It’s still the season of funeral rites. The Torajas wait for the summer and have enough money to organize funerals. Before that, the dead are placed in the room reserved for them in the traditional house. Everything happens in 5 days and is very codified. Platforms have to be built around a central square to house the hundreds of guests but also for the day to follow the show.
I attend many of the ceremonies, families in traditional clothes welcome tourists and treat them as guests.
In the first days the families of guests are present and each one must bring pigs and buffaloes as an offering. Buffaloes are sacrificed in the central square. For the richest families it is sometimes a carnage of dozens of buffaloes. The smell of vicerals, blood, excrement and mud meles is not really good.
On the platforms have brought us, the, to eat and betel nuts for the older ones. These nuts make a juice that mark the teeth in red definitively, scary!
In addition to ceremonies, buffalo fights or roosters on which paris are organized.
On the last day, the dead man’s family sings and dances in a circle around the coffin. In the form of Toraja house. The strong men then carry him to the cemetery.
It’s a moment of joy. The spectators throw mud on the coffin and the carriers who shake the dead man with all their strength (he must be awakened). Everyone shouts, laughs and has fun, it’s the end.
I enjoy my last day to taste the local culinary specialty in my usual little restaurant. It’s meat, rice, coconut and funny black spices, all cooked over a wood fire in a bamboo tube. Its good!
A last goodbye to my scooter owner and his family who invited me several times to take the tea at home in the evening and I went away to the north. Direction Toggean Islands.
