What to Know Before You Go
In Toraja, high in the mountains of Indonesia's Sulawesi Island, the worlds of the living and the dead stand side by side — with hardly anything dividing the two. As a result, the Torajan realm of the dead is just as colorful (if not as lively) as that of the living.
Cave floors littered with human bones and offerings of cigarettes; towering tongkonan (Toraja houses) set high on pillars; effigies called “tau-tau” staring with sightless eyes out of openings in a cliff; and regular sacrifices of buffaloes to appease the spirits of the newly departed — these all spring from the belief that the departed ancestors of Toraja have not really “departed” at all.
Spend a few days in Toraja to take in the fresh mountain air and the hospitality of the locals — and you'll find how happily they live, even in the ever-present gaze of their sainted ancestors. The unique culture of Toraja is well-worth the ten-hour curvy mountain drive it takes to get there!
Where Is Toraja, Indonesia?
The highlands of South Sulawesi in Indonesia isolated the Toraja people from much of the cultural ferment that overtook the island's coastal areas in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the old days, Dutch missionaries and Bugis mercenaries must have taken several days of hard marching to reach the Toraja homeland, located in mountainous terrain some 200 miles north of the capital Makassar.
A concrete highway makes short work of that distance today, requiring only about eight to ten hours' ride by bus. (The Torajans have a reputation as excellent mechanics; they operate most of the buses connecting Makassar to their homeland.)
Travelers disembark at Rantepao, North Toraja's capital and its cultural center. Rantepao's low-slung urbanity, chock-a-block with low 1960s-era buildings and the occasional tongkonan-style structures, quickly gives way to rice fields and towering limestone peaks.
The cooler weather is your only immediate clue to Toraja's elevation. You'll need to visit lookout points like Lolai to get a visceral idea of your place in the highlands: in the mornings, the lookout point at Lolai feels like an island peeking out of a sea of clouds.
What Sets Toraja Culture Apart From the Rest of Indonesia?
As the lowland Bugis and Makassar people underwent conversion to Islam and later Dutch colonization, the Toraja managed to hang on to their traditional beliefs — Aluk Todolo, or “the way of the ancestors” — that still serve as the basis for Toraja's culture today.
Even after the mass conversion of most Torajans to Christianity, adherence to old Aluk Todolo habits die hard.
The Toraja people arrange their lives around their position on respective social and spiritual ladders. Social: a four-tiered class system with royalty at the very top, and servants at the very bottom. Spiritual: three different levels, from our mortal life to puya, the afterlife, to heaven for noble spirits and gods (deata).
The traditional villages in Toraja — such as Pallawa — preserve the locals' original lifestyle, embodied in the area's iconic curved-roof tongkonan houses. Each community houses a single family or clan, who live in the row of houses facing north; smaller rice granaries (alang) line the other side of the lane.
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Torajan Status Symbols
Many traditional tongkonan feature a column of water buffalo horns, arranged according to size. These horns are markers of status: the remnants of previous sacrifices in honor of some dearly departed ancestor.
The people of Toraja — like every society in the world — busy themselves with collecting status symbols, accumulating and spending wealth, and breeding descendants. Torajans use rites of passage to cement their status, wealth and family standing in society; nowhere is this more apparent than in Toraja's famous funerary rites.
When death comes for a Torajan, the family lays the corpse in the master bedroom and treats it like a patient. “Father is sick,” a Torajan matriarch might say of her husband, his corpse lying in state in the next room, wearing his pajamas, and being served food once a day by his obedient children. (Torajans use a traditional embalming fluid using the juices of betel-leaf and bananas to ward off decay.)
As the body slowly mummifies in the tongkonan, the family pulls out all the stops to arrange the biggest party money can buy: a funeral usually held over a month after the time of death. Torajans believe that souls cannot enter puya (the afterlife) unless they perform a proper makaru'dusan ritual — involving the sacrifice of as many pigs and water buffaloes as they can afford.
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The Water Buffalo: An Unlikely Status Symbol
Water buffaloes do no work in Toraja, despite the area's endless rice terraces. Torajans do brisk trade in these beasts nonetheless, to go by the large, lowing herd perpetually on display at Rantepao's Pasar Bolu market.
Every rite of passage calls for the sacrifice of several buffaloes or pigs — but the rules are particularly stringent for funerals. Aluk Todolo (the way of the ancestors) sets out the minimum number of beasts to be slaughtered, depending on your status in society. Middle-class families must offer at least eight buffalo and 50 pigs; noble families must slaughter upward of a hundred buffalo in the event of a funeral.
Families spend about 500 million Indonesian rupiah (USD $37,000) per water buffalo, with the price reaching astronomical heights for buffalo of a certain color or pattern.
Tedong saleko, or white buffaloes with black spots, can fetch up to 800 million rupiah (USD $60,000) while the most expensive buffalo of all — albino buffalo called tedong bonga — can cost over one billion rupiah (US$75,000)!
No part of the buffalo goes to waste — in a conspicuous show of generosity, the family donates the meat to community members who attend the funeral.
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Torajan Coffee
Toraja's highland climate makes it an ideal environment for Arabica coffee cultivation.
Thanks to the relative difficulty of getting here (at least in the 19th century), Toraja's coffee plantations were spared from the coffee-leaf rust epidemic that swept Indonesia in the 1870s; as a result, Torajan coffee was so prized, a “Coffee War” broke out in the 1890s to seize control of the local coffee and its trade routes.
Today, combat is the last thing on anyone's agenda, when seeking Torajan coffee. You can buy a cup of hot joe in every coffee shop, restaurant and warung (street stall) in Toraja. For beans and ground, budget shoppers can head over to Malanggo' Market to buy inexpensive Robusta by the liter (about 10,000 Indonesian rupiah per liter, or USD $0.75).
Shoppers with a bigger budget and more discriminating tastes in coffee can head over to Coffee Kaa Roastery, a specialty coffee dispensary with Arabica beans and ground labeled according to type and origin. Beans at Kaa cost about 20,000 Indonesian rupiah per kilogram, or about US$1.50.
