After returning from Bunaken, mas Rizal and I jumped on the scooter & headed out West into a different part of the countryside for another 6 hours.

There wasn’t any one particular thing to see out here,,, but I wanted to see how people live in the North Sulawesi countryside. It was a worthwhile trip for me.

The areas to the west are less built up than Tomohon or Tondanao. Some of my lasting impressions were seeing the humbleness of bamboo & wood homes stretched along the sides of the road, with families & small clusters of people everywhere, happily washing clothes, bathing in the waterway in front of the house, sitting & watching the cars go by, talking, walking around, farming the rice fields behind the house, chopping wood, tending their cows, selling fruit, etc…

In the smaller towns I got the feeling that most youth don’t have the luxury of a scooter, or money to fill it with much gas, so entertainment seemed to consist of walking around & sitting by the side of the road.
There were a few wood & bamboo homes with a TV satellite dish outside (= I wish I got a picture for you. Not overly common, but a funny juxtaposition.
You see a lot of durian & nangka fruit sold by the side of the road.

There are ethnic differences between the areas I visited (Borgo in Manado; Bantik to the North; Sanger to the West; Minahasa to the South), and language differences too (Tumpusu in the North; Tombassian in the South; Borgo in the city),,, but little of that was easily distinguishable through the eyes of a foreigner (namely me). (=