I’m starting to feel that the jinx that has befouled our overland mission from Bali to Papua is beginning to lift.

It’s only taken a day and a half for the mechanic to find the part, mend our broken bike and deliver it proudly to our hotel. And, sure, I’m a little light-headed and cold-ridden.

But, my god, the landscapes…

We wind our way up out of Ruteng, past fields of maize and low bamboo huts, newborn piglets scampering by the roadway, through the clouds and down into a velvety heat. Stepped rice terraces in hues of gold and green descend towards banana orchards and coconut groves, grazing cattle, bleating goats and savage sun, rocky rivers in surrealist blues.

And we ascend again. The mountains send velvety tendons cascading into valleys that open up into dazzling vistas of sea, their peaks covered in clouds that chase each other down the gorges.

It feels, in fact, as we reach the edge of the bowl that holds the town of Bajawa, framed by neat volcanoes, as if we’re crossing the Wallace Line.

All of a sudden, the flora have an Australian feel to them.

There are spindly brooms with tendrilly scarlet blossoms, feathery pines, peeling stands of eucalyptus.

And as we watch a misty sunset over the little town below us, huddled into our jackets against the surprising cool that strikes at night, 1200m up, things feel – well, pretty good again, in fact.

The village of Lupa descends in steps, steep-thatched houses facing each other across a brushed dirt courtyard where the ancestors, still, are buried.

Someone is drying coffee beans on a Christian grave which sits below the ancient altar framed by jagged megaliths.

“The Ngada people are matrilineal,” explains Maximilian, our guide.

“What’s matrilineal?” asks Z.

“It means the clan goes down through the female line. A son belongs first to his mother’s clan and then his wife’s.”

“Matriarchal, too?” I ask.

“Not matriarchal,” he says. “The village elders are the men. And it’s the men who choose the wife, not the wife who chooses the man. But clan, house and property goes through the female line. A man comes to join his mother’s family, and is buried in her clan.”

Each of these little houses, with three spaces — one for sleeping, one for guests and one for work — belongs to one clan.

“Are there many matrilineal societies in Indonesia?” I ask.

“From what I have read of anthropology, there are only two,” says Maximilian. “One here. One in Sumatra.”

It never ceases to amaze me how many disparate cultures can exist within such a small space. The teepee-style houses of the Manggarai, back in Ruteng, are utterly different from these. Their lands descend from oldest son to oldest son.

Two rows of totems, the male totems like thatch parasols and the female like miniature thatch houses, sit in the courtyard below the altar. They house the spirits of the ancestors of the different village clans, the founding fathers and mothers of the place, if you like.

“Traditionally, the Ngada people worship two gods,” says Maximilian. “Though we are Catholic now… We have the male god, who is the sky god, and the female god, who represents the earth.”

For all the veneer of Catholicism, though, folk still sacrifice at the old altar, and the wealthier clans adorn their doors with the horns and jaws of buffalo they have offered.

And when bad luck strikes, the old ways are often best, even to educated Ngada who live in towns.

Maximilian’s aunt, for example, had some sort of breakdown a year or two ago.

“We tried doctors, psychiatrists, everything, but they could not work out what is wrong,” he says. “In the end, we took her to someone who could read the liver of a pig.”

“He told us that a woman who had been in the house had sold an old necklace that was sacred to the clan,” Maximilian adds. “We did not know that. So we replaced the necklace. We held a ceremony and sacrifices. Now my aunt denies she was ever ill. If you ask her, she’ll say it never happened.”

The Soa people live in the lower lands around Bajawa. Their harvest is just finished and celebrations are in full swing.

We can hear the boxing before we see it.

“In the old days men could not meet women except at the harvest celebrations,” says Maximilian. “So this would be their chance. And if two men liked the same woman, they settled it by boxing. Now it’s more of a competition between villages.”

A roar goes up, gasps, and then a steady buzz of chatter, punctuated by drums. An intermission?

It’s a carnival atmosphere, here in this tiny place. Probably a thousand people are gathered round the grassy patch, marked with ashes from the preliminary sacrifices, where guys in their teens and twenties are testing their strength.

Some of the clan elders sit under a gazebo, surreally sponsored by Honda. At either end, an all-male cheer-leading group drums and yells from a bamboo platform.

I make my way up towards one end to find my path firmly blocked.

“No!” says Maximilian. “It’s bad luck for a woman to pass near the supporters’ stand. Women are not allowed near there.”

One of the uniformed cops keeping order ushers us to the front, where we sit cross-legged on the grass. Elders pluck a young guy from the crowd to fight. I watch him progress down the field to where the elders will dress him for his bout. A skinny guy, he’s visibly nervous.

“They fight with antlers, wrapped in string,” says Maximilian. “You take a deer antler, you wrap it round and round with string until it’s as hard as stone. You tie it to the right hand and fight with the left.”

“Don’t people get hurt?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Maximilian. “But they believe the herbal medicines will help.”

We watch the first few bouts. They’re fast. Not least because each kid has two older men from his clan behind him, acting as a curious mix of judges and seconds.

The average round takes under 15 seconds of flailing, blocking and scuffling in the dust before the judges-cum-seconds jump in, grab the boys and pull them apart.

“What’s happening?” I ask Maximilian.

“They’ve broken the rules,” he says. “Left hand is only to block, not fight.”

It’s hardly the Marquess of Queensberry, from what I can see.

Our guy, who’s fought, like all the rest, protected only by a strip of cloth wound round his chest to shield the heart and a tight head turban, does not last long. He wobbles as he returns to the cheer-leading platform.

“I don’t know if you can see,” says Maximilian. “But the Soa people look different from my people. We have straight hair. They have curly hair. They are darker than us, too.”

He’s right. Bizarrely, as we saw with the Togutil in Halmahera, minority groups that live only a few days’ walk from each other are visibly distinct.

Sometimes I feel like we’ve spent too long in Indonesia. And then the country surprises us again.

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The occasion? Why, a cremation.

In Bali, what else?

And, mercifully, unlike the bulls we saw sacrificed at a funeral in Tana Toraja, they were thoroughly fake.

These three gilded sarcophagi were awaiting the auspicious moment when the three royal siblings who died within a month of each other could be consigned to flames. A date determined by the Balinese calendar, where weeks lasting from 1 to 10 days run concurrently with each other, and the stars count too.

They moved to the street early in the morning, lashed onto bamboo carrying frames, maybe 30 foot square. Behind them, two tall, sparkling funeral towers, adorned in gorgeous papers, shades of greens and reds and white and gold — incredible quantities of gold — the demonic face of the bhoma guardian glaring brightly down.

There always were a lot of kings in Indonesia. Still are, in fact. Tiny fly specks of islands support multiple sultans, or, in Hindu-dominated Bali, rajahs — some of whom still sit in government as elected representatives.

Densely populated, rice-rich Bali holds a myriad royal families. The kingdom (kingletdom?) of Peliatan is so near to Ubud that it’s impossible to tell where Peliatan ends and Ubud begins. Mengwi, with its grand and beautiful temple, is 30km away at most.

And the people still come out in droves for royal funerals.

You learn a lot about a culture by their approach to birth and death. And in the unique Balinese take on Hinduism – add a dash of Buddhism, plenty of animism and a hefty slug of ancestor worship, shake well – there’s a lot of earthy humour.

It’s the sort of realism that sees cigarettes, biscuits, loose change and plastic-wrapped Mentos mixed in with the flowers and rice of the offerings to the demons that litter every street corner, even in the package holiday hell of Kuta.

For the Balinese, a cremation is just one of many rituals that mark the passage from life to the spirit realm. It’s elaborate, and expensive. Families will spend all their cash reserves, and more, to give the ancestor a good sendoff and placate the spirit that will take up residence in the family shrine.

Even non-royal funerals can cost eight or nine thousand dollars, in a country whose per capita GDP is under four thousand dollars a year, meaning the vast bulk of the population live on much, much less than that.

And, as we’ve grown accustomed to in Indonesia, a cremation in Bali is a weird combination of the elaborate, the traditional, the contemporary and the plain shambolic.

There’s a mass orchestra of gong and gamelan, men in silk turbans and formal sarongs, hammering out ancient rhythms in pentatonic tones. Yet plenty of them have fags in their hands…

As they play, young guys amble in, carrying more gongs, and set them up. Children clamber over the bulls; a man with a hammer fixes a technical hitch around one hoof. Kids chase out a dog that has been napping in a temporary sidewalk shrine.

Women in bright lace tops carry elaborate offerings high on their heads like Ascot hats, crafted from flowers, bamboo, palm leaves – and food. Sticks of the spicy minced kebab known as sate lilit, whole sucking pigs, little sculptures of coloured rice dough pinned on palm baskets…

In one corner, the priest sits in bright white clothes and dark red head-dress, blessing offering after offering surrounded by lenses.

It’s not a funereal atmosphere. Not in the slightest.

The guys from the banjar, the village associations, are there in matching khaki T-shirts, complete with today’s date, disparate sarongs and head-dresses, and some mean shades. Chatting over walkie-talkies outside the palace gates or strutting down the road past their scooters, they look like something out of Reservoir Dogs.

Women with stacks of sarongs on their heads push them at western tourists. Others carry buckets of ice and drinks. Ibu Oka’s sucking pig shop, almost opposite the palace, is doing a roaring trade.

The fire engines which will attend the pyres roll up. A gamelan-player takes up position on each funeral tower. An MC gees up the crowd from the base of one of the bulls.

A street orchestra takes shape. Men with walkie-talkies push the crowd back. The guys in their green T-shirts square up to the giant bamboo frame which holds the bulls.

One big heave. And they’re off!

At a run, whooping and yelling. The first bull charges high above our heads, one young guy perched vertiginously on top and clinging for his life as he rounds the corner, the MC still projecting from the base, one guy waving a loudhailer with an oscillating siren like someone at an early 90s rave.

The second bull goes. And then the third.

Why the speed? Outrunning the demons, of course.

They’re not the smartest, Balinese demons. And they’re very bad at corners (which is why Balinese compounds have a blank wall directly inside the main gate).

Outside the palace, the green-shirted photographers who’ve immortalized proceedings from a bamboo ramp, make way for the pyre, over a tonne of it.

A coffin emerges from the palace, and onto the bamboo ramp. Guys lash it into the funerary tower with strips of fabric. One of the chaps sat astride the coffin, as matter-of-factly as if he were mending a boat, beckons for a hammer for some last minute adjustments.

They will ride atop the coffin, in the centre of this tonne-plus tower, on the shoulders of the banjar men.

I’m amazed by the strength involved, the coordination. The guys put their shoulders to the bamboo frame. Heft over a tonne of pyre, with six men on it, and process to the corner.

The drums and gongs build to a crescendo.

The men spin, and spin, and spin again.

The tower spins with them, wobbling high above the rooftops and the pylons.

Demons shed, the bearers run towards the funeral temple.

The second pyre comes. Two coffins in this one.

It spins, and moves.

The crowd surges forwards. The Balinese mount scooters, which follow the procession at a suitably stately pace, engine fumes merging with the day’s fierce sun.

Outside the funerary temple, the Pura Dalem Puri, the fire engines have hosed the road with water to keep folk cool. The hot tarmac sends a sauna steam into the air.

It’s a surprisingly open space, a Balinese temple. The bulls stand, in regal splendour, atop a stone platform, their bamboo framework sawn away.

Men clamber over them. One takes his kris, a ceremonial knife with magical powers, and with a gesture remarkable for its matter-of-factness cuts off the top of the first bull and hands it to the ground.

Men run up the ramp to the funerary tower. They hand the coffin down. Another progresses with a white-wrapped bundle, the last effects of the deceased.

They are piled, unceremoniously, into the body of the bull sarcophagus.

In fact, it’s hard to see the bulls now for the numbers of people scrambling over them. More padding — or kindling, rather. Sacred oils.

Under parasols not dissimilar to those which shade the statues of the gods, dressed for the day in chequered cloth and golden sashes, the women of the royal family wait, neatly colour coordinated like so many bridesmaids at a Western wedding.

Lines begin to form. Young men in white carry portraits of the dead men; an older man carries a stuffed bird, symbolising the deceased’s soul. Women of all ages balance elaborate offerings on their heads. A coloured rope binds family member to family member.

They wind across the square, less procession than disorderly queue, and deliver their offerings, which pile up high within the bulls, around the bulls, on the very steps of the pyre.

More processions. More offerings. It’s a festival of conspicuous consumption, an object lesson in religion as materialism.

One woman is weeping, perhaps the wife of a dead man. Perhaps a sister.

Meanwhile, children clown with feet and masks scavenged from the funerary tower.

The priest makes purification gestures. Says some words.

The petrol comes out, unromantically, sprayed from a high-pressure hose.

And the bulls go up!

It takes a lot of heat to consume a human body utterly. A lot of heat. Great chunks of ash and fabric go swirling into the sky. The bonfire pushes the audience back.

The fire brigade pull out the hoses, wet down the platform, contain a blaze that would otherwise reach several storeys into the sky.

It’s common to compare the scent of burning human flesh with roasting pork. And, in truth, the smell is not dissimilar. Just with a note of char-grilled hair, as well.

When the bulls’ stomachs give way, the bodies tumble down to the platform base. You can hear the hiss and sizzle of boiling fat, see the charcoaled toes disintegrate, feet become stumps…

It’s a gory thing, a cremation in Bali.

The funeral flame throwers come out, then. Metal gas burners on long handles. Men clamber onto the pyre and administer super-heated gas, one at either end.

The remnants that will process ceremoniously to the sea must be sufficiently burned.

When we leave, passing the hawkers vending bright dyed chicks and ice creams, the bodies are still burning, awaiting their transformation into ash.

And, on this most auspicious day, the sky not just in Ubud but in southern Bali too is full of the smoke of funeral pyres.

Interested in Indonesian ritual? Check out:

Lombok’s Bau Nyale Festival
Funerals in Tana Toraja
Murder and Reanimation in Halmahera
A Seance with the Governor

The post A Cremation in Bali 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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