Fellow travelers from our organized tour were catching some rest in the shade of the tongkonan, the ancestral houses of the Toraja people in southern Sulawesi (the Indonesian island formerly know as Celebes).
This was one of the first package holiday tours we went on, after having started to experiment with this form of group travel in the late 1980s, when it began to feel like we’d exhausted many of the places we could reach by car (and sometimes ferry): Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon. But just as important, flights were also getting considerably cheaper.
Our very first package trip we can also credit to my grandson. Being teachers, we were used to traveling every year during Easter holidays, but stubborn little Bertrand decided to be born in April — leading us to travel earlier in the year. I looked around for places where the weather was nice in February and discovered, to my surprise, that we could afford an organized tour … to Florida!
