The flight to Aceh...

As promised in the article The visit to Aceh 15-22 June , let's start the story on the recent Aceh trip rolling...

Here is my wife (on the left) and our friend Kak Ann as we were ready to take the flight to Aceh from the LCCT terminal in Sepang...

And that's our plane, an Air Asia Airbus 320 if I remember correctly. For the record this would be my first time on Air Asia.

Flight was smooth and said to take only an hour and 25 minutes or so. After a while, I became very excited as I recognised the landscape which I have seen many times in maps. For the apex-like land jutting out into the sea as can be seen through the window of the plane signifies an area I remembered from a passage out of the Malay classical text "Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai". The area called Jambu Air (or is it Tanjung Jambu Air or something like that?) in old times caught my imagination as the passage related the story of Sultan Malikul Mansur who was sent to exile out of his native kingdom Samudera after making the mistake of taking a woman from the palace of his elder brother Sultan Malikul Mahmud who ruled the nearby kingdom of Pasai.


Now, I thought this is the river Perlak which is related to the ancient kingdom of Perlak also mentioned in the "Hikayat Raja-raja Pasai". But Kak Ann said we have passed Perlak just about 10-15 minutes earlier.


From the windows on the left, we could see Takengon, the huge freshwater lake on top of the mountains of Aceh. I understand it is situated at 1,250 metres above sea level!

As the plane moved on, I rushed back to the right windows to catch the part of land which I believe should house the centre of the old kingdom of Samudera.

There. I try to catch it again. For somewhere down there lies the tomb of the much-vaunted ruler Sultan Malikus Salih @ Raja Merah Silu (deceased in 1297 AD or so) who founded both kingdoms of Samudera and Pasai. For the record, Malikul Mansur and Malikul Mahmud are both his grandchildren. Later do I realised that I had missed the actual area containing the tomb. But you could still see it in this picture... for it lies somewhere in the lands in which the sea looks like an inverted triangle just above the jet engine...

The mountains and hills called Bukit Barisan as we near the city of Banda Aceh, capital of Aceh.

At last, Banda Aceh in sight...

Another view of Banda Aceh, this time with a patch of land below containing the famous tomb of the venerable saint Sheikh Abdul Rauf as-Singkili or Abdul Rauf Fansuri, better known here as Syiah Kuala who lived sometime in the 1600s.

Touchdown. And we have arrived at the new building of the Sultan Iskandar Muda airport which I learned was opened just 2 weeks before we arrived! To be continued...