Tag: Indonesia

All different kinds of dried fish are on sale at this little stall on the weekly animal market close to Rantepao.

You can smell the freshly ground coffee from miles away. Here in Tana Toraja the people grow two different kinds of coffee, Robusta and Arabica.

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.

A traditional Torajan funeral is a big event for the local people in Tana Toraja. Relatives have usually been saving up for a long time to be able to buy water buffaloes and pigs to be sacrificed during the funerals. For this reason the deceased will be given their own room in a house and are considered still alive until the actual funeral.

Depending on which class the family is from, a funeral can last from a day to a week and the amount of animals to be sacrificed varies also. A family from the low class might only sacrifice 2 buffaloes and a few pigs. A middle class funeral will usually last 3 days and during its course maybe 15 buffaloes will be sacrificed. People from the high class might sacrifice 100 or even 200 buffaloes over the course of a week.

The price of a buffalo starts at about 20 million Rupiah, which is around 2000 USD or 1400 EUR. The price then rises steeply the bigger and the more white a buffalo is, reaching around 100 million in some cases.

The beginning of a funeral day normally starts with the sacrifice of a couple buffaloes. While friends or family members cut up the animals, processions of other family members take place. They receive food and tea or coffee in a special building and move to their allocated temporary built shelters after a while to make place for other family members.

Every group of family brings their own gifts of animals, but not all animals necessarily get sacrificed. At the end of the day every family member will be given a piece of meat from the sacrificed animals.

The majority of Torajans are Protestants and they don’t see any conflict between their old traditional animistic beliefs and their relatively new religion. I wonder, though, what the protestant church has to say on that matter.

The Torajan people are very welcoming and don’t mind at all that hordes of tourists come to watch their traditional funerals. They rather see it as a sign of respect for the dead. Although tourists aren’t required to bring a buffalo or a pig as a gift, every person has to bring something, a carton of cigarettes being the most popular choice it seems.

Below is a short video from the funeral I attended. The deceased woman originated from the middle class and had been dead for about a year.

You can find more photos from Tana Toraja here.

I am sat at the airport bar in Christchurch and I am just starting on my second beer. Nowadays you have to get drunk before you get on a plane. I still remember the old times, when a gorgeous stewardess would give you any booze you wanted for free with a beautiful smile on her face. Bad times for travellers indeed. You even go hungry on a plane if you’re not prepared to fork out for a meal yourself. The smiles and the fun are gone together with the gorgeous stewardesses, all being replaced by grumpy airline helpers with the charm of bored supermarket cashiers. You want to watch a movie? 10 dollars. You want to listen to the radio? 3 dollars for a headset. The only good news is that, for now at least, ticket prices have gone down a bit. Just wait for the next ‘oil crisis’, though.

And here I am, still nursing my beer, with a big grin on my face. People are looking at me in a strange way. You’re not supposed to show your happiness too openly, I guess. It makes people uncomfortable and conjures up images of an axe murderer. If they only knew! I’m on my way back to Indonesia, the land of infinite islands. I am truly enchanted by that country, by its people and by its diversity and I can’t wait to get back there. This time my travels will take me to Sulawesi and Kalimantan, none of which I know that much about. It doesn’t matter, though. Indonesia and I, we’ll understand each other somehow, we always have so far. Just to make sure, I have bought a phrasebook. I don’t need or want a guidebook, but a phrasebook will help me learn more of the language, which is one of my big goals for this trip.

For now I have more immediate problems than my worried fellow passengers. I have only one pair of socks left and they have big holes in them. I am pretty sure that I have to take my shoes off when I go through security and at times I can get quite self conscious. I don’t like people looking at me in a strange way. But hey, even if they do, why should I care? I’m off to Indo…

A ferry can be a crowded place full of people, fridges, scooters, satellite dishes and animals. In a place like Indonesia boats are the most used mode of transportation.

After being cooped up for far too long with far too many party nights in this little place called Queenstown I am finally off again in one week to my favourite country of all time, Indonesia. The Dutch, the English and the Portuguese once fought over it a few hundred years ago. But while they were unsuccessful in the long run, the Australians are doing a much better job right now, slowly and sneakily taking over Bali and beyond.

I’m in a bit of a predicament right now. According to Wikipedia there are 17.508 islands. Some time ago an earthquake created 6 more somewhere off Sumatra, so I’m a little undecided right now on where to go. I don’t want to stay too long on Bali. This has hardly nothing to do with the loud Australians, who I’m quite fond of, and more to do with the overall touristic busyness of the place. So my first option would be to head over to Java, check out Borobudur and some national parks and then slowly make my way along Sumatra all the way to Pulau Weh. I have a plane ticket from Medan to KL at some point, so that route would make a lot of sense.

But then, I never actually planned on using that ticket. One rule for getting an Indonesian visa is that you have to produce an onward ticket. Only when you arrive by plane, though, so there you go. My second option would be to catch a Pelni or cheap flight to Makassar on Sulawesi, do some diving, see if some people are getting buried in Tana Toraja and then head over to Kalimantan, which I have to admit I know not much about. Yet. Maybe somehow do a little quick visa run across to Sarawak and spend another 2 months in the Indonesian part of Borneo.

What would you do if you were in my pants?

This pic was taken quite some time ago while on a pleasure dive somewhere deep around Simon’s Reef close to Gili Trawangan. It was after the tsunami and we hadn’t had any customers for some time, so we just took the boat out for fun.

Happy Times

For a very long time the bandanese people had it extremely good. There was no raja or king or whatever to tell them what to do. Only Orang Kaya, village elders, but they were…, well, old! So Life was great! They were in the unique position, that their little group of islands was the only place in the world, where nutmeg and mace grew naturally. They traded with Arabs, Chinese and Malay, made a good living off it and, because growing nutmeg does not actually involve much physical work, spend their time fishing or hanging out in the shade on the beach with friends.

First Encounter Of A Smelly Kind

Now, the Bandanese had known for quite some time that a lot of their produce ended up on the other side of the world with people with unintelligible names in strange countries and were therefore delighted when they finally got a chance to meet some of them in 1512. Those guys, Portuguese as it turned out, filled up their ships with spices and then left Banda mostly to themselves for the rest of the century, concentrating mainly on the northern clove islands of Maluku. Not that the Bandanese were really heartbroken over that fact, since those newcomers always insisted on wearing heavy long clothes at all times, while having an aversion to regular baths at the same time.

Second Encounter Of A Smelly Kind

In 1599 everybody in the Banda archipelago knew that something fishy was going to happen or appear, when Gunung Api, the little but volatile 666m high volcano, started rumbling again after a long time of inactivity. And sure enough, not long after another group of pale sweaty guys turned up, this time from the Netherlands. The Dutch then did not waste any time establishing trading posts, buying as much over prized spices as their ships could hold and then set sail for Europe leaving behind a few sailors to look after their interests. Now when the Portuguese found out that the Dutch had arrived they were less than happy and for the next few years those nations tried their best to kick each other in the crotch.

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Lamalera, Lama meaning feeling or blade and Lera meaning sun, is situated on the southern side of the mountainous island of Lembata, which is part of the Solor Archipelago. It can only be reached by taking a bus, which is a converted truck, from Lewoleba. The drive takes about three and a half hours, mainly due to the bad roads, but is nevertheless quite scenic and adventurous. The roads can be extremely steep and narrow and there are usually many people sitting on the roof of the bus because of the restricted space inside.

Sam, an american backpacker I traveled with at the time, and I arrived in the little whaling village around four in the afternoon on a Saturday in late August 07. We soon found out, that the fishermen do not go out to sea past 4 pm and neither do they work on a Sunday, when the whole community is going to church and rests. So instead of joining the whaling boats the next day as we had hoped, we walked for about half an hour to a nearby beach and a big bat cave and spent a relaxed day out there.

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