Tana Toraja

When I was a kid, my father worked for the marketing department of a German car company. This meant that my sister and I spent an inordinate amount of time at motor shows and race circuits. Unfortunately, we found most of those events rather boring. Too young to drive or drink champagne, we routinely resorted to a savage pillage of the various promo stalls that accompany any car function.

Toilet revery

We mainly focused on two prized artifacts: pins and calendars. The pins decorated our jackets, while the most beautiful of the calendars ended up in the toilet spaces of our parental home.

Sitting on a ceramic bowl in the opulence of my own aroma, I would gaze at the beautiful, mountainous landscape that the good people at Toyota for some reason associated with the month of June. Sometimes I would picture myself behind a tree or a solitary house, looking out at the surrounding terrain from within the photograph, and imagine that I could leave everything I knew behind. I was an odd child.

“A short walk”

It is to those calendar landscapes that my mind wandered when I neared the top of Gunung Sesean, a medium-height hump on the island of Sulawesi. On the way up, I hadn't met a single person, only a couple of stray buffaloes.

Hannelore was back in our stilted guesthouse in Batutumonga, a charming village on the flank of the mountain. She decided not to join me because I had managed to turn our previous expedition (“a short walk to the next village”) into an exhausting, eight-hour long ramble.

So it came to be that on a sunny October day, while my love nursed her blisters, I enjoyed the Indonesian scenery in solitude. And it was awesome!

Dining of the dead

This was the heartland of Tana Toraja, a region best known for the elaborate funeral rituals (or tomates) of its inhabitants.The proceedings take three days and involve the slaughter of as many pigs and buffaloes as the family of the deceased can afford. It is believed that these animals will accompany the freed soul to the heavens and even offer it a piggy- or buffaloback ride so it can get there in style.

Since the big send-off is so expensive, it takes most families a number of years to amass enough funds. All this time, the breathless body is kept inside the house and gets three meals a day. So sweet!

The previous evening, a friendly staffer at our guesthouse had taken us to a nearby funeral. He knew the family and assured us it would be okay to visit. Walking into the premises, we could see small, wooden pavilions built to accommodate friends and neighbors. The women were in one corner, while the men were playing cards in another. It didn't seem much different from the family gatherings I knew.





Then a group of men stood up and formed a circle around a wooden fire in the middle of the yard. Without much ceremony, they started to sing a round, repeating the name of the deceased, pleading with her to leave her family and join the spirit world.

To keep the rhythm, they moved about like sulky chorus girls. From time to time, the song stopped and everyone broke out in laughter. A family member offered cigarettes to the guests, while more people joined the poker game. It was the coziest funeral I'd ever been to.

Rice glaciers

Tana Toraja means “hill folk” in the language of the Bugis, a seafaring people who also call Sulawesi home. But from my vantage point on the back of Gunung Sesean, it was clear that the Torajans lived in the valleys as well as on the hills. Their distinctive, hornlike longhouses popped up everywhere.

In fact, it was the Dutch who forced the Torajans into the valleys at the beginning of the twentieth century, claiming they wouldn't be able to enjoy the fruits of civilization if they persisted in their old ways.

Rice production, a relatively recent addition to the lifestyle of the Torajans, altered the landscape completely. Pausing for a moment, I took out my binoculars to look at the paddies that slid like glaciers down the hillsides. When I put them back, I noticed how silent everything was. No bird sounds, no insects, no wind. Nothing. It was like I was in one of the calendar images.

To poop or not to poop

Suddenly I was overcome by the irresistible urge to poop. This had happened on previous nature walks - it must be a Proustian thing (with ass goblins instead of madeleines) - but I never acted on the impulse. Usually I just whistled a tune and tried to forget about my bowel functions. This time however, I was tempted to give in. Who would know, right? As luck had it, I found an ideal spot for a discrete number two behind a nearby shrub (for some reason, even when you're all by yourself on the top of a mountain, you feel exposed without the aid of shrubbery).

I'm not going to lie: it was easily the most blissful dump I ever took. When I finished, I had to congratulate myself on producing an impressive piece of biodegradable architecture. Laying in the grass, gloriously lit by the tropical sun, were three perfect tubes assembled like a Shinto temple gate. I was so smitten that I decided to take a picture of my work, so I could show it to Hannelore.

Stolen camera

Before you start asking me about it, I clearly state that I won't be posting the image of my knockout turd on the internet. I can't do it for the simple reason that our camera got stolen on the night bus from Rantepao to Macassar. Traumatized as we were by the theft, we found some solace in the knowledge that the thief would be equally distressed at the sight of my handsome feces.

I did, however, get a chance to show it to Hannelore when I returned from my walk. Though she claimed to be horrified, I knew I had made her proud. Poop dreams!