TRAVELING IN STYLE : DEATH IN THE SEASON OF LIFE : The Funerals Are Something to See in This Little-Known Corner of Indonesia, Where Spring Comes Three Times a Year

IT WAS THREE IN THE MORNING IN LONDON AND THE PHONE WAS RINGing. At that hour, you answer with your heart in your mouth. The last time I’d had a 3 a.m. call, it was a man I had met on a bus in Nigeria who had carefully kept my name and address over three tempestuous years that culminated in his arrest for drug smuggling at Heathrow Airport. He had used his one statutory phone call to wake me up.

This time, vague twanging noises and crashing waves came down the line--and then a voice said “Pong” and I knew who it was. Pong is a title of respect in the Torajan mountains on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (also called Celebes).

Indonesia is composed of roughly 14,000 islands, and Sulawesi, east of Borneo and north of Bali, is one of the largest and wildest--a huge, orchid-shaped piece of land, with four narrow peninsulas twisting around three large gulfs. (When the Portuguese arrived, they didn’t realize that the islands’ arms were joined at the center, and named the land mass the Celebes Islands.)

Several hundred miles north of Ujung Pandang, the capital of southern Sulawesi, is the region of Tanah Toraja or Torajaland. About five years earlier, I had organized a Torajan exhibition at the British Museum in London. We imported a container of wood, bamboo and rattan--all the materials necessary to build a traditional Torajan rice barn--and with it a family of four Torajan carvers and painters, who built the structure from scratch at the museum.

The four builders were a living history of Tanah Toraja in miniature: The grandfather, Nenek Tulian, was a high priest of the old religion and spoke Torajan. The sons were Christian, and spoke Indonesian as well. The grandson, Johanis, wore jeans, worshiped nothing but the U.S. dollar and studied English at the university. It could be no one but him on the phone.

“I am calling you from the middle of the forest,” Johanis now said, “to say that grandfather is dead. Will you come? You promised when we were in London to come to his funeral. Wait.”

There was a click and suddenly I heard the voice of Nenek chanting, bardic, melodious, the voice pitched high, intoning an ancient religious poem from beyond the grave. Abruptly he broke off and said in Indonesian: “You, my friend in London. Come again even if I am dead.” Another click.

“He just came out with that at a ceremony days before he died. I was recording it,” Johanis said.

“Why were you recording it?” I asked. “Did you finally decide to take over the succession, to become a priest?”

He laughed. “Nooo. I took another path. I decided to study anthropology, like you. I turned Nenek into my thesis.” Then, with the heartlessness of the young, he added, “Don’t worry. I got the data I needed before he died.”

“I will come,” I said. “Write and tell me when. You can’t bury him now; it’s spring.” Torajans believe that life and death don’t mix, which means that funerals can’t be held in the springtime, the season of new life, when the rice shoots appear in the fields.

There was a chuckle. “Spring? In the valleys, it’s spring, but up here it’s winter. You’ll understand when you get here. Come now.”

Something suddenly occurred to me. “How can you call me from the middle of the forest?” I asked.

He laughed. “It’s the satellite receiving station. I have a cousin who works here so I get to watch the Thai porn movies and use the phone for free. It’s family.”

FUNERALS ARE SOMETHING THE TORAJANS DO VERY WELL--SOMETIMES EXhausting the wealth of a whole generation in a few short days, in order to shunt money into the celestial bank account of the deceased, to hitch up family status, to pay back the debts of years. There may be hundreds of guests, dozens of buffalo sacrificed, whole temporary villages built for lodging. The body of the deceased is sometimes kept for years in the house, wrapped in many layers of absorbent cloth--by tradition not even embalmed, though some Torajans do cheat a bit today and use Formalin--while sufficient resources are mobilized for a proper send-off.

At a typical Torajan funeral, guests are received in groups, bearing their gifts of buffalo, pigs and cloth. In return, they are given betel nut, cigarettes and the special sugary cakes that are the token of Torajan hospitality. The men dress up in traditional headhunting outfits (the Torajans were headhunters)--complete with special furry hats on which are mounted metal buffalo horns--and may greet guests with rather disconcerting whoops and waves of their spears, all meant in good fun. Palm wine and whiskey flow freely, and the men sing songs called ma’badong to lament and praise the dead. Schoolchildren are often drafted to play bamboo flute music, or cassette players will blare out songs from other festivals. (The elders frown on this, for it is mixing life with death--non-funeral songs with the funeral observance.)

In all, Torajan funerals are jolly affairs, where older Torajans meet to rake over the past, drink and dance. The young, meanwhile, flock to funerals simply to meet one another, and sidle away for trysts in the forest. “If there were no funerals,” one youngster told me, “no one would ever get married.”

TANAH TORAJA IS NOT THE SORT OF PLACE YOU GO FOR FIVE-STAR HOTELS AND cabaret. You go to see something of traditional Indonesia--and you discover along the way that the people are delightfully friendly and hospitable. Foreign visitors are even welcome at most Tora jan funerals. They are considered to bring honor to the ceremonies, in fact, and will be generously fed and entertained.

Rantepao, the region’s biggest town (population about 15,000), has a Wild West air about it. Houses and shops have been thrown up haphazardly, and the town now centers on a large open square where the market used to be before a fire destroyed it several years ago. It has been relocated nearby, and on market days, Rantepao seems to be bursting at the seams. After 6 p.m. each day, though, it seems deserted. Like other Indonesian towns, it is a practical place, where people go to get things done. It is not distinguished for its beauty.

It had certainly changed, though, since my last visit several years earlier. For one thing, there were televisions everywhere. “We always used to wonder about our missionaries from the Dutch Reformed Church,” one Torajan told me. “But now we have ‘Dallas’ and we see how they live at home.”

Also, there was a new plane up the coast from Ujung Pandang to Makale, about a dozen miles south of Rantepao, making the town much more accessible to tourism. Hotels had expanded; the guides now needed licenses. Everywhere were Westerners--Italians, Germans, Americans, backpackers headed for the forest, blue-rinsed ladies in air-conditioned buses. I noticed that a number of them were carrying copies of “Not a Hazardous Sport,” the book I had written about Toraja. I felt guilty. Johanis laughed.

“No, it is good. We are grateful. We are proud to be known. Because of tourists, we even have a disco.”

The Tamu Disco ( tamu means guest) turned out to be run by Jon-Jon, a friend from my earlier visits. He gave me a hug. “Welcome back,” he said. “You know when I told my family I was studying in Java? Well, I was studying disco. My father shouted and broke things when I told him, but I made him give me a chance. If it makes money. . .”

The disco was a big, echoing room decorated with carvings from a dismantled old house. “I got the idea from you,” he said. “Isit not just like a museum?” The floor was covered with cushions. Hill men perched respectfully cross-legged, mouths gaping, looking and listening to the screaming music. Johanis and I lolled nearby. “It is good,” he said, patting a cushion. “It means when you have a headache you can come to the disco and lie down.” Elton John boomed in the background, declaring that, for all this sitting and lying about, he was still standing.

JOHANIS LOOKED UNHAPPY. “Father,” he said, “there are two things I must say that you will not like.” Since when had he called me “Father”? This must be serious.

“First, there is a death in the valley, and we must go today. Daud, the tour operator, you remember him? His father is dead. Daud has organized the biggest funeral of the year. He will bring his tourists to the funeral, selling them tickets, giving with the right hand and taking with the left. You must go to show respect. Second, Nenek is already in the tomb.”

“What??!! You mean I’ve come all this way for nothing?”

He held up a hand. “The family declared that Nenek had converted to Christianity at the end, which meant they could avoid all those expensive ceremonies and put him in a concrete tomb with a cross on top.” I could not believe it. He had told me he would never change his religion. “Now we have taken him out of the Christian tomb and will put his bones in the rock tomb in the traditional way. The family has nothing more to say. You will buy a buffalo and save them the expense of feeding the guests. Nenek can go to his rest in peace. That is why you were meant to come.”

At Daud’s funeral for his father, we sat across from the square where guests were being greeted by girls with golden flowers in their hair. Gongs boomed. Everywhere buffalo were tethered, preened and polished, horns hung with tassels. Most Torajan young people can manage some English, and they are eager to practice. They descended upon us, gave us coffee, led us by the hand to see the body wrapped in cloth.

Johanis greeted a friend. “That one is very clever,” he whispered to me, nodding at the man. “An inventor. He studied in America.”

The inventor showed us his latest creation. All over Torajaland, you see tourists struggling with 3-foot-square, Y-shaped packages. Inside there could only be one thing: a model Torajan house, all carved and painted, beautiful but as cumbersome as a holly wreath. “See,” said the inventor. He drew out a single sliver of wood from his version of the model and the whole house gently collapsed like a ship in a bottle.”You carry it like this. When you get home, you push this piece back in and. . .” The house rose again in all its inconvenient glory. “Wah! I expect to become a millionaire.”

I HAD FORGOTTEN THE STAGGERING beauty of Torajaland. Great stretches of misty forest reached up into the mountains that faded into a purple infinity, row upon row as far as the imagination could reach. In the valleys, rice terraces cascaded down the hills, with gnarled rocks and waving bamboo exquisitely placed to set off the limpid pools of water. The air was pure, almost crystalline. The great carved houses with their beautifully curved roofs sat lightly on the earth like great birds, streams purling around their feet. They looked as if they might take wing at any moment.

Johanis led me sweating and puffing along a serpentine path toward Nenek’s house, climbing hills, teetering over moss-covered plank bridges. A perfectly good road led the same way, but Johanis had a good reason for our detour. “This is what I meant over the phone. We have to do this because of the new rice. You know that in our religion, death must never be mixed with life, so we hold the death ceremonies in the autumn. But it is the rice that decides the season. When there is growing rice, there may not be death. But with the new strains of rice, sometimes we get three crops a year, so every village might have rice at a different stage of growth.”

He pointed to a nearby hill lurid with sprouting rice shoots. “Over there, you see, it is spring and we must not tread there on our way to death.” In another direction, he indicated a stand of tall rice stalks. “Over there, it is summer--no death. But over here in the village”--he snatched a golden rice stalk already stripped of its ears from the field we were wading through--”it is autumn, and all right for funerals. So nowadays you can come here in spring and it is officially autumn, and there will be death ceremonies anyway. It is crazy.”

JOHANIS FINISHED HIS SPEECH IN TOrajan, waving a spear about, and then swaggered back, grinning.

“I said you gave this buffalo for Nenek. If they killed it, that was good. If they kept it, that was good. I said you gave it in the name of the Queen of England. They liked that.”

We sat in front of Nenek’s carved house in the sunshine, remembering, talking about things he had said and done. Like all builders, he never quite got around to finishing his own home, and the roof was incomplete. It looked like the inventor’s model. Remove one plank and it would gently collapse.

There was a slap on my back, and I turned to see Bunga, one of the tourist guides--not one for casual sightseeing, but a man of the forest, who took his clients into the wildest areas for three or four weeks at a time, to sleep in villages and eat roots and berries. He and I examined each other the way middle-aged people do all over the world, searching for new signs of decay in the fabric. He looked rough.

“A bad year,” he said. “I got divorced. She took everything. But I have a new wife, an imam’s daughter, and a new son. And I found a waterfall in the forest, the highest in Sulawesi, and no one knew it was there. And you?”

I remembered the Elton John song from the disco. “ Masih berdiri tegak, “ I said--”I’m still standing.” He giggled, liking the expression, and slapped the side of the old, ancestral house.

“Yes, me too, still standing.”

To one side, my buffalo was already being boiled. Laughing Torajans stood around with swords and spears, drinking great draughts of hot stock from the pot. Someone brought me a plate of French fries. “Johanis has explained to us what white men eat.”

A man came up with a clipboard and flashed a badge officiously.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you the owner of this buffalo?”

“Er, yes.” I had bought it earlier that day for 900,000 rupiah, about $450 at the time.

He cleared his throat and consulted the board. “There is a matter of three years’ unpaid buffalo tax on this beast, and the government’s new sacrifice tax of 20,000 rupiah to prevent excessive negative investment of positive national economic resources.”

“But, but, I only owned it for 12 hours.” Bunga led him quietly away, whispering in his ear with passionate intensity, grinning back at me. The man tucked his clipboard under his arm and walked away.

“Family,” said Johanis, shrugging. He speared a chunk of gray buffalo flesh. (Buffalo tastes not unlike beef, but is tough and grainy.) Then it was time to move Nenek’s body. The temporary tomb was a square concrete affair with an iron cross on top. We pulled the coffin out into the sunshine. There was no grimness about it. People cracked jokes. Children peered and picked their noses and respectfully made way for Johanis.

Ants had nested in Nenek’s bones, and when we opened the coffin, they swarmed out to attack the mourners. A child was sent to fetch a can of insecticide, while the men all joined hands and twirled counterclockwise to a booming death chant. Then the body was tightly wrapped in cloth, slung from a pole and zigzagged across the fields to avoid the green islands of growing rice.

The rock tombs we eventually reached are hacked into hills of granite, as much as 100 feet off the ground. Interspersed with the crypts are galleries also hewn into the rock in which are placed life-sized wooden effigies of the deceased, called tau taus . Torajans come to this spot from all over Asia to bury their dead, or to remove their bodies from the tombs and rewrap them with fresh cloh. Bamboo ladders reach up to the tombs in stages, and the funeral attendants must shin up them, carrying the corpse. To fall is certain death.

Nenek’s was one of three bodies being buried this day, and a race to reach the tombs developed spontaneously between bearers for the three bereaved families. Nenek won, to cheers and hoots from those of us below. Johanis draped an arm around my shoulder and looked out over the lush valley. Huge storks were circling peacefully over the sunlit mountains where the rice was germinating, where there were mice and frogs--where there was life. “Now Nenek, too, goes back to the spring,” he said, “and makes the rice grow. Safe journey, Nenek.”

“Yes. Safe journey.”

“When you die,” Johanis said cheerfully, “I will come to your funeral.”

“It may be a little different,” I said.

GUIDEBOOK: The Torajan Experience

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Indonesia is 62; the area code for Ujung Pandang is 411; the area code for the Tanah Toraja area (including Rantepao) is 423. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 2,020 rupiahs to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: It isn’t easy to get from Los Angeles to Rantepao. The best way is by air from Jakarta or Bali to Ujung Pandang, and from there to the Tanah Toraja Airport by air, or to Rantepao by chauffeured car or bus. There are daily connecting flights from LAX to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, on Japan Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines, and connecting flights several times a week on Eva. The journey takes approximately 30 to 40 hours, depending on routing. Garuda Indonesia Airlines flies to Bali three times a week from Los Angeles via Honolulu and Biak (Indonesia)--a 21-hour trip. There are daily nonstop flights from Jakarta to Ujung Pandang on Garuda Indonesia. Merpati Nusantara Airlines has one daily nonstop from Bali to Ujung Pandang, and one or two flights a day from there to Tanah Toraja.

Chauffeured car rentals are available at the airport and at major hotels in Ujung Pandang. The cost is approximately $25 a day plus gas. Buses also run about three times a day between Ujung Pandang and Rantepao, taking about 10 hours and costing about $4. Chauffeured cars are also available at hotels in Rantepao, and are recommended for exploring the countryside. A number of agencies also book all-inclusive short-term tours of Tanah Toraja from Jakarta and Bali. One of the best is Ramayana Satria Inc., with offices all over Indonesia.

When to go: Unlike much of Indonesia, Tanah Toraja has no clear wet and dry seasons, and daytime temperatures are generally warm and comfortable all year round. Rain is possible at any time, however, and is heaviest in December and January. The ideal time to visit the region is probably late winter and spring--spring in Western terms--after January but before the high tourist season in July and August.

Where to stay: If air connections require an overnight stay in Ujung Pandang, two good hotels are the reasonably priced Ramayana Hotel, Jalan Gunung Bawakaraeng, telephone 22-165. Rates: $15-$20. The Makassar Golden Hotel, Jalan Pasar Ikan, tel. 314-408, fax 317-999, is a large, comparatively luxurious hotel, expensive by local standards. Rates: $75-$85 plus 21% tax and service. In Rantepao, by far the best place to stay is the Hotel Indra II, Jalan Ratulangi, tel. 21-183 or 21-442. It’s very pleasant and friendly and built around a courtyard garden in the center of town. Rates: $20-$70. The older Indra I, Jalan Landorundun, tel. 21-163, is under the same ownership, but is more modest. Rate: $12.50. (Don’t confuse these hotels with the nearby Indra City Hotel, also under the same management, but not of the same standards.) A more upscale hotel, popular with tourists, is the Toraja Cottages, Jalan Pangeran Diponegoro, tel. 21-089 or 21-475, a mile or so out of town. There is a pool. Rate: $60.

Where to eat: The food in Tanah Toraja is not terribly exciting, and not very varied, but there are decent restaurants in the Indra and Toraja Cottages hotels, with prices around $10-$12.

Torajan funerals: Excellent English-speaking guides are available in Tanah Toraja at a standard rate of $7-$10 a day. They can devise interesting itineraries for both the active and the less-active visitor, and can often arrange attendance at a Torajan funeral. Hotels are also helpful in setting up participation. Though there is no admission charge as such to these ceremonies, it may be necessary to pay an additional fee ($5-$10) to your guide. It is polite but not obligatory to bring a carton of cigarettes as a gift to the family of the deceased, and polite to wear black. Don’t take photographs without asking and remember that, despite the singing, dancing, drinking and joking, you are attending a funeral; behave accordingly.

For further information: The Indonesian Tourist Promotion Office, 3457 Wilshire Blvd., 105, Los Angeles 90010, (213) 387-2078.