The Great Hot Springs Disaster
The rhythms of life at the convent in Ruteng do not encourage sloth. The sisters start their day early, in their cells up the hill,...
Tagged: animism
A Cremation in Bali
The three giant black bulls had been sitting in state outside Ubud Palace for a day or so, golden necklaces adorning their necks, their dangling...
King of the District: Part 2
Governor Hein’s clove cigarette fizzes hypnotically, dipped in the incense, and from the utter darkness the ancestral Moro talks the Tobelo language in an old,...
A Fistful of Dollars
Our favoured local, back in Rantepao in the Tana Toraja, was the hangout of the local Guides Association, a Teamsteresque conglomerate of the most amiable...
Souls Growing Skywards with the Trees
At Pana, the cave graves were easy to find, half of them broken open, looming out of a granite slab in the oncoming dusk and...
Buffalo Soldiers: Living for Death in the Tana Toraja
“Are funerals like this in London?” asks my new Torajan friend. The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”,...
Spirits of the Forest
The sheer complexity of the ecosystem in protected, mature forest, from lichens spinning their symbiotic webs across old bark to the chaos wild pigs wreak...