The things I travel with affect the way I travel much less than things I travel without. I travel without a partner; this forces me to be responsible for curbing the inevitable loneliness by reaching out and talking to as many people as possible. I travel without a camera; this forces me to be more conscious and mindful at all times in order to better preserve memories. I travel without a Lonely Planet or similar holy book of the gap-year generation; this gives me the freedom of arriving in a completely foreign place with zero prior knowledge and no expectations.
Feeling in the mood for some companionship I find myself glad to be accompanied by a Dutchman by the name of Remy. We have spent the last two days going to towns near Makassar, Sulawesi to seeing waterfalls and butterflies and multiple hours of punishing public transport in between. The name we have heard almost every time we ask for a recommendation for our next destination is a region called Tana Toraja. Knowing nothing about the place we roll into the central town, Rantepao, around 9am after a surprising luxurious night bus from Makassar. We walk up and down a few streets and all the hotels we find are either full or of a price range approximately equivalent of a weeks budget for us. We are now nervous that this region will turn out to be a tourist trap hell full of plaques with politically correct paragraphs about culture and history leading down a path to a gift shop.
While we walk around the town we more than once have to get way off the road to make way for motorbike gangs rumbling around on demufflered bikes each group with their own matching t-shirts, headbands, flags and even large flat bed trucks with dance parties going on on the back. Apparently this how they do political campaigns here. No TV ads promising hope and change just body painted young people seemingly intimidating their fellow citizens for votes.
Eventually the two of us are successful in finding a reasonably priced hotel with an available room. After setting down our bags the friendly owner serves us coffee and we start hashing out a plan. The plan is this: rent motorbikes down the street and head to a town called Palawa, as per the recommendation of the hotel proprietor. We find the man with the bikes and after a bit of haggling get him down to 55,000 Rupiah (about $6) a bike for the day. After buying fuel at the side of the road from glass bottles we are off. Following vague hand waving as direction and dealing with a few more mobile rallies/raves we are soon out of the town area and on the jungle road. Palawa, here we come!
Winding up and down switchbacks we enter and exit pools of mist going through arrogantly green valleys. The road is sporadically paved and we share it with manically driven buses, trucks, cars and fellow motorbikes along with buffalo and uniformed children walking to/from classes. We stop occasionally to absorb the view, eat junk food, pee and drink water and at one point to investigate a deftly spotted roadside cave which turns out to be small and housing no mysteries other than moss, cigarette butts and spiders.
After about an hour we realize we are not at all headed towards Palawa but to some place called Palopo, we missed the turnoff way back near town. A quick examination of a map shows Palopo is on the coast, "OK we're going to the sea" Palopo, here we come!
After another hour of high speed riding we are sweating, our hands and butts are vibration-sore and we are happy to be only 5 kilometers from the sea, a swim in cold water never sounded so good. As we reach the outskirts of a small town a trio of self-important looking men stick out their hands and wave us to the side of the road. Shit, cops! Their English skills are nonexistent but we know exactly whats going on. They have moneybags in their eyes and have just spotted two fat wallets roll into town. Our crime is not wearing helmets - as if a country where 6 year-olds smoke and drive bikes much more erratically and faster than us is concerned with enforcing health and safety laws. After passing around our dictionaries they make it clear they want 50,000 Rupiah from each of us. Once they have our money (their booze and cigarettes) they become very friendly posing for pictures with us on their camera-phones. We head back to Rantepao, as lightning flashes all around and the rain starts as it does every evening - this'll have to be our swim for the day.
Next morning we opt not to rent bikes, it'll be bemos (vans with wood benches in the back) and hitch-hiking for us today. After many hours of sunburnt walking and a ride on the back of a flatbed we stumble into a small town in a valley to the confusion and amazement of the local children. We walk up a hillside to find many small structures on stilts with swooping roofs housing the dead, along with large boulders also carved out and housing corpses - cigarettes and drinks laid outside, y'know case they wake up with a mad-hankerin' for a coke and a smoke. The rest of the day is more sunburns, hitching and views of beautiful valleys.
Day 3, it's our last in the area so it's back to the motorbike way of getting around (different rental place, helmets this time). After further wrong directions we eventually find Londa, what to expect we are unsure. As we walk up a hill a morbid one is set for the day - bones. On the cliff above are hanging coffins made of rotting wood. Many of them have crumbled and fallen right beside the path with the dude inside sprawled out like an awkward skeleton puddle. More cigarettes and drinks laid beside them (to be fair if I awoke and my skull was on a hillside a few meters from a pile ribs, not clearl mine or my buddies, I'd probably need a cigarette or five-hundred). The top of the hill leads to a cave and you'd never guess what's inside...BODIES! Yeah, everything is corpses in this region. Corpses and cigarettes. Everywhere you look is bones and coffins often stacked haphazardly on top of each other. Another cave a few miles down the road is the same story with the added bonus of spiders the size of a chihuahua.
Returning to town, the land of further political rumbles, sleazy guides and van drivers and Police with well lined pockets it's hard to not picture some of the less lovable characters with their skulls teetering on a slimey cliff walk, spiders crawling through their eye-sockets.
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