After the funeral Mar­tin, my guide for the next two days, and I star­ted to drive back to Rante­pao, where most trav­el­ler stay. The land­scape is just abso­lutely stun­ning. Little pock­ets of rice fields have been carved out of the forest. On all sides large lime­stone cliffs reach up and every­where you can see farm­ers bring­ing in the second har­vest of the year.

We stopped for about an hour in Kete Kesu, a tra­di­tional Tora­jan vil­lage. Here many people still live in the tra­di­tional houses with their dis­tinct roofs. The ancest­ors of the Tora­jan people came from the north over the sea and they star­ted to build their houses to resemble the ships they sailed on.

Every­where you look there are graves. Some are over 100 years old. Some were being built right then by hol­low­ing out rocks. Fol­low­ing a little path past the vil­lage we walked to a huge lime­stone rock. There are hanging graves on the side of the cliff. Some have fallen down and will remain so until there is another cere­mony, where only two or three buf­fa­loes are being sac­ri­ficed. There are skulls and bones everywhere.

Mar­tin then invited me into his home for a tra­di­tional Tora­jan meal called Papi­long. First we bought a live chicken on the mar­ket in Rante­pao. At his house we cut down a bam­boo pole and car­ried it back. Then Mar­tin cut three seg­ments off. These were filled with chicken, veget­ables, herbs and coconut and then sealed with palm leaves. Then we put them dir­ectly in the fire, turn­ing them once in a while. The meal is fin­ished when you can’t see any more liquid bub­bling out of the bamboo.

Being invited into an Indone­sian home can be quite an awk­ward situ­ation some­times. You might have been a cus­tomer before, but sud­denly your status changes and you then are a guest. You’re not expec­ted to lift a fin­ger and everything gets very formal. Not so with Mar­tin, which might have some­thing to do with his two chil­dren. They were very shy at the begin­ning, but after a while they got used to me and were play­ing pranks and telling me stor­ies, of which I didn’t under­stand a thing. I’m sure they found this strange bule (Indone­sian for for­eigner) sit­ting in their liv­ing room very amusing.

While we waited for the meal to fin­ish Mar­tin intro­duced me to the grand­mother of his wife. She died about a year ago and lies in the house of his in-laws. The funeral will be this Decem­ber. In the only other room in the house three kids were watch­ing TV. This made me fully real­ize that the Tora­jans really do live with their dead.

The meal was abso­lutely delicious.

You can find more pho­tos from Tana Toraja here.