A culture of death lives on

A culture of death lives on

Jacqueline Mackenzie, Contributor/Tana Toraja, South Sulawesi

Whatever travel agents may say, there are not many places in the
world where cultures have survived the tendrils of travel and
telecommunications, or where the visitor does not feel traditions
have been tainted by the tourist dollar.

Tana Toraja's culture is just as authentic today as it was
when Christian missionaries first penetrated their highlands and
converted the animist Torajans in the 1930s, persuading Torajan
royals to sacrifice buffalo and pigs (instead of slaves) at the
massive funeral ceremonies that are one of the main tourist
attractions of the region.

It's a place where, in the 1970s, it still took a week to go
by truck from the South Sulawesi capital Makassar to Rantapao in
the center of Tana Toraja, where tourism really only started in
the 1980s and has been kept down in recent years by travel
warnings, one of which specified South Sulawesi as a danger zone
for a time (neighboring Mamasa is another matter).

While there are plenty of direct flights between Jakarta and
Makassar, to get north to Tana Toraja you either have to charter
a flight at huge expense, or make a seven to eight hour haul in a
minibus.

The route leaves the west coast of South Sulawesi at Pare-
Pare, after which you quickly move into the hills. Not only does
the countryside change, the people do too -- the mosques start to
thin out, dogs and pigs start to appear in villages and the
people look more like their Cambodian ancestors than their
lowland neighbors.

So you have made quite an effort by the time you arrive at one
of the famed, week-long funeral parties, most of which are held
after the rice harvests in August and January each year.

Consequently, it's reassuring that, as you are offered sweet
tea and traditional coconut cake by the hosts of the ceremony,
you get the genuine impression that all the performances and
practices you are watching would be going on just as they are,
irrespective of whether you had turned up or not.

Funerals take months of preparation and cost hundreds of
millions of rupiah. In fact, it can take years for a family to
save sufficient funds to send off a loved one in the style
required. In the meantime, be it months or years, the embalmed
body is kept in the house and is even offered meals and
introduced to visitors, as though still an active part of the
family.

Because of this, the coffin you see draped with elaborate
fabrics atop the funeral tower in the central courtyard may
contain a body long, long dead -- an extraordinary thing in
itself in this predominantly Muslim nation, where the dead should
be buried before sunset on the day of death.

But if Islam has little hold on Torajans, you quickly realize
the Christian missionaries were only partly successful: All the
proceedings, from the ceremonial drums to the pork and buffalo
meat and palm wine galore, are animist in origin.

A visit to a funeral requires no invitation, one of the
reasons why thousands attend -- the buffalo meat being another
big draw-card.

You can arrive at a funeral at any time on any day, but the
customs you will see vary depending on the day you chose. Day one
is for the major procession, the days following are dominated by
a cycle of receptions for guests, several hundred at a time.

The pounding of bamboo poles on the base of the funeral tower
greets each new group of guests and the livestock gifts they
bring into the central clearing -- scores of pigs and dozens of
buffalo -- the most prized of which are rare blue-eyed albino
mutants with pie-bald brown patches on white skin.

Each procession of guests is led into massive open-sided
reception rooms, where, seated on mats for an hour or two, they
are served tea and cakes by a troupe of finely dressed close
family. They are entertained by dancers and a bamboo orchestra,
then served cigarettes (for the men) and betel nut (for the
women), before being led out of the reception rooms to make way
for the next guests.

Behind the scenes, palm wine is served liberally in hollowed
bamboo cuttings and dozens of pigs are slaughtered and roasted to
feed the multitude of guests.

Despite our deliberate avoidance of having the youngsters see
a sacrifice (see box), children's reaction to the other big
tourist attraction in Tana Toraja may surprise you. The open air
and cave burials at many different villages, including Lemo and
Londa, are confronting by Western standards: caves full of
coffins, some quite new and others hundreds of years old, their
timbers rotted through and their skeletons jumbled together in
the dirt.

Children, however, often find this all very mysterious and
exciting. One particular burial cave can be explored with
kerosene lamps, crawling through narrow openings to get to ever
deeper caverns full of coffins and skulls.

Our family went deeper into the cave than the guide had ever
been before, into a huge cavern full of bats and guano, before
their thirst for adventure was satisfied and the parents were the
ones asking if we could all go home now please.

But both adults and children may both enjoy most in any trip
to Tana Toraja is a trek in the clean cool mountain air. There
are any number to choose from to suit your timetable and fitness:
we chose a medium-grade two hour climb to Kandora Mountain to
stay overnight in the simple but comfortable Kandora Mountain
Lodge.

The kids ran wild in the surrounding forest, made a campfire
as the temperature dropped to decidedly cold overnight and woke
to mist filling the valleys and swirling between mysterious stone
forest formations on nearby slopes.

The morning trek along the ridge-line shows off Toraja's
natural beauty, then, as you wind down through the hills to
villages around Suaya, you see more cultural sites, including a
baby-grave tree: Torajans have a very touching practice of
burying children who die before they lose their milk teeth in a
hole carved into a living tree, then sealed with a matted grass
door. As the tree grows, the child's remains move heavenward,
until their soul is finally released into the sky.

After our trek, we were pleased to meet our trusty minibus
near Makale in the south of Tana Toraja, before beginning the
long drive down out of the mountains and south to Makassar once
again.

Toraja may be famous for its culture of death, but the way its
people meld death so joyously into life, and the rejuvenating
effects of the cool air and clean environment, make a visit one
of the most memorable you are likely to have in Indonesia.