Showing 1-4 of 4 results
-
A Fistful of Dollars
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 16 September 2010
Our favoured local, back in Rantepao in the Tana Toraja, was the hangout of the local Guides Association, a Teamsteresque conglomerate of the most amiable rogues since Dick Van Dyke. Sporting various permutations of Aviators, moustaches, long hair, cropped hair and funeral sarongs as night-time outerwear, the chaps spent most of their time out back [...]
-
Rafting the Maiting River
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 15 September 2010
We spent our last day in the Tana Toraja whitewater rafting. An activity, which in the mind of the child, now forms a kind of holy trinity with zipwiring and zorbing, as sheer, adrenaline-fuelled, screeching fun. As he put it, “Zipwiring is aerial. Zorbing is, ummm…, terrestrial. And whitewater rafting is the aquatic equivalent.” Or, [...]
-
Buffalo Soldiers: Living for Death in the Tana Toraja
Blog: Travels with a Nine Year Old - 2 September 2010
“Are funerals like this in London?” asks my new Torajan friend. The dead man’s drum-shaped coffin emerges from the matrimonial bedroom where he has “slept”, preserved in formalin, with his family for the last eight months. Now he has left the house, he is finally dead, his soul winging its way towards the afterlife. “Not [...]
-
Lessons on Life and Death in Toraja
Blog: Around The World On The Toilet - 2 July 2010
*ANIMAL LOVERS BEWARE. THIS POST CONTAINS GORY IMAGES. “Of course death is better than life” my guide Budi stated after we just watched the sacrifice of two large buffalo for a funeral ceremony. In my time in Toraja, I could not think of a better summary of their unique cultural beliefs. It was in the [...]
Showing 1-4 of 4 results
