justified. In my mind, it wasn’t because I did see looting, what people call looting later on, but it was more like a picnic than anything else. You have an image in your mind of what looting is all about. And it wasn’t like that at all. All it was was like a big department store I was walking by one day and I guess somebody had managed to break open the doors and then hundreds of people just gathered and they just kind of walked into the store like shoppers and they just kind of walked around and grabbed things off the shelf and walked out and they all came running up to me very happy and very excited and they’re telling me go you know just take whatever you want everything’s free today. So it had like a picnic almost like a festival atmosphere of everything’s free in the store. Go take whatever you want. So it wasn’t like looting as you might think of it in the Hollywood movies, right, with violence and that kind of thing. It was more like a fun outing. Go to the store and get stuff for free. So I don’t think the real concern about danger from robbery and bad men and gangs was really that justified. But that idea was in the air and this lasted for months. The electricity was out for months and it took weeks and up to 2 months before anything started to operate again. So that entire time you were always every morning you woke up where am I going to get water from today? Where am I going to get food? How am I going to cook? And then in my case I got sick from the water that I was drinking. And I was like, where do you get medical attention? It was like a real survival hunter-gatherer kind of situation.
And when I watch all the documentaries about the tsunami in Banda Aceh, I don’t hear any of that. All you hear, you hear about when the wave hit, the destruction, and then you hear the survivor stories. People tell their story of where they were when the wave hit and how they managed to survive and how family members of theirs and friends they all perished. Like 200, I think 250,000 people died in this part of Asia around the Indian Ocean when the tsunami hit. So that’s what you hear about. But then I’ve never heard any stories about the aftermath. Like none of this having to survive like where do you get food? Where do you get water? That the police and the government everything is shut down. Even in Tacloban there was a big prison there. I visited the prison before the typhoon hit. So I’ve been inside the prison and things like that just visiting prisoners. I wasn’t arrested or anything. I just go there as kind of a habit. I like to visit prisons and talk to prisoners, see what’s going on inside the prison. And that the prison wall was destroyed by the flood when the storm surge hit. When the tsunami hit, it just knocked over the prison. So all the prisoners, thousands of them, escaped from the prison and they all basically went home. So you had that to deal with as well. And you saw wanted posters all over the city. Most of the prisoners just came back voluntarily. I mean, the prison was wiped out. So, they couldn’t even stay there even if they wanted to because there was nobody there to feed them. There was no guards, no cooks, no, you know, there was nothing there. The prison disappeared along with the rest of the city. So, it’s not like the prisoners escaped. They just had no, they had to go home and they wanted to check up on their family. So thousands of prisoners just fanned out into the countryside and went back to check up on their families and then after a few weeks or a couple of months they all kind of drifted back to serve out the rest of their prison sentence. So you had that angle as well on and on and on. And yet in all of the coverage of Banda Aceh the tsunami here I haven’t heard any of those stories at all. And I’m wondering why that is. And I think it’s partially because Banda Aceh is a much much larger city in terms of the population and the area. Tacloban was very condensed with hills on all sides. And so I think percentage-wise more of the city was destroyed. So I think here in Banda Aceh the edges were destroyed as far as the tsunami came inland but then a large part of it was untouched. So there was still perhaps functioning police forces, functioning governments, civil authorities, airports, roads, there was access. So the story of the tsunami in Banda Aceh doesn’t seem to be about post-tsunami survival so much as surviving the initial tsunami’s attack destruction of the city and then there wasn’t quite as much of a where do we get food where do we get water I mean people had their homes destroyed and of course they were struggling but there was still I think a functioning city around the destroyed areas so you didn’t have quite the same aftermath but anyway that is my idea because like I said I haven’t seen any of these stories in the documentaries.
Well, time to stop talking about this and go into the museum itself. Really looking forward to this. I’ve know a lot about this museum from the reading I’ve done and yeah, I’m really looking forward to this experience.
So, here is the entrance to the Tsunami Museum. Open from 9 till 4. Closed on Fridays. That’s something to pay attention to. Children and anak-anak 3,000, dewasa adults 5,000 and asing basically foreigners 20,000 rupiah. So it says they’re open from 9 to 4, but I think it’s also closed from 12 till 2.
Hello. Museum close. Because lamp is turned off. Oh, what is turned off? Turn off. Lamp. Lamp. Lamp is turn off. What is lamp? Lamp. Lampu. Lampu. Nothing. And nothing.
You don’t know. No, no, I don’t. I don’t understand.
I didn’t really understand what those men were saying, but they’re telling me the museum is closed because of the power blackout. They were trying to explain the details to me, but I didn’t really understand what they were saying. But the upshot is that the museum is not open today. Yeah, there’s the ticket window. Welcome. Welcome to Planet Doug, as they say. That’s how things go.
Police helicopter here out on display. Yeah, it’s definitely closed. They weren’t lying about that. This is more of the front entrance to the museum. No people here, as you can see. It looks like this was designed for presentations, auditorium style seating with a stage down here at the bottom. And nobody seems to mind me wandering around even though it’s closed. Thought I’d walk up here and see what the building looks like. It’s definitely an interesting building, the architecture and the design.
Large pond here, fish pond.
And there are some photographs on display.
Yeah, this photo illustrates what I was talking about. So, that looks very similar to Tacloban where you have all the debris in the road except even this is really not close to how it was in Tacloban. This looks like it could be cleared away pretty easily. They might even be using an elephant to clear things away. But in Tacloban, this would be as, you know, 10 feet deep up to 20 feet deep. There’s just massive piles of debris blocking all of the roads.
Yeah, that image there, it’s more reminiscent of how it was in the Philippines, this height of debris. And again, that’s something even the documentaries about the tsunami here didn’t really talk about that debris and that was a big part of reconstruction and rebuilding in Tacloban.
And something you quickly figure out when you’re in the middle of a big flood is that cars, we think of them as extremely heavy. But as far as water is concerned, they’re just like balloons because they’re an enclosed space with air on the inside. The floodwaters just pick up vehicles and just float them away like they don’t weigh anything. And deposits them on top of each other, on top of houses.
And something else that was a big part of life in Tacloban post storm surge was this collecting the dead bodies that went on for week after week stretching into months collecting the dead bodies. There were so many out in the open and they were collected first of course but then there were many many more inside the rubble. So you were finding bodies everywhere for a very long time.
And this is something else that was a big part of Tacloban as well where huge ships were picked up and floated inland and then deposited on land like kilometers from the shore here in Banda Aceh. I believe this one you can see the name of it there. It’s been turned into a museum. So maybe I can walk to this museum today. It’s not that far away from where I am now.
Of course, that’s another big aspect to any disaster relief. So this is a team from Mexico recovery and rescue. I saw a lot of that in Tacloban as well.
Though I had a lot of thoughts about the international relief efforts where I think people just assume across the board that they come in and do all kinds of wonderful things and very helpful things. But what I saw in Tacloban was that the international aid efforts were not really that effective. A lot of them came too late because it took a long time for people to travel around the world to get to Tacloban. And so much money and effort and time went into just getting there. And then once these rescue teams showed up in Tacloban, where do you put them? Like there was nowhere for them to stay. And then the local emergency teams had to kind of act as a host for these international teams, find them places to stay, feed them, take care of them. And I did wonder sometimes whether the international aid was more of a drain on the local recovery efforts than, didn’t seem to help that much to be honest.
And over time when I started to see the city of Tacloban recovering, it was almost always the Filipino services that were doing the real work. So what needed to happen, the very first thing that needed to happen of course was clearing out the dead bodies, helping the survivors, but then the next thing you had to do was clear out all this debris. And that couldn’t happen until they brought in heavy machinery, massive pieces of steel, bulldozers and front-end loaders and trucks to get rid of all of this. And that is what the Filipino government did.
So one difference between Banda Aceh and Tacloban was that in Banda Aceh a lot of the buildings that remained standing were mosques and mosques became a symbol of recovery and survival. So there’s quite, there’s a very famous image. I haven’t seen it here yet, but there’s a very famous image of a mosque way out in a field that everything around it was destroyed, but the mosque was still standing.
And this is interesting, too. I was just talking about how heavy machinery was the most important tool for recovery in Tacloban. And I haven’t seen any in these pictures yet, but at the very beginning, apparently they did have access to elephants to move some of the heavier debris blocking the streets.
Yeah, I was thinking about elephants the other day. How many elephants still live in Sumatra? You don’t really come across elephants here the same way that you would in Thailand, I don’t think.
I think this is the main mosque. Yeah, we’re actually very near this mosque here in Banda Aceh and it survived the tsunami as well. But you can see in the grounds around it, all the debris from the nearby buildings, but you can see all around it these cement buildings. They’re all still standing on that side and on that side.
But this picture sparked a memory for me, the helicopters because when I was in Tacloban in the initial days and weeks after the tsunami hit and just sort of in survival mode feeling totally cut off from the outside world because there was no way to contact anyone or get information. And then one day I was out walking around taking pictures and a helicopter went by overhead. But it wasn’t one of these helicopters. It was one of those massive I think they’re called Osprey. I’d never seen one in my life before, but this huge, it looked almost like something from an alien world, this Osprey helicopter, I think it had four different rotors, went floating by overhead and it had such an emotional impact on me because it felt like a symbol of the outside world like and the difference between me on the ground and the people up there in that Osprey helicopter. It was a very kind of profound feeling.
But yeah, this is a very familiar image from Tacloban as well. You would have all this debris where all the houses were destroyed and you have a little bit of a structure of one house left. I have almost this exact same photograph from Tacloban.
This photograph brings up another unique angle to the situation in Banda Aceh. Apparently, this is a hotel and according to the caption here, a three-star hotel was destroyed by the earthquake on December 26th, 2004. So again, this isn’t talked about very much in the documentaries, but the disaster in Banda Aceh was two stages. There was an earthquake, right? Everybody forgets in a way about the earthquake. The only time they talk about it is how the earthquake caused the tsunami. But the earthquake brought down a lot of buildings and a lot of people were trapped inside the buildings. So then the city went into emergency rescue mode trying to save all the people that were trapped in the buildings. So all the emergency crews and volunteers, they were out in the city trying to help people and rescue people from earthquake damage. And right in the middle of that rescue operation, that’s when the tsunami hit. And I haven’t heard people talk about that. Like you think about someone who might have been trapped inside a building like one of these. This debris pile here could have been started by the earthquake. A building came down. Someone could have been trapped inside the building by the debris and then the tsunami hit and they probably died from the flood. But again, that isn’t something I’ve seen the documentaries talk about very much.
These photos also remind me of something else that jumped out at me in Tacloban after the storm surge was just how powerful water is. Like in this photo you can see all of the brick, cement, and even rebar, all the steel. And it was all just flattened by the tsunami. Twisted metal, destroyed concrete. There were entire areas of Tacloban consisted of nothing but concrete houses. They weren’t made of wood, just hundreds of concrete houses. And when I went to visit that area after the tsunami or after the storm surge, there was nothing left. It was just flat ground. Like all of those concrete houses with all the metal rebar had been just completely wiped out by the storm surge. So yeah, you have no idea how powerful how heavy water is until you can see the damage it can do even to concrete and steel.
This is an interesting photo. Just before I came to the museum, right, I was walking around in the park. This is the park. So this is actually the park where I was walking and talking before I came here. Look at all that debris. Yeah, it’s exactly where I was just a few minutes ago. I recognized the plane that’s on display that’s in the park, but it remains standing and it’s still there in the park today.
I mentioned the images of the famous mosque that survived where everything around it was destroyed. I hadn’t seen this picture before. The one I know is more of an aerial shot, but this is the actual mosque there and it’s on the coast at Lampuuk.
There’s a photo of an ambulance that they say was carrying body bags for the tsunami victims. But again, that’s something that feels a little bit different. I’m not sure why. Like when I was in Tacloban, I spent a lot of time with the teams that were tasked with collecting dead bodies and I went out with them on the trucks and there were so many and it was such a huge job. It was done in dump trucks, like actual construction equipment, like huge dump trucks that would be filled with the dead bodies, and then they would be brought to like a mass grave, and then they would all just be dumped out of the truck like they were dumping gravel. I mean, just hundreds of bodies. And in all the documentation I’ve seen here in Banda Aceh, I haven’t seen that that ambulance wouldn’t be nearly enough to handle people who died here in Banda Aceh. So I wonder how the body collection was taken care of. Like I just haven’t seen images of like trucks and heavy equipment for even that kind of work.
Here is a photograph that relates to what I was just talking about because this is all about the Indonesian military helping to evacuate tsunami victims and bring them to mass graves. And here they have quite a large truck and that was a common sight in Tacloban once the roads were cleared enough for the trucks to get in. So they were using large trucks like this to collect the dead bodies.
Yeah. And you can see again the power of a wave like this with all the debris. It basically crumpled up that car like it was nothing. And all of the concrete steel houses behind it. Completely gone.
Another image that’s very familiar to me from my time in Tacloban. Saw scenes like this everywhere. But one interesting thing that jumped out at me in Tacloban after the typhoon and the storm surge is that even in Tacloban there were a lot of walls surrounding houses and going along public parks. So you often couldn’t see things because there were walls like security gates and walls everywhere. And the storm surge knocked down all of the walls. So, as I was walking around the city, it became wide open, kind of like this picture. You could suddenly see long distances where you couldn’t see before because there would have been all kinds of walls around residential properties, but all the walls were torn down as well by the wave. And there were city parks. I never saw the city parks until after the storm surge because they were surrounded by high walls. And then the storm surge tore down all the walls and the city was much more open. It was a very weird feeling.
So that will be my experience of the tsunami museum for today. I don’t know when it’s going to be open. One person said tomorrow. Someone else said come back in 2 or 3 days. So I’m not really sure. But yeah, I’m glad that they had all the photographs on the outside. That was very interesting for me to see the, you know what they say, picture being worth a thousand words. It’s very very true.
But from here I think I’m going to walk to the other museum. The one they took there’s like a huge it was like a power barge they call it. It was like a ship with a large diesel generating station on top of it. And that ship was floated inland by the tsunami and then deposited on land. And that also happened in Tacloban. You saw huge cargo container ships that were blown inland on the storm surge and then they just dropped down on top of the houses. I remember thinking what a kind of like injury added to injury added to injury really because these people in Tacloban had the typhoon, the wind and the rain which just battered the city and then the storm surge destroyed their houses, knocked it, you know, destroyed the city and then out of nowhere a huge cargo ship came floating and as if having their house reduced to rubble wasn’t bad enough, this massive ship be deposited right on top of the rubble where their house used to be. I mean, it’s like, come on. I mean, when is enough enough, right? Yeah. But anyway, yeah, the visual of seeing one of those huge ships sitting on land is quite something. And I don’t know what happened to the ships in Tacloban. They were closer to shore, so I assume they could somehow pulled it back into the water. Maybe. I don’t really know. But anyway, this boat here, the power generating boat, they left it there and turned it into a kind of museum. So, I’m going to walk there now.
I didn’t realize it at first, but this walk from that museum to the boat museum is taking me very near my original hotel, the Wisma Sachita. I actually when I left from that hotel, when I checked out and then checked in at my new hotel, I walked down this street. Kind of connects the two neighborhoods. Yeah, I remember this. So, it’s a very nice neighborhood, very residential, very quiet.
My old hotel is just up the street here. So, very familiar territory. I just have to walk down this way, turn right, cross the river, and I should be somewhere near the boat museum.
I found the small access road. Takes me across the river.
This is the same neighborhood where I found the tofu making center. I shot a bit of video of how they make how they process soybeans into tofu. It’s right near this river just down in that direction.
Yeah, water is still flowing pretty strongly. Could still be the after effects of all the heavy rains.
Yeah, this particular river is alive with monitor lizards. When I was walking along the river, coming in this direction, they were all lined up just every few feet. There was a big one and they all went plunging into the river as I got near them. I don’t see any right now, but they’re out there.
Yeah, nice spot for a cemetery right alongside the river here. And my path is taking me through some very nice residential areas. Look at this. And considering that this massive boat was deposited here by the tsunami, it’s reasonable to assume that all of this would have been hit by the tsunami as well. All of these houses. But apparently I cannot go this way.
I have to do some reconfiguring how I get through. Oh, I’m in the vicinity. Anyway, walk through some really nice areas, a university campus back there, and I think I’m right in front of the museum, but it’s not looking promising. The Planet Doug effect may still be in operation. I think that’s the ship right there. And they converted it into a museum, as I said. But the gate appears to be locked at least on this side. Again, I don’t know if this is the main entrance or not. Maybe there’s another one. But, there’s the ship. This was probably as close as I’m going to get to it considering that I live on Planet Doug. And as we all know on Planet Doug, number one rule is everything is closed on the day that I want to go there or at the time that I visit. But anyway, I’m going to walk around the perimeter, see if I can get a better look and maybe find another entrance.
It’s a much larger complex than I expected. Look at the size of this place. They built a giant fence all the way around it. And I’m definitely in the right place. Just looks like a museum sort of place with all the photographs there on the wall and these buildings that were clearly damaged by the tsunami and they left them in that condition.
Yeah. And they built a giant walkway going up like what 15 20 feet above the ground going all the way around this ship and even a watch tower. I guess they built that tower as part of the museum so you can climb up there and get an aerial view of the ship. They really spared no expense really.
And there’s the name of it. I’ve never known exactly how you say the name, but I think they call it the PLTD Apung Museum.
I can understand why they might decide to just leave it there and turn it into a museum. Can you imagine a tsunami bringing that huge ship inland, depositing it right here, and then you look at it and go, “Well, we can either try to drag this thing back to the ocean or just leave it where it is.” And I think they made the right choice. Just leave it where it is. But I wonder what was here before. I mean, was this all residential? Were there all houses here? And the ship basically landed on top of a bunch of houses. I’m not sure. But yeah, my kind of place. I’d love to be rambling around inside there climbing on all these walkways and up into the tower. But unless we find another gate, I mean, to be honest, it doesn’t look open at all. It doesn’t look like it’s just closed for today because of the blackout or something. It just has the feeling of something that’s never open. Like I don’t see any people anywhere. No guards. Oh, there’s a guy doing some grounds work. Let’s see. Maybe there’s a gate around here around the corner up ahead. Beautiful mosque.
Well, maybe I spoke too soon about the Planet Doug effect. This is the main gate. I just happened to arrive at the back entrance, which is the rear entrance, which is closed, but yeah, this is the front entrance, and it appears to be open.
Whether these are the opening hours. Huh. Of course, it’s 11:30 right now and they’re probably going to close at noon until 2, so my timing isn’t very good.
So, I have my ticket. I bought it from that ticket booth over there. It’s only 3,000 rupiah and you get a QR code and I think you scan the QR code at the turnstile.
Okay, thank you.
There you go.
So, we’re on the inside and here is the main monument commemorating the tsunami. And there is the ship. It’s pretty impressive that it landed so flat. But that’s also an aspect of Banda Aceh that I’ve noticed that it’s a very very flat landscape here which I think is one of the reasons the tsunami was so destructive and came so far inland. So this is the PLTD Apung 1 2600 ton offshore diesel powered electric generator and it was pushed 5 kilometers inland. I didn’t realize it was so far. 5 kilometers inland by the fierceness of the tsunami. Now it is located in Gampong Punge Blang Cut village and as I said they just thought well let’s just leave it here and turn it into a museum. Very cool. 5 km inland. I had no idea. I wonder if they had to level it off, whether its original resting spot was on more of an angle or whether it just landed flat like that. But yeah, there’s an aerial image of it. Very interesting, huh? Can you imagine? You’re just living your life here in this village, this village area of Banda Aceh. Oh, there’s the museum Aceh. I went there a couple of days ago. Really nice museum. Highly recommend it.
But yeah, just imagine you’re living here, living out, you know, just living your little life, and then the tsunami hits, a wave comes in, next thing you know, a giant ship like this just comes floating over the horizon and just lands right beside your house or on top of your house.
Yeah, I’m not sure if the tower is open or not, but that’s where I’m going to go to start. I’m amazed that they built this steel structure, this walkway.
I don’t know. Every time I get excited by a tower like this, it usually tends to be sealed off. Somebody eventually decided it wasn’t safe enough. And even though there is a tower, you’re often not allowed to climb to the top. Let’s find out.
I’m guessing it’s blocked, but we’ll see. Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me. Again, Planet Doug effect. Anytime there’s an exciting tower to climb, it’s usually not accessible. But hey, we can see the ship from over here. We can actually go for a walk all the way around this walkway.
Yeah, I don’t have much time. Half an hour to explore and then they’re going to close for 2 hours. But yeah, there’s the ship.
It looks like wherever the ship landed, there were some buildings here. You can see one over there, the remains of a house. And then over here as well, the remains of some buildings. I’m not sure if these were houses or commercial.
Oh, this is blocked off as well. So, yeah, all the wood I guess the wood has rotted. So, yeah, it’s not safe to head out in that direction, but that’s okay. You can actually see the buildings here and get a new view of the ship from this direction.
And as I always like to do, let’s walk around it before we go up. I always like to walk the perimeter. It’s kind of a tricky landscape, though. I’ve nearly run into this wall a couple of times already. It’s like they built a skateboard park in here. But because I’m looking at my GoPro, I keep running into these things, not realizing that they’re there. I’m tripping over the landscaping.
Wow. Yeah. I don’t know anything about the history of this ship. It says it was a diesel generating station. Why do they, why is there a diesel generator on a massive ship? What is its function? Like, it’s floating out there in the water generating power, but where is the power going? Like, what’s it for? Like to give it to other ships or is there a cable running inland to shore? Like why would you build a diesel generating plant on a ship? Makes it mobile. I guess you could bring it to various places along the coast to outer islands and provide emergency power. I don’t know. And then like was it operational? Yes. When the tsunami hit and when it landed on shore? Or I mean, could they have just kept running it and producing power?
Yeah, this is the front. They did some landscaping with some rocks and there’s another walkway over here. But again, I’m guessing that the walkway is made of wood and then maybe it’s blocked. Not safe. I’m not sure. Let’s see. Oh, no. It looks like it’s made of some metal.
But to get from the landscaping to the walkway, there’s like this giant gap.
There we go. I leaped across.
Huh. Very odd design for the museum in general, these walkways and things, but that’s kind of cool. Too bad they made the steps to the tower out of wood because the wood rotted and that’s why you can’t go up in the tower anymore. Yeah, they should have built the whole thing out of metal, huh? 5 km from the shore.
These are the stairs up to the ship itself. Has two different stairs. That stairway takes you to the walkway and the tower.
And then these stairs get you onto the ship. Since I don’t have a lot of time, I’m going to head straight for the top right away. I think we can actually use the stairs that are built into the ship like this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. So, here’s the other side. I have no idea whether you can go inside or not, but for now, let’s go up to the very top.
Feel like a sailor.
Every movie I’ve ever seen about Navy ships tells me that the stairs are always really steep and then when they’re in a hurry, they can just slide down them when it’s time to swing into action. Yeah. As a sailor, you get your exercise going up and down these steep stairs.
Almost at the top. Hello, guys. Hello. Yeah, it’s in really good condition for an abandoned ship.
Gorgeous view from up here. The mosque and the neighborhood, surrounding hills.
Yeah, the tower in a way. Yeah, you don’t really need the tower because this ship is so tall. It actually gives you the views of the city that you would have gotten from the tower anyway.
One more set of stairs.
Here we are at the top. They even give you binoculars.
Those binoculars are old school. Whoa. Yeah, you feel the height. This the roof. I didn’t expect that. It’s slanted. You can see. And then this the very very low railing. So, feels like you could get pitched over the side pretty easily.
Luckily, I have no fear of heights, so I really enjoy heights. So, looking over the edge of something like this doesn’t bother me at all.
Oh, look at that. A spotlight. I assume giant fans on it to cool it down when it was working. Oh, you know, I wonder if these spotlights actually operate at night because during the blackout from my hotel, I saw search lights scanning up in the sky like going moving through the clouds. And I was wondering like where the heck are those search lights coming from? And could have been coming from this ship if that search light is still operational. Although I think I saw more than one. I only see one here on the boat, so it’s probably wasn’t coming from here. Smoke stack.
One last look at the top of the ship and the surrounding city and the mosque. Beautiful. I’ve got 10 minutes left. So, 10 minutes. Let’s go down and see if we can go inside the ship or not. I’m not sure.
Wow, look at that stack.
This gives you an idea of the size of the probably diesel engine powering this boat. Needs a smoke stack that big just to get rid of the exhaust. Ships are just astonishing things. They really are.
Whoa.
All right, let’s follow the stairs.
Yeah, there’s no entrance so far.
Wonder what this is for. It’s almost like a railroad track.
Could be for running. Yeah, I have no idea what this could be for.
Okay, the front is blocked off for construction, but yeah, the ship is really well-maintained. Like, even the cables are still there. They’re not really that rusted. Nice paint job.
So far, all the doors have a big padlock on them, so you’re not getting inside. Can I look inside?
Yeah, I can just make out the interior with my eyes. The GoPro is not going to see anything. Oh, there’s an open door. Yay. Got 5 minutes left. Unless I want to wait for two hours to come back. But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of museum like classic like museum exhibits and displays like information. It’s more about the ship itself. Oh. Oh, spoke way too soon. Turns out that there is an exhibit on the inside.
Ah, okay. Wow.
Wow. There’s a lot of information here. I wasn’t expecting this at all. I don’t see anything in English yet, but you could Google translate all of this if you wanted to. Look at the interior. That is crazy, huh?
Oh, this looks like a photo of when it shortly after it arrived here.
Wow, look at that.
Way more information here than I was expecting, but I don’t have time to go through it, unfortunately. I’ll have to come back if I want to take a closer look. Wow, even some aerial shots. Lots of video. Look at that. They even have an animated video recreation of the ship. All right.
Look at that. All right. Very interesting. They’re even tracing the path of the ship, how it got from the shore to here. That’s amazing. Very dark in here, though. It’s hard to see a lot of the photographs.
And there’s some video of when the ship arrived.
It’s nicely air conditioned in here. That is nice.
Wa. Second floor exhibit, too.
All the information and photographs up there. Getting a lot hotter up here. The air conditioning doesn’t reach this high.
Very cool place. So, I’m not going to have a chance to go over all the exhibits right now, but my overall impression is very positive. Yeah, highly recommend it to come here, especially if you’re interested in more of the actual physics and geology and geography of the tsunami. Seems like they have a lot of technical information about how tsunamis work exactly. Seismographs, tectonic plates. Yeah, it’s a very looks like a very educational place, huh? And then some documentary photographs of post tsunami recovery and destruction. And it’s time to go. The clock has run out. They’re going to close right now. There’s the ship behind me. And you can hear the announcement telling everyone that the museum is closed for 2 hours. Time to go out. But if I’m back in the neighborhood again for 3,000 rupiah, yeah, definitely worthwhile popping back inside and doing a deep dive into all the information in the actual exhibits. But since I don’t have any time today, you the video viewer, you’re spared my deep dive into all the information. But yeah, just another look at the ship from the outside.
Yeah, the gates are closed and it looks like they have guides available. Probably Indonesian speaking or Acehnese speaking guides, not in English.
So, I hopped in a Grab car and I took the Grab car from the museum in the boat to a new bakso restaurant that’s in my new neighborhood. Really nice place. This is it here. Kedai Bakso Sati. I’ve eaten here once before already. Really nice place. They make a really good mie bakso. It’s the best that I’ve had in the city so far. So, and I can hear a generator behind me. So, I guess the power blackout is still ongoing, but I guess it depends on your neighborhood. I don’t know. Some places have power, some places don’t. The main tsunami museum was closed because they had no electricity, but other places seem to have electricity. And this restaurant, apparently, it doesn’t have power, so they’re running off their own generator. Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on.
I love it here that they give you a piece of paper like an order form and then you write down your order and they even have a menu on the wall right there. You can see the whole menu there. So yeah, that’s very cool. So yeah, just going to relax, have my lunch, a quick look at my meal before I dive in it. Yeah, it’s higher quality meat in the bakso than I’ve had at other places. The chicken is nicer sort of shredded chicken. The noodles are nicer, more like homemade noodles. Yeah, everything about it is just like a better quality than other places. And same price, too. Very comfortable seating here on the inside. Yeah, really nice place. I like it here.
Lunch is done and I’m on my way back to my hotel. Get out of the midday sun for a little bit. Relax. Yeah, that was a good lunch. Mie bakso. So, my usual simple lunch. The little girl that came over to say hello. She returned to my table throughout lunch just to check up on me, see how I was doing, see what I was doing. Always curious about the foreigner. She was very sweet.
And yeah, summing up my morning, I think it worked out okay as far as I’m concerned. The Planet Doug Effect was there, of course, where the main place I wanted to visit, the Tsunami Museum, was closed because of the power blackout, which kind of confuses me. Even the restaurant where I just had lunch, they didn’t seem to have power either, and I’m not able to connect to mobile internet either. So, that seems to be down because of power shortage, the blackout. I thought the blackout was done. I thought it was all over after 24 hours, but apparently it’s ongoing. So, the museum was closed. But that wasn’t such a bad thing for me. I’m sure I’ll go back there at some point. But I think in terms of all the exhibits at the museum, there wouldn’t be a whole lot there that would be new to me, things I hadn’t seen or things I hadn’t thought about. So, in a way, the main attraction of that museum for me was the building itself, just being able to see that the building, the very unique architecture there. So, I did see the building from the outside and I got to see a lot of photographs that they had on display on the outside. And then I went to the ship museum and that was also kind of a Planet Doug effect because I got there late and I only had half an hour before they closed. So, I wasn’t able to do a deep dive in all the exhibits. I didn’t even know that there were exhibits there to be honest. I thought the whole museum was just the boat, but it turned out they really had an interesting set of exhibits on the inside. Video and all kinds of technical information about tectonic plates and the actual mechanics of how a tsunami works. So, I think I would have found all of that very interesting, but I wasn’t able to really do a deep dive because I didn’t have enough time. But again, for the average person, I think the main attraction of that museum is the ship itself. And I was able to see the ship, walk all the way around it, walk all the way up to the top and go into the inside. So, yeah, at least I was able to see the unique nature of that museum itself. So, that worked out really well.
And all morning long I was trying to keep using the Malaysian Touch ‘n Go e-wallet. That’s an ongoing project of mine to see how that works here. But today was a little bit of an erratic day because I wanted to use it to pay for Grab. But both times I took a Grab car couldn’t do it. But I’m not sure why. It could be because the driver didn’t want to do it. The driver didn’t know how to do it. The driver couldn’t do it or it’s just because there’s no mobile internet and they couldn’t connect to get the QR code for me to scan. So, it failed both times, but I don’t know why it didn’t have anything to do with Touch ‘n Go. It was only because the whole QR code system, the QRIS system, I couldn’t access it. And same thing at the bakso restaurant. Couldn’t use it there either. I know it’s possible because I’ve done it there in the past, but today there’s no mobile internet.
So, but all in all, pretty good morning. Enjoyed that quite a bit. As I said, heading back to the hotel to get out of the sun, relax a little bit. So, that’s it for this morning’s small adventures. And as always, see you in the next video.