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  The old man took things very slowly and had a friendly smile that made me feel OK. Gibson’s mother emerged and we were introduced. She then handed each of us a strong black coffee made of Torajan beans. Gibson then told us we should wait while they ‘got ready’.

  We finished our coffees, then Gibson invited us to enter the house. He lingered behind as we climbed the steps towards the entrance. I moved as gently and as precisely as I could, taking off my shoes at the top of the steps.

  ‘Follow her,’ Gibson said, pointing to his mother. He seemed awfully uncomfortable, as if we were about to walk in on a ghost. We followed the old lady along a passage, until we got to a doorway. She held open a curtain covering the doorway and ushered us into a small room. Beau went first, followed by me, then Josh with the camera filming.

  Lying on the floor on the far side of the small room was the corpse, wrapped in sheets and covered by a blanket, with only her mouth and eyes exposed. I nearly bumped into Beau who had stopped not too far into the room, with Josh still trying to get in with the camera.

  Gibson’s father shuffled past us. He beckoned to us, indicating it was OK for us to come closer to the body. Josh was filming, while Beau didn’t quite know if he should start taking photos or not.

  ‘How long has she been here?’ I asked the old man, breaking the silence. He didn’t understand me, instead shouting to Gibson who was elsewhere in the house.

  ‘What?’ came Gibson’s muffled voice through the thin walls, as if his father had asked him if he’d done his homework.

  ‘How long has she been here?’ I began, starting in a loud whisper and ending in a shout.

  Gibson relayed the question back through the wall to the old man still standing beside us. He shouted back in Indonesian and smiled at us.

  ‘Two months,’ came invisible Gibson’s translation.

  What was up with Gibson, I wondered. Was he scared of ghosts or did he feel embarrassed at bringing tourists into his family home? Perhaps he wasn’t allowed in the room. It was such a crazy scene I didn’t know if I should feel relaxed or on edge.

  The old man certainly didn’t appear worried. In fact, he seemed overly casual about the whole affair. He smiled at us as he began pulling back the blanket to reveal the skinny body of his deceased mother-in-law wrapped like a mummy in cloth. The body had been preserved by injecting formaldehyde to retard the decaying process, which gave the family up to a year to save funds for her funeral.

  We gradually moved closer, inspecting her face and trying to decipher which were her mouth, eyes and nose. Her face was a dark blue and looked as if it would sound hollow if tapped. The only other exposed part was her fingers, which stretched out from long sleeves. Everything about the body had shrunk. She looked like she could have been dead for 20 years. Only the bright coloured material she was wrapped in gave any indication of how recently she had died.

  It was fascinating to actually examine a dead person and contemplate what it meant to be dead. I was surprised to find I didn’t feel spooked by what was before me. The old man manoeuvred the blankets around as if she were merely asleep. Josh held the camera while I crouched over the body and explained the preserving process while Beau stood quietly against the wall, his hands clutching his camera at his crotch. I don’t think he was enjoying himself.

  ‘She doesn’t look very happy,’ I flippantly said to the camera. It seemed this was no place for jokes, for Gibson’s voice startled me.

  ‘She can hear what you say,’ he warned through the wall. ‘Speak to her, tell her how well she’s looking.’

  I looked apprehensively at Josh and his camera.

  ‘She looks pretty good doesn’t she?’ I said, nodding at the lens in an attempt to be as convincing as possible. Josh was smirking behind the camera.

  ‘Seriously though!’ I said loudly, so everyone could hear, including grandma.

  We got the shots we needed as quickly as we could, then Gibson’s voice came meandering through the wall.

  ‘It’s time for her lunch.’

  It struck me as an odd thing to say.

  We took that as our cue to leave, and thanked the old man. We helped drape the blanket back over the corpse before leaving the room. It was one thing to read about the Torajan way of dealing with death, but another to actually see it for yourself. I left the room feeling honoured to have experienced it.

  There was no sign of Gibson in the house. We eventually found him sitting on the porch staring out at the nearby hills. It was our chance to ask all the questions that had been running through our minds.

  Gibson explained that in Torajan culture, the grandparents were the primary carers of the grandchildren. The old lady was more like Gibson’s mother than his grandmother, we learned. He would have become too upset if he’d come into the room with us.

  He explained that during the time the body was in the house it was treated as if it were still alive, hence Gibson’s insistence she could hear us and that it was time for her to eat. Family members visited and spoke to the deceased, keeping them company until the funeral, when it was believed the spirit left the body. Only then would their deaths be mourned.

  Gibson then told us his father knew of a funeral to be held in the next few days much further out of town. His family knew some people who lived close to where the funeral was going to take place. We would be welcome to stay with these people and attend the funeral, if we wished. It didn’t take long for us to agree. We thanked Gibson’s parents and headed back to the car.

  It took us an hour to get there, along a very winding and bumpy road, climbing even further into the mountains. We passed rice fields on either side of the road where women sat, hunched over, planting new rice seeds, their ankles deep in a mixture of water and mud. Buffalos were often tethered near the houses, chewing their cud and swooshing flies with their tails. Due to the spiritual importance of the buffalo, they were a family’s most prized possession, Gibson explained. They were always well fed, washed by hand daily, and allowed to roam free during the day. Of course, their happy lives came to a spectacular end when they were sacrificed, as we were to discover.

  We arrived at the village late in the afternoon, stepping from the car into another round of introductions. Gibson appeared to know the people very well. The man and woman looked like they too could have been Gibson’s parents, so I wasn’t surprised when Gibson revealed this was actually his home. Confused, but not surprised.

  We spent the afternoon walking through the surrounding hills. It was a hive of industry. Children and women carried sacks of rice from the field to a communal grinding machine that prepared the rice for storage.

  We returned to the house to find Gibson sitting on the porch, chatting with his ‘family’. A freshly killed chicken was stewing on an open fire. As the sun went down we sat on the floor of the family house and ate dinner by candlelight.

  As we ate I asked Gibson about the funeral preparations. He told me they were taking place about a kilometre away.

  ‘When will we be able to go there?’ I asked.

  ‘Now,’ he said. I was surprised, for I presumed it would be a daylight event. After dinner Gibson led us through the dark, down the side of the hill and past yet another rice hut until ahead of us we could see a few lights. Then came the sound of chanting. This was it – the preparations for a full-blown Torajan funeral.

  We came across a clearing 30 metres wide by about 150 metres long. Along each side of this area were more than a dozen rice huts, arranged so that people could view the events that would unfold in the clearing. It seemed that some huts had been built especially for the occasion. The front of these buildings looked like any normal rice hut, while the rest of the building remained unfinished.

  Gibson came across a family he knew sitting under one of the rice huts. The father, Paulus, invited us into his family’s hut so we could watch a circle of men and women swaying from side to side and chanting like Tibetan monks.

  The eldest son of the family, Ronny, was
our age but only Paulus spoke understandable English. He introduced us to his wife and youngest son, Budi.

  Paulus was a well-to-do man by local standards, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and shoes with socks. He seemed out of place considering the subsistence living of the locals. Paulus took a shine to our small camera, asking to have a look at it as Josh explained about the filming we were doing. Paulus then proudly pulled out his camera from a top pocket to show us.

  ‘Where are you parents?’ he asked.

  ‘We are travelling alone, just us three, and one other who is sick in Toraja. We’re staying up the hill,’ I told him.

  ‘Will you be staying for the funeral?’ Paulus asked.

  ‘We’d like to,’ came our reply. ‘Who should we ask for permission?’ He smiled and translated our question to his eagerly awaiting family.

  ‘This is my funeral,’ he finally answered.

  I knew he didn’t mean it was his funeral, but he was clearly overseeing the event.

  The deceased person we were honouring was actually an important local chief. Anyone who knew of him would attend the funeral, with thousands of people expected to pass through the funeral grounds over the next four days. Paulus and his family had flown over from Borneo, where he worked as an engineer for a timber company. His relationship with the deceased was not clear. He never explained it and we thought it too rude to ask.

  ‘You can stay with us if you like,’ Paulus said.

  Gibson wasn’t fussed by this, so we accepted Paulus’s offer. I paid Gibson for his help, then we said our farewells and he headed back down the mountain. It was the last we saw of him.

  Paulus’s house was located near one end of the clearing. There seemed to be several families staying in the house. Paulus said they were his family but I wasn’t so sure. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he now considered us part of his family. Needless to say, we were welcomed by all the occupants. We found a patch of floor in the corner of the house and put our bags down not far from where a man and woman were already sleeping. We decided to do the same, for it had been a long day.

  The next morning we found Ronny, who asked us to breakfast. Paulus appeared and joined us on the floor for rice, coffee and buffalo pieces dipped in a tomato and red chilli sauce.

  The four-day funeral, we discovered, was to begin that day. We couldn’t believe our luck. Like any major event, there was a scurry of activity on the funeral site. Dozens of men hauled long bamboo poles as they raced to finish building the rice huts, while live animals were being carted left, right and centre.

  The noise outside the house reminded me of a livestock show. The pigs were the loudest, protesting at being strung upside down on thick bamboo. When each animal was lifted from the ground, the vines that were lashed around its body tightened, sending the pig berserk. Its high-pitched squeals conjured up frightening images of someone being slowly tortured with a hot iron.

  After breakfast, Paulus took us beneath the house to proudly show us his family’s buffalo, which was to be sacrificed during the funeral.

  The Torajans believe that the deceaseds’ spirits are carried by a ship pulled by the spirits of animals slaughtered at the funeral. The buffalo, as the ultimate working beast, is best equipped to drag the ship through rivers and over mountains, finally arriving in paradise. The more buffalos sacrificed at the funeral ceremony, the more pulling power for the ship, which means a greater chance of arriving safely at the heavenly destination.

  However, not everyone can afford to offer a buffalo. One buffalo is equivalent to a year’s wages for many locals. Those who can’t afford a buffalo often bring a pig. We even saw a deer and a pony roaming the funeral grounds. The poorest families can sometimes only afford to offer a couple of chickens. It’d be a fair effort getting to paradise on the back of a chicken’s spirit, I thought.

  Paulus explained how his family’s buffalo would be one of many sacrificed.

  ‘Every buffalo here?’ I asked in disbelief, for everywhere you looked there were buffalos. I estimated I saw at least 40 buffalos during my time there.

  ‘Yes, every buffalo.’

  But before they were killed, they had another use, Paulus added. ‘Bullfights!’ he announced with a smile.

  These were held each afternoon of the funeral on an old rice field further down the hill. After lunch we followed hordes of people down a road to where the field opened up. People scrambled for any vantage point they could find. The owners of half a dozen buffalos proudly walked their beasts to the edge of the field, waiting their turn to fight. Bets were placed and two animals were brought together. Initially they didn’t seem interested in fighting, possibly due to the sheer number of people standing around shrieking with excitement. The owners then led the buffalos directly into each other. Once their heads collided, it was on. They charged at each other, their horns locked together as they battled it out. This went on for about a minute, each buffalo giving no quarter until eventually one could take no more.

  Pandemonium broke out when the bloodied loser of the bout suddenly turned tail and charged towards the crowd, hotly pursued by the victor. Men, women and children leapt for their lives as the frantic loser tried to find an exit from the field. It eventually leapt down an embankment on the far side of the field and charged through some fairly substantial growth to get away.

  After the scores of bets were settled, two more combatants were led onto the field for another violent contest.

  Josh, despite his vegetarian views, was in his element, for suddenly he had so many interesting things to film. Luck had finally turned our way and we couldn’t afford to waste it.

  That first day of the funeral was mostly spent deciding which parts to revisit to film. It was exhausting and when night fell, immediately after we ate our evening meal with Paulus and Ronny, we rolled out our beds, in the same spot we’d been eating, and fell asleep.

  I woke some time later to the sound of chanting. I must have been asleep for only a couple of hours, for the room was still lit by its solitary electric light bulb. I’d heard music in my dreams, only to wake and realise it was actually happening. I listened for a while, then noticed Josh, too, was awake.

  ‘I thought I was dreaming,’ I said, loud enough for only him to hear.

  ‘Yeah it sounds amazing doesn’t it! Should we get up and film it?’

  My body had adjusted to sleep mode and all I felt like doing was letting the chanting carry me back to dream land.

  ‘I just want to enjoy it,’ I said. ‘Hopefully they’ll do it every night.’

  ‘I’m a bit concerned about the tapes,’ Josh said, well awake by now. ‘I could easily use the last 80 minutes tomorrow.’

  It was something that had also been on my mind. We agreed that now that we knew the quality of the footage we could get, there were some tapes on the boat of footage from earlier in the trip that we could afford to tape over.

  ‘Maybe we should wait and see how much we use,’ I urged. ‘If necessary, I can catch the bus back, get the old tapes and check on the boat at the same time.’

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, satisfied. On that note I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what the next few days would bring.

  The following day it was obvious we were going to run out of tape. Josh was becoming very selective with what he shot, but there was still so much to cover. We needed tapes urgently and the only option was for me to make a quick dash back to the boat. If I missed the sacrifice that was just bad luck. Beau and Josh would be there to film as much as possible.

  I hitched a lift back to Toraja at lunchtime on a truck that had just dropped off a load of people at the funeral. Maria was surprised to see me suddenly appear on my own.

  ‘Where’s Beau and Josh?’ she asked. I explained everything, finishing with the need for my dash to the boat. I asked if she wanted to meet the guys at the funeral or come back to the boat with me. She was feeling slightly better but was still rushing to the toilet and had a constant headache. All she felt like doin
g was lying on a bed, so she opted to return with me to Makasar and check into a hotel that had air conditioning.

  I felt sorry for Maria. There is nothing worse than feeling sick in a Third World country. Except seasickness, perhaps. Maria had experienced both and I admired how little she complained.

  We found a bus heading to Makasar that afternoon and piled our bags in. It was another long road trip. Maria sat next to the window, her head glued to the glass, trying to sleep through the ten-hour ordeal.

  It was well into the night by the time the bus finally arrived at a hotel for her to check into. I told her I would see her in a few days’ time. Hopefully, by then, the tapes would have arrived from Customs and we could get her out of that place.

  I headed straight for the boat, happy that the long drive was over and looking forward to a good night’s rest. I was relieved Toraja had uncovered some interesting footage and I looked forward to calling Maya with this small amount of good news. Every piece of good footage was one step closer to her joining Kijana.

  I got to the jetty in the dead of night and found a boat-owner willing to drop me on Kijana. After a solid sleep I was up early and packed two 40-minute tapes into my bag. In the mad dash to make the bus, I forgot to check the seed and water levels in the birdcage. I think my mind was also a bit muddled by the thought of another ten hours bumping along a winding road ahead of me.

  I arrived in Toraja late in the afternoon and caught a lift back to the funeral site. I found the guys among the growing crowd and Josh lunged at the spare tapes in my hand, ramming one into the camera. I was not a moment too soon.

  They’d been working hard while I was away. Beau had taken eight rolls of film and Josh had run out of tape. I was relieved to discover I hadn’t missed the buffalo sacrifice, which was to be staged the following day.

  The following day we witnessed the biggest bloodbath imaginable. It had been one thing to see a pig sliced open on a bush track, but an animal the size of a buffalo was a different matter. The crowd cheering gave the experience a chilling dimension. As distressing as the scene was before us, it was exactly the sort of thing we’d set out to experience on the journey of Kijana.