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.

Sige — Pre­lude To A Tra­di­tional Wedding

On the morn­ing of the Monday fol­low­ing our arrival Sam and I went to the beach hop­ing to be able to observe the whal­ing. The beach was full of people, but all the boats were still under their pro­tect­ive little shel­ters. A bit later we found out, that on this day part of a tra­di­tional wed­ding was tak­ing place, called Sige in the local lan­guage Lama­ho­lot. There are 12 clans in total in Lamalera and there are cer­tain rules and cus­toms to be fol­lowed when it comes to mar­riage. People are not allowed to marry within their clan and neither are they allowed to marry into the imme­di­ate fam­ily of their par­ents siblings.

So on Sige, which pro­ceeds the more formal wed­ding in the church, the clans of the bride and the groom come together and agree on the dowry the bride is to receive. This usu­ally con­sists of two ele­phant tusks, which are then being kept in the new foun­ded fam­ily until their son is being mar­ried. Mean­while the rest of the vil­lage gets together on the beach, a few pigs are being slaughtered by the men and a huge feast is then being pre­pared by the women. As soon as the anim­als are carved up large cans filled with palm wine and cigar­ettes are passed around. The palm wine is self-made and many ants and other bugs are float­ing around in it, which does not seem to bother any­body. It is quite sweet and weak, but will still get you drunk before the after­noon. It was dur­ing this drink­ing ses­sion, that we met Jef­frey, a man­age­ment stu­dent in Kupang and son of the owner of a guest house in town. Jef­frey speaks very good Eng­lish and patiently answered all our ques­tions about Lamalera.

Tenas — The Boats And Their Crew

The earli­est inhab­it­ants of Lamalera arrived from Sulawesi by way of Halma­hera in Malukku, after a big tsunami des­troyed their homes. The local fish­er­men are very skilled in catch­ing whales, dol­phins, manta rays and sharks their tra­di­tional way. This involves sail­ing close to their prey, then clos­ing the gap by row­ing furi­ously the last 100 meters. Then the har­pooner , or Lamafa, leaps from the very front of the boat onto the back of the whale and uses his body weight to embed the har­poon deep in the flesh of the whale. This kind of whal­ing can be dan­ger­ous busi­ness and some­times people get hurt as arms or legs get entangled in ropes, boats cap­size as the speared whale tries to dive or boats get dragged far out to sea by an injured whale.

Almost every clan has its own boat, or Tena, which usu­ally car­ries a crew of 8 to 12. Every Tena is believed to have a spirit and should one of them sink, the whole vil­lage enters a long period of mourn­ing as it has lost a valu­able mem­ber of the com­munity. No whal­ing is being done in that time. Should a boat need to be rebuilt or repaired, then one of the boat­makers, or Molle or Labak Tilo, is called. Every boat has its own boat­maker, of which there are only six in the whole vil­lage, but one Molle can be respons­ible for more than one Tena. Dur­ing repairs old parts of the boats are always used so as to pre­serve the spirit of the Tena. Another duty of the Labak Tilo is to divide the caught whale into its 17 tra­di­tional parts.

Every Tena has to have some tra­di­tional ropes, called spirit ropes or Leo, on board. Nowadays these ropes, that are made of cot­ton, are only used to catch manta rays. Stur­dier and thicker plastic ropes are now being used to hunt for whales. Another con­ces­sion to mod­ern times is the use of engine boats. These are not dir­ectly involved in the hunt, but are used to spot the whales and then help get­ting the Tenas close to the whales. The Tenas are made com­pletely out of wood and no metal nails are being used. Even the sails are made not of cloth, but of inter­woven stripes of palm leaves. It is because of these tra­di­tional ways of whal­ing and the low num­bers of whales caught per year, that the fish­er­men of Lamalera are still allowed to fol­low their tra­di­tion. Every part of the Tena relates to a human body part. The wooden out­rig­ger is its arms, the rud­der is equi­val­ent to legs, the front is the head and the very bot­tom of the boat is its stom­ach. The Tena is usu­ally named after its owner and some even carry inscrip­tions in Latin.

In total there are only 17 har­poon­ers, or Lamafa, in the vil­lage, some as old as 60 years. Their trade usu­ally gets taught from father to son and it takes a long time to mas­ter all the neces­sary skills. Keep­ing up this tra­di­tion seems to become more dif­fi­cult though, as the chil­dren get sent to Flores to go to high­school or as far away as Kupang to go to uni­ver­sity. Many of them later find bet­ter paid jobs away from Lem­bata, so the future of Lamalera as a whal­ing vil­lage seems some­what uncer­tain. In addi­tion to that the WWF together with some vil­la­gers is try­ing to find altern­at­ives to whal­ing alto­gether. On the other hand there are vil­la­gers, like Jef­frey to settle back here once their uni­ver­sity course is fin­ished with the goal to upkeep the tra­di­tions and to fur­ther open Lamalera up to tourism.

The Hunt For Whales

The whal­ing sea­son lasts from May to Octo­ber, though whales and other mar­ine life are being hunted year round.Since May this year 37 whales have been caught already. After five full days in Lamalera without a single Tena going out Sam and I were ready to leave. We had been told that no boats would go out the next few days due to too big waves around full moon. We had our bags packed and had just fin­ished lunch when we heard the shout ‘Baleo’ echo around the vil­lage, which basic­ally means that whales have been sighted and the men pre­pare everything to go to see. Here’s a little video of our experience:

The hunt was very emo­tional and con­fus­ing for me. I found that killing such a grand creature as a whale is far too easy. This exper­i­ence was a lot of things, as Sam put it. It was very sad, but awe­some at the same time; It was excit­ing and dis­turb­ing, and bey­ond all it was some­thing neither of us is ever likely to forget!