Apologies for the delay in posting - I have spent the last week and a half travelling with limited internet access. The other volunteers and I have been travelling around Sulawesi, another of the big islands in Indonesia. It has been a fantastic trip and I was lucky enough to spend it in excellent company.
We spent the first couple of days visiting one of the regional offices of our NGO in an area called Jeneponto. I was completely blown away by the kindness and generosity of the people we met there. They were so welcoming of us, even though we were only there for a brief visit and some of them only spoke basic English. There seems to be a different attitude to friendship here; it is immediate and automatic rather than reserved for those who have proven their 'worth' in some unspoken way, as often seems to be the case in our culture. One of the employees in the Jeneponto office, Annie, not only allowed us to stay in her house, but took her entire Saturday to show us around. Moreover, her mother and grandmother, who didn't speak a word of English between them, made sure that we were well fed at all times. In Jeneponto, we were first taken to see the office, then to visit a horse market (horse meat is a local delicacy) and then to a village. In the village we went to visit the local chief and were once again treated to a delicious home-cooked meal. After lunch we were taken on a tour of the village, including a boat ride round the chief's seaweed farm. I am so lucky to have the social network provided by the NGO; it has allowed me to visit places and meet people that would otherwise be entirely inaccessible. The NGO describe themselves as a family and this was certainly borne out by our experiences in Jeneponto
On Sunday we headed to Tana Toraja (that of the Lonely Planet fame) for a whirlwind tour of the region. Whilst planning the trip we had unfortunately overestimated our tolerance of long bus journeys and underestimated our need for sleep and booked ourselves onto two consecutive overnight busses. I think overnight busses are a little like childbirth; you subconsciously forget how bad they are, otherwise you would never get on another one. They are sufficiently comfortable that you feel sleepy, but not quite comfortable enough to actually allow you to sleep (the air conditioning on this one was practically arctic). We survived, but I would not recommend it.
We arrived in Rantepao at around 5am and spent a good half an hour wandering the streets, stupid with tiredness. We eventually found a cafe where we could sit and drink tea until daylight came. As soon as morning arrived we headed to the tourist information centre to hire ourselves a guide for the day. Our guide Asis took us to a number of Tarajan villages and through a valley of rice paddies. The first village we visited confirmed some of my fears about tourism in Toraja (see last week's blog entry). As beautiful as the traditional 'boat' houses were, the village seemed to have been created entirely for the purposes of tourism. Despite Asis' protestations that the village had inhabitants, I saw no real signs of life, and there seemed to be more souvenir shops than houses. Nevertheless, the houses were stunning and it was interesting to hear how their size and layout relfect social organisation and cultural beliefs (for instance, the bigger the house, the more important the person). Later in the day we visited another village, in which the houses were more lived in - one was even under construction - which made me feel a little less of a gullible tourist.
It might sound morbid but Torajan culture is famous primarily for its fascination with death. The traditional house all face North - the domain of the divine - in order to form a bridge between the living and the dead. We were taken to see some elaborate graves, including a tree in which dead babies are buried because the white sap of the tree is thought to be like the mother's milk. Torajan culture is perhaos most famous for its elaborate funeral rituals, some of which involve slaughtering hundreds of buffalo at immense financial cost (a big funeral is a sign of high social status). Unfortunately the funerals only take place in July and August (sometimes people save up for years to hold a funeral) but Asis kindly invited us back to his house to see some photos he had saved on his computer.
As anyone who has travelled round Asia will tell you, lavatory facilities can be a little - how shall I put it? - unsavory. Over the course of the week a competition developed to see who could find the worst offender. The toilet in the cafe we visited in the early hours of Sunday morning was a definite contender: it was a simple concrete shed with no lock and no lighting; not even so much as a squat toilet, only a drain in the corner. Now, I don't know whether you have ever tried to pee in pitch black, holding the door shut with your hand, desperately trying not to let you clothes or belongings touch the walls or floor, with an Indonesian woman chopping vegetables only a metre away, but I can assure you that it is a deeply unpleasant experience. This was followed by an amusing incident later in the day when Hannah realised she needed the loo in a remote Torajan village. At the behest of our tour guide she decided to brave the 'natural toilet', only to emerge from the bushes a few minutes later looking sheepish, flagged by an angry looking farmer. Over the course of the long journey home this competition developed into an elaborate ranking system, which we designated the Study of the Hygiene of Indonesian Toilets (S.H.I.T.)
The only real blight on the week was that soon after arriving at our hotel in Makassar we realised that Hannah and I had been robbed on the bus. As soon as Hannah realised her cash had been taken, I was filled with a horrible sense of foreboding, soon confirmed when I found my camera missing. My camera was by far the most valuable of my posessions, in both economic and sentimental terms, and I was utterly devastated by the loss. It left me with a bad taste in my mouth to think that someone could be so selfish, so devious, as to climb under my seat whilst I was asleep, take by bag, remove the valuables, and then carefully return it. Even worse was the realisation that the other passengers must have been aware of what was happening, but no one saw fit to stop it. However, there is nothing that can be done to change the situation and I have been trying to see the bright side. I am one of those tourists who takes a million pictures, terrified of missing an opportunity, convinced that somehow can experience doesn't 'count' if you don't have a photographic reminder of it. I think that travelling without a camera will force me to value experiences for what they are, rather than worrying about documenting them on film.
Luckily, I spent the next four days in such an amazing place that the theft could not have been further from my mind. Bunaken island forms part of the Manado-Bunaken National Park, one of the world's best diving sites. We were met at the airport by a representative of our hotel - Lorenzo's - and driven to the coast, where a small motor boat was waiting to take us to the island. It was sunset when we arrived and I remember sitting in the boat, looking out over the stunning scenery, just awestruck by the simple thought that of all the places in the world I could possibly be, I was here .
Lorenzo's Beach Garden is a small collection of bamboo huts, sitting on a beach in a private lagoon. I think it is entirely possible that the proprietor, Lorenzo, is the happiest man on the planet. He spends his days lounging in hamocks, eating amazing food and swimming in the world-class coral reef that is his garden. The four of us passed four very happy, lazy days in his establishment, reading in hamocks and sitting up at night playing cards. We were treated to three amazing meals a day; pancakes and fruit every day for breakfast, followed by two hearty meals of rice and fresh fish. The first night happened to be my birthday and, unbeknowst to me, my friends had prepared a few suprises, including a birthday banner, a feather boa and sparkly tiara (what birthday would be complete without a little humiliation?) and a very thoughtful present: a lock for my posessions! We spent that evening having a few drinks at a neighbouring resort. Presumably as payback for my actions on our night out in Jakarta, Hannah made sure that the lead singer of the band knew it was my birthday and I was soon up on stage being serenaded. The singer began with happy birthday and then moved on, somewhat less traditionally, to Creep by Radiohead. I found it impossible not to get the giggles when he was kneeling at my feet singing "you're so very special . . ." with all the verve and sincerity of a Celine Dion Power Ballad.
It would have been a dreadful shame to visit one of the world's premier diving sites without seeing the coral for ourselves, so on Thursday the four of us hired a boat and an instructor and headed out to sea. I was aware that scuba diving would be a once in a lifetime experience, but when I got down there I was absolutely dumbstruck by the beauty of it. Words, quite simply, cannot do it justice. It was like every David Attinborough documentary you've ever seen, but better. Even though we were only about 12 meters down, we were right up close to the coral, swimming through shoals of brightly coloured fish. I had expected that the fish would swim away whenever we tried to get near them, but they seemed almost oblivious of us and I even reached and and touched one. During my dive I saw a stingray and a barracuda (on their dive Jenna and Kamran saw sharks but, if I'm honest, I was quite happy to miss out on that experience). Whilst we were on our way home we saw a school of dolphins in the distance, which was just the icing on the - already delicious - cake.
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