Hidden away in the mountains of South Sulawesi is the closest you’ll probably ever come to a Shangri-La in Indonesia. After making a stopover in fabled Makassar, the province’s capital, the journey begins north into western Torajaland.
I took the overnight bus which turned inland at Polewali on a road the Dutch first hacked out of the mountains in the 1930s. Though improved, the switchbacks up to the cool high town of Mamasa will never really be finished because they’re perpetually being washed away by landslides. Like great bloody wounds, gouges were torn out of the hillsides by the constant sullen rains of this ever cloudy region.
At dusk, the road entered a forest. Tattooed wildboar hunters, carrying spears, trotted along the forest’s edge. As night fell, I could make out the shape of my first traditional house, given the name Tongkanan by eastern Torajans and benua layuk by Mamasans. We bumped into Mamasa at 9 p.m.
Little known and visited, Mamasa is like a miniature version of much larger and better known Torajaland to the east. In the number, fame and antiquity of its tourist attractions, the motherland far outranks Mamasa. It boasts, for example, five times as many traditional houses. But what it does not have is Mamasa’s pollution-free air, its non-commercialism, its innocence. Comprising a 300,000-strong subgroup, it is a time-capsule of traditional Torajan culture. Mamasans speak their own archaic, twangy dialect of Torajan that sounds a bit like spoken Italian.
Surrounded on all sides by mountains, this large valley was for many years made nearly inaccessible by a gut-wrenching road that sealed it off from the outside world. The government only started upgrading the road in the late 1980s, laying the first asphalt in 1997.
The main town – as it cannot possibly be mistaken for a city - also goes by the name of Mamasa. With a population of only 7000, it is small as Indonesian district capitals go. A wide river the color of coffee-with-milk winds through its center. Like an Asian Yosemite, thin white waterfalls streak down dark green mountains in the far distance.
The next morning I trudged up to the village of Rantebuda. Here stood the area’s most majestic and finest benua layuk. Its dimensions, a soaring 25 meters-long by five meters wide, were gigantic for a manmade rough slab wooden structure. No nails were used in its construction. Wood is first immersed in water, jammed into place, and as the planks expand they fasten themselves like cement. The raggedy-grass roof of the building extended so far that it had to be supported by a single tree trunk over a meter thick.
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The shoulder-to-shoulder Mamasa market is not only the vital economic event of the week, but a major tribal gathering as well. For several days, even in the shadows of early morning, I had seen women from all over Mamasa with burdens of coffee, fruit, cloves, and textiles on their heads. They will spend the night, rising at 4 a.m. along with thousands of other blanket-wrapped people, when the market begins to stir like a slumbering behemoth waking beneath a waning moon.
Among the milling sea of people are rustics dressed like gypsies who have come down from the mountains to stock up on such staples as salt, soap, sugar, cooking oil, kerosene, medicines. Noisy cockfights are held in the back and the air is riven with intense haggling and bartering.
I loved best the turbaned old matriarchs, so dignified as they sat straight-backed by their wares. Market-goers rummaged through piles of used and tattered clothing. In another corner, a seller tested the purity of his honey by dipping a match into it, then lighting it.
A scraggly-haired old man with a full Fumanchu moustache, bent over from the weight of his load, handed an empty bottle to a kerosene vendor. Gesturing wordlessly to fill it, he spoke a language no one understood.
The whole scene wrenched my mind back 30 years to the Katmandu valley in the Himalayas. Mamasa gave me that same rush of discovery, that same sense that I had happened upon a Lost Kingdom.
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The Guntar (Thunderbolt) lurched away from a side road adjacent to the market. Buses leave when full, so I wedged myself into the only seat left, to be sure, behind the rear axle. From a speaker over my head Menadonese pop songs blasted at distorted volume, and whenever the driver found another bump my head hit against the roof.
Two hours out of town we put more air in the tires from a roadside compressor, readying ourselves for the assault on the mountains that form a natural barrier to the Mamasa region. It was midway over the range when the vomiting started. I then realized that Mamasa is the Shangri-La it is because of this miserable road.
Hours later, I waited in the suffocating heat, the flies, the cacophony of the Polewali bus terminal. Carrying before it a wall of dust, the big bus to Makassar finally pulled in.
I thought back to that strange and lovely land I had just visited, its spired hills echoing with the sounds of beaten iron, a refuge of old men speaking indecipherable tongues, and I wanted that road never to be finished.
E-mail : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2004 PakBill
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