SULAWESI does not reveal itself easily. The island is all elbows and crooked peninsulas, a mapmaker’s afterthought, with roads that stutter into mountains and villages hidden in folds of cloud.

To go inland is to give up on shortcuts and schedules. You wait for trucks to pass, for bridges to be repaired, for rain to finish its tantrum.

It was into this landscape that I ventured in search of old stone figures.

The Bada and Napu valleys are whispered about more than they are visited – fields where statues lean out of the earth, their round eyes staring at nothing, their mouths sealed in a permanent riddle.

Some call them gods, others ancestors, and a few say they are playthings of giants.

Palindo, the Entertainer, four metres of granite leaning eternally in Bada’s grasslands, grinning as though there’s some private joke only the stones remember.

The explanations matter less than the fact they are there, scattered in grass and paddy, as though someone had built a kingdom and quietly walked away.

Archaeologists speak cautiously.

In the valleys of Bada, Napu and Besoa within Lore Lindu National Park, hundreds of megaliths have been counted – over 2,000 if you include every urn, lid and menhir.

Their forms vary: human-like statues (patung), cylindrical stone urns (kalamba), flat lids and solitary menhirs.

The carving style is strikingly simple, often just round eyes and a faint mouth, a tilt that makes the stone seem more alive.

Estimates of their age range from 500 to 3,000 years. Theories swing between burials and ancestor worship. No one knows for certain; there is no written record of the people who carved them.

The first valley I reached was Bada, a green amphitheatre rimmed by hills, where buffalo plod through flooded paddies and children walk barefoot on berms, plastic kites tugging at the sky.

It took only a short walk to find Palindo, the Entertainer.

At 4m tall, the largest of them all, he leaned at an angle, his grin weathered, his tilt so human it seemed as if he were chuckling at me.

Farmers walked past without a glance.

One of Lore Lindu’s mysteries: a round-eyed megalith half-sunk in the earth, watching silently as harvests pass by and clouds roll across the valley.

I followed goat tracks into meadows where other statues stood: urns with lids that may once have held the dead, faceless menhirs softened by moss, stones with hints of eyes and hands.

Out here, the catalogues and counts meant little. What mattered was the strangeness of their presence, the way they turned an ordinary rice field uncanny.

Napu was different: higher, colder, swept by winds that combed the grass flat. Here the stones were harder to find.

My guide, a wiry man on a motorbike, led me up footpaths between cassava plots and across rivers on planks that wobbled with every step.

He would stop suddenly, point to a thicket – and there it was: a round head half-buried, a basin of granite by a stream, a figure leaning out of a terrace as though listening.

Because Napu asked more of me – the walking, the waiting – the discoveries felt sharper. Each stone carried the air of a secret.

Birds flashed through the trees, hornbills beating their wings like fans. The stones stood still, as they had for longer than anyone could measure.

The hikes were not difficult in the mountaineer’s sense. No ropes, no summits, but they demanded patience: rain turning paths into slick slides, the sun burning in open fields, buffalo blocking trails until they chose to move.

There were no ticket booths, no fences.

The stones remained in situ, guardians in fields where people still worked, indifferent to mystery. They had seen tourists and researchers come and go, and the weather do its slow carving. They would outlast me too.

Some compare them to Easter Island’s Moai, but the difference is telling.

The Moai are culturally specific, tied to Polynesian ancestor worship.

The stones of Lore Lindu are varied, abstract, without clear cultural attribution. Their very uncertainty defines them.

On the way out of Napu, jolted in the back of a truck with bags of rice and a goat tied to the railing, I thought of how ridiculous the whole journey had sounded when I first mentioned it.

Hiking to look for rocks? My friends had laughed. And yet, what is travel if not the pursuit of something unnecessary?

The megaliths were not waiting for me. They will outlast guides, villages and roads.

But walking among them reminded me that the best journeys aren’t to collect answers but to live inside a question.

And in those valleys, the question was carved in stone, patient and inscrutable: Who put us here? Why?

The stones, of course, offered nothing. They watched as I left.