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Funeral Crashers
Tana Toraja, Indonesia |
Tana Toraja, Indonesia
One of the main questions that Tim and I get asked by people we meet on our travels is where have you enjoyed the most. This is a tough question for us as everywhere has had its own special things that we have loved but the general agreement is that Mongolia was the best simply because it was natural, beautiful and there were just a handful of other tourists, little did we know Sulawesi was about to give Mongolia a run for its title.
When we tell people that we have been to Sulawesi we are generally greeted with a blank look, so just to save you all having to google ‘where is Sulawesi’, it is a spider shaped island in Indonesia.
Having travelled a little bit of Indonesia last year we know that it is not one of the easiest places to travel. Boats sink, planes are generally not up to European safety standards, buses take days to get anywhere and it is all in all not the most pleasurable of countries to explore. So we made an executive decision to book a guide and a driver. Anyone that has looked at travelling Sulawesi will have probably heard of Dodo the Penman, he is the man! After just a couple of emails we had a full itinerary locked in to take us from Makassar to Tana Toraja and back to Makassar via Sengkang and Bira Beach. It was time to sit back relax and enjoy the journey for a week.
Our arrival in Makassar didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned, we were due to be staying with Dodo our guide, but unfortunately there had been a death in his family so he booked us into a hotel for the night. Given that Sulawesi is definitely the road less travelled we were welcomed with some blank faces at the hotel, but after a game of charades and a lot of giggles we managed to get some keys and a room. We thought that we were playing charades to get a double bed instead of two singles and were pleased with our progress until we got to our room and discovered two singles… hmm no idea what we discussing then. Dinner was equally as complicated when we tried to order and were told that they had run out of rice. Amazingly we managed to get some pretty massive portions of fried noodles and all in all had a successful first night in Sulawesi and slept sound knowing that we had definitely made the right decision booking a guide and driver.
The next day our driver turned up in a lovely comfy car and we set off on our journey, 9 hours to Tana Toraja…
Dodo the Pen man our guide was not going to join us on the whole tour but he set off with us to our first stop where he treated us to a magic show. Dodo is known is the pen man and over the years he has collected thousands of pens from all around the world, obviously there was only one pen that we could possibly give to Dodo. Anyone who knows Jersey knows that the logo for the zoo is a dodo, and thanks to a delivery from Jersey we presented a very happy Dodo with a Jersey Zoo Lonely Dodo pen, I am pretty sure it is going to take pride of place in his collection.
So onwards we set with our driver Agus, who spoke a little English and managed to navigate the windy, potholed, treacherous roads with ease. Half way to Tana Toraja we stopped off at a place called Buntu Kabobong, also known as erotic mountain. This was a pretty stunning location, literally in the middle of nowhere, with just a couple of tourist cafes for the buses to stop at overlooking an incredible valley with mountains towering above. We had a cup of coffee and some biscuits and were taking some photos when the owner came over to us and Tim made the mistake of asking why it was called Erotic Mountain. She pointed to a large painting of the mountain which had highlighted the large crevis directly across from the café accentuating the fact that it looks a lot like lady parts. Cheeky!! Legs stretched, driver refuelled with coffee it was time to get back on the road and head to Tana Toraja.
I am largely going to let the photos speak for themselves in this post and will just give you an overview of the culture, sorry if it is information overload, but this is a pretty fascinating place!
Before we planned our visit to Sulawesi I had never heard of Tana Toraja and I am sure than many of you will never have heard of it either. It is a pretty special place in the middle of Sulawesi for some pretty odd reasons. The Torajian people were originally boat people who hit land in Sulawesi and decided to dismantle their boats and carry them across land. They subsequently decided to set up home and what better to use than their boats so the roofs of their houses are now an iconic vision of a small wooden hut with an extravagant roof much like the hull of a boat.
Our first experience of Tana Toraja was to enter the gates of the province which had an example of one of their houses proudly on an arch over the road. Our driver asked if we wanted to stop for a photo, which after 6 hours of driving we definitely did. What our driver didn’t warn us was that we would not be the ones taking the photos. Seemingly villagers and locals from miles around convene at the gates of Tana Toraja to have their photo taken with a tourist. Literally everyone from teenagers wanting to practice a little bit of English to the head of police in his full uniform with his wife and two children had us posing for photos which their friends were taking on their mobile phones. For about 20 minutes we felt like celebrities, god only knows where those photos are going to end up?! Eventually we made our escape and got back on the road.
Whilst the houses in Tana Toraja are pretty cool, it is the culture of the Torajian people which is fascinating. Life in general seems to revolve around death and interesting burial places, not in a morbid way, more in that they see death as a celebration of a life and the journey to the next life. So the vast majority of every tour to Tana Toraja will be to a series of different burial locations and if you are lucky you will get to attend a funeral.
Funerals are huge affairs in Toraja, depending of course on the wealth of the family and their standing in the community they can last for days and hundreds and hundreds of people will attend. In many cultures having a bunch of tourists and their cameras at a funeral is just inconceivable but in their culture foreigners are seen as good luck.
The funerals in Toraja are extremely expensive affairs, the families must save for months or even years to be able to afford to pay for the elaborate ceremony which means that the bodies of their loved ones remain unburied until such a time as the money has been raised. So this is another interesting oddity of the culture. The bodies are considered sick or resting until such a time as they are buried and they are kept in the home of the family for the months or years that it takes to raise the necessary funds. The bodies are never left alone during this time, meals are prepared for them and they are still treaded as one of the family until the day of the funeral. Thankfully nowadays the bodies are treated with embalming fluid during this time.
The funerals are so expensive for many reasons, every guests will be fed and watered during the ceremony, which consists of many many elements over several days and several bamboo buildings must be built to hold the funeral in, these can only be used once for the funeral and must be dismantled after the ceremony.
Each day of the ceremony the guests arrive and are welcomed with tea, coffee and homemade cakes and biscuits. Next the guests follow a procession of the head of ceremonies into another building where the grandchildren all welcome you. The men sit on the left and the women on the right. The ladies of the family bring yet more tea, coffee and cake and then after that the ladies are presented with Betel Nuts and the men with Cigarettes. Pigs and buffalo that have been brought by the guests that are in the ceremony tent are then paraded through and taken to be slaughtered in order to feed those guests. The guest eat, drink, dance and chant into the morning and it all starts again the
next day.
Thankfully we missed out on the ceremonial slaughtering of the buffalo and pigs as this would no doubt have caused me nightmares, we spoke to some other tourists who had been there and I was pretty glad we had missed out.
However unlike every other tourist who attended this funeral we seemed to get extra special treatment which we are not sure that we wanted. First we went to one of the rooms for tea, coffee and cake which was ok as we were with our guide and then when the people started funnelling into the ceremonial room our guide told us to follow. We did as we were told and subsequently had one of the most awkward 30 minutes of our lives as it turned out that not another single tourist joined us and we were the lone foreigners sat in the ceremonial tent with no clue what was about to happen. One of my biggest concerns aside from being sat with a whole load of Torajan ladies who spoke no English at a funeral was that I hadn’t known we were coming here today so when I took off my trainers to join all the other bare footed people I was rocking my favourite novelty batman socks. Not a good look. My next biggest fear was what do I do with a betel nut?! Thankfully the look of fear and horror on my face must have made the lady handing out the betel nuts feel sorry for me as she gave me a sweet which was meant to be for the children. As the men were all being given their cigarettes Tim made a run for it and escaped the ceremony room leaving me the only stressed out foreigner willing it to all be over so I could get out. For anyone reading this who plans to go to Tana Toraja, be sure to just observe from a distance it is a much more relaxing experience!!!
So while the funeral is a huge expense for the family there is an added problem for them. Each and every guest that arrives will bring a gift, the most expensive being a buffalo or a prize pig and the cheapest being cigarettes or sugar all of which are used during the ceremony. When you arrive at the funeral you log your gift and the family then is obliged to return a gift of the same value when someone in their family has a funeral. So not only does the ceremony cost a fortune you then have an IOU list of several hundred pigs, thousands of pounds of buffalo which you are going to have to pay at some point in the future.
The funeral that we attended was for a very well respected lady of 95 year old. Her death had been 5 years prior to the funeral.
The buffalo and pigs that are slaughtered are mainly used to feed the guests but they are not all slaughtered, some are donated to charities around the village so there is no waste. There are however two important parts of the buffalo which are kept. The horns and the jaw bone. The horns of each slaughtered buffalo are kept by the family and mounted on their house and the jaw bone is given to the founding family of the village for them to mount on their house. Many of the houses have a large array of buffalo horns adorning the front and side of their houses and only a few will display jaw bones, which means that they were the founding family in that particular village. It is for this reason that you will never see a buffalo skull adorning the houses, the more affluent families have carved wooden skulls, the ones painted white with black spots are the more prestigious families as these are the most expensive and prized bulls. Unbelievably live bulls of the white and black spotted variety are sold for over £50,000 so these are usually only slaughtered at the funerals of royalty, however during funeral season during December the prices of standard bulls and pigs increases so they are never cheap in Tana Toraja and now many have to be imported during this time of year to keep up with demand.
The place of burial is also an important feature here, every Torajan returns to Tana Toraja to be buried. To ensure that everyone returns when they are born their placenta is buried at the side of the family home as a marker that a part of their body is there and they must return so that they can be buried whole. Many of the poorer families are buried in standard grave yards however the more affluent are buried in the stone cliffs around Tana Toraja or beautiful burial houses. One of the most famous burial cliffs is in Lemo where it takes 2 men 6 months, or one man a year to chisel out the burial hole by hand. These beautiful cliffs are also adorned with a balcony containing what are called ‘Tau Tau’, these are a hand carved wooden statue designed to be essentially a mini me of the person being buried. These are extremely expensive and sadly despite the risk of bad juju they are often stolen and sold on the black market. Our guide pointed out one Tau Tau which was said to be of a princess and it had a solid gold nose.
Lemo was in a perfect order with new holes being dug as we were there, however there were many more burial grounds we visited which are no longer used which were in much poorer condition where the wooden coffins had fallen, smashed or just disintergrated and bones and skulls just littered the cave and cliffs. One of the most fascinating grounds we visited was a baby grave, this is no longer used as the tribe that used this method has died out but when a baby died at birth or soon after it was buried in a foetal position within a tree so it would continue to grow with the tree.
One more unmissable experience in Tana Toraja is market day, a real assault on the senses in every respect. We started with the bulls and pigs which was pretty interesting. We spent the vast majority of our time posing for random photos with locals again, but we did get to experience a negotiation of the sale of a bull which sold for thousands of pounds and resulted in people producing carrier bags full of money from all over the place to seal the deal. Next up was the fruit and veg which was less disturbing and certainly more fragrant but sadly the market place was built for the more vertically challenged Indonesians and we spent the next hour banging our heads, ducking and diving through the make shift structures.
Before we knew it our time in Tana Toraja had come to an end, we had seen and experienced some things that you only ever see in National Geographic. It is certainly an interesting place and whilst it is the road less travelled it is not the road less travelled for the hundreds of groups of French tourist who seem to be there in their masses of tour buses. Thankfully being on a budget and staying in the backstreet homestays meant that we avoided the annoying tourists for the vast majority of the time and gave us a more authentic experience. We were also very lucky to have booked in advance and secured one of the longest serving and best guides that Toraja has to offer, despite sending us into the funeral unprepared Josef was the most awesome guide we could have hoped for and would totally recommend him to anyone planning on a visit.
I feel that there is still so much to learn and see in Toraja, a real step back in time to the land that most people don’t even know exists.
Next up we are back on the badly made and badly maintained road to Sengkang, which translates as the centre point of Sulawesi and the home to the floating houses of the lake people….
Farewell Tana Toraja!
Beans Around The World 