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Bangkok - Perhentian Islands - Kuala Lumpur - Bali - Manado - Togean Islands - Tana Toraja - Makassar
Sulawesi is like nowhere I've been before: the sky seems vast, the horizon is always dramatic and the land is carpeted a rich green. This beautiful, crazy place has seduced us all.
We arrived in Manado three weeks or so ago on a flight from Bali. Find Sulawesi (its odd-shaped limbs straddle the equator) on a map and Manado is almost at its northernmost tip. A night in a smelly, rat-infested harbour-side hotel was soon forgotten when we took a boat to the island of Bunaken, a few kilometres away.
This little roadless patch of greenery is surrounded by mangroves and plunging drop-off coral reefs that teem with life. There are a few places I've been that have planted a seed in my heart and Bunaken is one of them. We spent a week at Daniel's Homestay - snorkelling, diving, eating fresh fish (tuna, wahu, barracuda...), indulging in the local tipple while enjoying (and contributing to... yes, Chris is our very own tambourine man, photographic evidence to follow) the guitar-percussion ensemble of the guys who worked there. The diving was extraordinary - we usually did a couple of dives a day, in the morning, and saw thriving coral, huge bumphead parrotfish and napoleon wrasse, tiny seahorses, turtles and the odd black-tip reef shark - to name a few, thanks largely to our expert underwater guides (and heroes) Andris and Felix. Chris has emerged as a rather talented underwater photographer - evidence of this to follow too. Special diving, special people. Where do you go from there? To another island paradise of course.
We very reluctantly said our goodbyes and returned to Manado, where we chartered a car to take us south, the buses being slow and cramped and, besides, in our desperation to spend as much time as possible in Bunaken we'd left it rather late to make the journey any other way. (In Sulawesi you can buy a seat in a car to take you where you want to go and even hire the whole thing if, like us, you've got a crazy amount of baggage. You'd think we would have learnt by now.)
We'd been warned that the drivers like to put their foot down, but we'd set off late with a deadline to meet - the once weekly Friday night car ferry (= bigger and better than the once weekly Wednesday night passenger ferry) from Gorontalo to the Togean Islands. We flew like the wind: coastline, villages, forests - all a beautiful blur. With a soundtrack (sound and videos) of Guns'n'Roses and scary Indonesian dance music (think the cheeky girls but even more wrong) provided by a bass-boosted car-aoke system, we overtook, undertook and careered our way to Gorontalo in eight and a half hours, making the ferry with minutes to spare.
We had time to buy a ticket and the obligatory-for-foreigners insurance (says something about the record of boat travel here) and find crew willing to rent out their tiny four-person cabin for a bit of extra money before the boat upped anchor and set off southwest. A pot noodle supper, a reasonable sleep (despite cockroaches and 5'6'' beds) and 12 hours later we were there.
The Togeans sit in a cluster just south of the equator in the huge bay that lies between Sulawesi's northern arm and the rest of the island. The greenery is relentless and covers every patch of land, clinging to steep cliffs as they plunge into the sea. The rocky coastline is interrupted every so often by the curve of a perfect white-sand beach, and it was to one of these, on Kadidiri Island, that we headed. Kadidiri Paradise, where we stayed, is indeed paradise. We snorkelled and dived and ate more delicious fresh fish.
Once again time to move on, once again reluctantly. A four-hour boat ride south to Ampana, where we spent a night, then a thirteen hour car trip south to Tana Toraja. This was the quick option: the alternative (and much cheaper) way would have been to take a couple of buses from Ampana to Toraja, but this would have taken a couple of days. We also had to pass through parts of Sulawesi where there is Muslim-Christian conflict and this provided the best reason to stump up the extra cash and be chauffeured straight through.
Our journey was much more leisurely than the Gorontalo rally. We passed fishing villages perched on stilts by turquoise bays, pastel painted wooden houses with white picket fences and flowerpots and cocoa beans drying on mats in the sun as we wound our way south then east, up into the hills.
The people in Tana Toraja converted to Christianity with the arrival of the Dutch in in the early 1900s but many of their age-old customs have merged with their newer beliefs - most spectacularly in the funeral ceremony. Based in Rantepao, we spent a couple of days exploring the area (mostly by car with a minimal bit of trekking. We are a bit over trekking. And rice, and fried eggs, and green food. They like green food here - bread, cakes, that sort of thing. Not sure what the flavour is meant to be but the taste is slightly bubble-gum-like).
We started with a visit to a funeral that was underway (they take many days). I know it sounds a bit odd, just rocking up to someone else's funeral in a place you don't know but it wasn't. Well, it was odd but that's not why. Torajan funerals are big, hundreds of people are invited from villages all over the place, and many people often didn't really know the person whose funeral it was. Guests arrive in waves and are given tea and coffee and titbits. We brought cigarettes and other goodies, which were warmly welcomed, as were we, by the host family.
Central to Torajan funerals are animal sacrifices - people believe the souls of animals should follow their masters into the next life, and this has developed into a tradition of guests contributing pigs and water buffalo to the cause. Lots of them. The bigger the funeral, the bigger the death toll. Our blinkered Western sensibilities were horrified and our hypocrisy exposed by the site of pigs being carried in all trussed up then killed in front of us (bacon and sausages are high on our list of foods we miss).
Dozens faced that fate. And then there were the water buffalo. I don't know how many were sacrificed in all - maybe 10. We had been at the village for about 20 minutes when one buffalo got very distressed and bucked and caught a man in the cheek with one of its immense horns. Fear spread and people screamed and Lucy and I fled around the corner with a group of equally panic-stricken betel-nut chewing old ladies. Then there was an announcement (there was a tannoy system, guests' gifts being announced so all can hear) that the buffalo should be slaughtered early and than its leg should be cut to stop it charging around. This was done but the creature then went completely berserk and charged around and a woman was hit and left with a broken leg. Not that I saw any of this, Lucy and I were still in hiding with the old ladies, but Chris and Fred saw it (...). The buffalo escaped (or may have been led, not sure in the chaos) and a little later we heard a gun shot and it was dead.
We were pretty shaky after that but everything seemed to go back to normal and were were invited to sit and have some (excellent) Torajan coffee. Johan, our guide, said in 14 years of bringing people to funerals nothing like that had ever happened. The rest of our time in Tana Toraja was much calmer - we visited cliff graves adorned with wooden effigies and walked through cascades of rice paddies. The people, as in all Sulawesi, were so warm and friendly.
Then, as before, we continued south to the island's capital, Makassar, where we are now. But back to Bangkok, when I wrote last. The bus journey south to Malaysia was a(nother) shocker, involving a coach (with ear-drum bursting volume on the non-stop film screenings), a pick-up truck, two cars and two (packed) minibuses. It took a bone-crushing 24 hours. Oh, it also involved some terrorists - indirectly at least. It turns out that Muslim separatists in south east Thailand are causing a few problems at the moment and it's not necessarily wise to travel overland by bus to the border at Sunghai Kolok, where we were headed. Nobody in Bankgok mentioned this when we inquired about and booked tickets. Admittedly an opportunistic woman at one of our many stops along the way tried to convince us that not only was it dangerous, which it possibly was, but that the border was closed and we should go via the border on the western side of Malaysia - which would have added 24 hours to our already mammoth journey and put quite a few extra pounds in her pocket. We've been been duped - and fleeced - by border-related stories before and decided to stick to the plan. Whatever the reality, the only sign that anything was happening were a dozen or so army posts along the main road. We walked across the border into Malaysia in a matter of minutes and made it to Khota Baru in time to feast on a fine meal of barbecued chicken, rice, salad and chilli sauce at the night food market.
Early the next day we took boat out to the Perhentian Islands, two small jungle-clad islands fringed with sandy beaches off Malaysia's north east coast. I had been to Perhentian Kecil, the smaller of the two, 12 years ago, but inevitably they'd changed a lot - more buildings, more boats, more people. The newest addition on almost every beach are vast concrete jetties the government is building.
But it was good to get back in the water and do some diving at last. And a few yards from the beach we swam with sharks. This sounds braver than it was - these were baby black-tip reef sharks, about 14 of them, each around two feet long. They'd linger in the chest-height shallows and you could wade up and hold your head in the water and see them swim past your legs.
After the island and a night in a sleepy one-horse town, it was eight more bus-hours to Kuala Lumpur, where we met up with a friend of Chris's from school, Rizal, and his wife Liza. We had a fantastic time and were truly spoilt, being chauffered around the place and fed - a lot. Apart from braving an early start to go up the Petronas Towers, most of our time there was spent eating - chilli crab, crispy chicken, lime-battered squid and so much more.
From KL, we took another bus to Singapore (the best bus we've been on, each seat like a lazy boy) for our flight to Bali. Fred was waiting in Bali to pick us up - with a car - when we arrived. The luxury lasted for a few days. We had a fine time gatecrashing the pool at the hotel that Fred's sister and family were staying at, gobbling brie and French bread bought at an enormous Carrefour supermarket and dining on souvlaki (Greek restaurants get everywhere).
Tomorrow we fly to Balikpapan in Kalimantan, where we hope to spot an orangutan or two in the jungle and maybe dive with a manta ray.
*It's now 8th June. Photos to come but could be a while as we are having problems finding an internet cafe with the right setup to upload them. Just think of palm trees, beaches, that sort of thing. Also, I've realised that in my excitement about the buffalo saga I completely forgot to mention that Tana Toraja is famous for its houses, which have steeply curving rooves like buffalo horns and are painted with a sort of abstract buffalo motif. We are in Balikpapan in Kalimantan now, waiting very hopefully but possibly pointlessly for our luggage to arrive. Our flight was cancelled as we sat buckled up and waiting to go yesterday. We were switched to another airline but of course our bags weren't, despite promises to the contrary. Maybe today, they say.*
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