Rantepao

Toraja means, roughly, people of the uplands, a name given by lowlanders to the communities living in these valleys. Before the 20th century there was no single Toraja state: society was organised around the tongkonan, the ancestral house, and around local nobles, and the highlands traded coffee, forest products and slaves with the Bugis and Makassarese kingdoms of the coast while resisting their control. Rantepao itself was a market place at a river crossing rather than a capital.

Dutch forces moved into the highlands in the first years of the 20th century, meeting armed resistance before imposing colonial administration; Rantepao became one of their administrative posts, and the colonial government abolished slavery and gave the highlanders the name Toraja in 1909. Missionaries of the Reformed Church began work in the 1920s, and over the 20th century most Torajans became Christian while keeping the funerary rites of the older religion, Aluk To Dolo. The Dutch encouraged coffee growing and built the road that still links the highlands to Makassar.

After independence the region was disturbed by the Darul Islam rebellion in South Sulawesi in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1970s Toraja became one of Indonesia's best-known destinations, with foreign visitors arriving to see funerals and tongkonan villages, and tourism became a significant part of the local economy alongside coffee and remittances from Torajans working elsewhere in Indonesia and abroad. In 2008 the old Tana Toraja Regency was divided, and Rantepao became the seat of the new North Toraja Regency.

Toraja identity rests on the tongkonan, the ancestral house with its towering saddle-shaped roof, carved and painted in red, black and yellow with motifs of buffalo heads, roosters and spirals, facing a row of rice barns across a courtyard. A tongkonan belongs to a descent group rather than a person, and rebuilding one is itself an occasion for ceremony.

Ritual is divided between rites of the rising sun, Rambu Tuka', which celebrate harvests, marriages and houses, and rites of the setting sun, Rambu Solo', the funerals for which the region is known. A death is followed by months or years of preparation while the family gathers resources and relatives return home; the ceremony that follows lasts days, with processions, guests housed in temporary pavilions, chanting and dance, and the sacrifice of buffalo and pigs whose meat is distributed according to status. The dead are then placed in tombs cut into rock, in caves or in hanging coffins, and in some families a carved effigy, a tau tau, is set on a balcony at the site. These are acts of respect and obligation towards ancestors, and the expense involved is considerable.

Water buffalo, especially the pale spotted tedong bonga, are the measure of wealth and are traded at Pasar Bolu for very large sums. Alongside all this, Sunday churchgoing, choirs, school and coffee define ordinary life, and Torajans who have moved away return for ceremonies from across Indonesia.

Rantepao is a small town of a few tens of thousands of people and the seat of North Toraja Regency, which has about 270,000 in all, living in the valley bottoms and in hamlets scattered up the slopes. The rhythm is agricultural: rice in terraced fields worked by hand and buffalo, coffee on the higher ground, vegetables, pigs and chickens around the houses. Market days at Bolu, which fall on a rotating cycle rather than a fixed weekday, draw people in from the whole district.

The other economies are tourism — guesthouses, guides, drivers and carvers — and money sent home by Torajans working in Makassar, Papua, Kalimantan and abroad, much of it saved towards ceremonies and houses. Many families keep a foot in both worlds, with children at school or university in the city and grandparents in the village.

Days start early and cool, with mist on the terraces, church bells or roosters, and traffic of motorbikes into town. Afternoons bring rain for much of the year. Concern locally is over the price of coffee, the cost of ceremonies, young people leaving for work elsewhere, road conditions in the hills and how to keep tourism respectful and worthwhile now that it has become part of the economy.

Toraja cooking is unusual in Indonesia in being neither Muslim nor coastal. The celebrated dish is pa'piong: meat — most often pork, sometimes chicken or fish — chopped with grated coconut, spices, lemongrass and local greens such as the leaves of cassava or mayana, packed into lengths of bamboo and cooked slowly over an open fire, so the bamboo flavours the contents. It is the centrepiece of ceremonies and ordered ahead in restaurants.

Pork is common, roasted or stewed, and buffalo meat appears after ceremonies, distributed among guests and often sold on in the market. Vegetables are highland ones — pakis fern tips, bamboo shoots, chayote, cassava leaves — usually cooked with chilli and coconut. Deppa tori, a fried sesame-topped rice cake sweetened with palm sugar, is the local snack, and black rice and sticky rice dishes appear at feasts.

Coffee is the highlands' other great product. Arabica has been grown on these slopes since colonial times, and Toraja beans are sold abroad as a premium origin; in the town they are drunk plain, strong and hot. Tuak, palm wine tapped from sugar palms, is drunk at gatherings, and ballo', its local name, is offered at ceremonies alongside sweet tea.