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capn_n_pyeVisiting Tana Toraja was our main goal of coming to Sulawesi, and it did not disappoint.
Rantepao is Kornelius’ hometown, and he really came into his own on home turf. We think he's like watching Parks and Recreation, all you have to do is be patient enough to get through the (mediocre) season 1, then it's amazing.
Buffalo are an extremely important part of Torajan society, and the first stop of the day was a buffalo market.
There were a couple of loads of Dutch tourists who looked like they were feverishly pretending they were the only tourists the buffalo market – unless that’s just what they look like when they realise that the white buffalo look like naked Dutch men…
The ones with white fringes looked like they were trying to steal Stinky’s hairdo…
And this mottled bastard tried to shit on us, but missed.
We learned a lot about which eye and skin colour and horn shapes contribute to a buffalo’s value, as well as how many you need to buy to do a proper funeral. If anyone wants to join us in an enterprise to round up the descendants of Grandaddy Umphelby’s NT buffalo and sell them back to the Torajans, just let us know.
Next to the buffalo market is a pig market, and next door to that again is a food and goods market. We love a good wander through a market!
However, the main event of the day was a massive Torajan funeral. Given that Torajans look after their dead (in the house, in this case, in Nanna’s deadroom) until they’re good and ready for a funeral, and given that the June/July holidays are when most people like to hold them, we were extra lucky that one was popping off on the very first day we arrived in Tana Toraja.
This one was for a 90 year old woman named Ruth who had died a year ago. Ruth, you say? What does the Bible say...? Ah yes, 2 Timothy 4-7: "... I have kept the faith." Tell that to the livestock! We, too, suddenly got real damn quiet about being in our Ruth phase after they slaughtered half a dozen buffalo under our noses.
Torajan people believe that buffalo will take the soul to Punia (heaven) and a pig will guide them (assuming you’re ‘Christian’), so you have to sacrifice a whole bunch of them (especially if you want to show the deceased’s high status). Ruth was very high status, so this was definitely a bad day to be a pig or buffalo. You'll notice a conspicuous absence of Moose - he poked his nose out, saw what was happening to his fellow ungulates and fucked off.
Try not to think about how the humidity enhances the smell.
We’d always pictured these houses and rice barns as being out in the countryside, but they’re really just everywhere – Ruth’s place was only just out of town. There were hundreds of people in attendance, and this dude with a microphone announced the name and pedigree of every single one of them!
Ruth was there in her coffin, and there were tributes festooning the wall, but we do wonder how she would have felt about those people who thought her name was Ruht…
If there aren’t blood splatters up the wall, are you really seeing grandma off with the respect she deserves?
The Indonesian equivalent of the CWA were working their guts out to provide tea, coffee, snacks and lunch, although for some reason we didn’t have the appetite for lunch in this particular context. We had nice chats with some of the family members and heroically sipped our tea in between selfies.
It’s always great when you get a party bag to take home from a party, but if you're in Tana Toraja and the party is a funeral, it's a sack of pig meat…
Thank goodness we’re not community members, that’s too much pork!
Despite conclusions you may be tempted to draw from these funeral traditions, most Torajans are Christians, making the highlands a relatively small pocket of Jesus-fans in a region dominated by Muslims. Apart from the fact that it means we can get a cold beer with a meal, it comes with other benefits.
To show off their Christian pride, they’ve got a massive statue watching over the town. Forget Christ the Redeemer (a piddling 30m tall, 700m above sea level), this baby is 40m tall and is about 1700 metres above sea level!
You know what, we need a closer look! Don’t get distracted by any hot sales (poos and wees now the same price!)
Don’t get distracted by the views on the way up!
Just wait your turn to join in the Mexican wave. Whoooooo!
You can climb all the way up to just under Jeezy Boy’s sandals, as long as you don’t mind sharing the space with some big fat beetles…
Moose enjoyed the views and the attention up the top…
…and meanwhile, Stinky finally realised where she’d seen those soulful eyes before.
Eventually, we got hungry enough to have lunch – we’d left it so late that the afternoon rain arrived. Luckily for us, the novelty of a banging rainstorm has yet to wear off, so it was like a meal and a show.
The rain cleared up relatively quickly, and despite it not really being all that warm, we were so inspired by the buffaloes that we had to have a quick dip in the pool back at the hotel.
Speaking of the weather, check out the stupid shit the weather back in Victoria was doing while we weren’t watching – what the hell - it’s mid-autumn, and we’re looking at a hotter top temperature than Sulawesi??
Having spent a day looking at dynamic cultural practices, the next day was about the static aspects. Tana Toraja has some truly extraordinary burial practices and we were about to see examples of almost all of them!
We made sure to have an early start, so we could cram everything in before the afternoon rain arrived. This necessitated a take-away breakfast box from the hotel, which is never a truly delicious option, but is the price we were willing to pay. No matter where you are in Indonesia, you always get a strange bread product, a piece of fruit and a hard boiled egg, and Toraja was no exception. What was unexpected, however, was that whoever put the lunchboxes together didn't know how to hard boil an egg - we discovered this when D'admiral went to crack his egg open on the wall of the car it just smashed semi-cooked albumen and yolk everywhere lol.
First stop was the cliff graves at Batu Lemo.
Just there, hanging out in a cliff, people have carved out graves for their loved ones and made tau tau (effigies) of them to keep them safe. The tau tau hands are posed to protect and attack, which Moose respects.
If you walked around the valley, you’d keep finding cliff graves, just hanging out.
This place was very cool, but not according to the leech that was so desperate to leave that it hitched a ride on D'admiral's head. What a rascal!
If cliff graves aren’t your thing and you prefer your graves in caves, just head down the road to Tampang Allo.
These caves are shallow, but pack a punch.
It’s just a cave off to the side of a farm, yeah, there are skulls just hanging out. They go back at least 1000 years, with the newest being (probably) about 400 years old.
If you’d prefer to find your bones in a cliff but also in a shed, head over to Liang Suaya.
Some sort of maintenance was afoot, so next to this cliff there was just a shed piled up with bones. I mean, where would you keep them?
We took a brief break from looking at places for burials to visit Tongkonan Karuaya – houses of a group of people who used to be really into headhunting.
There was a big ‘housewarming’ ceremony a few years ago, and Kornelius is super proud to be in it (all in white on the right, about 4 minutes in).
Like the other tongkonan and rice barns, there’s a lot of intricate decorations and symbols, including buffalo, pigs and chickens. Chickens are the symbol for justice because in the past they'd have humans fight to the death to determine right, but now they leave it to the chooks (well, the outcome of cock fights really). We did not currently have any disputes for this chicken to settle, but we’ll keep it in mind.
There were no skulls left in evidence, unless you count the buffalo horns and heads…
Across the road from head headhunters' houses are some more traditional houses. Kornelius showed us how you actually get into the rice barns…
… and told us about how at a ceremony the most important person sits under the step. Moose plonked himself down as soon as he heard the news!
That was enough of a break from dead people, it was time to go to Ke’te’ Kesu’. This one was a lot more touristy that the earlier places, which you can see they respected by not building any fugly buildings in between any of the rad houses…
… but it was time for a coffee break anyway.
A couple more bule-hunting moments later…
…we were looking at hanging graves (for when all the other sorts aren't enough). Climbing up the stairs, we discovered that bad grandmas go in the cage…
According to Kornelius, the really old tau tau up the back have gold tits (or teeth, who can tell)??
Anyway, in case you were wondering, ‘hanging graves’ means you just dangle the coffins off the cliff and park some skulls where they’re most fitting.
To be fair, there is also a cave for more graves…
… though some people may now consider this a bit of a snooze fest…or there’s a fresh one??
There was a bus load of French tourists who we kept encountering around the place who were so French they were almost incapacitated by it. We don’t know anything about them, because I think they can’t see Australians? Maybe it’s a problem they caught from the Dutch tourists at the buffalo market? Even when we were just when we were having a quiet lunch, there they’d be! Bloody Europeans, always invading.
We leapfrogged past them to Nongnongan, where you can see the trees where they inter babies who die before they have any teeth…
…and they leapfrogged back to get to the Londa cave burials.
One day we'll go to a place where the path isn’t fucken slippery and trying to kill us, but it was not to be this trip!
These caves go deep and connect kilometres away, although we were happy to take their word for it. The tau tau here were super fancy!
Inside the cave were more remains of more people, including black goopy ash on the ground, which Kornelius informed us is what happens to the meaty bits of people who have been embalmed.
Visitors are allowed (nay, encouraged!) to climb in behind some of the residents, which seems weird, but okay!
Unlike those of us in cities, in terms of food production and life skills, non-urban Indonesians are going to be just fine when the collapse of the internet happens. But if it turns out to be a zombie apocalypse, Toraja will be so extra fukt it’s not even funny.
Just as we finished at that site, the heavens opened again, which we took as a sign to knock off for the afternoon – after a bit of Moose-guided shopping, that is.
The next day, we were welcomed to Bori by this outraged little yap machine, whose neighbour let us have a look inside their tongkonan.
Bori also has a cool ancestral stone circle - each stone represents an important noble who has passed away. Ye olde sticky-uppy stones? Yuck, we hate those things!
Touching it!!!
We could have kept wandering in circles, taking photos for hours!
Meanwhile, in the hill next to it, there were boulders just waiting to receive bodies.
This guy was hard at work expanding it – let’s add this to the list of jobs we will never be strong or tough enough to do.
That day’s adventures had barely begun, but that’s it for the death and burial rituals and lore, so let’s take a short break to contemplate our mortality and come back for the tail end of the trip.
Rantepao is Kornelius’ hometown, and he really came into his own on home turf. We think he's like watching Parks and Recreation, all you have to do is be patient enough to get through the (mediocre) season 1, then it's amazing.
Buffalo are an extremely important part of Torajan society, and the first stop of the day was a buffalo market.
There were a couple of loads of Dutch tourists who looked like they were feverishly pretending they were the only tourists the buffalo market – unless that’s just what they look like when they realise that the white buffalo look like naked Dutch men…
The ones with white fringes looked like they were trying to steal Stinky’s hairdo…
And this mottled bastard tried to shit on us, but missed.
We learned a lot about which eye and skin colour and horn shapes contribute to a buffalo’s value, as well as how many you need to buy to do a proper funeral. If anyone wants to join us in an enterprise to round up the descendants of Grandaddy Umphelby’s NT buffalo and sell them back to the Torajans, just let us know.
Next to the buffalo market is a pig market, and next door to that again is a food and goods market. We love a good wander through a market!
However, the main event of the day was a massive Torajan funeral. Given that Torajans look after their dead (in the house, in this case, in Nanna’s deadroom) until they’re good and ready for a funeral, and given that the June/July holidays are when most people like to hold them, we were extra lucky that one was popping off on the very first day we arrived in Tana Toraja.
This one was for a 90 year old woman named Ruth who had died a year ago. Ruth, you say? What does the Bible say...? Ah yes, 2 Timothy 4-7: "... I have kept the faith." Tell that to the livestock! We, too, suddenly got real damn quiet about being in our Ruth phase after they slaughtered half a dozen buffalo under our noses.
Torajan people believe that buffalo will take the soul to Punia (heaven) and a pig will guide them (assuming you’re ‘Christian’), so you have to sacrifice a whole bunch of them (especially if you want to show the deceased’s high status). Ruth was very high status, so this was definitely a bad day to be a pig or buffalo. You'll notice a conspicuous absence of Moose - he poked his nose out, saw what was happening to his fellow ungulates and fucked off.
Try not to think about how the humidity enhances the smell.
We’d always pictured these houses and rice barns as being out in the countryside, but they’re really just everywhere – Ruth’s place was only just out of town. There were hundreds of people in attendance, and this dude with a microphone announced the name and pedigree of every single one of them!
Ruth was there in her coffin, and there were tributes festooning the wall, but we do wonder how she would have felt about those people who thought her name was Ruht…
If there aren’t blood splatters up the wall, are you really seeing grandma off with the respect she deserves?
The Indonesian equivalent of the CWA were working their guts out to provide tea, coffee, snacks and lunch, although for some reason we didn’t have the appetite for lunch in this particular context. We had nice chats with some of the family members and heroically sipped our tea in between selfies.
It’s always great when you get a party bag to take home from a party, but if you're in Tana Toraja and the party is a funeral, it's a sack of pig meat…
Thank goodness we’re not community members, that’s too much pork!
Despite conclusions you may be tempted to draw from these funeral traditions, most Torajans are Christians, making the highlands a relatively small pocket of Jesus-fans in a region dominated by Muslims. Apart from the fact that it means we can get a cold beer with a meal, it comes with other benefits.
To show off their Christian pride, they’ve got a massive statue watching over the town. Forget Christ the Redeemer (a piddling 30m tall, 700m above sea level), this baby is 40m tall and is about 1700 metres above sea level!
You know what, we need a closer look! Don’t get distracted by any hot sales (poos and wees now the same price!)
Don’t get distracted by the views on the way up!
Just wait your turn to join in the Mexican wave. Whoooooo!
You can climb all the way up to just under Jeezy Boy’s sandals, as long as you don’t mind sharing the space with some big fat beetles…
Moose enjoyed the views and the attention up the top…
…and meanwhile, Stinky finally realised where she’d seen those soulful eyes before.
Eventually, we got hungry enough to have lunch – we’d left it so late that the afternoon rain arrived. Luckily for us, the novelty of a banging rainstorm has yet to wear off, so it was like a meal and a show.
The rain cleared up relatively quickly, and despite it not really being all that warm, we were so inspired by the buffaloes that we had to have a quick dip in the pool back at the hotel.
Speaking of the weather, check out the stupid shit the weather back in Victoria was doing while we weren’t watching – what the hell - it’s mid-autumn, and we’re looking at a hotter top temperature than Sulawesi??
Having spent a day looking at dynamic cultural practices, the next day was about the static aspects. Tana Toraja has some truly extraordinary burial practices and we were about to see examples of almost all of them!
We made sure to have an early start, so we could cram everything in before the afternoon rain arrived. This necessitated a take-away breakfast box from the hotel, which is never a truly delicious option, but is the price we were willing to pay. No matter where you are in Indonesia, you always get a strange bread product, a piece of fruit and a hard boiled egg, and Toraja was no exception. What was unexpected, however, was that whoever put the lunchboxes together didn't know how to hard boil an egg - we discovered this when D'admiral went to crack his egg open on the wall of the car it just smashed semi-cooked albumen and yolk everywhere lol.
First stop was the cliff graves at Batu Lemo.
Just there, hanging out in a cliff, people have carved out graves for their loved ones and made tau tau (effigies) of them to keep them safe. The tau tau hands are posed to protect and attack, which Moose respects.
If you walked around the valley, you’d keep finding cliff graves, just hanging out.
This place was very cool, but not according to the leech that was so desperate to leave that it hitched a ride on D'admiral's head. What a rascal!
If cliff graves aren’t your thing and you prefer your graves in caves, just head down the road to Tampang Allo.
These caves are shallow, but pack a punch.
It’s just a cave off to the side of a farm, yeah, there are skulls just hanging out. They go back at least 1000 years, with the newest being (probably) about 400 years old.
If you’d prefer to find your bones in a cliff but also in a shed, head over to Liang Suaya.
Some sort of maintenance was afoot, so next to this cliff there was just a shed piled up with bones. I mean, where would you keep them?
We took a brief break from looking at places for burials to visit Tongkonan Karuaya – houses of a group of people who used to be really into headhunting.
There was a big ‘housewarming’ ceremony a few years ago, and Kornelius is super proud to be in it (all in white on the right, about 4 minutes in).
Like the other tongkonan and rice barns, there’s a lot of intricate decorations and symbols, including buffalo, pigs and chickens. Chickens are the symbol for justice because in the past they'd have humans fight to the death to determine right, but now they leave it to the chooks (well, the outcome of cock fights really). We did not currently have any disputes for this chicken to settle, but we’ll keep it in mind.
There were no skulls left in evidence, unless you count the buffalo horns and heads…
Across the road from head headhunters' houses are some more traditional houses. Kornelius showed us how you actually get into the rice barns…
… and told us about how at a ceremony the most important person sits under the step. Moose plonked himself down as soon as he heard the news!
That was enough of a break from dead people, it was time to go to Ke’te’ Kesu’. This one was a lot more touristy that the earlier places, which you can see they respected by not building any fugly buildings in between any of the rad houses…
… but it was time for a coffee break anyway.
A couple more bule-hunting moments later…
…we were looking at hanging graves (for when all the other sorts aren't enough). Climbing up the stairs, we discovered that bad grandmas go in the cage…
According to Kornelius, the really old tau tau up the back have gold tits (or teeth, who can tell)??
Anyway, in case you were wondering, ‘hanging graves’ means you just dangle the coffins off the cliff and park some skulls where they’re most fitting.
To be fair, there is also a cave for more graves…
… though some people may now consider this a bit of a snooze fest…or there’s a fresh one??
There was a bus load of French tourists who we kept encountering around the place who were so French they were almost incapacitated by it. We don’t know anything about them, because I think they can’t see Australians? Maybe it’s a problem they caught from the Dutch tourists at the buffalo market? Even when we were just when we were having a quiet lunch, there they’d be! Bloody Europeans, always invading.
We leapfrogged past them to Nongnongan, where you can see the trees where they inter babies who die before they have any teeth…
…and they leapfrogged back to get to the Londa cave burials.
One day we'll go to a place where the path isn’t fucken slippery and trying to kill us, but it was not to be this trip!
These caves go deep and connect kilometres away, although we were happy to take their word for it. The tau tau here were super fancy!
Inside the cave were more remains of more people, including black goopy ash on the ground, which Kornelius informed us is what happens to the meaty bits of people who have been embalmed.
Visitors are allowed (nay, encouraged!) to climb in behind some of the residents, which seems weird, but okay!
Unlike those of us in cities, in terms of food production and life skills, non-urban Indonesians are going to be just fine when the collapse of the internet happens. But if it turns out to be a zombie apocalypse, Toraja will be so extra fukt it’s not even funny.
Just as we finished at that site, the heavens opened again, which we took as a sign to knock off for the afternoon – after a bit of Moose-guided shopping, that is.
The next day, we were welcomed to Bori by this outraged little yap machine, whose neighbour let us have a look inside their tongkonan.
Bori also has a cool ancestral stone circle - each stone represents an important noble who has passed away. Ye olde sticky-uppy stones? Yuck, we hate those things!
Touching it!!!
We could have kept wandering in circles, taking photos for hours!
Meanwhile, in the hill next to it, there were boulders just waiting to receive bodies.
This guy was hard at work expanding it – let’s add this to the list of jobs we will never be strong or tough enough to do.
That day’s adventures had barely begun, but that’s it for the death and burial rituals and lore, so let’s take a short break to contemplate our mortality and come back for the tail end of the trip.
