It’s not exactly been a lazy Sunday – even if it has been a fairly quiet one. My wife’s been busy much of the day on her ‘virtual retreat’ and the various yoga/exercise and meditation classes that involves whilst I’ve been pottering around at home scanning slides and catching up on some email correspondence. The weather’s hardly been conducive to doing much more as we’ve had intermittent rain thoughout the day. Even so, we did manage to get out in between Dawn’s sessions to food-shop and get a walk in through our local woods and up around Savile Park whilst dodging the showers.

Back at home, I took another trip down memory lane whilst scanning the latest batch of old slides from Sumatra. I reckon that with any luck this album will be done and dusted by the end of next week – which is rather pleasing. That means it’s only 22 years it’s taken me to get them to a wider audience! So, without further ado, here’s the picture of the day, which was taken in Banda Aceh, the capital of Aceh province at the very Northerm tip of Sumatra on the 3rd August 1998. This is the city’s Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, which I couldn’t resist visiting at sunset. Here’s why…

Aceh has a fascinating if turbulent history going back centuries. It’s seen more than its fair share of conflicts, but its biggest challenge happened a few years after Lynn and I visited. On Boxing Day 2004 the city and surrounding area was devastated by a Tsunami. It’s estimated that the disaster killed 167,000 inhabitants and destroyed more than 60% of the city’s buildings. It was the hardest hit of all the places struck by the Tsunami. Lynn and I had a lucky escape from the Tsunami. On Boxing Day 2002 and 2003 we were on beaches in Southern Sri Lanka that were badly damaged by the disaster, but in 2004 we’d delayed travelling as we’d a lot of plans for that year. You can imagine how we felt when we learned of the devastation caused to places we’d visited and knew well. There, but for the grace of God…

If you’re interested in looking through more photos from Sumatra (or the rest of the epic trip), you can find them in this gallery on my Zenfolio picture website.

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