Funeral in Tanah Toraja

Got the full ceremony today. The bodies were brought out after resting at home for a year, and pushed up to the family home (pictured - note the peculiar roofs)  one last time before they'll be finally buried. There were hundreds of guests in large wooden pavillons built specifically for this ceremony, plus a couple dozen tourists.

Feeding that many people takes a lot of meat. There were pigs tied to bamboo poles all over the place, and every few minutes one was taken out back to the open fires, screaming and thrashing, before being killed and put on the fire whole. I have never been served pork as fresh as this.

They also slaughtered one of the many buffalo on the grounds: one man held up its head and another cut its throat with a long knife in one fast strike. There was a great splash of blood, the buffalo was struggling soundlessly for a few seconds, before falling down with blood still gushing out its neck. Then they skinned it right there, with a child playing with the tail. Later saw two small children dragging bloody hooves behind them on a string, like a toy car.

Rantepao

Rantepao is a town in the middle of Sulawesi. It's hard to get here; the interior roads in Sulawesi are so bad that it takes three days by bus from one end to the other. There aren't a lot of tourists here and the town doesn't have a lot of tourist facilities, besides a number of simple hotels. Although Rantepao isn't very interesting, the countryside is: lots of green hills, bamboo forests, huge terraced rice fields, women in conical hats threshing rice, and water buffalos plowing.

Today was all about dead people: tradition demands that when someone dies, the body is embalmed and kept for years at home. Then it's buried in an elaborate ceremony - which we missed but will see tomorrow. We did see a cave where the sarcophagi are stored, until they rot away and the bones tumble out, at which point the skulls are tastefully arrangend in niches or piled on flat stones. Lots of skulls. And they put up effigies in a bizarre rock wall into which balconies were hewn. To top it off, in past centuries babies often died young, due to dysenteria and other diseases, and they cut a hole into a tree, put the body in, and closed off the hole. The idea was that the tree grows and carries the baby up. None of these traditions are still followed except the embalming and ceremony bits; the rest sounds a little unhygienic.

I wish Google would hire someone with software experience so I could add a picture. I can't post to Google+ either because every way to post there has some fatal bug.

Last diving day

More muck diving plus corals. Saw lionfish that looks like a mobile circus, stingrays, and lots more of those oddly named nudibranchs that look like many-colored jewels on the corals. Also a mimic octopus trying but not quite succeeding to blend into the seafloor, until it shot off to safety, away from all those big creatures noisily blowing bubbles and pointing cameras at it. Please refer to the Southeast Asia marine life identification chart: http://xkcd.com/928/ .

Muck diving

Sounds charming, does it, but it really means diving over a dark sandy seafloor. The guide pokes this and that with his pointer, and suddenly a small school of fish bursts out of the ground, or a warty Devil Scorpion Fish gives up its perfect camouflage and swims away, or a fish with tall fins somehow materializes from soft coral, or a stingray with bright blue spots flaps away. Mud diving is all about the little creatures.

But the first dive of the day was to the wreck of a big Japanese freighter at 16-30 meters, all overgrown with corals and little curious animals living in them: nudibranchs are the butterflies of the sea, in all sorts of bizarre shapes and colors. Like that bright purple slug with yellow antlers.

This was my first real dive that wasn't part of my training. The nice thing about those is that the dive center staff puts together the gear and cleans it afterwards.

Diving license

Gave myself a birthday present today: I am now a licensed open water diver, after completing the last set of training dives. All were out in the sea, none of that pool nonsense. You learn how to put the gear together, buoyancy, losing and recovering mask and regulator, emergency procedures, and dive planning. Plus practice dives down to 18 meters out on the coral wall.

Saw a huge turtle gliding along at 18m. Quite impractically constructed animal really but it clearly knew what it was doing. Diving is a lot of fun once you are properly equalized and neutrally buoyant; you just float effortlessly.

Diving

So what do you do in a dive center? Dive, of course. I don't have a license but they have instructors. The reefs seem a little less interesting than the ones at Pulau Weh (see way down on this blog) but of course they don't let me dive the really deep places. Got to change that.

3

I so love getting up at three in the morning. Well, it got me out of Jakarta and to Bunaken, a small island off the coast of Sulawesi, which is a large Indonesian island northeast of Java. Bunaken is very quiet; there is just one tiny village. People come here for diving.

On unrelated news, Lady Gaga just had her concert in Jakarta canceled by some Muslim blockheads. The world would be a better place without that biblical bloodthirsty desert god from the bronze age.

Jakarta

The fastest way to go from Yogyakarta to Jakarta is by train. The luxury executive train may lack elegance (and speed) but it's certainly spacious and comfortable. Eight hours of rural panoramas of Java: endless rice paddies, little villages, lakes, and green hills in the background.

Jakarta continues to fail to enamor me. Not only does the train pass through dirty slums, full of garbage, dirt, and lean-tos built from tarps and rusted corrugated metal, but downtown is still the soulless traffic-choked concrete jungle I knew from my previous visit. On the other hand, like Yogyakarta there are quiet green, if rather dilapidated, neighborhoods in the middle of the large blocks formed by the main streets.

I am here only for the airport to catch a very early flight to Sulawesi tomorrow.

Yogyakarta

Java isn't like Bali, it's more like Indonesia. Gone are the posh resorts, the vans with tinted windows, the busloads of Australians invading temples like cellphone-wielding locusts, and the westernized malls. Yogyakarta, or Jogja as it's called here, has no synthetic attractions and caters mostly to locals. Very refreshing. Much cheaper too.

Rented a becak - a bicycle rickshaw, see photo - for the afternoon to show me around the various neighborhoods. Jogja's main streets are not beautiful; life happens in the little alleys that are not shown on any map. Old ladies bbq satay squatting on the ground, people sit in front of their houses to make the silver and batik souvenirs sold on Java's markets, and children play soccer pretending to be Bayern München. I skipped the usual tourist attractions like Borobudur, you can read up on those way down in this blog.

North Bali

I have been to Bali before but never to the northern end. They have some pretty major mountains and a volcano there. The water temple is on a lake at 1200 meters. The temples themselves are not accessible but they have a big platform where monks do a sort of brief pray-in, scheduled by a guy with a bell and a megaphone.

Also saw some massive waterfalls deep in the forest, and could swim there. Also at some natural hot springs. Water falling from high up is like a massage...

They also have a Buddhist temple, the only one on Bali and very large, which would be tranquil and serene if a tour bus hadn't unloaded a herd of loud French tourists apparently working out the thing with taking off shoes in temples for the first time and having a ball of it.

Bali again

Time to leave the Gilis... The speedboat I had booked promptly broke down before it could leave, and we had to wait for another one. In Indonesia such things are not a reason to get upset. The minibus that brought us from the harbor to our destinations got stuck in Denpasar's traffic maelstrom, no news here either.

Bali can actually be very nice provided you stay away from Kuta, Bali's mass tourism hell. Still too much in relax mode to do much today, but I'll be on tour tomorrow.

Island life

The Gili islands are wonderfully relaxing, but after a while it does get a little tiring if every local I talk to drops into that signature whisper after a minute: hashish? Ecstasy? Cocaine? "Super duper mega radical maximum fuckin' bloody fresh magic mushroom", end quote?

Just a block behind the beach promenade, the locals have their houses and real life begins.

Now I am waiting for my barbecued red snapper at a fancy dinner restaurant, sitting at the edge of the sea, sipping a sublime guava-pineapple-mint juice. It's not all pizza and spaghetti.

Shrooms, boss?

Drugs are illegal in Indonesia so you have to promise the dealers not to report their offers. Enforcement seems a little lackluster.

Gili Tralala

There's three tiny islands off the coast of Lombok, called the Gilis. Small green jewels, quiet, wooded, no motor traffic, endless beaches. Gili Trawangan has the most visitors and the occasional party, so people call it Gili Tralala. I got a traditional hut in a very nice resort. The island is small enough to walk around in an hour or two, to escape the huddle of beach restaurants and dive outfits at the harbor.

The harbor is not quite like Rotterdam: boats simply run up the beach and guests must wade ashore.