It takes at least two days to get to the Togean Islands from anywhere of consequence in Sulawesi. It’s a difficult journey of nauseating roads and deafening boats. So it’s of little surprise that very few people go there. All the better.

Trip one: The bus from Toraja to Tentena

Idiots and trained astronauts need not take motion sickness pills. The road from the highlands of South Sulawesi to the central coast makes more turns than a shopping cart with a bad wheel. Your stomach plays musical chairs as you’re tossed from side to side.

You try to focus on the distant horizon, but the top two-thirds of the bus windshield is covered in stuffed toys with dangling tails and bobbing heads. This somehow worsens everything.

A TV plays Indonesian music videos with karaoke subtitles. It would be a welcome distraction if it wasn’t the same four videos played on repeat at the loudest volume. One of the singers is a middle-aged mustachioed man who thinks he’s a good dancer and a snappy dresser. If Sascha Baron Cohen was Asian, this would be his most successful character.

You hear what sounds like passengers throwing up in little plastic bags, but try desperately to shift your thoughts elsewhere. You look at the aisle for something steady and realize what the little blue bucket passengers pass around is meant for. Thankfully, the driver smokes clove cigarettes in the hermetically-sealed bus, and this masks the smell of bile.

You arrive 10 hours later, proud at having survived it, but the world doesn’t really stop spinning for 24 hours. You end up spending two nights in a hotel in Tentena to see a heart-stopping waterfall and your team get eliminated from the World Cup.

Trip two: the microbus from Tentena to Poso

This is actually a pretty good 1.5-hour ride. One lady threw up.

Trip three: the car from Poso to Ampana

It’s a car with three rows of seats. There’s a woman with a little girl in the back, and the driver stuffs your backpacks next to her. You apologize for her discomfort. They put you in the middle seats, and another man sits on the front passenger chair.

You travel for five minutes, and a family of four asks for a ride. Instead of politely turning them away, the driver stuffs their luggage over your backpacks. A man squeezes between the luggage and the mother in the back seat, then his wife sits on his lap. The other two squeeze in the middle row, which is meant for three but now has four.

The driver puts a 10-kilo bag of rice in the legroom of the front seat, forcing the passenger to put his feet on the dashboard. You look behind, see a disjointed cluster of four heads, and realize with horror that you have by far the most comfortable seat.

But at least we’re in the coast, you think. No more mountain roads. But the coast is mountainous. One child threw up. I think. I couldn’t tell anymore.

Inside the boat.

Trip four: the boat from Ampana to the Togean archipelago

There’s no ferry that day, so you either split a private boat with five other people or lose another day at a boring coastal village. The boat is no wider than a bowling alley. You choice is the lower deck, which is stuffy and dark and no higher than a toddler, or the top with no shelter from the sun and rain.

The motor sounds like a lazy machine gun with a bullhorn. Earplugs are useless, since the noise reaches your brain via vibrations on your bones. You fashion your backpack into a pillow and try to lie back and relax. Rain and sea spray you through the potholes.

This lasts five hours.

Epilogue

You arrive in Kadidiri island. You paid dearly to get there. You look around and know that you’ll cry when you leave.