It's the road accidents, stupid!

I've been to Indonesia 10 or 12 times now, and spent maybe 1% of my total life there so far. Yet a majority of all the road accidents I've ever witnessed have been during my Indonesian visits. Its largely about the 100 million motorcycles that dodge and weave their way around the country's roads. By far the biggest danger for any visitor to Indonesia is the possibility of being in a road accident. Nothing else comes close.

During my recent two week trip I witnessed two road accidents, fortunately both minor. On a six-lane crowded highway in Makassar I saw a motorbike tipped over by a car, and its two riders sent sprawling across the roadway. All traffic screeched to a halt. The people dusted themselves off, and the show went on.

Then, during an otherwise safe and relaxing day tour in the Toraja region of Sulawesi, I saw another motorcyclist come to grief. The farm workers in the back of the truck above were watching, enthralled, as a young lady came hurtling down a steep hill, with her motorbike out of control, her wheels locked solid.

Over it went, with the engine roaring. A collision with the truck was avoided though, and fortunately she wasn't hurt when she came off it. Arief and John, my red-blooded driver and guide, leapt into action, ran over, switched it off, helped the poor girl pick the bike up, and twiddled and tweaked it a bit so it would start again.

She was appropriately embarrassed though when she saw I'd been photographing some of the action!

A Keystone Cock Fight

At the markets and elsewhere you'll see them being shown off. Their fine plumage, plus their aggressiveness to other birds, is what is being evaluated. I think it is thus all over Indonesia.

The actual cock fights take place a little more secretively. They are illegal, or at least gambling is, and that's what it's all about.


So I was somewhat curious when my guide, my driver, and I stumbled onto one during one of our day tours out of Rantepao, in Southern Sulawesi's Toraja region. The boys weren't curious. They were almost ecstatic. What a bonus for them! Like most Torajan men, I imagine, they were wild about cock fighting and the gambling that went with it. Even if I'd had no interest in the event myself, I  couldn't deprive my companions of this thrill!

They knew immediately what was happening, by the big collection of parked motorbikes outside the small village we were passing. So we parked the car and wandered up the path to join the throng.

I don't have any pictures of the actual fights, or of the aggressive warming up sessions between the participants, or of the attaching of the sharp knife blade spur extensions that were to deliver the fatal blows, sometimes only two or three seconds into the match. Or of the furious placements of the bets and payouts to the successful punters. I was told it wasn't OK to photograph most of this. Some photography would have been OK, but my companions were so consumed by the action that they weren't answering my questions at all. I did photograph one of the little sideshow gambling games that was also going on.

Then there was an announcement by an authoritative man with a loudspeaker. The police were on their way, he said. But don't worry. He and his fellow organisers would head off down the road to meet them. It would all be OK. And they had to come from Makale, 30km away.

How the situation got resolved I didn't hear. I can make a good guess though. And also, as guide John pointed out, the police and the villagers are all friends. How would they decide who to arrest and who would do the arresting?

Later in the day, on the way back to Rantepao, the motorbikes were gone. But we passed another very similar collection in another village nearby. Looks like they had relocated.

Where should we put the body?

If they were a high-status South Sulawesi Torajan, we should probably put it in a cave grave. We'll have to hollow out a sizeable square section cavity in the appropriate cliff face for it and its coffin.










Then we'll have to have a tau tau made from wood or bamboo. This is a lifelike effigy of the deceased, and it goes into the cliff too.










Sometimes dead Torajans are put in cave graves, maybe suspended on wooden platforms up high in the cave. The platform can rot and collapse. In the cave I was taken to, this had happened. The random jumble of  bones had had to be rearranged, unidentified.

Often, you see the offerings left by relatives. Things to eat, drink, and smoke. It's important to keep the spirits happy and comfortable.

In one particular village, they were in the habit of putting deceased babies into hollowed-out cavities in jackfruit trees, which are considered to be their 'new mothers'.

A funeral to die for

And a large number of pigs and buffaloes did indeed die for this one. I was in South Sulawesi's Toraja Land, and life is largely about the funerals there. They're very very big, a central part of the people's culture, and if you're a tourist in the area, you get taken along as a welcome extra guest.

The Torajans are animists, meaning everything is dictated by the needs of the ancestors' spirits. They watch over things, and they require a massive funeral ceremony with lots of  guests, and lots of pigs and buffaloes sacrificed to feed them. Except they're nominally Christians. In Indonesia everyone had to choose one of the five official one-God religions, and Torajans chose Christianity, as a result of past Dutch influence. (And they got to eat pork and drink alcohol too!)

They talk about the 'credit economy', whereby you need to spend half your life donating pigs or buffaloes to other people's funerals, building up credit. It's all recorded meticulously, and when it's your turn the favours are returned, and with a bit of luck your own funeral is big and grand enough that the spirits allow you into heaven.

Funerals take months to organise. During this time the deceased continue to 'live' in the family home, and are 'fed' and 'watered'. A whole temporary village is built to house the hundreds of guests who will return from all around the country and beyond. So much of the region's wealth is spent on funerals that the Government has been trying to discourage it for decades. But I've a feeling the spending has only been increasing with rising prosperity. And with eternity in paradise at stake..........

The treatment of the animals seems extremely cruel to our sheltered eyes. Hog-tied squealing pigs are everywhere, and I saw some being disembowelled while still alive. It's all done in a precisely defined ceremonial way though. When some of the pigs were squealing particularly loudly because of rain getting into their ears, a chap ran around providing them with cardboard 'umbrellas' to ease that particular suffering.

There were speeches, songs, musical performances, and lots of processions, often involving gifts from guests to family and vice versa. I spent a couple of hours there, and it was quite enthralling. The whole thing goes on for many days.

Here's a video of pigs being carted off for slaughter:

And here's a procession, I think of family members heading to the guests' pavilion to present some gifts:

Stocking up on livestock

It was a Saturday, and the big livestock market at Bolu, near Rantepao in Sulawesi's Toraja highlands, was in full swing.

The main events were the pig and buffalo auctions. These are big deals indeed in Toraja Land. The region gets through an enormous number of pigs and buffaloes. They are shipped in from far and near to satisfy the local funeral ceremony demand, and the prices are high. There was talk of buffaloes being worth more than houses, and they were mostly not going to be used in the fields.
Those pigs above were 'hog-tied', very much alive, and possibly resigned to their nasty fate to come.





It's cruel, but not nearly as cruel as what was to follow when they arrived at the funeral site.

Albino buffaloes feature prominently. They are 'sacred buffaloes', and fetch much greater prices still. If you're a high status Torajan, you really ought to have a sacred buffalo or two included in the sacrificial mix at your funeral.

Traditional tongkonan of Toraja Land

The tongkonan are the traditional houses of the Toraja people of South Sulawesi. They are a lot like those of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra (see my piece here from last year: Minangkabau housing ). But the latter were said to be modelled on buffalo horns. The Torajan style, I was told, was about the traditional boats on which the ancestors had arrived, probably from West Sumatra.

They still build a lot of their houses in this style, though the new ones tend to have steel roofs. The older ones are thatched, and maybe have green vegetation growing on them.

A village will generally have one or more houses with a huge collection of buffalo horns, representing all the buffalo sacrifices made at funerals, and thus the status of the place.

Sometimes I saw a funny mixture of old and new building styles in a village. A lot of Torajans have travelled to other parts of Indonesia, earned good money, and come back wanting to live in greater comfort than the older style probably afforded. They would still keep the traditional house for ceremonial purposes though.

A masterpiece in bus travel

The road from Makassar up to South Sulawesi's Toraja highlands region is a long and winding one, and when I last did the trip it was a ten hour uncomfortable ride in a cramped and battered old bus.

Well it's still a ten hour ride, but the buses have improved astonishingly. I took the 'Masterpiece' day service with Litha & Co buses. I didn't get to see their super-luxury night bus, but the day bus was more comfortable than any I've encountered anywhere. The seats were very soft and almost fully reclining. Shorter passengers than I were able to treat them as beds. There were actually very few passengers on the northbound trip. I couldn't quite believe my luck. This wasn't the Indonesia travel experience I was expecting!
The bus doesn't have a toilet (some do). But there are meal and toilet breaks every two or three hours.

For my return journey a few days later I used the same company. Their ticket office is on the main drag in town, but the bus runs from its depot some way away. I was delighted to find that the ticket clerk himself was happy to put me on the back of his motorcycle and give me a free ride to the bus when the time came.