Megaliths

Nobody really knows how old the Bada megaliths are, or who made them, or even why they're there. They probably date from the first millennium AD, but this figure is fairly debatable, depending on which scientist you consult. The locals don't have a clue - 'they've always been here' is the most common response - and all this adds to a wonderful mystery. Interestingly, all the objects in the area are made from a type of grey stone of which there are no deposits in the near vicinity, so work that one out. There are 14 statues in total, plus many large stone vats scattered along the 15km valley. In 1984 the government persuaded the locals to build some wooden houses next to some of the megaliths, which appear to serve no purpose, and some concrete walkways around some of the more famous statues. You would assume that this makes the megaliths easy to find - it's almost set up as a tourist destination, after all, just without the tourists - but it's never that easy.

Talk about a needle in a haystack. The Bada Valley is a farming area, smothered in paddy fields and little streams, and there's just no way you're going to find megaliths in something like that. But where there's a will there's a way, and we just kept asking the local farmers where the megaliths were until, eventually, we realized that they were sending us in totally the wrong direction. That's when we saw the house, complete with little kid and grandmother, who turned themselves into our guides for the morning.

Following the odd couple through the fields, we began to realize that finding megaliths was fine if you knew where to look, but not so good if you didn't. Luckily our guides managed the job fairly successfully, guiding us to all sorts of statues and large stone pots, and only getting lost a couple of times, and before you knew it we'd seen standing megaliths, sleeping megaliths, large pots, small pots and all sorts of odd stone shapes, all of which we would never have found alone. Returning to their house we knocked their initial demands for huge sums down to 3000 rupiah, and then persuaded the old man of the house to take us to another megalith on our way out of the valley, all for another 2000 rupiah and half a packet of cigarettes: this one turned out to be hidden inside a paddy field, along a network of paths that nobody could navigate without help. It all felt rather satisfying to have found the megaliths, but without resorting to the tourist trap of hiring an expensive guide for the day.