Philippine Travel Notes

It's called Power Ship (or powership) in many countries, but in the Philippines we call it a Power Barge (or powerbarge). They all have one and the same function, ships that are themselves at the same time power plants , producing a lot of electric power usually to augment the electricity supply to/at a place. We have many of those all around the country maintained by our National Power Corporation . Anyway, this power ship in Banda Aceh is named PLTD Apung 1 (basahin mabuti ang abbreviation, 'di yan yung telco sa atin)! It was anchored in the Ulee Lheue Port area since July 2003 to support power needs of Banda Aceh City and Aceh Province , during their Indonesia-wide power crisis of that period. This ship weighs around 2,600 tons - for comparison purposes, one car (kotse) is about 1.5 tons only. So, it was/is as heavy as 1,733 cars! It's 63 meters long and 19 meters wide. Malaki sya at puro bakal. The port is around 3kms from where the ship now sits. So ganun ...

Across Lapangan Blang Padang  is Museum Tsunami Aceh or Aceh Tsunami Museum . But I had to arrest my self and be objectively pragmatic about what I was seeing - meaning stay away from the pain that my country was/is not acknowledged anywhere, for any negligible help it has done. Well, I must say, this museum was very well designed, at least form the point of view of a normal non-technical tourist hehe. Basta malaki at maganda sya sa biglang tingin, ganun! Na nagbabadya maging white elephant. What do I mean? It's a hi-tech museum that now no one wants to own, kasi magastos! You probably won't be interested to know the details of that issue, but it is a very good lesson to learn: just because there are donors, does not mean you can keep accepting built structures, because, in the long run, you'll need money for O&M (Operations and Maintenance) to make it sustainable. Meron ba? That is what happened (sa tingin ko). But let us go around anyway, because as I said, an...