in town

Sometimes, especially now that I have a bicycle, I occasionally find myself pedaling around Banda Aceh in the evening time. I say ‘find myself’ not because I am especially lost—I know that I can always point myself towards the massive cell phone tower and, failing that, the loudest and most vitriolic sounding mosque—and thereby become un-lost, but because I never go out with any fixed intention beyond eating dinner.

It is not quite dusk, but at the tail end of the day. To me dusk represents the most difficult time to see all day, darkness in some ways included, and the time I am thinking of is certainly not dusk. It is a far too visual time for it to be that time yet.

It rains a lot in the afternoons, in spite of it being ‘dry season,’ though the local people do not pay much credence to such designations. To them, if it is raining, it is ‘rainy season’ and vice versa if that day happens to be clear. I suppose if you can have multiple Buddha’s birthdays every month, there is no reason why the seasons need to stick to any sort of schedule either. Anyways, I think Banda Aceh is situated (as you may know, at the very northern tip of Sumatra) such that the weather is kind of wacky, as it spirits back and forth across the equator, without much land mass to scold (or sivilize) it into a properly regimented monsoon weather pattern.

The environs of Banda Aceh itself are flat, paddy flat, which you get the impression much of it was not long ago. I imagine I have already told you about how the unimproved lots go back to being kind of informal paddies, and this helps spread the houses out, in spite of the lots sitting right on top of one another. Banda Aceh itself is ringed by mountains, probably about 2,000 feet, to the south and west. They sit right up over the city, but most of the time a haze of heat, dirt, and exhaust draws down over them and moves them far off. Only after the rain, when the air has been all scrubbed and rinsed, can you realize how close they actually are. It is amazing how much these hills jump; you can suddenly clearly make them out, and easily examine the logging scars that trace most of the way up the sides.

Again, I cannot speak on any authority, but something about the lay of the land makes the sky seem massive. It feels nothing like New England, with a big expansive sky in all directions. Of course it could be the clouds, massive and coiled thunder cells that drift aimlessly around this big basin, leftovers from the afternoon’s storm. I think they are some of the sheer tallest clouds I have ever seen, and the fact that you can look up and see half a dozen of discreet masses—each like the fortress of Le Monte Saint Michel, which my grandfather saw in the war and always told me about—contributes to the sky stretching effect.

You cannot tell where precisely the sun is, but you cannot miss the incredible oranges and purples that it bathes the entire scene in, diffusing and fracturing around the thunder clouds onto every surface. Biking and walking are probably about equal, as far as head height is concerned, so there must be something about having your feet off the ground, because you are liable to miss it all on foot. But when I go spinning around in this twilight, and it is cool from the rain, and all the mosques are bouncing all around the air, echoing the evening prayer (the most mellow and melodic of the day’s prayers), and there are big thick shafts of color sluicing through the expanse just a little ways off, something about it is really quite striking.