Between Jogja, Makassar & Toraja

It's been several days after I arrived back from traveling to Jogja, Makassar & Toraja. Felt like I was back from the 'world': long hours of traveling in the bus, airport view, meeting new people, eating strange-delicious food. My husband said to me, now you're complete because beside traveling around the world you're finally traveling inside Indonesia.

There's a special experience I would like to share with you... When I was acompanying Sebastian Winkels & Icang in shooting their video diary in Jogja, for the first time I saw Kalasan Temple. It was much smaller than Prambanan or the famous-huge-commercialized Borobudur temple, but it's the oldest one. Also it was 'hidden' in between people's houses and only few steps away from the main road. Somehow I became part of it, became part of some events took place centuries ago. You don't have to imagine it, you just need to sit and enjoy its silence, then you became part of it. You just knew it, somehow.

In Makassar I met nice people who just help you out without knowing who you are. Don't know some of their names, but still they make me want to go back there again. I love how they're really proud of their culture. I wish all Indonesians are like the Makassar people, still using their own language although some will also learn English, to become a tour guide for example. Besides all this sea food at its very best taste, I found that I still don't know anything about their culture. It's like all the things I read from books would be too small. I also went to Laeng Laeng, which are caves with paintings of pig and hands from the pre-history time. The stone hills surrounding us, trying to explain something with the bluest sky I've ever saw as their beautiful blanket.

Toraja on the other hand just suck you in with their highly demanding dedication to the dead. It's a cemetery tour only. It's how the dead still helping out the living people by letting strangers looking at them months or years after their death, in their sculptured-dirt coloured house. They even give you tours inside the cave where they burried their family. For me it's becoming too direct than my experience in Kalasan Temple where I could still keep the distance. Cause I am a stranger among them. But there no such thing in Toraja, everything's shared between them, including the expensive-huge-mass ritual for burrying the dead with a hundred buffalos as their meal.

I found out that the mistery of the past would stay as a mistery, no matter how good we are in researching them. You would never feel the feeling, the mood, the sense of the past. You can only feel its impression and sometimes its longing for its discovery by the present time, if you're lucky. They will be re-discovered again and again forever, I hope...

lulu, Multiplus Buncit, 11.43, September 18, 2006