Field report · North Sulawesi, Indonesia
Manado, before the guidebooks catch up
A city with the airport, the malls and the hotels already built, and almost none of the visitors they were built for.
North Sulawesi, Indonesia
Manado has built everything a tourist city needs and the tourists have not arrived. The airport is large and modern with stained glass showing the region indigenous heritage, and there were more staff in it than passengers. That gap, between what has been prepared and who has turned up, is the whole experience of being there.
We came in from the airport on a one hour ride that cost eleven dollars, through what we can only describe as organised chaos. Grab drivers, motorbikes, and modified cab vans running with their back doors swinging open, some of them playing music loudly enough to hear two lanes away. The energy is entirely there. The visitors are not.
Early walks along the boardwalk set the tone. People greeted us with a warmth that tipped over into the surreal. Groups of children shouted hello and wanted to practise their English. Professional photographers stood along the path waiting for an event that did not appear to be happening. The city felt prepared for something that had not started yet.
The mall made it stranger still. A vast complex with an artificial sky painted on the ceiling, and retail staff outnumbering shoppers. The grocery store was immaculately stocked and nobody was carrying a bag. Our hotel was large, well staffed and genuinely comfortable, and full of local people hosting events with MCs and photographers rather than travellers. The service was faultless. The sense of having wandered into a set that was waiting for its audience never quite went away.
“The foundations are laid, the experiences are there, and for now it is still an undiscovered frontier.”
From the journalWhat is actually here
Bunaken National Marine Park is the headline, and it deserves to be. The diving and snorkelling rank with anywhere in the world, and the biodiversity holds its own against Raja Ampat without any of the crowding. If you dive, that alone justifies the flights.
Inland there are jungle treks with a genuinely unusual cast: the spectral tarsier, the crested black macaque, the knobbed hornbill. This is the kind of wildlife list that would carry an entire eco-tourism industry somewhere better known, and here it is close to unvisited.
The food is the quiet argument. Seafood at prices that do not seem plausible. Our tuna and squid feast came to twenty-seven dollars and was one of the best meals we had anywhere in Indonesia. The city is also starting to promote Cap Tikus, a palm liquor that used to be illicit and is now being repositioned as heritage.
Whether you should go now
Yes, and we say that as someone who is generally suspicious of the phrase before the crowds arrive. The reason it applies here is structural rather than romantic. The infrastructure is finished. The hotels, the roads, the airport capacity, all of it already exists at a scale built for numbers that have not materialised. You are not roughing it in exchange for being early. You get the polish and the emptiness at the same time, which is a combination that does not usually last.
On the way to the airport our Grab driver pulled over halfway to buy a bottle of petrol from a roadside vendor. It was a fitting note to leave on. Waiting, preparing, anticipating.
Manado is a place poised for something. For travellers who want to see somewhere before the guidebooks catch up, the window is open now, and we do not think it stays open long.
From the journal · The Travelling T · Written March 2025
