The plain between between the mountains and the coast widened, the road inland and rolling through a land of palm plantations and marshy grassland. Despite the slight breeze from the sea, the sun was burning hot, the palm plantations taking away the natural shade of forest and mountain. Numerous rivers, some small meandering creeks, others wide tracts of flowing ochre water thick with silt headed towards the sea. Many of the villages scattered roadside are terraced facades with overhanging second floors shadowing the shop fronts beneath. I have a strange sensation that I’m cycling through the wild west, albeit one with a deep green flora saturated by the the daily rains.
Before Meulaboh, the largest town to the epicentre of the Tsunami, it’s old harbour and seaside neighbourhoods now surviving merely as broken foundations of houses and ruins of walls, a huge expanse of burnt wasteland stretches towards the mountains. Butchered trees, razed grass and blackened stumps that form strange, alien shapes carpet of what was once forest. The sound of chainsaws rang from afar.
After manouvring around a herd of buffalo, caked in mud and standing stubbornly in the road, I once more joined the sea, passing fishing villages, wooden boats hauled up on the beach and river banks. With the threat of rain coming, I again relied on the hospitality of a local man, Erson, for a place to stay. In the evening I met his uncle, an old man with sucked in cheeks from a lifetime of hard smoking and leathered skin from a lifetime farming. He has a big nose ( as I have, which apparently is a compliment) and western features, a descendent of an early portuguese colonialist. He’s pleased to meet me; I am, it seems, a way in which he can connect with a culture and world far from his own but to which he feels some sense of belonging. As well as farming, he practises traditional medicine, able to heal a broken leg using purely traditional techniques. I’m sure he can, but doubt whether I’d travel from England to Sumatra with one limb hanging by a strand to find out.
I woke at 5am feeling sick with a queasiness in my stomach. I looked around me, feeling disorientated and nervous, sitting up and trying to get a sense of what was happening. After a short time, hazed by my semi-consciousness, I once more fell asleep. Woken by a phone call from my family, they told me there had been a big earthquake, 7.3?, out at sea not far from where I stayed. There were Tsunami warnings, but with the quake deep underground, nothing manifested.
The next day continued with more palms and banana trees, heading inland, towards to the mountains and thick cumulonimbus clouds above. As it began to pour, I shared a shelter with a couple of guys on bikes, baskets either side full of small, silvery fish. I decided to continue, the rain refusing to abate, and cycled through a strange air of rain, mist and the smoke drifting from the late afternoon fires that everyone burns. I stopped for some melon and watched a man rolling cigarettes for some kids who looked under 10. Unsure of my place, I left, feeling it best to leave my shock and dismay behind in the puddles surrounding the soaked shack.



