Somehow Makassar wasn’t quite the place we thought it would be. It sounded a lot more promising when we read the information on the internet, but in our experience it’s dirty and noisy.
Maybe it was because we were in a city again after having already been in Kuala Lumpur for 10 days. Maybe it was because we were tired and didn’t venture out much, except to get food. Maybe it was because we couldn’t sit outside while Jace was sleeping and were stuck in our hotel room a lot of the time. I think there are quite a lot of interesting excursions you can do from Makassar, but there was no advertising for it, no travel agencies in the streets. And we weren’t motivated enough to search. So apart from the city we didn’t see much and we didn’t much like what we saw.
Too much touching
This was our first destination where random people just kept sticking their hands in Jace’s stroller, kept touching him at every opportunity and were making selfies with him whenever they could. We were lucky that Jace is still tied up when we’re driving him around in the stroller, because some of the bolder ones even tried to pick him up! Not sure about customs in this part of the world and not wanting to cause a scene, the first day we were a bit hesitant to react, other than looking angry. But this quickly changed!
Nightmares in Makassar
Our little one was doing really well, but started having nightmares in Makassar, waking up in the night crying ‘no mommy, no’. It really broke my heart. Of course there were also some very nice people who just asked us politely if they could maybe take his picture or who, after looking at us first, held out their hand for a high five and gave him the opportunity to respond. If not that was fine too.
Meeting nice people
We did talk to a nice group of young guys one evening on the boulevard and they restored our faith in the Makassar people a little bit. Of course, they weren’t actually from Makassar, just students from all parts of South Sulawesi living and studying in the big city. They were really curious to know about Dutch culture and habits and shared a lot of their stories as well. Very interesting.
Kiddie playground on the boulevard
One other cool thing that Jace liked a lot, was that in the evening the boulevard turned into one big kiddy playground with electric carts and bikes driving around everywhere. For IDR 10.000 Jace could drive around for 15 minutes. At first he was scared, but after a while he didn’t want to get off the bike.
Our conclusion about Makassar
But all in all, Makassar didn’t leave us with a good impression and we were happy to move on. We spent 5 days there, which was actually 4 days too long. All because we couldn’t decide on our next destination. Distance and budget were a big factor, but in the end we decided to go to Manado and Bunaken for diving after all. How could we resist going to one of the best diving destinations in the world, when we were so close…?
