Tana Toraja - Beauty, Cruelty, Friendliness and Negligence

Very trippy houses

With no strict itinerary and a cheap promo ticket to South Sulawesi purchased many weeks ago, I decided to head for Tana Toraja after arriving at Makassar airport.  It is most well known for holding 3 day funeral ceremonies.  Sounds grim I know, but after hearing a few testimonies and reading a few bits and pieces, it seemed like it would be a quite unique event in a place also renowned for a temperate climate and stunning natural beauty.  So off I went on the super comfy night bus for ten hours. Eight quid for seats twice as large as you get on the UK’s inappropriately titled National “Express”, with double the legroom thrown in, and the ability to recline many parts of the seat.  It was practically an adjustable bed.  An additional bonus came when I stumbled across a tin shack selling premium spirits at normal prices next to the bus station.  It takes special contacts to get hold of any familiar spirits for less than fifty pounds a bottle in Indonesia. In normal circumstances you can’t even buy them anywhere apart from in nightclubs. So I got a bottle of Smirnoff for about fifteen pounds when I was only looking for some peanuts.

I’m quite an experienced traveler now, so I immediately smell a rat when a middle aged guy with a weathered face and a cold, distant look in his eye offers to sort me out a package including hotel, food, driver, guide etc.  They’re always going to charge more than it is worth and you don’t even get to see the hotel beforehand. So I took the number of the man offering me just this kind of deal as soon as I arrived at the airport, said “Yes mate, well aye” in Indonesian, left the airport and turned off my phone. The best way always seems to be to just rock up and see what’s around.  I found a guide as soon as I got off the bus in Toraja who took me to the funeral ceremony at 9am after I had checked into a hotel.   I was a bit disappointed if I am honest.  I had expected a variety of ceremonial curiosities, and in fairness, had I stayed longer or even arrived the day before who knows what I would have seen.  Most of what I did see was a variety of animal cruelty.

  However, all in the world is not so simple.  It would be unfair of me to impose Western values on a people firstly incredibly hospitable and kind and then also largely disconnected from the moral and intellectual advancements made in lands foreign from their own over the last hundred years or so.  In light of these mixed feelings, I looked on feeling morbid curiosity combined with pity for the animals but also a sense of respect for those prepared to rear animals ultimately to sacrifice them, who are able to stomach the sight of such an action, unlike us Brits who take shiny, packaged fillets from the shelves with not even a nanosecond of thought for the life that the fillet was once a part of.  So yeah, basically lots of animals were sacrificed.  Lots of pigs to be precise – I saw at least thirty pigs either dead, almost dead, being killed or waiting to be killed in the hour or two I was there, with the unfortunate buffalo seen wandering around in line to be slaughtered the next day.  However this is not in itself cruelty.  Well… it could be argued that taking a life of anything is as cruel as it gets right?  I naturally feel more empathy towards animal’s feelings than I do toward the commonly held view that people should eat meat because it is natural.  But that’s just me.  I can’t help feeling sad when I see any suffering, and just because it is a pig and not a person being slaughtered doesn’t mean my stomach doesn’t turn at the thought of its life, its one and only life, being brought to an end.    The cruelty however was before the pigs’ death.  They had their trotters tied together and were unable to do anything other than wriggle on their side, often while watching one of their kin only a meter away being eviscerated.  When the inevitable periodic desperate yelps occurred, eager locals would pick up the bound pig by the trotters and throw it randomly to one side, sometimes giving it a kick for good measure, to generous jovial applause from those nearby.  This is what I found really sad.  I just wanted them all to be killed quickly.  Nevertheless, if I was to judge these people as cruel based on standards set in the west when only a generation or so ago such standards didn’t exist; us being little different to those we now condemn, be that in our treatment of animals or women or any person or thing that isn’t a straight, Christian, white male, then frankly, I’d be a dick.

Next stop on the tour was a cockfight.  I had no idea this was part of the itinerary.  Maybe it wasn’t and my guide just stumbled across it and thought I’d be interested.  I guess I was, again in a morbidly fascinated kind of way.  As an aside, I find it quite odd that cultures worlds apart with no influence on one another both practice the same horrible ‘sport’.  It isn’t open or widespread like here in Toraja – in fact I hope it doesn’t happen at all anymore but it’s no secret that gambling over cockfighting has and probably still goes on in the UK and probably many other countries.  For those of you not in the know, this is how it works. 2 men hold one chicken each with one hand around their bodies and another firmly around their necks.  They then force the chicken’s heads into close proximity with one another until they get angry and start pecking.  Then the men take turns presenting their chicken to the other – in effect all tied up; its beak being held now too so the other chicken can peck away furiously, and then vice versa until both chickens are in full on fight mode.  Then they are released and continue the script as written for them, while someone walks around taking bets on which one will get pecked to death first.  Although I won’t judge (I think crowd psychology is not entirely blameless here with both the pigs and the chickens - considering the carnival atmosphere and the important social nature of the event it only takes a couple of people to do something cruel and it can become accepted as normal behavior), or maybe because I won’t judge, I find it quite fascinating to note how my and no doubt many other’s standards in any issue can be so flexible depending on the context of what is before us.  If I had seen these events in the UK, I would have been disgusted to put it mildly.  Yet the harsh truth is that we in the UK are just better at disguising our cruelty.  There is little doubt that chickens are the most abused animal on earth, most of them living their lives in their own shit, developing arthritis in spaces barely big enough to fit their bodies and being force fed unnatural and carefully planned diets designed to aide maximum growth as rapidly as possible regardless of their suffering, while we happily eat their breasts, our eyes and morals shielded from the horrors that they suffer by the nice packaging.  Yet many who happily snap up cheap supermarket meat would have been horrified by what I saw today. I’m not justifying it, because frankly I didn’t like what I saw, but then I also thought that these people for the most part have their animals roaming free range before these unfortunate episodes occur and that their culture is so far removed from anything I have ever been a part of that I should play no part other than that of curious observer.  The fact that these events take place at funerals underlines this stance.  Imagine if you will, at a wake in the Red Lion after the death of your uncle, a fascinated Inuit on a multi stop trip round the UK popped in and tried to stop anyone from eating pork scratchings because the pigs had suffered.  It wouldn’t be so different.  He’d probably get knocked out and would deserve it.

The same morning I learned of the existence of a caste system here, not unlike that of the “untouchables” in India.  The higher the caste of the unfortunate person whose passing is being mourned, the more elaborate the celebration.  The inequalities permeate life as well as death though, with those on the bottom rung of the social ladder apparently being denied the most basic of courtesy and respect by those higher up according to my guide.  He used the following analogy, seeming not at all unimpressed by this harsh reality, despite seeming a very nice chap otherwise.  Imagine if someone gave you a durian (the world’s smelliest fruit) and said it was a tomato.  You would know straight away that it was a durian because of the smell.  He basically said that even if someone from a lower caste lied about their background or makes a lot of money, you would still be able to tell them apart because they would stink.  He actually referred to them as “the slave caste,” a caste which if one is unfortunate enough to be born into, there is no escape. From which caste my guide was I do not know.  Those in the highest caste get priority in their places of burial, the photo shown here is one of many rows of tombs in a cliff face. 

I was told that to be buried here it costs one hundred million rupiah, which at ten thousand US$ seems expensive considering the cost of labour here is so cheap, but maybe it’s the exclusivity of the location and the fact that it symbolizes which caste a deceased person is from which makes it so expensive.  Regardless of the background, I found these burial sites to be so beautiful, intriguing and tragic all at once, especially when I saw one tomb with a young man’s photo outside of it.  I also came across many smaller burial sites with two or three tombs embedded rocks surrounded by rice paddies.  The bodies are transported to their tombs from the preceding ceremonies in miniaturized versions of batak houses which are only used once and remain in the vicinity of the deceased’s tomb.  From a purely aesthetic perspective this is such an interesting tradition, in which intricately designed receptacles, each with its own story, dot the forested and agricultural land all around.  One wonders, were the population to dramatically increase if this would be practical to maintain, though at the moment settlements are very sparsely spread throughout the region.

Animal cruelty and cultural issues aside, the scenery here has made my jaw drop like never before.  It’s not unlike Sumatra, but without obvious palm oil plantation encroachment on the nature.  Having said that, I’ve only covered a radius of around 30km, so I wouldn’t be surprised if such a problem was just around the corner.  During my excursion yesterday, following the gore-fest I was taken to a café made of wood situated on a corner of a winding mountain road which benefits from unobstructed views stretching endlessly into the distance.  The problem is that, as I’m sure those who haven’t developed skills in the art of photography will relate to, ordinary cameras just can’t capture the magic. 

Let down by my camera or my photography (lack of) skills

The following day I rented a motorbike without a guide and enjoyed driving around without a plan on some of the worst roads imaginable but surrounded by lush forest and occasional picturesque villages.  John Lennon spoke of “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”.  He should have seen the roads here.  Potholes that could kill motorcyclists are everywhere, although the fact they are everywhere make them unlikely to kill, as drivers are always on their guard, reluctant to accelerate beyond 20kph unless they can see a long stretch of road ahead.  On one occasion, seeing one of the many potholes in the middle of the road with a diameter like a bicycle wheel and noticing plants growing out of it, I stopped to have a look at its depth, and was amazed to see it was a hole leading to an underground stream about a metre below.  That’s when I headed back to the hotel for a swim, but when I was sat in my shorts at the side of the pool I noticed a subtle but large enough layer of dirt on the surface of the water, with a few dead insects thrown in, to put me off.  This country is so bad for that.  Come on!  You have a pool in your hotel, you’re a business, clean the pool!  Indonesia certainly is a fascinating and stunningly beautiful place, and the people  for the most part absurdly polite, helpful and friendly, but it has so many simple problems it needs to fix, though then it wouldn't be Indonesia.  One member the hotel staff remarked "Indonesians rule time, but Europeans are ruled by time."  What a brilliant way to sum it up! However it masks the fact that what he is saying is that very little gets done in Indonesia, and in fairness, too much gets done in England.  "You there! Yes you! No customers?  Polish the whisky bottles again!"  No chance of that happening around here.  There's a happy medium out there somewhere, I hope I can find it one day, because the unprofessionalism and inefficiency I encounter almost every day here is no longer funny,  yet I don't like being fined fifty quid for forgetting to bring  my wheelie bin back into the house in the UK.  Utopia next please.