Manaaahhhdo...
The journey across Sulawesi is complete
On Saturday, September 16, nearly six weeks after leaving the southern city of Makassar, my wife Holly and I drove into the city of Manado in Sulawesi’s opposite, northeastern-most corner. The long drive across Sulawesi, which began with a ferry from Labuan Bajo to Bira on the south coast in late May, was complete. A milestone, to be sure — even though the expedition is still ongoing.
Let me explain. The notion of driving across Sulawesi took hazy shape during the early months of the pandemic. Holly and I had been leading a tour across Indonesia in March 2020, which ended abruptly in Sulawesi when Singapore shut its borders and we had to re-route all of our guests home to the United States via Bali and Dubai. We decided to stay on in Indonesia to ‘sit out the pandemic’, and that morphed into a permanent — and fortuitous — relocation. I told the story of our initial decision to stay in Indonesia and subsequent move to Lombok in several Medium posts, as well as my first Substack post, and won’t rehash it here.
Those early months of lockdown were a surreal experience, as they were for so many around the world. For someone who has spent much of his adult life traveling more than half the time, the enforced downtime was quite an adjustment. During those early months I began to think more about what else there was to see in Sulawesi beyond our truncated visit to the Maros and Tana Toraja, and dove down many online rabbit holes, reading as much as I could on the island’s geography, biology, culture and prehistory. It became clear that this was one of the most fascinating places in the world, and we had only scratched the shallowest of surfaces during our short visit.
As I began to construct an imaginary trip to Sulawesi in my mind, and then in map and list form, it became clear that much of the journey would need to be overland — unusual in Indonesia, with its 17,000+ islands often connected only by boat. Sulawesi is a beast, the world’s 11th-largest island with wild, snarling tentacles of land flailing off in different directions around a forbidding, mountainous core uplifted by millions of years of tectonic strife. As a result its coastline is longer than that of Borneo, a much larger island, effectively rendering Sulawesi into a set of several large islands connected by land bridges. I would need a rock-solid vehicle to make the extended trip. Already a fan of classic Toyota Land Cruisers, I knew immediately what my steed of choice would be.
Despite early issues with the overheating original 50-year-old F engine, necessitating a replacement with a newer and more powerful 2F model, the FJ40 has performed flawlessly with its new engine. It’s not the most comfortable vehicle in the world for driving long distances, to be sure, but it’s now a rock-solid partner. We even christened her with an appropriate name: Besse (we pronounce it ‘Bessy’, an American nickname for a beloved farm animal). She’s a bit like a large animal in many ways, and Besse was the name given to the Toalean girl whose genome was published in 2021 — the oldest genetic material ever obtained from Sulawesi, revolutionizing what we know about the pre-Austronesian inhabitants of the island. The name has stuck.
Besse has tolerated the heat, dust, and insane driving conditions of Sulawesi like a champ, and I am completely confident in her now. Since leaving Lombok in early May and arriving in Manado we’ve logged over 4,000km (2,500 miles), equivalent to the driving distance between the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides and Istanbul, or between Las Vegas and Manhattan. Not bad for any vehicle, let alone one a half-century old.
Along the way we’ve seen so many absolutely fascinating things, and I have a large backlog of posts to share here. My first should be arriving in the next week or so, but as I’m still on the expedition — and will be until the end of October — the cadence will be a bit slower than I’d like. Rest assured, though, that they will arrive in the next couple of months.
So with that as a quick update, and having just returned from retracing Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1859 journey through the nearby Minahasa highlands, I’m going to be based in Manado until the beginning of October when I take a ferry to Ternate and Halmahera to explore the exotic province of North Maluku — part of the famous ‘Spice Islands’ that inspired the European Age of Exploration. While I’m here, though, I’ll have time for some writing and a bit of diving at Bunaken National Park (I’m staying at the closest point on the mainland to make it easier to pop over for a dive or two when I’m not on the laptop), plus a short two-day visit to Tangkoko Nature Reserve to see some selfie-taking macaques, tarsiers and (hopefully) maleo birds. A pause to catch my breath, in other words, and then onward to the next adventure…stay tuned.
This sounds amazing, would love to catch up when you are back in Lombok.