The Tsunami Tourist

Another bus station in the early morning, hazy from an all night bus journey in a fridge. Sitting around the periphery of the station yard are the usual mix of gruff and grisly men taking their first coffee of the day. We are grunted into sitting at one of their tables and they hold forth over us, at us, ignoring us, chatting to us. They are serious men yet they goose each other and giggle like school girls. I wonder should I try and join in.

We have arrived in Banda Aceh. This was one of the hardest hit areas in the tsunami at the close of 2004. Somehow we have managed to arrive here with little idea of how the area was faring now, only having been reassured that any tourism was a good thing. We are aiming for the island of Pulah Weh just off the coast of Aceh.

It starts on the way to the boat. Our tuk driver points at a factory up ahead. Tsunami, he says but it is unclear what he means until we get closer and realise the "factory" is actually a ship. It is perhaps a hundred metres long and half that wide, a cargo ship. It has settled permanently in the middle of a residential neighbourhood of single storey houses. At this point we are still several kilometres from the sea. As if this marked some sort of border, the scars are suddenly everywhere. Houses crumpled in on themselves, the concrete and cable supports buckled and twisted, or plucked from their foundations. The occasional eery site where all that remains is the tile floors, rain washed maps to vanished homes.

There's a new bridge with the splinters of the old one still jagged underneath. At one point desolate black lakes clogged with debris and tree trunks line the roadside. Locals sift through them. I can only imagine what they find.

There is an occasional palm tree amongst the buildings, towering upto fifteen metres into the grey sky, their leaves still ragged and broken. Higher says our driver, the water went higher. And there was no higher ground, nowhere to run.

Suddenly we feel like vultures. We huddle down in our little seat as far as we can. People stare at you most places in Indonesia but here I imagine it to be accusatory, even when they smile. Our driver tells us with a small smile that he lost a baby and I shrink a little more.

The sea is so calm, we might as well be boating on a lake.

Pulah Weh is a breeze dried piece of paradise, snorkelling with turtles in seas that are brochure blues, framed by jungle and palm trees. Five naked brown boys prance around in the waves, the picture of innocence (though they do show an impressive knowledge of the mechanics of love whenever Toni has her back turned. I try and put on a disapproving look but fail. There's five of them, naked, humping the air. "Are you?" their eyes ask.)

Pulah Weh island itself felt much less impact from the tsunami, with jungle hillsides rising up almost from the waters edge, but it still bears the scars. The water came as high the floor of our beachside cabin, raised as it is back on the hill slightly, and the Malaysian couple inside at the time were safe. But when the water receded it took most of the lower structures with it and the topsoil. Trees line the back beach, many now with their roots exposed. Some of them lie still slumped on the beach, untethered, a picture of defeat.

There are barely a handful of tourists here. The whole country seems to go through cycles of recovering from natural disasters and social upheaval so that tourism comes and goes like the tides. Aceh, with its regular natural disasters and an ongoing separatist conflict, seems to be one of the slowest places to regain the traveller's trust. And then this week there's another offshore earthquake, another tsunami warning and the area's battered reputation takes another knock.