The Bada Valley opens in shades of green where rice paddies shine beneath cloud-shadowed hills, with a lone hut and palms standing like sentinels on the edge of the fields.
Sulawesi does not reveal itself easily. The island is all elbows and crooked peninsulas, a mapmaker’s afterthought, with roads that stutter into mountains and villages hidden in folds of cloud.
To go inland is to give up on shortcuts and schedules. You wait for trucks to pass, for bridges to be repaired, for rain to finish its tantrum.
