VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Today, December 26, 2025, is the 21st anniversary of the Boxing Day Tsunami that struck Banda Aceh in 2004. So it seems like an appropriate time to visit the Museum Tsunami Aceh. I had tried twice before to visit this museum, but it had been closed due to the ongoing blackouts from the flooding and landslides that had taken place weeks before. But on this day, it was finally open.
It was a bit disappointing to find that though the museum was open, many of the exhibits were closed for repairs and renovations. In particular, I’d heard that the entrance was a dramatic tunnel with a multimedia display designed to give the feeling of being in a tsunami yourself. However, that exhibit was closed. In fact, I had no idea where it even could have been. I saw no evidence of it anywhere.
I was also surprised to find a certain lack of actual information about the tsunami itself. As I walked around the outside and inside, I slowly came to the realization that this museum was not really about information and knowledge. It was designed and funded more as a memorial and was meant to exist more in the area of emotions, symbolism, and remembering.
I hope you enjoy my thoughts and commentary as I explore this important place in Banda Aceh.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning and welcome back to Planet Doug. As you can see, I’m standing outside the Tsunami Museum here in Banda Aceh. And today is attempt number three to go into this museum. I’ve been here twice before and on both occasions the museum was closed. There has been a lot of flooding and landslides in Aceh province and Sumatra in general. So a lot of the power lines came down and there’s been ongoing blackouts here in Banda Aceh. So every time there’s a blackout the museum closes. Though the last time I came here they were also talking about renovations and maybe that’s why it was closed. So I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen today. It’s a rainy day. Yeah, you can see rain is coming down. But I thought I’d try one more time and see if the museum is open or not. There’s the museum building. I don’t see anybody moving around. I don’t see crowds of people, but that doesn’t mean it’s open or closed. Oh, there are two people in there getting off their scooter. They look like regular people. Might be coming to visit the museum. So, and I noticed some of the stores over here, like souvenir shops, were open. So, those are all good signs that perhaps the museum is operational today.
I don’t think I have to give a lot of background about what this museum is all about. It focuses on, of course, the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and that tsunami had a devastating effect on Sumatra, Banda Aceh, Thailand. It hit countries with a lot of force as far away as Sri Lanka. I know a lot about the tsunami, a lot of the history, the facts and figures, watched all the documentaries on YouTube. But I still wanted to come to this museum because I understand that it takes kind of an emotional approach, that there are like multimedia displays in here and perhaps tells a lot of the survivor stories. I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what the exhibits are like in this museum. I haven’t watched videos about it or done deep dives into this museum itself. I’ve learned a lot about the tsunami, but not about this particular museum. So, everything in here is going to be a surprise. That’s assuming it’s actually open.
This is a bit sad. They have this really nice coffee shop here and it’s closed. I’m very familiar with the word tutup in Sumatra. Everywhere I go, I have this superpower that whenever I try to go somewhere, that’s the day they’re closed or the time they’re closed. Happens a lot. So, tutup. These are the operational hours for the museum, 9 till 6:00. Though, what they don’t often list in these signs is that it closes, almost everywhere closes, between 12 and 2. So in fact the real hours are 9 to 12 and then 2 to 4. So it’s like 3 hours in the morning, 2 in the afternoon. So you have to be aware of that. It really isn’t open from 9 till 4:00. It’s only open in the morning and then 2 hours in the afternoon. And then yeah, these are the days. Ticket prices for Indonesians 3,000 rupiah, for children, adults 5,000. For foreigners, 20,000.
And on my previous two visits to this museum, I also planned to record paying with an e-wallet. I’ve made two videos about e-wallets since I’ve been here in Sumatra. One was about using the Malaysian e-wallet Touch ‘n Go to pay for as many things as possible just to test the limits, see how well it works. And I shot an entire video about using an Indonesian e-wallet called GoPay. And I shot a video about that as well. And for both of those videos, I wanted to include a segment where I came to the famous Museum Tsunami Aceh. And I was going to pay for my ticket using one of those e-wallets. And on both occasions, of course, the museum was closed. So, I wasn’t able to do my test. And I’m going to do that today. I’m going to try to pay. I think I’m going to try with a Touch ‘n Go, thinking from the point of view of a tourist from Malaysia coming here and they want to visit this famous museum. Can they use their Touch ‘n Go e-wallet to pay for the ticket? Let’s see. See, let’s see how well it works.
So, so far, yeah, everything looks good. That door is open over there. That may be the main entrance. I don’t know where the main entrance is. Here is the sign for the museum itself. And as I talked about before, this museum was designed by an architect, Ridwan Kamil, I think his name was. And as you can see, it looks a lot like a wave. It’s like a towering wall of water. And it was also designed to have elements of a traditional house here, a Rumoh Aceh. And those houses are traditionally built up on stilts partially to keep them out of flood waters which is very appropriate for a tsunami museum. And you can see these huge pillars here. The entire building is raised up on these pillars. So that’s another architectural element of this museum. So, let’s see.
There is a ticket office. Oh, yes. Bisa QRIS? No, no, I’ll buy cash. No. No QRIS. No, really. Oh, interesting. Only cash.
That really surprised me. No, they are not set up for QRIS in any way. So, it doesn’t matter what e-wallet you try, none of them will work here. It’s cash only. Yeah. And that really surprises me considering the scale of this museum and the hard government push to adopt QRIS and how proud Indonesians are of the QRIS system. I thought definitely you could do it here. So, yeah. Interesting. I suppose considering the serious topic of this museum, it’s a bit silly to get caught up in these trivial things, but I have a real interest in design and systems. So, the fact that they don’t have QRIS and then they did say cash only and then one of the great advantages to an e-wallet for me is that in countries like Indonesia, nobody ever has change of any kind. So whenever you’re trying to pay for something with like a 100,000 rupiah note, it always causes these big problems because nobody has change for notes that big, right? So they said, “Yeah, we don’t have QRIS, you have to pay in cash.” And then I’m falling all over myself apologizing because all I have are 100,000 rupiah notes, which is what the ATM gives you. So I show them, yeah, I have seratus ribu. And they’re like, aha, we can’t break that. I mean, don’t you have anything smaller? And I’m like, no, I don’t. I mean, that’s all I have. I mean, I did my part. I got an e-wallet and I learned how to put money in my e-wallet. So, yeah, you guys got to get QRIS. If you’re not going to have small change, you got to sign up for QRIS. Yeah, kind of funny. Anyway, yeah, time to head inside the museum.
Pintu masuknya. Okay.
So, there’s a map here in the entrance way in the lobby with numbers and a legend up here. Lobby, ticketing, amphitheater. That’s on the outside. The space of fear. Lorong tsunami memorial hall. Ruang kenangan. Chamber of blessing. Space of confusion. Lorong ingatan. Space of hope and then the fish pond is on the outside. So I mentioned on the outside, I think this museum is quite a symbolic, very emotional sort of museum and you can see that in the way the exhibits are named. Space of fear, memorial, blessing, confusion, hope ending on hope.
The museum begins with quite a substantial staircase. I’ve seen a number of people already turn away ’cause they didn’t think they could make it up. And I guess they do have an elevator down below if you’re elderly. But I think I can manage these stairs. And I noticed on this expansive wall there’s a map of Sumatra. And maybe from up higher we can get a better look at it. From down here you can’t really make out much of the detail, but I recognize these places such as this island. And then there’s the coast. So there’s the city of Meulaboh and Meulaboh and these coastal cities on the west coast of Sumatra, they often get overlooked in international coverage of the tsunami. Most of the focus is on Banda Aceh and then on the like the beach resorts in Thailand. That’s where most of the video shot and most of the information comes from there. But cities like Meulaboh right here were decimated by the tsunami because these places were hit first. The epicenter of the earthquake was right off the coast here and the wave hit them with zero warning at all and this whole coastline was devastated. But you don’t actually hear a lot about that in documentaries or in news coverage, anything like that. But yeah, I love that map. I just wish it was more clear. I can’t really read anything, especially from down below. But maybe we can see it better from up high. First, we have to conquer the stairs.
There was a registration book at the entrance there, and so I signed in with my name and the date and the nationality, phone number, things like that. But I noticed that a lot of the people were Malaysian. So I’d say 50% of the names were Malaysian. Okay. So up here you do get a slightly better view, but still yeah, not very clear. I wish the lettering was brighter. I’d love to see the relief clear. Again, it looks more like a piece of art than anything that’s meant to give information. But yeah, up there is Banda Aceh and then off the coast the island of Sabang and then the coastal area here that was hit really really hard. But I’d love to see like brighter colors and contour lines and then some information showing the path of the tsunami. I’d like to see a lot more information in that map. But yeah, that’s just the way my brain works. I’m much more into the practical information than I am in the symbolic nature of things.
I guess as I go through the museum, I’ll probably be a bit more practical and maybe a bit more critical than the average person. Partially because, as I’ve talked about before, I lived through a similar disaster in the Philippines in the city of Tacloban where it was hit by a super typhoon and a massive storm surge. And the storm surge that came along with that typhoon was such a dramatic one. It basically was a tsunami. It had the power of a tsunami. So I was there when the storm hit, when the storm surge hit, and I stayed for many, many weeks afterwards and watched all the rescue efforts and the recovery efforts. So I have all those personal experiences that I can compare to what I see portrayed.
I had a very interesting experience in Tacloban because I was physically there for the entire experience. Nearly 2 months I stayed even after the typhoon hit during all the recovery and the rebuilding and I was there when the typhoon hit and I went out into the city the day of etc. and I saw all the destruction and the recovery and all those efforts and then weeks later, well 2 months later when I managed to finally leave and I got on the internet and I saw all the stories like all everything that was in the international media talking about the storm surge and the typhoon that hit Tacloban and the stories were far different from my experiences. Like the headlines and the way people described what was going on were very very different from what I saw on the ground. So I’m very very sensitive to this idea that journalists and YouTubers and anyone at all taking photographs and writing stories and articles will not always portray things accurately. So I’m just very hyper sensitive to that and my brain went off on that tangent largely because of this photograph. And here at the bottom it says that this is housing aid that was built for the tsunami victims. So these houses were built with aid donations and aid money from the Indonesian government to help tsunami victims. Basically building housing for them because their houses were destroyed. And I remember in Tacloban a lot of international agencies did the same thing and they swooped in and built these houses. And yet in the Philippines, nobody moved into them. They were just left to rot and they all fell apart because the foreigners who built them didn’t really know how the local communities worked. And they built the houses in areas where nobody wanted to live. Like people couldn’t live there because there was nothing around them. It was like an isolated area. And these houses that were all built for survivors of the typhoon just sat empty and they never ever got used. And yet they’re always trotted out as a symbol of all of the aid that flowed into Tacloban.
And this is interesting. They have a model of the entire museum. And from up above you can see that it very much looks like a wave, a rolling cresting wave. And I think another element of the architecture is this green area on the roof which is meant to symbolize a high place that you can escape from the tsunami. So the tsunami building was designed with that idea as well. It looks like a wave and then it has a rooftop area, a refuge where people can run to to escape a tsunami.
And I find that quite interesting too because I recently had a conversation with someone who survived the tsunami. She was 13 years old at the time when it hit Banda Aceh. But she had an interesting perspective on people’s attitudes, knowledge of tsunamis, which at that time was zero. Nobody really knew about tsunamis. And when they saw the water coming towards their neighborhood here in Banda Aceh, everybody tried to run away from it because that’s your instinct, right? You go down to the beach, you don’t want to get wet. The wave comes in, the wave crashes, and you back up a few feet, the wave doesn’t reach you, and you’re safe. But a tsunami is not like a wave really. It’s more like an incoming tide. And all these people, their instinct was to run away from the water, but of course the water caught up with them and they drowned. And I asked her, well, I mean, this woman, she survived. She was trying to get away from the tsunami on a motorcycle with her sister, but even they couldn’t get away on the motorcycle, but she ended up surviving because when she was in the water, she floated into a mango tree and she climbed up into the mango tree. And she survived not because she ran away from the tsunami, but because she went up and then as she was explaining it to me, we people here in Banda Aceh didn’t have that instinct to go up. Their instinct was to run away. They saw the water approaching and they tried to outrun it. And of course, you couldn’t outrun the tsunami. It’s moving too fast. And then people also misjudged the power of water because you see water that’s coming up to your knees and you’re not panicking ’cause you think, well, I can just walk around in knee-deep water. But even knee-deep water will knock you off your feet when it’s moving. It’s very, very powerful. And then before you know it, it’s waist deep and then it’s shoulder deep and then you’re done.
So museums like this play a key role I think in educating people about future tsunamis. And all over Sumatra you will see evacuation routes, information about what to do when a tsunami hits. So maybe in the future people, not as many people will die in a future tsunami because they will have the instinct to head up rather than running away. Things like that. And they know what direction to go in. ‘Cause that’s a key thing, too. You know, you start running, everyone around you is panicking, everyone’s shouting, yelling, everybody’s running, but what direction do you go in? You don’t know. And you end up running straight into the water because you got turned around. So, you see all these evacuation routes, signs all over the place, telling people, “Okay, this way. That’s where safety is.” So, yeah. Anyway, let’s continue on into the museum.
Thank you.
I just stepped out of the little theater next door. Seats about 40 people. Very comfortable. Nicely air-conditioned which was nice. And they show a video there about 10 minutes long and most of the video I saw before. It’s most of it is out there on YouTube already, has been used in multiple documentaries on YouTube and news reports, things like that. But it was still interesting to see. There were little bits and pieces here that I hadn’t seen before.
In a couple of previous videos where I went to the PLTD Apung 1 Museum and then the day that I came here the first time or tried to come here the first time, I talked a lot about this tsunami and comparing it with my experiences in Tacloban. And one thing I saw here at this museum down below were a series of photographs and I noticed that there was I think there’s zero heavy equipment like in terms of recovery based on my experience. You the only thing you can do is bring in the big equipment, bulldozers, front-end loaders, dump trucks. You got to clear the debris out and nothing can happen in terms of recovery and rebuilding until you get rid of all that debris. And you need that heavy machinery to do it. And yet I saw no evidence of that anywhere like in the documentaries online, the photographs. I was like, where is all the heavy machinery that had to have been brought in? But in this video, they showed a little bit of it. So you did see some big machines, you know, tearing out the debris and loading it onto trucks to be taken away. Most of the imagery that I’ve seen focuses on elephants because they are so dramatic. They’re so picturesque, right? So, you get a photo or a little bit of video of an elephant pulling a piece of debris. That’s what you see in all the documentaries and all the photos. But elephants would have had a very small role, a powerful symbolic role in the recovery and rebuilding, of course. But in terms of actual effect, the elephants are not going to do that much. You’re going to have to bring in the big machines in order to really clear out all the debris.
The exhibit in this room talks about some of the things I’ve already mentioned. One, how local people here in Sumatra didn’t really understand about tsunamis and how to react to them and how after the 2004 tsunami and because of museums like this, they’re educating the public. And that’s what’s going on here. So in terms of an evacuation route, you see these all over Sumatra, arrows pointing you what direction to go in when a tsunami hits. And you notice they put in stairs. So head for high ground. And that was a big lesson I think that came out of the 2004 tsunami and education in schools about tsunami preparedness, things like that.
And I saw one sign over here that is interesting. They’re talking about a tsunami early warning system. And the key thing, well, one of the many, many key things about a tsunami is that out in the open ocean, it’s almost imperceptible. The tsunami is moving incredibly fast. It’s really hard to understand these numbers, but they move at the speed of a jet through the open ocean, 500 to 800 km an hour. And the water doesn’t rise hardly at all. The water goes up just by a few cm in some cases. So even if you’re out in the ocean and you’re in a ship and a tsunami passes by, you may not even notice. Your ship will kind of go up a little because the water level goes up as the tsunami passes through. But then the wavelength of a tsunami can be hundreds of kilometers long. So the water rises and then stays up for a while and then it slowly goes down again. So when the tsunami passes by a ship in the open ocean, you wouldn’t even notice. You need incredibly sensitive, highly specialized sensors to be able to notice a tsunami going through the ocean. And in the Indian Ocean, they didn’t have these back in 2004. They didn’t have, as far as I understand it, I’m no real expert in this, but I don’t think they had these specialized tsunami sensors in the Indian Ocean. So there was very little advanced warning anywhere around where you know where the tsunami was heading because I think often Hawaii they felt the tremors there, there’s when you watch the documentaries you see all these scientists in offices there and they have seismographs and oh there was this major earthquake but then there was no concept that a tsunami was heading for all these places and the warnings didn’t go out. So, I do wonder now after 2004, did they put these sensors in place? I don’t really know.
And this is something that really speaks to me based on my experience in Tacloban. This is a collection of debris, houses that would have been destroyed by the tsunami. But even a display like this, which is quite dramatic, doesn’t even come close to the reality of what you’re dealing with after a tsunami or a storm surge. You can just imagine this, all this debris piled together. Imagine this 20 ft deep and filling the entire street. And yeah, it’s a big big job to move all of this debris afterwards.
And there’s a long series of photographs in this hallway all about mainly about reconstruction afterwards and the role of international like UN agencies and assistance from other countries and I find that to be a fascinating topic because I saw a lot of that in Tacloban as well. And there’s a lot of nuance in these things that you wouldn’t know unless you live through it. And I remember so many tiny details. For example, the day of the typhoon and the storm surge. I mean, the storm was still raging, the rain was still coming down, and people were already rebuilding because they had no choice. Their houses were completely wiped out. Like, everything was gone. And yet it was pouring rain. So the very first thing they did as soon as it was light enough was to go out and start scavenging, grabbing pieces of wood and then hammering wood together to build a shelter. And for me, the soundtrack of Tacloban after the typhoon was hammering all day, like never ending. You go down to the shoreline, you just hammering hammering like hammering just going on all around you as people were rebuilding. And the thing is they would take pieces of wood and rubble out of the debris piles and then they would have to pull out all the old nails and then straighten the nails and then hammer them back in again as they rebuilt. And I was quite impressed later on to see that some aid agencies understood the practical needs. And when they started distributing aid packages, they were handing out hammers and nails to some of the local people like rather than just giving, you know, water and rice, you know, things and first aid. Someone thought, oh, they probably need nails. So they were distributing nails to all these people as part of aid packages. But the thing is, nobody used them because for the local people, these brand new shiny nails were much more valuable as an item that they can trade in and get money so that they can buy food, things like that. So they gave all these nails out to all these communities, all these people, and all the nails just ended up in the black market. They were for sale because they were more valuable to them as something they could trade. They kept taking the old nails out of the debris, straightening them, and using the old nails and just selling the new ones that international aid groups were giving them. So, in a weird way, supplying them with nails did help them out, but not in the way they intended. The local people didn’t use the nails.
There were also aid packages that had things like flashlights and batteries in them ’cause international aid groups were thinking, well, they could use flashlights ’cause there’s no electricity, there’s no light. But these flashlights and batteries were so valuable to the local people. None of them would use them. They would rather sit in the dark. And then all these flashlights and batteries, you could see them for sale in these like local like impromptu markets that sprung up like black markets where all the relief goods that were flowing into Tacloban were now being sold in these markets. So rather than using the flashlights and the batteries, they sold them and then took the money so that they could buy food and you know rebuild their lives. So yeah, little little things like that were fascinating to see and I was thinking about that because of course this display is all about big organizations around the world, governments, UN agencies flying in with helicopters and bringing relief, clothing, tents, water, medical supplies, you know, whatever they thought people would need. And again, not to be too terribly cynical about all this, when I was in Tacloban, so much rice flowed in. Like there was so much donation of rice and food that it ended up rotting away. I saw warehouses packed with sacks and sacks and sacks of rice and it couldn’t be used fast enough and it was all just rotting away. So this urge to provide assistance is very very important, but it’s not as clear-cut as you might think. You really have to know what you’re doing to deliver effective aid in a way that can really help the people out.
And just one last perhaps illuminating story along those lines is that I was there in Tacloban during the disaster. I was in as bad a shape as any of the local people almost. I was a bit better off because I was traveling by bicycle. So, I had a full set of camping gear, cook stoves. Even when the typhoon hit, I had several days worth of food like spaghetti and I had water filters, a first aid kit because I was traveling by bicycle. I was set up for camping. So when the you know electricity went away, running water disappeared, there was no food, no drinking water, nothing like that existed anymore, I was a bit better off. But still, I didn’t really have much that I could help anybody with. But I tried to offer my services like after a couple of weeks all the big UN agencies, you know, things like the Red Cross started to appear and they all stayed in certain areas of course and I went to those areas and I tried to volunteer. I said, “Well, I’m here. I’m a foreigner. What can I do? Can I join your organization? Can I help in some way?” And they all rejected me. Red Cross, all the UN agencies, everybody, they all said, “No, we can’t use you in any way because you’re not covered by our insurance.” And it was like that just shocked me. And it makes perfect sense in the real world. They can send all these foreigners in to help out only if they’re covered by heavy duty medical insurance and rescue insurance and life insurance. You know, you can’t just show up at the Red Cross offices in the middle of a disaster and just say, “Oh, I’m here. Let me help.” They won’t let you because you’re not covered by their insurance policy. They can’t risk it. So, even if you want to help, you can’t, which is a kind of an interesting thing I came across.
This room has a lot of technical information about tsunamis, how they work, sort of the physics and the science. But it’s a bit unfortunate because the screens zip by so fast you don’t have enough time to read anything. So I was trying to read through the information, but the screen zips by so quickly that it’s kind of pointless to be honest. I was trying to read all this information, but I gave up ’cause it all goes by way too quickly.
And in the neighboring room, I think there are a lot of exhibits that are shut down. This one has no lights. I don’t know what’s going on here. It seems to be blocked off over there. But I’ve seen a lot of rooms that are blocked off. So there’s no entrance from over there. But this looks like the model of the— Oh, yeah. There it is. There the PLTD Apung 1. So this is the other museum here in town.
Heading up. And notice even on the stairs, they have tsunami evacuation route signs. So this if a tsunami hits right now while I’m in the museum, this is where they want me to go, which makes sense. They want me to go up.
Common sense, of course. But until you’ve lived through a tsunami, maybe it isn’t common sense. And unfortunately, it looks like the rooftop is closed. That’s where I really wanted to go, but it looks like no, you can’t go up to the roof anymore. Kind of makes sense. A lot of the building seems to be falling apart. A lot of the exhibit rooms are closed for repairs and renovations. And I guess the rooftop isn’t safe anymore.
But yeah. Okay, we have another exhibit here. A special exhibit from USAID. Huh. I suppose there’s a certain irony in that because of the era we’re living through where in the United States I don’t really know the extent of it, but USAID was somewhat cancelled, right? Or their budget heavily slashed or they got rid of USAID completely. Right now the American government. I’m not sure, but it looks like this whole exhibit is about USAID helping out after the tsunami. It’s a bit ironic ’cause maybe USAID doesn’t even exist anymore.
This exhibit sparks a lot of memories from Tacloban as well, you know, about international aid flowing in. It took me a long time to learn about it because my part of the city in Tacloban was pretty much devastated and it was difficult to get out to go anywhere else. So, it turns out there was a lot going on out at the airport because that’s where international aid could arrive quickly. There was an airport in Tacloban and then giant C-130 cargo planes from the United States and the UN wherever were landing there bringing in aid, bringing in medical supplies, things like that and then carrying refugees out, the people who wanted to leave. And I remember again I stayed there for quite a long time. So towards the end of the two months that I was there, I went out to that district many times, but I went out there towards the end like towards the airport and there were these vast complexes that had been built by the Australians, by the Americans, by various European countries and they would be like field hospitals filled with all the equipment you can imagine. Generators, water filtration systems, refrigeration systems, like complete hospitals basically. And the people were gone for the most part. The Australians were gone, the Americans were gone, but all their gear was still there. And that really puzzled me. But then I talked to some people who were involved in this, and they said that all of that equipment that they flew into the Philippines, they couldn’t really bring it home. It’s too expensive because all of that heavy gear would have to be flown out back to Australia for example and then it has to go into quarantine and then it all has to be cleaned very very carefully and that costs so much money it’s cheaper just to leave it behind. So like all of that gear, generators, refrigeration units, hospitals, everything they flew in, they just left it there because it’s too expensive to bring it back home. And then of course you had the local people, governments kind of fighting over all this stuff because it’s like a bonanza. It’s worth a lot of money. All these generators, all this equipment, vehicles, all kinds of things, clothing, medical supplies. Who gets it? Which level of government gets to keep this? And that was another angle to the relief after the typhoon. And I don’t know what it was like here in Banda Aceh, but you know, when I look around at all of these pictures and I see, you know, helicopters dropping off tons of things and they probably built hospitals. I mean, look at all this stuff. And they wouldn’t bring it home again once the mission is over based on what I learned in Tacloban. They just leave it all behind. And again, not to get too cynical, it led to a certain level of corruption in the Philippines where local politicians were fighting over all this stuff that they could keep it, sell it, and then put the money in their own bank account. And that was an aspect to the aid as well.
This next room is a fascinating one because this is certainly one aspect to the tsunami in Banda Aceh in Aceh province that often gets overlooked, the Helsinki agreement. I don’t know the official name for it, but of course here in Aceh province, they’d had a longstanding independence fight against the central government, the Free Aceh Movement. As you can see here, the Free Aceh Movement called GAM. They were in a military struggle for many many years against the government and the tsunami basically encouraged everybody to work together. And then one good thing that came out of all this destruction is that they came to an agreement. Looks like the meeting took place in Helsinki. That’s what I’m picking up here. And the Free Aceh Movement and the government of Indonesia, the central government, they committed to a peaceful solution to the conflict and they basically worked out an agreement where Aceh province was given a special status in Indonesia, a kind of limited autonomy and in exchange for putting down their guns and stopping the fighting. So that was something very very positive that came out of the tsunami.
A special exhibit up here on the third floor right next to the Helsinki exhibit is a room they call tsunami artifact. So these are all items from the tsunami, items mainly that were destroyed of course and gathered up later on. And then they built a bunch of models to illustrate the destruction. And again, that’s something else I find most people overlook when it comes to the tsunami. They think about the tsunami, but the earthquake came first. And so you got this earthquake, a mega earthquake hits and you get a lot of damage to the buildings. Some buildings came down, they collapsed. And then in the midst of that destruction trying to deal with the effects of the earthquake then the tsunami hit and the tsunami kind of stole the spotlight from a disaster point of view but it all started with the earthquake and that often gets overlooked. It’s mentioned as the cause of the tsunami, but the actual destruction caused by the earthquake before the tsunami even hit is sort of an interesting topic to think about.
This is something I haven’t seen in person yet here in Banda Aceh. I’ve heard a lot about it. I think it’s one of the main exhibits that you can look at as part of learning about the tsunami. This boat which I believe is still there. It landed on top of a house carried there by the tsunami and they just left it there as a museum. And looks like there’s nothing in the boat itself. You don’t climb onto the boat, but it looks like you climb onto a viewing area, a platform, and it’s in a village called Lampulo, but I haven’t been out there yet. So that’s on my schedule to do at some point.
Up here on the third floor. The entire floor goes in a circle and it’s ringed with all these photographs on this side focusing on international aid again. And again, that’s bringing back some memories from Tacloban ’cause there were so many aspects to this that you wouldn’t think about from the outside. You kind of have to live through it to understand how these things work. And in Tacloban there was quite the range of special assistants that flew in. So for example from Canada I met a team that brought in dogs. These dogs were trained to look for survivors in earthquakes so that if a building collapses and then people are trapped underneath the rubble and they’re still alive. This Canadian team has specially trained dogs that can smell the people in the building. They sniff them out. And this Canadian team flew into Tacloban, but their main role was actually finding dead bodies because there was nobody alive in the rubble anymore by the time they got there. And their job was to go out every day with their dogs into these massive debris piles and find dead bodies basically. So the dogs would run around in this area, stop when they smell something under the debris and they put a flag there and they mark all these places and then the Filipino teams, the body recovery teams would then move in, look for these flags and then start digging and pulling out the debris and then recover the body. So that was quite interesting.
There was another team. I forget what country they were from. They showed up with a set of high-powered drones. And these drones had infrared sensors and heat sensors and all kinds of special equipment. And they would fly the drone over the fields, over the water, over the debris piles, also looking for dead bodies because there would be a heat signature or something like that. So they would fly these very high-tech drones also involved in like body recovery work. So there’s like a tremendous range of teams with special skills that fly in after a disaster like that. And they fly in from all over the world.
And I do remember reflecting at the time a little bit of practical thinking or perhaps a little bit of cynicism that some of these teams the amount of money they spent to get there and the amount of effort they put in like even for this Canadian team. They told me some of their story about the flight to get into Tacloban. I mean, it took them days and days and days just working their way through, you know, getting the tickets and probably getting insurance approved and getting all the supplies they needed and then flying from airport to airport to airport, delays at every airport, finally getting into Tacloban at great expense in terms of money and time. And then by the time they’re doing their work, you do have to think, well, was it all worth it? Like maybe the project cost, I don’t know, $200,000 to get that team into the country. Maybe they would have been better off just giving the $200,000 to somebody in the Philippines. It probably would have been a better use for their money, right? In terms of the actual work that they did. But at the same time, there is sort of a symbolic role that goes on as well that promotes goodwill between countries and humanitarian gestures, you know. So there’s more to it than just practical aid to see a group of doctors from Japan, drone pilots from Sweden, you know, body recovery dog teams from Canada. That just does a good thing in terms of the feeling between countries among people. And the Filipinos, of course, were instrumental in taking care of these people while they’re doing their work. They need places to stay and they need food and they need water and yeah it was all very very interesting.
Still up here on the third floor. And from up here, you can see like remember that model that we saw at the beginning how the building has a wave kind of a circular shape. And so the wave is on the left and the right and the area in between is a very open like this. And I think that down there is called the bridge of peace. And you see the names up here in the ceiling of all the countries who provided aid and assistance during the tsunami. So this is sort of what I was talking about. All of this international aid promoted kind of, you know, unity among countries around the world. And that’s the bridge of peace down there. And it looks like it’s sealed off as well. I think there’s an exhibit. I don’t know what’s inside that tower. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just you walk around it and there’s photos or something, but yeah, it’s blocked off as well. So, can’t go on the bridge of peace.
I think that’s the end of the main exhibits. I might pass something else on my way out of the museum, but yeah, it’s closing in 30 minutes at 12:00. I think at 11:30 they close the lobby doors so no one can come in anymore after 11:30. But yeah, over here too, these are the stairs going to the roof. But on this side, it’s barricaded as well. Blocked off. You can’t go up onto the roof. Unfortunately.
Right now I could definitely go for a museum coffee, but I think they have a canteen on the inside and a coffee shop on the outside, but both of them are closed. I didn’t see anything there. Actually, there might be a third one out in this direction. I spotted it the other day. I’m here down on the main floor again. There’s the bridge of peace. Raining outside unfortunately, but I have a vague memory of seeing some sort of a coffee shop or restaurant at one of the ends here. Oh, yeah. Not on this end. It would be at the far end. All of these photos, I’ve already gone over them in detail in a previous video. Very interesting.
There’s a big display of photos over there as well. And this coffee shop is on the other side of the bridge of peace down there. Let’s go see if they’re open.
Oh, and this is the amphitheater that they mentioned. So, it isn’t part of a like a normal exhibit, but if they have a special display or presentation, they can use this amphitheater.
Ah, here we are. Look at that. Specialty coffee musta or something like that. And they have tables with chairs. Makes me very very happy to see that. So, let’s go down and grab a coffee and see if we can come up with a conclusion for my visit to the museum. Got to navigate these wooden steps. And let’s go get a cup of coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Yes, please. Yes. Sugar. Sugar. Sugar. Sugar. Sugar. Okay. And milk. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Just over there. Yes. I can pay you. 10,000. Sepuluh. Okay. A very important word in Indonesian. Sepuluh. 10,000 called sepuluh ribu. It’s 10,000. You hear that a lot. You master sepuluh ribu, you’re never without a cup of coffee.
Oh, look at these. I love chairs that have a back rest.
Ooh, even bigger back rest over here. Let’s go for the biggest back rest I can get. These are giant chairs. Look at that. That’s very cool. I see my coffee coming towards me. So happy.
Be careful what you wish for. I always want my coffee to be as hot as possible, which this coffee is, which is really nice. But then the cup itself is so hot and I’m such a wimp, I can’t actually hold the glass. So, I have to put a serviette around the cup for my tender fingers so that I can hold on to the hot. There’s no like loop or what do you call it? There’s no handle. There’s no handle.
Yeah. Funny thing about being a westerner and getting coffee overseas and coffee culture, the one thing they know about foreigners, about Westerners like me in general, we don’t like sugar in our coffee. They just seem everybody knows that. And I guess every Westerner that comes here and asks for coffee, they make a big deal about no sugar, no sugar, no sugar. Because the local style is to have the coffee very very sweet and to the most western tastes it’s not very good. Everybody asks for no sugar, but I’m kind of the opposite. I don’t really care. Sugar, no sugar, it’s all the same to me for the most part. I just like things to be as simple as possible. So, I always get the coffee like however you make it, just normal. Don’t worry about how much, how little, just coffee local style and I’ll deal with it. Though I’m coughing so much because this really is true local style coffee where the coffee grounds aren’t filtered out. They just put the grinds in the coffee and pour the hot water in. So all the coffee grounds are like floating on the top and I’m like choking on them.
So as much as I appreciate it, not my favorite cup of coffee.
Very crunchy. I’m like chewing on it.
All those photographs and the discussion of foreign aid after a major disaster has got my brain turning over and I’m remembering other details from my time in Tacloban. Kind of funny anecdotes. And I’ve sort of been hinting that a lot of the international aid, as well-intentioned as it was, often missed the mark entirely. Where you ended up with houses that nobody wanted to live in, food that just piled up in warehouses and rotted away, objects that were valuable, but to the local people, they didn’t really need them as much as they needed the money. So, they actually took all these things like flashlights and batteries, nails, tents, anything that they were given, they would just turn around and sell them on the black market. And then because the money was more valuable to them. They’d rather, as I said, sit in the dark and get the money for the flashlight. So, it’s just kind of an interesting way of looking at things.
And my experience again in Tacloban with the ongoing recovery. Again, I wasn’t privy to all the behind the scenes stuff that was going on, but just from a casual on the ground perspective, it seemed like when things actually got done, like when real work took place, real beneficial work, it was coming from the Filipinos themselves. And I’ve talked in other videos about how the city didn’t really start to recover until the heavy machinery arrived being operated by Filipinos and they would just get into the streets, you know, day after day with an endless stream of dump trucks and these heavy machines or like pulling out the debris, piling it into dump trucks and carry them away and then restoring electricity. That kind of work again was done by the Filipino organizations. Body recovery, the hard work, the physical work of doing that was done by the Filipinos. The foreigners were there with their fancy machinery, the heat-seeking drones, the cadaver-sniffing dogs, things like that which were helpful, but the real work getting stuff done tended to be done by the Filipinos themselves.
But then from my point of view, I have a couple of interesting stories about that because being a foreigner overseas, you’re still subject to the local styles. So, I eventually reached a point where I wanted to leave, but I wanted to leave with my bicycle, right? Because I was there on a touring bicycle. And there’s a long story about that. My bicycle was pretty badly damaged during the typhoon and the storm surge and it took a long time to get it roadworthy. I never did get it roadworthy until I came to Malaysia afterwards and had the bike professionally repaired. But anyway, I did get it roadworthy and it’s worth a lot of money. I wanted to take it with me, but you couldn’t really take something like that on the planes. There were these C-130 cargo planes that were taking refugees away, but you couldn’t show up there with a motorcycle or a bicycle and a big bicycle trailer. They’ll take me if I wanted to leave Tacloban by plane. I could have gotten a spot on one of these cargo planes, but they wouldn’t take my bicycle. But then Navy ships from the Filipino Navy started to arrive and I rode my bike down to the docks just to look at the ships and I found out from them that oh yeah, they’re taking away refugees and they have tons of room. So I could get a spot on one of these ships. So I made all these plans to ride my bike to the ship and I just roll my bike onto the ship. You sleep on the deck and this Navy vessel would take me to Cebu or to Manila or wherever they’re going. So I go there and it’s covered in soldiers, things like that, but they’re pretty casual. It’s Filipino soldiers. I show up as a foreigner. They just sort of let me go. They just say, “Oh,” they just wave me through, you know, because I’m a foreigner. Oh, it’s okay. It’s okay. You can go through the guarded checkpoint. So, I go up to the ship and they had a kind of a counter at the front with someone there keeping a record of people they’re going to evacuate. So, I happened to have, you know, I had a phone number by that point. I think I could send text messages. Enough communication had been restored by that point. But anyway, I talked to them and said, “Oh, can I get a ride on your boat?” And they says, “Yes, sir. Absolutely. Write down your name. Write down your phone number. We will contact you when we’re leaving and then you can come.” And of course, I never heard from them. And the next time I went to the harbor, the ship was gone. But then another ship came and I went up to them and said, “Yeah, can I get on, can I get a spot on this ship? Can you evacuate me and my bicycle?” And they said, “Yeah, absolutely.” And they told me when they’re leaving, the day and the time that I was supposed to return. So, I did. I planned ahead. I got everything ready and I went back. Well, actually, it was the day before I was supposed to get on the boat. I was down near the harbor and the ship had already left, right? So, now you’re dealing with the Filipino style where they don’t stick to schedules or appointments or anything like that. And every time I arranged to be evacuated on a Filipino naval ship, which I thought would be a big adventure, the boat left without me. And that was like a funny angle to this whole Tacloban disaster situation.
And that’s it. The end of my visit to the tsunami museum. Luckily, the rain has taken a break, so I can walk back to my hotel. Yeah, I was just looking at these signs over here. I noticed them on my way in and I saw the words on them where these signs said Akan Ada Renovasi. And I think that means when you go into the museum, all these exhibits that they’re showing on these posters, they’re all closed because they’re all being renovated or repaired. And I think there’s that one in particular. There’s like a circular hallway which was supposed to give you the sensation of being in a tsunami because of the sound and the visuals or something like that. Kind of a fancy multimedia. I never saw that. So I think that was closed and I think all of these were closed. But I went in there with those expectations. I heard a lot about how this building ever since it was built in fact has suffered from problems because I think a lot of these sorts of places there’s a lot of money available to build it because that’s the exciting part. You’re building a new museum. It’s easy to line up donors and millions of dollars come in to build this amazing museum. But then once that excitement dies down and it’s time to pay for ongoing upkeep, well now the donors start to disappear a little bit and there isn’t always a sufficient budget for renovations, repairs, additions, upkeep, things like that. So, I already heard in advance that you might find a lot of exhibits will be closed and that the building might show some physical problems. And I did see that quite a bit.
But overall, I mean, as a place to visit, do I recommend it? Well, yeah, absolutely. If you’re in Banda Aceh, why not? You’re here, come to the museum. It isn’t my kind of museum. I would highly recommend, of course, going to the other one, the PLTD Apung 1. That’s more my style, more technical, more informative, a lot more detail. As I mentioned when I came into this museum, I think this museum was built with a sense of hope and like it’s a symbol of recovery, reconstruction, and teaching people about future tsunamis, how to survive them, how to prepare for them. So, it’s not really a museum. It didn’t have a lot of information. I was surprised to be honest. Even I was a little bit surprised how little information there was in there. There was like, now that I think back, almost none at all. You had that 10-minute documentary, but it showed some scenes from the tsunami, the destruction afterwards, but that’s it. There was no explanation. Yeah, really nothing at all. So, it focused mainly on yeah, a lot of the aid that came from other countries, from the United Nations, the rebuilding, things like that. But if you come here hoping to learn even about the extent of the damage, the nature of the damage, the countries affected, how Banda Aceh was affected, how long the recovery took, the rebuilding, there’s pretty much nothing at all about any of that now that I think about it. So, but a lot of interesting photographs, some background information, and as I said, well, if you’re in Banda Aceh, why not? 20,000 rupiah to go in, spend an hour or two looking around. I think it’s still well worth your time. And then on another day, you can head to the PLTD Apung 1 Museum.
And then you can track down some of the other ships that are in the city. There’s the one in there that I showed. There’s the model that’s sitting on top of houses. I haven’t seen that one yet. But if you come here and you want to learn about the tsunami, the history of Banda Aceh. Yeah. Drop by the museum. Get yourself a cup of chewy crunchy coffee at the little coffee shop back there. Yeah. So there it is. The Tsunami Museum in Banda Aceh finally opened. Third time’s the charm, they always say, right? My third visit, it was finally open. So that’s it. Shutting down. See you in the next video.