Caves, Graves & Waves, Part III: Waves

As I was preparing to sit down and write this last installment of the Caves, Graves & Waves trilogy, I realized that this might be one of those a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words situations.  Usually, as a writer, I'll take any opportunity I get to wax poetic (or blab, as the case may be), but this time, I'm not sure that would really do Pantai Bira justice.  You could just as well call up a scene from the ultimate beach fantasy of your wildest dreams, and that would probably be pretty accurate.  We laid out on the white sand, went swimming in the brilliant turquoise waters, snorkeled by a tiny island half an hour off the coast, ate the best fish cooked in Bumbu Bali sauce I've ever tasted in my life, took walks on the beach, drank cold beer, read our books, and watched the sun set over the ocean.  See, no justice.  Picture time.

Stellar end to a stellar trip, wouldn't you say?  Oh, that's right, sorry -- you're speechless with envy.  I'll give you a few minutes.  Can't say I blame you.

On the other hand, back in Yogya, I've just been roped in to judging a debate competition at my school -- all weekend.  That's Saturday plus Sunday, sitting in a chair all day watching kids argue with each other in English.  Ohhhh, goody.  This should be a good one.

Caves, Graves & Waves, Part II: A Bumpy Ride

Among the various things that first go up and later must come down, the first, in our case, was a certain aforementioned 10-hour bus ride between Tana Toraja and Makassar.  A year ago, when I first got this job and my boss at PiA was regaling me with the wonders of Indonesian transport ("Some of the airlines aren't the greatest, so you should just exercise good judgement -- like, if you see them duct-taping the door of the plane closed, you should probably get off"), she advised that I avoid overnight buses in Indonesia, since apparently many of the drivers have an unfortunate tendency to fall asleep at the wheel.  This piece of information, coupled with our knowledge of the width of the winding mountain road that connected Toraja and Makassar (not very wide) as well as with the fact that it had been tending to pour rain in Rantepao starting into the afternoon and continuing late into the night, led us to elect the day bus, rather than the night bus, back to the big Mak.  Feeling very responsible and safe, we boarded the bus at 9AM and, waving to Tata through the window, rolled out of Rantepao.

Most of the first hour and a half of the ride was spent getting to, and then stopped at, Makale (20 km south of Rantepao), waiting for the rest of the passengers to finish buying their oleh-oleh and board the bus.  At around 10:30 we finally got on our way, and at around 11, the bus broke down.  Something had happened to the front right tire, but Megan and I did not know what the problem was, nor was it ever explained to us.  Over the course of the next 3 hours, we sat in the bus on the side of the road (the driver would occasionally turn it on for 10 minutes at a time so we could get a little AC), amusing ourselves by eating crackers, telling each other riddles, speculating about what might be wrong with the tire, and reminiscing about the days when we actually knew what was going on in our immediate environment.  At around 1:30, one of the porters came onboard to tell us that we were waiting for another bus to pick us up (receiving a piece information was never so sweet), and miraculously, half an hour later, one did.  So, around 2PM, about 1 hour into our journey and running only 5 hours late, we finally hit the road.

Before the bus broke down, we had been slated to arrive back in Makassar between 6 and 7 in the evening, and had originally planned on meeting up for dinner with my friend Jenny (who is teaching English in Makassar on a Fulbright fellowship), crashing at her place, and getting an early start the next morning for Pantai Bira, a beach at the southern tip of Sulawesi about 5 hours away.  After we rolled in shortly before midnight, though, and finally found poor Jenny who was waiting up for us at her house, we decided the early start probably wasn't going to happen.  But no matter -- we would just aim to leave mid-morning, be at Bira by late afternoon, find a hostel, settle in, and maybe even catch the sunset over a Bintang.  No problemo.

There aren't actually any buses to Pantai Bira, and we knew from both the LP and Jenny that the only way to go was to catch a Kijang (sort of like a jeep/minivan, but used as a minibus in many parts of Indonesia).  It seems to me this vehicle was built to seat a maximum of 8 people (3 in the back row, 3 in the middle row, 1 in the front, plus the driver -- and even then it would be cozy), but we also knew that Kijangs don't leave unless they are full, and full means 10 passengers (4 in the back, 4 in the middle, 2 in the front, plus the driver -- very cozy).  We got to the station around 11 or 11:30, and were immediately bombarded with offers to charter a vehicle for $50 -- 5 times what it would cost both of us to get to Bira in a regular Kijang.  My conversation with one of the drivers, roughly translated to English, went something like this:

DRIVER: Where are you going?

ME: We want to go to Pantai Bira.

DRIVER: Oh, to Bira.  Would you like to charter a car?  Charter is only Rp. 500,000.

ME: No, we want cheapest transport.  Kijang.  How much?

DRIVER: Oh, you want a Kijang.  That's Rp. 50,000 [about $5] per person.  You don't want a charter?  It's faster.

ME: No.  We want Kijang.  50,000 from here to Bira?

DRIVER: Yeah.  You can take that one over there. :: motions to red vehicle nearby ::

ME: We take that one, from here to Bira, 50,000?

DRIVER: Well, first you stop in Bulukumba [a town about 40km before Bira], but from there you can catch a pete-pete [a different type of minibus] to Bira.  It's 40,000 to Bulukumba, and then 10,000 to Bira by pete-pete.  No problem.

ME: From here to Bulukumba, 40,000.  Then from Bulukumba to Bira we get pete-pete, 10,000.  Yeah?

DRIVER: Right.

ME: Okay, we take this one to Bulukumba, 40,000.  Then we get pete-pete, 10,000, to Bira.  Yeah?

DRIVER: Yes, that's right.

ME: Okay, we take this one now, to Bulukumba?  40,000?  Later, get pete-pete?

DRIVER: Uh ... yeah.

You know, I just wanted to be sure.  As we climbed into the Kijang, along with another young woman and an old man, Megan said, "Maybe it will just be us four?" with a note of doubt in her voice.  I think we were both holding out that this 5-hours-in-a-jeep-with-10-people-and-no-AC thing might be better than we had been led to believe, but it was not to be.  Just as with the bus ride from Toraja, we did not get on the road immediately, but rather spent the first hour and a half of the journey weaving through the backstreets of Makassar picking people up at their homes and along the side of the road (yet another feature of Indo transport that continues to baffle me: did they arrange that beforehand, or is the bus driver just telepathic?).  Getting on the road was not much better, though, as I spent the next 4 hours -- coincidentally the hottest hours of the day -- bumping up and down on the crack between 2 seats of what was probably a 15-year-old vehicle, sweating down every surface of my body and occasionally moving my legs 2 inches forward or back as if that would alleviate the pain in my tailbone.  At one point I fell asleep, but we were hitting a pothole about every 50 meters so that didn't last long.  At one point one of the women in the back row got out along the way, which brought our grand total down to 11 human beings inside the vehicle (as the 12th, she had been an extra, I guess since she wasn't riding the whole way).  At one point, I remembered that the bus from Toraja, even though it had broken down for 3 hours on the side of the road, had had air conditioning.  Then I stopped thinking about it.

We rolled into Bulukumba around 5:30, but even before we got out of the Kijang, I could tell something was wrong.  We had dropped everyone else off along the way, so it was only me and Megan by the time we got to the station and the parking lot was looking pretty deserted.  It took about 4.5 seconds for a circle of men to form around us once we exited the vehicle (I remembered this from Rantepao), and the ensuing conversation went something like this:

THEM: Where are you going?

US: We want to go to Pantai Bira.  The man in Makassar say we get pete-pete from here to Bira, 10,000.

THEM: You want to go to Bira?  Oh, no.  There are no more pete-petes tonight.

US: Yeah, but the man in Makassar say we get pete-pete from here.

THEM: No, all the pete-petes are finished.  It's very far to Bira from here!  Hm.  But you can charter a car to take you there, you know.  We can take you, maybe for 200,000?

US: No, very expensive.  The man in Makassar say we get pete-pete from here, for 10,000.

THEM: There are no more pete-petes.  It's too late.

US: But the man in Makassar say to us we get pete-pete from here to Bira.

THEM: You can't do that, because there are no more pete-petes tonight.

US: But the man in Makassar say we can.  He say!

THEM: Hmm.

Obviously, our hands were tied.  There was no way to get a pete-pete to Bira at that hour (which, we decided later, the guy in Makassar had of course known beforehand, though he had failed to mention that his suggestion was in fact impossible) and there was no place to stay in Bulukumba (it being not exactly a hopping tourist destination).  Finally, one guy said that he and his wife had to go that way anyway, and would take both of us for 100,000 -- the same price we'd paid to get from Makassar to Bulukumba, which was four times the distance from Bulukumba to Bira.  Not having very many options to choose from, we had to accept.  The vehicle we'd be taking, however, was somewhere else and would be about another hour, so we heaved off our packs and sat down on a wooden bench to wait.  A new circle formed around us, comprised of men, women and children, but this one seemed purely observatory.  For about five very surreal minutes, a circle of Indonesians squatted around our bench and stared at us in silence, while Megan and I just looked at each other thinking, "Is this real life?"  After a few minutes, though, someone started a conversation, I think to ask me about my tattoo, and that broke the spell.  Good to know we hadn't accidentally slipped into a parallel universe after all.  

It was dark by the time the minibus we'd be taking arrived.  We piled ourselves and our packs into the back, along with a couple crates of fish, while the man and his wife and his wife's friend got in the front.  Finally on our way to Bira, and with the beach almost within our grasp, we settled back against our packs for the jolty one-hour trip, figuring we were in the clear.  I mean, at this point, how much worse could things get?  Not worse, maybe -- but within the first ten minutes of the drive, our now 33-hour journey from Tana Toraja tipped from the category of "amusing and mildly painful" into the realm of the truly absurd.  Our extortionist-turned-chauffeur flipped down a brand-new DVD screen from the ceiling of the van, and my first thought was, "Wouldn't it have made more sense to have put a door on this vehicle before installing a DVD player?"  He then proceeded to put on a soft-core Asian porn video (for the record, his wife seemed into it also -- it was more bizarre than creepy), and I had no more thoughts.  Megan and I just looked at each other thinking, "This is not real life," and then went back to looking out the window and pretending that nothing out-of-the-ordinary was occurring.  Good to know we actually had accidentally slipped into a parallel universe after all.

They turned off the video after about ten minutes but left the accompanying music on, so we completed the last leg of our odyssey to the soundtrack of blasting porn-worthy techno.  We got dropped off in the center of Bira, paid up, bid the crazies goodbye, and for a few minutes just basked in the realization that we had finally made it.  It was almost 8PM by then, so we got some food and found a place to crash for the night, deciding we would evaluate our state of affairs in the morning.  Our state of affairs being, of course, whether this Bira joint was worth all that grief -- and all I could think about as I fell asleep was the answer better be yes.  But as we know by now, what comes down must also go up.  And luckily for us, that answer ended up being yes indeed.  A big fatty yes.

Caves, Graves & Waves, Part I: Caves & Graves

Hello again to all my faithful and devoted readers – I’m back!  For those out there who were starting to get worried, keeping this blog perpetually open in one of your Firefox tabs and refreshing the page at the beginning and end of every coffee break on the off-chance I had returned to the land of the living and posted in the interim, you may now heave a deep sigh of relief.  Your favorite reading material is back online.  You can go ahead and close out the New York Times and Chronic Boredom Support Chatroom tabs now.

The reason for my long absence was that I work for a Catholic university, which meant I got a week off for Easter, which meant I obviously did a little finagling of my schedule so I could take a glorious, eleven-day vacation on the island of Sulawesi, famed for the boat-shaped roofs of its traditional houses, mythical funeral ceremonies, and some of the best diving sites on the planet.  While we did not, unfortunately, get to partake of the diving (that’s for later in my life, when I have a better relationship with my bank account), we did manage to squeeze in some snorkeling, as well as our fair share of – you guessed it – caves and graves.

My trip started out solo, as I wasn’t due to meet up with my travel buddy Megan until a few days later.  I flew in to Sulawesi’s capital city, Makassar, early in the morning, and marched myself straight to the bus station where I boarded a bus for the town of Rantepao in the mountains of Tana Toraja, the heart of Sulawesi’s traditional village culture.  Within the first 15 minutes of the bus ride, as I was settling in for what the Lonely Planet promised would be a scenic, 7.5-hour journey, the woman sitting next to me struck up a chat and, upon establishing that I spoke Indonesian, proceeded to talk to me for the remainder of the 10-hour journey.  Since I didn’t seem to be required to do anything more than nod and smile in response, I was fine with this arrangement -- just as I was with her decision to buy me lunch at the roadside rest stop, and to generally look out for me for the duration of the ride.  At one point some of the Indonesians across the aisle began to take an interest in the bule (foreigner) who spoke at least enough Indonesian that she could pretend to hold a 10-hour conversation, but Chatty Cathy deftly fended them off, as I had clearly been established as her bule and she was not about to share me.  I mean, let's face it: who would?

Chatty Cathy disembarked at Makale, the city before Rantepao, so I rolled into town alone.  Since it’s still low season for tourism in Indonesia, I hadn’t bothered to make hostel arrangements beforehand, figuring I’d just swing by a few of the places I’d circled in my LP and decide when I got there.  It wasn’t until I was standing in the middle of a circle of Indonesian taxi, becak and angkot drivers who all wanted to take me somewhere and who couldn’t understand why I did not yet know where that place was, in the dark, in the middle of a tiny town in the mountains of Sulawesi, that I realized this decision had lacked foresight.  So I did what any solo traveler must do, and decided on the spot.  Deciding on the spot simply involved blurting out the name of the first hostel I could remember from the guidebook – Wisma Monton – and allowing myself to be taken there.  In general I operate on the faith that it all shakes down the way it’s supposed to shake down, and this situation was no exception.  Set around a little garden, clean, quiet, run by a lovely family and providing stellar mountain views from the third floor (as I discovered in the morning), Monton was the right choice.  No matter that I was absolutely the only person staying there.  Creepy?  No way.  More mountain views for me!

The next morning I hired a guide for the day, mostly because I really wanted to see one of Toraja’s famous funeral ceremonies and they are hard to find without local guides who know the dead people’s schedules.  Luckily for me there was a ceremony happening nearby that very morning, and when we got there I’d only missed the beginning of a series of speeches in Bahasa Toraja, the local Torajan language, which I couldn’t understand anyway.  (On the note of speeches, I've realized lately that it's going to take a lot of adjustment when I get back to the States and can suddenly understand everything that happens at ceremonies, meetings, and over loudspeakers.  It will be total data overload.  My poor brain will not know what to do.)  The coffin was set up in the center of a swept clearing surrounded by a compound of covered platforms where all the guests were seated, and where I also sat with a handful of other bule and their guides.  After about an hour and a half of speeches, chants, and songs, the special Torajan dish pa' piong was served, in which meat and vegetables are stuffed all together into the thick tube of a stalk of bamboo and smoked over a fire for several hours, before being pushed out of the stalk and eaten with rice.  In this case, the meat was pork from a pig that, as my guide informed me, had been slaughtered that morning.  Fresh meat, anyone?  It don’t get a whole lot fresher than that.  Animal sacrifices (usually of pigs and buffalo) are a common feature of Torajan funeral rites, and with the number of animals sacrificed being proportionate to the status of the person who has died, I’ve heard that as many as 14 buffalo could be slaughtered at one funeral.  Needless to say, I was kind of glad I missed the sacrifice part.  I’m all about partaking of cultural experiences, but I’m also all about keeping large quantities of buffalo blood out of my direct line of sight, so, you know.  I was content to eat my pa’ piong and move on.

After everyone had eaten, we all moved down to the clearing and stood in big circle around the coffin and held hands and chanted, while the close family of the deceased gathered tightly around the coffin and commenced to weep and wail with a degree of hysteria that I’ve seldom witnessed in real life.  It was kind of strange, actually, to be present at an event that for Americans is usually quite private, privy to obvious human pain that the family of the deceased did not in any way try to hide.  What was even stranger, though, was how quickly the hysterical wailing gave way to buoyant gallivanting, as the young men in the family, along with others, picked up the coffin and pranced it out of the compound, transitioning into the next phase of the ceremony where the coffin is brought to the grave.  People were laughing and shouting as we all scampered after the coffin-bearers, up a hill, down a hill, through several rice paddy fields, across a stream, up a steep embankment through thick jungle foliage and finally into another clearing in front of a tall flat cliff face of solid rock.  The singular feature of Torajan graves is that they are traditionally located inside caves, either natural ones or – more spectacularly, as in this case – manmade.  As with all Torajan cut-rock graves, a large rectangular chamber had been cut into the side of this cliff face, big enough to hold maybe up to 10 or 12 coffins, and enterable only through a small square opening – big enough to fit a coffin through, basically.  According to custom, all members of a family are buried together in one grave in death, just as they lived together in one house in life.  It took a lot of huffing, puffing, heaving and hoeing to get the coffin up to the opening and in to the cave, but then it was done.  It was an interesting sight to behold, as at American burials coffins are often lowered into the ground – a horizontal piece of earth – but in this case the coffin was hoisted up above head level and slid into the side of a cliff – a vertical piece of earth.  It was a great reminder that all it takes is a few little instances of ancient cultural tradition at work to wonk with the needle of your Normality Compass.  I love traveling.

That was the name of the game over the next few days, as I traipsed all over the hills and valleys of Toraja checking out sweet burial site after sweet burial site – I saw life-size wooden effigies lined up like spectators at a sports event in balconies above cut-rock graves, coffins stacked in natural caves, human skulls strewn on the ground beneath the columns of hanging graves, babies buried in miniature chambers in the sides of more cliff faces.  Megan made it to Rantepao safe and sound, and one of the mornings we met up with some friends of hers and did a 7-hour hike through a handful of traditional Torajan villages, dropping our jaws around every corner at the views of the soaring distorted roofs of the houses and the cascading rice paddies down into the valley.  Legend has it that the original settlers of this region came up the river from the coast on boats, and used their vessels as the roofs of their first shelters, which is why the roofs of the traditional houses bend up at both ends today.  Whether or not that folktale holds water (…get it? HA) it’s hard not to stare out over the expanse of Torajan hills and see the clusters of bended red roofs as fleets of tiny ships on the green patchwork ocean of rice paddies.  A couple of the afternoons when it poured end-of-rainy-season-wonky-weather rain, I just sat up on our third-floor balcony at Monton and watched the storm and the mountains and wrote in my journal.  I ate every meal at the same restaurant around the corner from Monton, and made friends with the 19-year-old girl who worked there, Tata, who sat down to chat with me (and Megan, when she got there) before and after every meal, and brought us free desserts of fresh fruit cups and sliced papaya, and walked us to the bus station on the morning we left, holding my hand and making me promise I’d keep in touch.  I got some beautiful Torajan handicrafts as gifts for family and friends back home, drank sweet, thick Torajan coffee, and soaked up the cool Torajan weather.  Toraja, in other words, was pretty much perfect.

But, as we all know, what goes up must come down.  And lest this blog begin to sound too much like a greeting card from Ten Thousand Villages, I can assure you that what went up soon came down.  Stay tuned for Part II, and in the meanwhile, get a firm grip on your hats.  You cannot even begin to fathom the meaning of the phrase "bumpy ride."