Introduction to North Sulawesi

Introduction to North Sulawesi

'The town of Manado', wrote the well-known English zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace after a visit to the area in 1859, 'is one of the most beautiful places in the East. It looks like a big garden in which rows of villas are built. Wide paths in between are streets, which are usually squared. Good roads split up in several directions to the inland, with some rural houses, nice little gardens and wea (...)

Manado and Bunaken	Wealth on land and in the sea

Manado, the nice capital of North Sulawesi, stretched over the low hills with coconut trees alon a wide bay. Three vulcanoes offer a spectacular backgrouns. Because the city only has a limited number of attractions, the traveller is expected to be mainly interested as it's bas to explore the Tondano area and the beautiful sea around Bunaken. Manado gained in importance during the early coloni (...)

Travelling in Minahasa	Varied environment of Manado

Manado is the starting point for a number of roads, which all seem lead to interesting locations. Because the best hotels and fascilities are located in the city and most points of interest can be seen in a series of day trips, you can best stay in Manado and make your trips by chartered taxi, minibus or public transport. There are several possibilities for this; the routes which are given here, a (...)

Parks in the north	Secrets of the rainforest

Sulawesi houses an unprecedented variety of fauna and flora which can only be discovered by travellers which have time and want to do some effort to visit the national parks. Ten meter long pythons, flying dragons, babirousa, anoa, dwarf buffalos and tree ducks are just a few examples of the wealth of odd animals which inhabit the reserves. The fact that about 60 percent of Sulawesi's mamals and a (...)

Gorontalo	Danau Limboto and old fortresses

Gorontalo, the second biggest city in North Sulawesi, is halfway the southern coast of Sulawesi's northern peninsula, at the eastern banks of Danau Limboto, where the lake and three rivers mouth into the sea. In contrary to most cities in eastern Indonesia, Gorontalo escaped the bombardments of the allied forces during the Second World War and remained it's architecture and atmosphere of pr (...)

History	Colonial center in the north

Legends, archological remains and linguistic analysis are the only real evidence for the history of North Sulawesi before the 16th century. There hasn't been a 'highly civilised' civilisation here, like on Jawa and B ali, and the precolonial populations didn't leave any written history at all. In a linguistic view, North Sulawesi is closely related to the Philippines. On the ground of this fa (...)

Populations of the north	Lively, happy and extravert

From the dozens of related populations which used to be in North Sulawesi, most of them have merged in four important ethnical groups. There names are related to the four districts of the province. Many local groups still have their own identiry, which is mainly distinguished by language or dialect. Outside the province, these groups are usually named orang Manado, but this term points (...)

Sangihe-Talaud	Little visited small parasides

Adventurous travellers are getting a big reward when visiting the Sangihe-Talaud Archipelago, consisting of 77 small islands scattered in the sea north of Manado. The read adventure starts when yoiu leave for the remote areas. Little English is spoken here and some knowledge of the Indonesian language is precious. The area is known because of it's fertile soil, quality nutmeg and palmtrees. There (...)