From Perlak to Geudong, seat of the powerful twin ancient kingdoms of Samudera and Pasai!

Continued from Rural Perlak, the seat of a powerful ancient Islamic kingdom!

We went out of the small town of Perlak and stopped somewhere at the north fringe...

After the visit to the tomb of Sultan Sayyid Maulana Abdul Aziz Shah, we deserved to have a good session of tea or rather coffee... with rojak, a mish-mash of fruits with special hot sauce...

The journey was soon continued. If I remember correctly this plot of land is where Kak Ann would build a new mosque along with certain facilities...

A few kilometres later we stopped again at the roadside...

This time to say hi to a few of Kak Ann's friends who run the district police headquarters...

Then only do we continue to our next destination, the town of Idi which should be about 2o km north of Perlak...

We went here to a honour a request by an elderly person in Malaysia who originated from these parts of Aceh. He wanted me to meet his relatives here. So have to take the whole crew with me I guess...

Praise be to Allah, we found the relatives' place near the old mosque of Idi. After doing our prayers here, we enquired about their whereabout from the congregation and found their house just about 200 metres or so from the mosque.

The journey up north, or rather north-east was continued after 8.30 pm or so...

Our destination, the main place we wanted to go since the day before, that is Wednesday before the journey got prolonged (refer again to the explanation in Thursday morning trip from Langsa to Perlak and reminiscing what goes on before... ) should be about 90 km or so from Idi...

Ah... almost there. But have to take a certain junction from the small town of Geudong to the coastal areas...

And here we are at our main destination, tomb of the founder of the ancient kingdoms of Samudera and Pasai, the venerable saintly ruler Sultan Malikus Salih, deceased 1297 AD! For more information you could refer to the article Makam (tomb of) Sultan Malikus Salih! in the bilingual blogspot SENI LAMA MELAYU (MALAY OLDEN ART) . In fact you could just use Google as the Sultan is a very famous and important personality in the Malay world. After this I would do a piece on the ruler and his tomb at my Malay blogspot CATATAN SI MERAH SILU ya. So enough story-telling here for the moment... take care!