Some Sulawesi tour guides

I've forgotten this chap's name, but he was a veteran at the game, and a total professional. He'd claimed me before I even got off the bus in Rantepao. And there was no way he'd take no for an answer, and no way he'd budge from his asking price of Rp 800,000 for a day's tour guiding, including car and driver. That's the tour guide union's agreed rate, he said, and that was that. He was pretty good though. Here he's playing with a giant stag beetle, for some reason.

This is our driver, whose name I think was Arief. A jovial young happy chappie and an excellent driver. He was quite a ladies' man too. Whenever we stopped at a tourist site,  he's be chatting up a young woman or two!

On day two I found myself with John here. He did an adequate job I thought. He's posing here with a giant deposit that looks like it was left by our car.

John told me that we'd be climbing Mt Sesean, the 2150m high peak on the range in the picture. I knew that we wouldn't, as there was only an hour or two budgeted for it, and the driver was waiting for us to return for lunch. Sure enough we only made it to the first peak there, and he announced we'd have to turn around and go back down.

The chap on the left was a bit of a pain. He was the becak (cycle rickshaw) driver in Makassar who managed to lure me into the 'it's up to you how much you pay' con for his quick tour of the harbour and local markets. I knew it was a bad idea, and would have really rather walked to these places and took my time there. And of course once the tour was over the friendly and relaxed disposition vanished and he was demanding ridiculous sums. I gave him three times what I really should have, and pointed out that this was the same as the amount I'd just paid for my ticket for the 10-hour bus ride to Toraja Land.

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.

Makassar street interviews

I love being interviewed by students. In Indonesia it's often English language students who need to practice their English. In Makassar the other week I had a couple of slightly different but very pleasant encounters.

The girls on the left were German language university students, hoping that I might be a German tourist. It tends to be Europeans who get to explore the more interesting bits of Indonesia, after all. Australians mostly only know Bali. Anyway, I happen to be half fluent in simple German, and was able to comply with their request, much to their delight. The girl on the left filmed the proceedings, and the one on the right interrogated me in German, about my travels, and my thoughts about Makassar and Indonesia. I was a bit surprised to discover that my German came more naturally to me than my Indonesian has been coming lately. I used to be a bit proud of my Indonesian, but not so much recently!

The couple on the right, who holed me up on the waterfront, were international relations students. The chap on the left did the interviewing, while his accomplice filmed. They were doing an assignment on tourism and how to promote Makassar as a tourist destination. His English was impressive, though we got a bit hung up on the word 'halal'. He wanted to know about my understanding of halal in relation to tourism. I realised eventually that he wasn't meaning it in the sense of religiously approved food preparation. He actually wanted to know whether tourist facilities were clean and appropriate for foreigners, and what should be changed to make the place more attractive to us.

I replied to the effect that Makassar had lots to offer and attract the western tourist. Mostly it just needed to advertise the fact. Most westerners knew nothing about Sulawesi. I also told him that the public transport system was all a bit of a mystery, and could benefit greatly by being simplified and rationalised along the lines of what I'd seen in Jakarta and Jogjakarta.