Weh Island Circle Tour

The northernmost point in Indonesia at Kilometer 0 is one of the main tourist attractions on Weh Island. While we made a stop at this surprisingly giant landmark, we also wanted to delve a little deeper into the story of the island. We started with the winding laneways and roads of Sabang, where most of the 40,000 island residents live.

Central to any visit to this part of Indonesia is the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. That horrific event marks a before and after moment that has defined the lives of the survivors and the communities of Aceh, the northern province of Sumatra. More than 220,000 people died in Aceh.

Many of the people we have met wanted to talk about it. We were told about loved ones lost, multiple generations that perished, homes swept away, bodies filling the streets and the horrible filth and mess left behind. Slowly, some communities are being rebuilt as new generations, with government help, are returning to their family lands and trying to create a new life.

Sabang was fortunate. While seven lives were lost, it had only minor damage along one section of the coast mainly because of the north-facing entrance to its port and the position of its main town. Our round-the-island tour took us past the home that was the demarcation point of the tidal wave. The waters came up to that home, close to the coast and spared the neighbours and the remainder of the coastal community.

Leaving Sabang, we passed through small villages, each with a central Mosque. At one stop, our driver went to the Mosque to pray while we walked around a small harbour. All along the coast were pillboxes and bunkers built during the Japanese occupation of the island during WWII. Further on we passed white sand and black sand beaches, common to volcanic islands, and then we headed inland to climb to a steaming caldera with bubbling mud pots that looked very similar to those at Yellowstone.

Perhaps the most unusual site we visited was the former psychiatric hospital that the Dutch built in 1923 - to essentially imprison Acehnese who repeatedly made suicidal attempts to kill Dutch occupiers. The individual attacks were part of a holy war that would earn the attacker martyrdom. Our tour guide described them as extremely courageous warriors seeking to free the Acehnese from the Dutch. An online source said that the Dutch pathologized the repeated attempts at murder, framing them as a racial condition, the result of centuries-long degeneration of the Acehnese mind, therefore they built a psychiatric hospital. Thousands were hospitalised and "treated" involuntarily.

Aceh has been occupied Indian Hindus, Arabian Muslims, Chinese and Portuguese traders, and Japanese soldiers. Most recently, Aceh was fighting a civil war for independence from Indonesia. That ended with the tsunami, when a truce was agreed and Aceh was granted autonomous zone status. We are visiting, apparently, in a rare time of peace.

A final word about our tour food - an important part of our voyage of discovery in Indonesia. It was fabulous. For morning tea, we stopped at a bakery where we were given little boxes of small round pastries that were filled with large dollops of sweet coconut and bean paste. Lunch was a buffet where you were handed a plate and pointed to the big rice cooker where you scoop out a serving and then select from a variety of vegetable dishes, chicken, shrimp and fish that have been variously or in combination fried, baked, steamed or battered, then on to a clear soup with spinach and corn or a seasoned soup with seafood. Everything we tried was delicious, although I had to get advice on spicy/not spicy on just about every dish. Afternoon tea was a fruit salad of pineapple, jicama, mango and papaya slices served in a peanut, tamarind and brown sugar dressing and washed down with the clear juice from a freshly sliced coconut.

Everywhere we stopped, people wanted their pictures taken with us. We felt almost famous by the end of the day.