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.