Simeulue road trip

Guess what? It’s only one week til I go on holidays. Exactly one week from now, I will be sitting on a plane to Singapore. Yah! I have about 6 hours between landing in Medan and leaving for Singapore, hopefully enough time to get a hair cut (so I look half decent for this wedding) and to buy some warm clothes! I need gloves, scarves, thermals, socks and comfy closed shoes. Not to mention maybe a nicer outfit for this wedding…

Being in the field like this, with little to do at night, provides me with ample opportunity to regularly update my blog.

Last weekend we took a road trip to a little place called Sibigo, aka Batu Ragi. It’s a trip that’s been long in the planning – we’ve been meaning to go there for about a year! It’s about 4 hours drive on the other side of the island to Salang – heading north-west from Sinabang on the east coast road rather than the west coast road. There’s only one road around the island, and I don’t even know if you can make it all the way around. The north-western tip of the island is apparently impassable at the best of times, particularly in the rainy season.

Which it definitely is at the moment! This last few days has seen almost constant rain all through the day and night. Simeulue seems to be constantly wet anyway, but we’ve had downpour after heavy downpour here over the last week. It’s crazy! Thank goodness it finishes by January (apparently). That will help the project a lot. Luckily we had enough of a break in the rain this afternoon to participate in a game of volleyball with the local lads (and one other lovely lady). It was good fun, although I felt a bit crap at the game, especially compared to the guys who are all extremely athletic and can jump a metre in the air to spike (local version: smash) the ball. Still, it was good to finally get some exercise here in Salang. I noticed that the neighbours also have a table tennis table, and I brought my Frisbee too, so that will keep me busy.

Anyway back to the story: road trip to Batu Ragi. Back during the time when Steph and Jon were still here, we’d talked a few times about making a trip to Batu Ragi, the location of the field office of Norwegian Red Cross, where my friend and fellow ex-pat Shir Shar works. He’s another WatSan delegate on Simeulue, and is a nice Afghani fellow who has a project up there building community latrines and capturing spring water supplies for a number of villages on the opposite side of the island. He spends as much if not more time in the field than me – and stays every second weekend there – in an equally isolated little town on the water.

Last weekend at Lugu, we were discussing our various weekend plans and once again this one came up. So finally we decided to do it the following weekend. Why not? We were all free! So, late Saturday morning after a lovely German-style brekkie at Lugu, Chigusa, Daniela, Anna, ShirShar and myself set off in the NRC landcruiser to Batu Ragi.

The drive itself is one of contrasts. Beautiful coastal scenery; the now dead and rocky coral, which was exposed when the 2004 earthquake tipped the island up; the mangroves hugging the shore, little re-forestation projects here and there, designed to help them recolonise and buffer the shoreline from future tsunamis; the hilly terrain with its beautiful untouched rainforest. Scattered in between the forest are little villages, green rice padis with their new shoots interspersed with empty ones or those underwater, or even disused padis that are now only the playground for wallowing buffaloes. And then you drive over the next hill and out come the gasps of horror, or amazement, or both, from everyone as we see, yet again, rows and rows of ‘kebun sawit’ – palm plantations, stretching as far as the eye can see. Last time I went on this road – around one year ago – I was amazed by it. The destruction is now at a catastrophic level, with more than double the area cleared. It’s really sad. Unfortunately its providing the community with a means of income but at the same time destroying this beautiful island. At the moment the price of palm oil is apparently very low. Maybe this will be the island’s rainforests’ saving grace?

After about a 4 hour drive, we arrived. Batu Ragi is a beautiful little place, right on a now-disused harbour. When you stand on the jetty, where the local kids jump into the water for an afternoon dip (which we also did), there are four identically sized, identically spaced islands spanning the horizon between two peninsulas. It really is a beautiful place to while away some time with a book.


The NRC compound may have once been a nice little place, but clearly only men live there! It’s pretty grubby. Its staff accommodation shelters are currently being dismantled as they downsize their operations, and move next to the PMI (Indo Red Cross) and Government Water Supply Company offices. Not far up the road is another little town (whose name escapes me at the moment) on another bay, where people take the local ferry, called a “Robin” – named after the motor it uses. The ferry is basically a motorised wooden canoe! It has a couple of nice waterside warungs (local restaurants), so we watched the sunset over the water before heading back to the compound.
The following day we took a boat out to one of the islands. It was interesting to see, as we approached, that the four islands were in fact very distinct from each other and different in size, shape and composition. The island we visited was beautiful, with a long, white sandy beach – and I’m totally bragging when I say all of the outlying islands around Simeulue are like this! Ahhh nothing like living in a little tropical island….
The snorkelling was beautiful and we spent the next few hours exploring the coral reef surrounding the island. The coral, as in most locations around Simeulue, was dead or exposed in some areas, but it was unique in this case because it was arranged in hundreds of canyons extending outwards from the island, creating havens for so many fish - many more species than I’d seen in other locations around Simeulue (like Pulau Siumat, where we normally go). Hence it was really interesting to snorkel around this island and discover what it had to offer.

So we finally made our road trip to Sibigo. It was worth it too, and we had some great company. I really enjoy spending time with the other expats on Simeulue; they are such a wide variety of fun people with such different interests, and coming from so many far flung and different countries, it makes for an interesting group of friends.

Next weekend will be a long weekend, because on Monday (8th Dec) it’s Idul Aha, or the Hajj. Perfect for me to have enough time to pack! And just for something different, we also plan to attend a buffalo slaughtering ceremony. During Islamic celebrations people jointly buy buffaloes, get them butchered, share some with the poor, and then cook up their portions in a big feast. We plan to go along and witness it, and then buy some buffalo meat to make a barbeque. A bit of a pre-Christmas Christmas dinner, so to speak. Something else to look forward to … hope I can keep my breakfast down :)