Some photos of our walk through the hills of Tana Toraja: the great views & cave graves.
As long as I'm waiting for the pictures to upload, perhaps I'll write a brief post. A few words on those days spent during the summerofgills that often go overlooked: the travel days.
Travel days are a necessity when you're trying to cram in most of a country in two months. Sure, we may visit Ubud and the Gili Islands and Makassar and Rantepao and Manado, but the time in between is unmentioned and unheralded (for good reason).
Travel days, in a word, suck. They're doable, but not enjoyable. Huge blocks of time are taken up on buses, in airplanes, on boats...or sitting around and waiting for buses, airplanes, and boats. Recently we've spent not one but two whole days waiting for connecting flights at the Makassar airport. Both self-created layovers were in the neighborhood of seven hours. What do you do at the Makassar airport for seven hours? Answer: not much of anything at all. You read. You play travel Yahtzee. You try to sleep but fail. You peruse the bookshop (with a scary collection including Mein Kampf and books on Zionist Holocaust revisionism). You eat bad overpriced nasi goreng. And you stress about what you will do and where you will go when you arrive at your next destination.
That's the other drag of the travel day: showing up and not knowing where you're going to stay. You're lugging around a huge pack, you're prey to every taxi driver and hotel tout on the street, you're usually really hot, and all you want to do is get settled and get the attention away from you. Oftentimes that means settling for the first dump you lay your eyes on that comes with a cheap pricetag. Some places reek of mothballs, others have roosters outside the door that crow at 3 in the morning, others have mattresses so dirty you swear they were rescued from the dump...already twice this trip we've moved from our first guesthouse the very next day.
But once you've been through the hours of travel and have a respectable place to lay your head, the fun begins and you realize it was all worth it...
