our trip to tour toraja, sulawesi, indonesia

The vegetation is all so colorful and many plants are recognizable from Rhodesia. The is the Heliconia flower.

Anne outside the hotel rooms.
Hard-working chair carrier loading up after the church service on Sunday.

The child on the right was a scavenger - she came after the big Sunday service event outdoors and picked up all the plastic water cups to recycle them and to get money for her school fees. She couldn't have been more than 6 or 7, but she sure knew how to work!!

Everywhere Jonathan went in the village, he was approached to help with scholarships, buy rice fields, lend credit, etc, as he has been a very successful businessman and a VP for Tourism in the Government and is probably the most prominent man in the community.

He is actually the land owner of the hotel, and has shares in it with other Govt. men who built it in the height of the tourism industry in that area. Unfortunately, the economic downturn has hurt the tourism business since the Bali attack several years ago.

This is the church of Toraja, a most prominent place in the city of Rantepau, the village Jonathan grew up in and where we all stayed for the week.

It is Dutch Reformed, now just Reformed in denomination, and the community is known to be almost 100% Christian as a result of a Dutch missionary who came there in the early 1900s and was killed in an ambush 3 1/2 years later.

There are few Muslims in the community, but they are coming in for business purposes, much to the alarm of the Christians there. They are surrounded by Islamic communities who have persecuted the Christians sorely over the past years, especially in the 1960s.

We arrived in time for Jonathan's initiated Spirituality Week.

His vision is to transform this Christian, formerly animistic community, to less wasteful traditional ceremonies, using their time more for helping with real needs in the community.

The hotel from the front

The rooms were so comfortable and we wish we could have taken the the rattan furniture with us!

We loved the flower in the loo~ Nice touch!

We arrived at the Torajan Heritage Hotel in the dark and had no idea how spectacular the hotel or the surrounding scenery was until morning light. The rooms were so inviting and comfortable and Ian and I had our own "house". Each boat-shaped roof is a unit - some single units but some, like ours with apartments above and below. We were above another apartment, but it was in a stand-alone house. The Torajan clans build their villages in these units of about 6-8 houses with barns for their rice storage in identical designs opposite them in a rectangular area. So, as you see these houses in the picture, they are designed with the roofs designed like traditional houses, but real houses in the villlage consist of 3 rooms and underneath is a platform for sitting on, for eating, and entertaining guests.

Note the mountains in the background. The air was welcomingly clean and cool after Jakarta's heat and smog. We slept with our windows open and could hear the roosters crowing in the morning to wake us up - after the crier to wake the muslims up for prayers and before the inevitable motorbikes putting around.

Exhausted, we all arrived at Jonathan's (left) deceased parents home where his sisters Abbe (left) and Dina (middle) had a warm meal awaiting us. Below, little Ranier had conked out and her daddy Tagor had to carry her. It had been a very long trip for the kids. They were great!

Road snack time - hot noodles, dried bananas and sweet tea or coffee. Toraja is coffee territory and is world famous for its Arabica coffee.

The view was magnificent, but because of the poor time we made on the road due to construction, we couldn't see how amazing it was in the dim light. We did enjoy it on the way home!
We stopped at another place to eat and use the bathroom way up in the mountains. All alongside the road were fruit stalls, and this place was the same. Note the sizes of the bananas! They grow wild here and they are delicious! we had them for dessert every day in Toraja.