Sporting various permutations of Aviators, moustaches, long hair, cropped hair and funeral sarongs as night-time outerwear, the chaps spent most of their time out back smoking clove cigarettes, drinking Bintang beer and swapping stacks over rupiah a card game not dissimilar to shithead.

We liked them a lot.

Didn’t play cards with them, mind.

I mean, that would have been just stupid.

Days in the Tana Toraja tend to the surreal, thanks to the buffalo death cult (and, well, Indonesia in general). So stumbling across an entire Christian school marching band parading down main street on a Sunday morning followed by a traffic jam of cattle trucks and pickups crammed with chaps phased us not one jot.

This chick, however, at the head of it, sporting quite the sluttiest cheerleader’s outfit I’ve seen outside of fetish clubs and the sort of bars I hurried the nine-year-old past when we took the wrong road to the night market in Chiang Mai did give me pause to wonder.

I guess it behoves me, at this point, to explain that Indonesia is a Muslim country. Admittedly, in the Togians, folk celebrate Eid ul Fitr (and anything from the arrival of the boat with the arrack to the policeman giving the fish harpoon back — watch this space) with arrack (palm spirit) mixed with beer and/or Coca Cola, but still…

Admittedly, also, Indonesia is Sufi Muslim. Not Shia. Not Sunni. And definitely not Wahhabi (that’s the crazy oppressive Saudi/Taliban one).

But Muslim, basically, nonetheless.

The Torajans are, essentially, evangelical Christians. Buffalo sacrificing, corpse-reburying, ancestor-placating Christians, sure.

But Christians, all the same.

Now, while Islam on Sulawesi (and, in fact, in most of Indonesia) is pretty relaxed, it would be fair to say that neither the Muslim nor the Christian womenfolk of the region generally expose flesh above the knee or the upper arm.

Which makes this outfit quite the most extreme Sunday morning church parade costume I have ever, ever seen. Particularly given how neatly covered the little girls behind her are.

Anywise… A few more cattle trucks idle by, guys waving and wearing baseball caps, before the jingle sparks up. At which point, finally, we realise what is up.

One of the joys of our stint in the Philippines were the local elections happening at the time. (Philippine politics, like, I suspect, Indonesian politics, is something better experienced as an observer than one whose life will be affected by the result.)

Every smalltown dignitary or business owner worth their salt was running for some post or other at one level or the other: from market stall holders up. Those running for mayor or deputy had their very own jingles, as catchy as syphilis, almost as unappealing and with a remarkably similar brain-gnawing effect.

So to the near constant squawks of cockerels and karaoke that pervades even the smallest town in those parts, was added the synthesiser blast of smalltown glitterati in glad-handing mode. Almost every tricycle in town sported a flapping poster for one politico, or several of the same family (Philippine politics is dynastic at every level), PhotoShopped into a state somewhere twixt rigor mortis and Nicole Kidman’s forehead.

This is Governor Carrion. The name, the nine year old believes, says it all.

PhotoShop, by the way, is a standard part of the photographic process in most of Asia. The equivalent of Snappy Snaps is a bank of 20-somethings labouring over pirated software to glaze newly-weds into a state of glossy, luminescent anonymity, and apply eyeshadow, too. Politicians, though, take it to a whole new level.

Anywise. From the jingle, it appears there are elections in Toraja. The band emerges, on a float.

And then, this chap, making like JFK in Texas from an open 4WD, in a Nehru jacket.

I pull out my camera. The nine year old gawps.

Now, this dude has serious presence. He makes eye contact with the nine year old which is, honestly, presidential in its dignity, if, to my mind, uncomfortably reminiscent of John Malkovich in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (My spawn, to his credit, does not giggle.)

He bestows on us both a nod and a wave in the fashion of the Queen.

Then proceeds on his regal path in the direction of the buffalo market, there, no doubt, to wade through buffalo manure to an accompaniment of screaming pigs, while we proceed to the beautiful countryside (sans guide).

Where our new friend’s picture is outside every church in town.

When we get to our local for dinner, a rather depleted meeting of the Guides Association is in session. There are, in fact, only two of them left, and neither of them is drinking beer.

“What’s up?” I ask our friend with the moustache. He’s in his 50s, I would guess. Substantial chap. Been around the block a few times. Very fond of the nine year old. Likes to explain stuff to me, too.

“Ah,” he says. “We’ve had a meeting with a politician.”

“A politician?” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “You know. Before the elections, the politicians, they come to see the Guide Association and we decide whether they can get our members’ vote.”

“Aha!” I say. “Just like the union vote in England!”

I pause. I’ve seen no English language news for a while, and my dictionary, even now I’ve got a handle on Indonesian prefixes, ain’t much help on the Indo language papers. But I really can’t imagine having missed an entire bloody election.

“So these elections…” I ask. “Are they just for the Tana Toraja?”

“Just for the Tana Toraja,” he says.

“And this guy,” I say. “With the, erm, y’know, the band and, erm, the girl in the short, umm… You know. The guy this morning.”

“Ah,” he says, recalling the morning, when he had, from the goodness of his heart, since, as a duo, the nine year old and I have “cheapskate, does not require your professional service, thank you, sir” written all over us, flagged us a rickshaw and negotiated local price. “He is a Christian. We have five Muslims and four Christians in the election.”

“What parties are they from?” I ask.

“It’s not so much about the party,” he says. “More about the people. Indonesian politics is quite complicated.”

I do not doubt him. “So what are the issues?”

“Well, tourism,” he says. “And some say the government is planning to put a tax on buffalo because they don’t want us to kill so many of them. But, you know. Buffalo are expensive anyway. So a small tax will make no difference.”

I ponder his logic. Yer entry level buffalo for funeral sacrifice comes in at north of $2000: albino, blue-eyed, gold-horned buffalo can run a hundred times that price and more. I decide not to get into percentages.

“Oh,” I say. “So what did you talk to the politician about?”

At this point our friend with the Aviators dives in. He’s stunning. 30ish. Long, slicked back hair and stunning, sculpted features, pure Bollywood idol until you get to the Torajan teeth. Scarily bright. Self-taught in several languages. Put him on Wall Street and he’d be minting money, dating babes.

Here? He’s, well, a tour guide.

“We want a coherent strategy for the development of tourism in the region,” he says. “We want creative solutions… I am very disappointed that there is no difference between what one politician has to say and another on the issue of tourism…”

The chap with the moustache looks wearily at our matinee firebrand, then back to me. It has clearly been a long evening.

“He does,” he says. “I just want the bribe.”

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As he put it, “Zipwiring is aerial. Zorbing is, ummm…, terrestrial. And whitewater rafting is the aquatic equivalent.”

Or, “Wooooooo! Wapids ahead!!! Woooo!!! More wapids!!!”

Whitewater rafting is, actually, an almost flawless combination of adrenaline, nature and physical activity.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, whitewater rafting means, essentially, paddling a toughened inflatable dinghy down a mountain river, over white water and rapids. What folk don’t often mention is that you cover quieter stretches too.

So when you’re not soaring, bouncing and howling your way over rocks, chutes, swells and chop, you idle gently downstream, admiring the landscape around you, like a character from The Wind in the Willows (or, perhaps, in our case, Three Men in a Boat).

Now, I’ve wanted to go whitewater rafting for a while –- since a climber friend came back from a trip babbling about rafting being “one of the most fun things ever”. And I’ve had an eye out for a good place to do it since January, before we hit the Andes next year.

So the Maiting River, which runs through a dramatic forested gorge in the mountains outside Rantepao, seemed perfect. I had thought about a two-day trip down the nearby Sungai Sa’adan, where the rapids run grade IV and V at this time of year and water level.

However…

Under-14s are not allowed. And, while I’m kind of blase about most age limits, this one exists because you need adult strength not only to paddle the raft but to make your way to shore without serious injury should the raft tip up (they do), or you fall out (folk do).

As we reach the very top of the gorge, when I hear it roaring below us, my slightly childish concern that Grade III rapids means “no fun” rapids, begins to evaporate.

Getting there, in fact, is an adventure in itself. From dragging the 4WD out of the ruts on the road up the mountain — the single worst road I have experienced in a lifetime, far worse than any Borneo logging road, Mauritanian camel track, or Kenyan lorry jounceabout — to bouncing the cattle truck into motion, to slipsliding the hour or so down from the village to the rocks which frame the river.

There, Osbert, our lead guide, gives us a safety briefing. Which is great until he gets to these bits:

“If you fall out or the raft tips up, swim on your back. Don’t swim face down as you can hit hidden rocks.”

“If you fall out, head for the shore and wait to be picked up downriver. Don’t try and swim back to the boat.”

And, the piece de resistance, this:

“When I shout ‘boom boom’, that means ‘rocks overhead’. Get in the middle of the boat and crouch down low, away from the sides.”

This instantly transitions me from a slightly (?very?) childish fear that these rapids will be NO FUN AT ALL to maternal fear for Z’s cranium.

Used as I am to Asian safety equipment, the fact that these lifejackets fit, the helmets look like they could take an impact and the throw ropes are in good nick makes me, paradoxically, rather worried that Z might actually get hurt.

But we’re off. Paddling across the channel, which splits around a boulder, into a surging swell of water which looks set to spin us straight into the black granite wall of the gorge.

I have about enough time to think, terrified, that we’re going to hit the cliff head-on and crash, when we do exactly that.

The raft, being inflatable (doh!), tilts, slides up the side of the ravine cliff a little way, hangs in midair a little while, then angles back, and sploshes into the water.

Z is howling with joy. I can’t help whooping.

My fear transforms instantly into excitement, and we’re ploughing down a neat, narrow water chute into…

Well, into waves about a metre or so high, curving backwards away from the rocks and clashing in a way that waves at sea only do when nasty tidal currents collide…

“Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy!” yells my spawn, his eyes wide with total joy, as the guides and I plough the water, paddling hard on the left side.

And then we’re out.

We’re racing.

And the water calms.

I look around. We’re in one of the most beautiful gorges I’ve ever seen. Ducks scoot low over the surface of the water. Dark green highland forest stretches down to a pebbled beach fringed with palm and wild banana as the leisurely brown river ambles by.

“Wapids ahead!” yells the child, who has appointed himself mission videographer and is delivering a vocal running commentary from the relative safety of the middle of the boat.

A long, gold and black striped lizard of the kind they call “iguana” here picks itself up from the sun on the bank and enters the water at surprising speed, disappearing beneath the gathering waves.

Then we’re in. Bouncing, jostling, paddling hard around the rocks, great slabs of water thudding into the boat as though someone’s chucking in barrels of the stuff stage left.

A lurch as we scrape across a submerged rock and tumble off the farther side. I almost fall backwards off the edge of the boat but my feet are locked under the dinghy frame.

My son sounds like an underage John Motson commenting on the Derby…

My biceps are beginning to feel the strain.

And then through, the current slowing, waves turning to ripples, and cruising past the most idyllic stretch of waterfalls frothing white down the sheer black granite, kingfishers darting low and blue over the waves.

We break for lunch after an hour or two of this heavenly alternation, on the stony banks of the calming river. Then idle, again, downstream.

It is safe for Z to swim downstream with the current here, and he leaps from the raft to float “gently, gently, gently down the stream”.

A few more gentle rapids, and we reach our pick up point, a little farm where the kids have just caught fresh fish from the circular pond Torajans carve out of the centre of the paddy. Life here is raw and brutal, but it’s a beautiful place to be.

Thanks to Debbie @ Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Friday.

The post Rafting the Maiting River appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”, preserved in formalin, with his family for the last eight months. Now he has left the house, he is finally dead, his soul winging its way towards the afterlife.

“Not really,” I say. “People are always buried within about a week of their death. Normally we put them in the ground. Sometimes we burn the bodies.”

As if sensing that one of their souls will shortly follow the dear departed, the pigs, hogtied with strips of bamboo bark in the noonday, equatorial sun, reach a crescendo of screaming.

“What do you sacrifice?” he asks.

“We don’t have sacrifices in England,” I say.

“Not even a chicken?” he asks, clearly shocked and politely disapproving that our dead could pass into the afterlife unescorted by even the lowest of creatures.

“Not even a chicken,” I say, apologetically, thinking of the sandwiches, cocktail sausages, olives, quiche and French fizz at my grandmother’s funeral eighteen months ago and a world away.

Like my grandmother, though, like the deceased, like the other funeral guests, and like the folk whose bodies lie below the hanging graves in the nearby village, my interlocutor is a practising Christian.

Here in the dazzling highlands of south central Sulawesi, where jagged mountains fling out green hills like flying buttresses, rice terraces tumble like mirrored staircases and surrealist outcrops jut from the hilltops, pretty much everyone is Christian, in fact.

The Muslim evangelists who swept across the Indonesian archipelago shortly before the Portuguese arrived half a millennium ago never reached this far into the interior. So the Toraja followed their old beliefs and rituals unmolested until well into the twentieth century.

Then Protestant missionaries, with a mental athleticism almost Jesuitical in its genius, managed to paste the Good Book over the existing animist framework.

Just, in fact, as their antecedents pinned Christmas onto the Roman festival of Saturnalia and the druidic ceremony of Yule, and painted Easter carefully over a myriad spring fertility rituals.

Along the main road, where scooters whiz and bemos roar, there are almost as many little churches as there are tongkonan houses, their roofs curved dramatically like the boats which, the Torajans believe, brought their ancestors over the sea from Indochina.

And the crocodile of female relatives who process past the 40-odd bamboo structures erected to house family members over the week or so of the funeral are dressed in good Christian garb.

They bear token gifts of coffee, tea and biscuits, covered with purple doilies, into the family reception room.

Their menfolk carry the larger gifts – the pigs, the plastic jerry cans of palm wine and rice hooch – up the hill on bamboo poles.

Others lead their highly prized buffalo, with quiet, or more obtrusive, pride. I mean, if you’d spent three years’ wages on a buffalo for the slaughter, would you laugh or cry?

The dead man’s beautiful grandchildren form the reception line, fidgeting in beads, silk and turbans like so many pages and bridesmaids at a Western wedding: last-minute wardrobe adjustments included.

Men bring the conventional token gift of a carton of kretek (clove cigarettes), sometimes in elaborate boxes, other times (as we did) in black plastic bags. Though a couple of the older mourners wear solemn expressions, the atmosphere is more festive than funereal.

It’s a celebration. A good show. Months of planning and crippling financial investment reach its culmination in days of processions and ritual.

Not only what the dead man would have wanted. But what he worked his entire life to achieve.

It would be fair to say, however, that the nine year old does not entirely appreciate this masterclass in comparative religion and ethnology. He is concerned by the condition of the pigs.

Some of them are foaming at the mouth. Others urinate and defecate uncontrollably. Immobilised by their bamboo carrying poles, dumped on the ground like so many sacks, they alternate between panicked screaming and a desperate panting.

This prize sow will, apparently, be spared the coming holocaust. Which is why someone has covered her in rattan leaves, a token attempt at shade.

“This is making me nauseous,” Z says. “Can we go yet?”

“No,” I say, pompously. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see an authentic animist funeral. We can go after the sacrifices.”

“Mum…” he says.

“Have you ever seen a buffalo sacrificed?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Me neither,” I say. “So we should. But you don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”

Z has done really well, in fact. He’s eaten lunch (plain boiled rice — after a look at his expression when confronted with the pork, I explained in my pidgin Indonesian that “Child Eat Boiled Rice. No More. Thank You. I Eat. Very Good. Good good!” ). And he has done so using his right hand, not his left.

Two strapping chaps begin to dig a hole in the ground, in front of the decorative rice barns under whose porticos the elite guests sit.

“I really don’t like this,” Z says. “Do you see that buffalo there? He’s got blood coming out where the ring goes through his nose.”

Torajans reckon their wealth in buffalo. Even an entry-level bovine costs thousands of dollars: a blue-eyed, albino version will sell for around 250 million rupiah (or well over 25 thousand US dollars). More than the price of the most elaborate tongkonan and many times the price of the car.

Throughout their lives, they work to amass these precious creatures, and tend them with a deep affection. Not necessarily as rice farmers, any more, though this is how the dead man acquired the wealth demonstrated for the first time at his funeral and the rich soil of the highlands supports three rice harvests every year. Today, they could be computer repairmen, teachers, motor mechanics, tour guides…

Then, as family members die, the buffalo are sacrificed, in an epic of conspicuous consumption and family togetherness that puts the average Western wedding quite to shame.

Bill, the dead man’s Australian son-in-law, up from Jakarta for the occasion and resplendent in black shirt and black funeral sarong, has invited us for coffee and tea.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say, rather awkwardly, given that we are here, essentially, to gawp.

“It’s alright,” he says. “He’s been dead since December, so it’s pretty much in the past.”

“December?!” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’ve been getting together the money for the buffalo. It takes months to do that. Sometimes years. They’re expensive things, buffalo. And people round here don’t earn much. I bought three of them,” he adds, wryly. “I mean, my wife did…”

The MC continues his perorations, reciting the gifts brought and the names of their donors, inscribing each on old-fashioned carbon duplicate forms.

The local Protestant pastor will show up later in the day, after the sacrifices are safely complete and before too many of the jerry cans of palm wine and rice spirit have been drunk, to give a form of eulogy. I imagine a character straight out of Anthony Burgess’ Malayan Trilogy, returning home to gin and obliteration at the hopelessness of his flock.

A handler brings forward one of the ten or so buffalo which scatter the grounds, stroking his forehead and murmuring soothingly. The diggers produce the widest bamboo pole I have ever seen – almost a foot in diameter, I would guess.

At the sight of engineering, Z’s colour lifts noticeably.

“Oh,” he says. “Do you think they’re digging the hole to put the stake in?”

“I reckon so,” I say.

“I think that’s the buffalo they’re going to sacrifice, don’t you?”

“Yep,” I say.

The chaps secure the bamboo pole with three wooden stakes, each three or four inches in diameter. A screaming pig is unceremoniously dumped on the ground behind the pole, where it squawks and grunts itself into submission.

Another procession of women files past. The women of this branch of the family are wearing lilac tops. Rather, I think, like bridesmaid’s outfits in the west.

The concept of family in the Toraja is an extensive one: a better translation might be “kin” or “clan”. It encompasses everyone up to grandparents (their siblings, their children, and their children’s children), and everyone below that.

The dead man was ninety-four with nine surviving children of his own from a sequence of wives. The relatives have invested in a ton and a half of rice to feed guests over the week, and round the back of the guest constructions guys are killing, singing and butchering pigs around the clock.

Poorer neighbours have set up temporary stalls under the bamboo guesthouses and on the track leading up from the main road.

Martin, our guide, remarks with ill-concealed envy on the number of buffalo. “He was a very rich man,” he says. “And his children have very good jobs. They’ll probably kill only one today. Another one or two tomorrow. Then seven or eight on the sacrifice day.”

Martin’s father died relatively recently. So he owns no buffalo any more. Although a poor family, they put together a ten-buffalo funeral. But nothing on the scale of this.

It rankles.

The buzz of expectation grows. Now, Z and I both eat meat. Whole-heartedly. Bloody fillet. Bleeding roast beef. Tartares, kidneys, liver…

But, as urban creatures, neither of us has ever seen an animal being killed. The closest we’ve come to the living, bleeding source is the whole sucking pig I bought Christmas one year, which a five year old Z, with absolutely no sentimentality whatsoever, insisted on carrying proudly from the butchers.

Some of the young mourners hold ceremonial axes, like the ones which decorate the balcony of the house. But the guy who performs the sacrifice is not in costume and holds only a butcher’s knife. There is no incantation. I wonder, idly, how this ritual would have looked before the missionaries arrived.

The pig dies first, so quietly and matter of factly I almost miss it. The slaughterer bends down, opens the back of the pig’s neck from ear to ear, and catches the blood in a length of bamboo. The creature does not even have the time to scream before its soul is racing into the afterlife.

Though out in the boiling sun, its fellow swine scream in sympathy.

The buffalo is secured to the stake with a halter that runs to its ankle. His handler strokes his nose and murmurs to him lovingly, soothingly. I think of the hecatombs of Homer’s Iliad, the mass slaughter of hundreds of oxen, the moment when the axe fell…

“You need to move back,” says Martin. “It’s dangerous.”

Dangerous? I think. The buffalo is tranquil, calm, doe-eyed, as slow in its movements as any cud-chewing Anchor cow. In all our time in Asia, I have not once seen a buffalo move at anything other than a snail’s pace.

We move back. And then it happens very quickly.

The handler takes the knife. Whips it across the animal’s neck so fast I cannot see it, and leaps out of the way, cobra-speed. The gash gapes open, filling the air with a fine spray of vermilion arterial blood.

The buffalo rears on its hind legs, gallops the length of its halter at phenomenal speed then stumbles, felled by the rope, onto its side.

There it jerks and spasms, trying hopelessly to rise, the gash widening each time it raises its head, a gush of fresh, well oxygenated blood the colour and consistency of Strawberry Ribena sullying the grass, eyes more doelike by the second, mouth open in a soundless bellow, over a tonne of death writ very, very large.

As Z says, “It’s an ugly sight.”

But it’s mesmerizing, too. One’s gaze is drawn away, then back, away, then back.

Maybe I need to read more Hemingway. But I never knew how long a buffalo takes to die. This one alternates between minutes of quietude, chest juddering, eyes blank, blood leaking from its neck, and moments of active struggle, when it lurches upwards as if galvanised by electricity, Frankenstein-style, while guests carry yet more screaming pigs up the hill.

As the dogs begin to sniff around it, and the pool of blood congeals, the buffalo’s soul passes, finally, into the ether, to carry the dead man’s soul on its journey to the afterlife. Z tugs at my arm. We make our farewells. The funeral will continue for several more days. But he has seen enough*.

Thanks to Debbie at Delicious Baby for hosting Photo Friday.

*: You can read his take on proceedings here. On balance, he is glad he went.

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