15. A "Makassar Countryside Tour'

    Our experience in Medan convinced me that we needed a more formal plan and an English-speaking guide. We signed up for what was advertised on Viator as a 5–8-hour tour that included a boat tour of large limestone karst formations, a visit to a park and waterfall, and a trek to a cave with traces of pre-historic drawings.

     We were picked up by “Krisanto,” a 50-something man from the northern part of Sulawesi Island. Rather than heading out of town as I expected, we first stopped at a gas station and waited in a line of ~6 cars to be attended. I am not sure what happened with that transaction, but we left without getting gas, spent about 10 minutes circling the neighborhood while he talked on the phone, only to end at the back of the line again at the original gas station. During that 45-minute-long detour we learned that is originally from North Sulawesi and the home of the Toraja ethnic group. Many people asked if we were planning to take a tour of Tana Toraja to see their elaborate funeral rites, burial sites carved into rocky cliffs, massive peaked-roof traditional houses known as tongkonan, and colorful wood carvings. Unfortunately, those excursions take a minimum of 4 days from Makassar and we only had one day before moving on.

Translated photos of murals from the Makassar airport

      We were next taken to a local port, crowded with colorful wooden boats. He said these were pinisi boat made with wood native to West Sulawesi and constructed without the use of metal fasteners. This was not on the listed tour and after the first 20 minutes of watching skinny barefoot men struggle to transfer bags of flour from a truck to a boat on their shoulders and then taking pictures with some local schoolgirls, we were ready to move on. We ended up standing around in the heat for another ten minutes so that Kris could use the restroom. We didn’t start heading north until 10:30 am and we requested a stop at Starbucks to use a clean restroom. Back in the car with two iced lattes, he said, “okay, now we’ll go to the traditional market.” As gently as I could, I said that we weren’t really interested in the market, and we wanted to get started with the countryside tour. It was only at that point did I realize that the tour he was giving was not the tour that we paid for. We had a short conversation about it, I opened a chat with Viator customer service, but at that point there wasn’t much we could do about it but enjoy whatever he planned to show us.

Loading bags of flour onto a pinisi boat in Pelabuhan Makassar (Port of Makassar)

Pelabuhan Makassar (Port of Makassar)

Mobile oil change motorbike

We went to a location called Rammang-rammang. I’ve copied and edited information about it from called https://authentic-indonesia.com.

Rammang-rammang is a name of tourist attraction that offering a panoramic view of karst (limestone) hills located in Maros-Pangkep, Salenrang Village, about 40 km north of Makassar City. Visitors can see karst mountains towering and overgrown with dense vegetation in the surrounding area.  Rammang-rammang is listed as the third largest karst mountains in the world after Tsingy in Madagascar and Shilin in China. UNESCO has included the Rammang Rammang karst mountains as one of Indonesia's World Heritage Sites.

The name is from the Makassar language and are interpreted as clouds or fog. It can be seen from the condition of the Rammang-Rammang area which is always foggy, especially in the morning or when it rains.

We boarded a small boat and set out to the village at the foothills of the mountains. The boat driver had to navigate around submerged rocks and narrow karst arches, so it was a different visual experience from the boat tour in Kalimantan. But it was also different because we saw only two types of birds and no other animals, plastic bottles and wrappers were accumulated along the riverbanks, and we got very little narration of what we were seeing from our guide. I used my roaming data connection to look up information about the geology and ecology of the location. Kris did share with us that Indonesia has two seasons, the rainy season, and the hot season, and that we were about a month out from the beginning of the rain. For that reason, the series of fish and rice ponds that defined the Rammang-Rammang Village were only inches deep. Kris told us we were going to see the Goa Kristal, or the Crystal Cave, and Mom started thinking we were going to see the prehistoric handprints. Instead, we were shown a deposit of a sparkling-mica-like material embedded in the limestone at the bottom of the cave’s entrance and were completely drenched with sweat from the effort. We stopped off at one of the villagers’ bodegas for some fresh coconut water to cool down, got back on the boat, and in 15-minutes were back in the car.

Entrance to the Puti River

Mangrove trees

The "crystal" of Crystal Cave

      The fact that we weren’t going anywhere else was “Kristal” clear to me when we passed exits to the other locations and reentered the city limits. We stopped at a restaurant along the way for lunch (fried rice and fried tofu) and then he was ready to take us back to the hotel.

   At this point it was around 3 pm and I asked him to drive us by a Buddhist monastery and temple that I had seen on-line. It was absolutely worth the stop for all of us. We couldn’t go in tall main-temple building, but a very friendly toothless guy who was hanging with his friends at a food cart on the street motioned for us to go down the street and we found another building in which we could step inside the incense-scented lobby to see a giant golden Buddha figure meditating in a verdant rainforest. The tour officially ended around 4:15, but a question that I had asked in the car made me think that there was one more activity to do in Makassar.

PHOTOS TO COME

      The fact that we weren’t going anywhere else was “Kristal” clear to me when we passed exits to the other locations and reentered the city limits. We stopped at a restaurant along the way for lunch (fried rice and fried tofu) and then he was ready to take us back to the hotel. At this point it was around 3 pm and I asked him to drive us by a Buddhist monastery and temple that I had seen on-line. It was absolutely worth the stop for all of us. We couldn’t go in tall main-temple building, but a very friendly toothless guy who was hanging with his friends at a food cart on the street motioned for us to go down the street and we found another building in which we could step inside the incense-scented lobby to see a giant golden Buddha figure meditating in a verdant rainforest. The tour officially ended around 4:15, but a question that I had asked in the car made me think that there was one more activity to do in Makassar.

      I asked whether Hollywood movies in Indonesia are dubbed or subtitled. Unlike in Hong Kong where movies are dubbed into Chinese, movies here are subtitled, meaning that could enjoy a  some popcorn and a movie here. An upscale mall with a movie theater was a short taxi ride away, and that’s how we ended up at Makassar’s Cineplex watching “The Wild Robot” in their VIP theater that provided no only reclining leather seats, but also a blanket, pillow, and delivery of concessions purchases direct to the seat. Purchasing the movie tickets was an event in and of itself, but I think the staff got a kick out of our confusion.