This weekend I traded 5 am calls to prayer for 5 am rooster wake-up calls. No I didn’t go native and adopt a rooster ( although upon my return I found out that someone in my little neighborhood did). Instead I hopped an early morning bus and took the eight-hour trip North into the mountains of Tana Toraja to visit my friend Judith for the Halloween weekend. As a former theatre major it probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. While the thought of indulging in a True Blood marathon while inhaling coconut cookies wasn’t the worst Halloween weekend I could think of for the weekend, I figured what better time to visit Sulawesi’s capital of Christian/animism/magical practices?
Fittingly, I arrived in the town of Makale in total darkness. The sun sets here around 6 or so do due the whole equator thing, and there are pretty much no streetlights in Makale. None. Good thing I was forewarned to bring my flashlight. This little tidbit will eventually play a major role in causing one of the most terrifying 30 minutes in my life, but that comes a bit later. Anyway, because of Makale’s anti-illumination policy, it wasn’t until the next morning that I realized Judith lives in a rice field, complete with random buffalo, chicken and pigs wandering around. But she has hot water, which is more than I can say for my fancy little home in the metropolis of Makassar.
Now’s a good time to explain that Toraja is a major tourist destination for buleh ( white people) and Indonesians alike. This is due not only to the insane natural beauty of the region , replete with amazing hiking and white water rafting, but also because the Torajans know how to throw a funeral. Yes, going to funerals is an enjoyable past time here complete with livestock auctions, ritual animal sacrifices and some of the best pound cake I’ve ever had. Witnessing one of these spectacles has been a goal of mine since I arrived in Indonesia, but seeing as the funeral season begins to taper off in December, my chances were getting slim. Yet it seemed like the Halloween gods were smiling on me because after some snooping around we were informed that day 3 of a funeral ceremony was taking place on Saturday ( funerals can be almost 5 days long) but it wasn’t the “big” day so there wouldn’t be that many people or that much excitement.
Well it turns on a “little” day consists of the ritual sacrifice and dismemberment of 4 water buffalo over 75 attendees with a steady flow of arrivals throughout the day, and a live pig auction. It should be noted that water buffalo are prized possessions and can cost more than a small car here. So for four to go under the knife at once indicates that the deceased was a pretty important person to the community. While Judith and I arrived a little late for the actual slitting of the throats, we did get to watch as the carcasses were de-skinned and butchered into convenient take home meat bundles, while chatting with the family and eating coffee and cookies. It was definitely interesting to see how what I would consider a scene out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was completely normal for everyone there. I felt like I was at a Fourth of July bbq, except there were 4 really large dismembered animals laying around. Old men and women chatted with each other and played cards, babies were passed around and little boys ran around with the discarded hooves tied to strings like your typical family reunion picnic.
Judith and I had a full day planned and eventually it was time to move on to the cave graves at Londa. There is a practice in Toraja of putting your dead in their coffins in these natural caves. It is considered a special honor, and the higher up your social class the higher up your coffin rests in the cliffs. Of course now, for a small fee, you can crawl through these caves and look and human skulls, femurs, coffins and the offering that families still leave to their dead. After Londa we took a high-speed ojek ride down the mountain to find some food. Ojeks are basically random men who will let you hop on the back of their motorbike for a fee. It’s pretty much one of my favorite things about Indonesia, it would definitely be better if helmets were included, but a little leap of faith goes a long way.
Continuing the weekend’s trend of brilliant strokes of luck, the restaurant that we ended up at for lunch served pa’piong, a traditional dish of meat and vegetables cooked in a hallowed out piece of bamboo for 2 hours. Because of the exorbitant cooking time, you have to order it a few hours in advance, so we placed our dinner order and make plans to go back that evening for traditional deliciousness and palm wine. Now Judith had confessed to me that she had never been out after dark. Taking into consideration that Toraja is a malaria region and ridiculously dark at night , I still thought this was a little odd. Turns out Judith didn’t go far after dark for a reason.
After 30 minutes on a public SUV, we arrived at Gazebo restaurant for our 7 pm dinner with two other ETAs. The pa’piong was delicious, the palm wine and stories flowed, and 3 hours later we were the last customers in the restaurant. Well as it turns out, the rumor that public transportation doesn’t exist in Toraja is completely true. So here we are, a tiny group of American kids standing in the pitch black on the side of the road in front of the restaurant, trying to hitchhike home. Well the proprietress of the restaurant was not down for this plan of action at all, and insisted on calling her friend who owns a suv to drive us home. It wasn’t until we were careening down rainy curvy mountain roads in total darkness at 87 kilometers per hour that we realized the our driver and his assistant were the two guys knocking back palm wine with us at the restaurant. Needless to say, I was pretty sure I was going die that night, especially sense everyone insists on removing all seatbelts from vehicles, the better to fit more passengers. However as shown by this post, I survived my Torajan Halloween and am now back to molding young minds.
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