A birds-eye view of the tsunami devastated coastline

Aceh Clam Chowdah

(continued)

By Freeman Anthony

Later that evening, I came face to face with Jakarta, a city with an intensity I've never seen before. It was raining and dark as we pulled up to the heavy timber concourse topped with temple-like spires and faced with dim glass that diluted the fluorescent lights inside. A good sense of leaving the first world could be felt in the worn, uneven red tiles that I plodded across, heading to the baggage claim. Large posters declaring the life-ending penalties of drug trafficking echoed the recent news coverage of Schapelle Corby.

After clearing customs, I looked hard for a familiar placard in the gaping crowd at the exit gates, hoping not to have to penetrate the city on my own. Not long after I saw the IRD placard in the air, I was ushered forward under the care of a seeming official middle-aged man. "Mista, please," he said and led me forward with a wave of his hand and a 99 percent believable smile. We met two stalky men in dark blue IRD work shirts with the placard, and my name was repeated with smiles, hand shakes and a sense of relief on my part.

Our party sifted through the wet taxi mayhem out front and packed my gear into a late model Mitsubishi that never quite made it to the Detroit showroom floors. My unofficial escort from customs to the car politely asked for his tip and graciously refused coin. "We prefer paper here, mista," he said with an understanding grin. I parted with my last Singapore $10 note, and we were off into the rainy snarl of traffic and dim lights.

The city was a blur of neon colors through the rain-streaked windows of our ute. With a wave of his hand the driver announced "Jakarta" as we sped into the high-rise district through manic traffic, the likes I've never seen. Scooters with one or two raincoat-clad nationals filled the voids between four-wheeled rigs of all types like sand in concrete. I was dropped at a modest guest house and left alone with a pack of cigarettes that the front desk produced for me after a few hand signals. The Marlboro Man and I took in the aged courtyard and pool surrounded with stringy palms and random cables. All silhouetted against the damp light pollution from a city of nine million.

I had a morning in Jakarta to meet my administrative superiors and buy granola, which was apparently a sought after commodity by expats at ground zero. Other items included mosquito spray and a bottle of whiskey at the "westerner" supermarket where your undercarriage gets a good check before you are allowed on site. Under the guard of four well-armed police officers, the gods of commerce smiled upon me as I was able to get a couple million rupiah from a bank account 6000 km away. My business done, we paid the "parking fee" to the officers and made another seemingly blind run through perpetual traffic to the airport. A causal glance down a side street revealed a steady stream of scooters and motorcycles ready to enter the stream, like oxygen depleted red blood cells eager to return the lungs.

The airport was familiar now, and I made for a plane headed for Banda Aceh by way of Medan. There was a suspicious similarity to all the expats on board. Each with a laptop and looking like they were out of an Amnesty International club from some rural New England university. I spent the flight yarning with the "UN Focal Point" for area operations who was a national with better English than most Kiwis. He filled me in on the regional situation to the extent I could comprehend the number of people killed, those currently homeless and the conditions in which most affected people were living. I struggled to comprehend the messy aftermath of a collision between natural phenomena and already desperate conditions.

The island of Sumatra forms the southern side of the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca. Sumatras north-south backbone of limestone, the Bukit Barisan mountain range, ends at Banda Aceh City like a severed neck in the northeastern Indian Ocean. As I flew in, I could see a few large islands to the north offshore with thick coats of jungle that contrast to the lowland rice paddies that snuggle up to the mountains underneath us. The devastated seashore came into focus as we circled over a long sandy spit and locked into a landing pattern. There was a chaotic zone of differing shades of brown between the green of the rice paddies and the blue of the Indian Ocean. The closer we got to the tarmac, the more you could see evidence of a massive forced flushing of the coastline and lowlands.