buffalo horns stacked up a house post, cloud gone by ten

Reserve twelve nights in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, guided end to end

Twelve nights are held on this reservation: one on the Makassar seafront, eight in the Toraja highlands with a guide on every one of them, two at Palopo on the Gulf of Bone, and a last one back at the coast. The figure is $4,516 per person on two sharing, without the flight. People go for the season when a family that has kept its dead at home for a year finally gathers the money and the relatives and sends them out.

Send a booking requestThe Pine Gazette answers every request within one business day.

You can reserve a guided twelve night trip to Tana Toraja through this office and have the whole of it fixed before you leave home: a man holding a card with your name on it at Makassar, a driver who has already asked which of the two roads north is passable that week, and a Toraja guide at the guesthouse gate at seven the following morning. The figure is $4,516 per person on two sharing, and it does not carry your flight.

Toraja is not difficult to get into. It is difficult to time. The thing most people go for is a rambu solo', the funeral a family holds once it has finally gathered the money and the relatives, and there is no calendar for it you can read from Louisiana. Dates are set locally a few weeks out, usually somewhere between June and September, and a foreign party gets in because a guide knows the family, walks in with the gift, and holds the district permission that covers outsiders standing on ceremonial ground. That permission belongs to the operator, is filed in your names, and is one of the two reasons this rung exists at all.

The other is the driving. Makassar to Rantepao is about 205 miles and takes eight to ten hours in a car, on two lanes that climb through Enrekang behind trucks doing twenty. It gets done twice, once in each direction. On a trip built this way you do it in the back seat with a cooler of water and nothing to work out.

Everything met and guided

Somebody is waiting at arrival, a guide is with the party most days, and every transfer and entry is held in advance.

No rung is better than another. Each one is a different amount of work for the traveller and a different figure.

One rung with more left to you: guided in parts

What it costs: 12 nights, from $4,516 per person.
What this reserves: On this rung The Pine Gazette books the whole run of it, twelve nights of rooms, the car and driver, the highland guide, every site entry and the standing arrangement that lets a foreign party attend a family ceremony, and it does not book the flight into Indonesia, which stays with the traveller.
Shape of the booking: The booking holds one twin or double room for twelve nights across four addresses, a car and driver for the full period including the two road days, a Toraja guide on all eight highland days, and one hour on Lake Tempe in a boat run by an operator licensed for that water.
Who books it: Somebody booking this wants to be met at the arrivals door and then decide nothing for twelve days, in a place where the thing worth going for is a private family event you cannot walk into by yourself.
Why somebody chooses another rung: If you would rather set your own hours, sleep where you land and skip the days when nothing is happening in the villages, the rungs further along buy the room and the pickup and leave the other eleven days open.
In the figure: twelve nights of rooms, two sharing, in a town guesthouse at Rantepao, a four room place on the ridge at Batutumonga, a plain business hotel at Palopo and a seafront hotel at Makassar; a car and an English speaking driver for the whole period, including both road days; a Toraja guide on all eight highland days, from seven in the morning; every site entry, covering the burial caves, the cliff graves, the megalith field and the village compounds; the district permission that lets a foreign party stand on ceremonial ground, filed in the party's names by the operator and renewed by it every year; the customary gift carried in to each family, sugar and coffee, bought in the market that morning; one hour on Lake Tempe in a small boat run by an operator licensed for that water; breakfast daily and eight dinners, including the two on the ridge where dinner is at seven or not at all; drinking water in the vehicle throughout; meeting at arrivals on the first day and the run back to the airport on the last.
Not in the figure: the flight into Indonesia and home again, which is yours to book, roughly $1,250 to $2,100 round trip out of the American South in an ordinary month; lunches, $3 to $9 a head in the highlands and $6 to $14 on the coast; the four dinners left open, $5 to $15; drinks and coffee outside meals, $1 to $4; laundry at the guesthouse, $3 to $7 a load; the customary end of trip amount for guide and driver, about $8 to $12 a day between two people; the camera fee charged at two of the burial sites, $1 to $2; a length of hand woven silk at Sengkang, $20 to $180 depending on the loom; a single room in place of two sharing, $310 for the twelve nights; any change of dates after the operator has confirmed, quoted case by case.
Who should not book it: Do not book this if you cannot sit out two road days of eight to ten hours on two lane road, much of it behind trucks in low gear on the Enrekang grades. Ceremony days mean two to three hours standing on packed earth in the open, and animals are killed by hand ten to twenty feet from where the guests sit, with the crowd talking through it and the meat divided in front of everyone. The ridge guesthouse at Batutumonga is at about 4,600 feet, the rooms are reached by stone steps with no rail, and the water is heated over wood and runs cool for the second person. Anyone who wants a clean line between their holiday and another family's grief should take a different rung.

This is a starting figure, worked out for two people sharing a room. Costing the exact days you name runs two to four working days, since the firm operating the trip has to answer first. No air ticket is ever inside it.

The road up from the sea

The first four hours run north along the west coast to Pare-Pare, flat and hot, fish drying on frames at the roadside and the sea on your left the whole way. After that the road turns inland and starts to climb. Somewhere near mile 120 the Enrekang valley opens on the right and a ridge of eroded rock stands in it, split into two rounded shapes, and every driver stops. From there it is another three hours of switchbacks to the gate above the Toraja basin and then a long drop into it.

Rantepao is at about 2,600 feet. Days run 80 to 84 degrees and nights fall to 61 or 62, cold enough that the ridge houses put out a second blanket without being asked. Being three degrees south of the equator, the light is the same all year: up around ten past six, gone by ten past six, no long evening at either end of the trip. Cloud sits in the basin most mornings and lifts around ten.

Fine wind rippled dune sand with marram shoots pushing through

Houses that face north, graves cut into rock

Facing each ancestral house across a swept courtyard stands the rice barn, smaller, same roof line, on six smooth posts a rat cannot climb. Between the two is where the family sits, and where you will be sat.

Burial is not in the ground. At Londa the coffins go back into a limestone cave and a boy walks ahead of you with a pressure lamp; the galleries are low enough that you duck, and the older coffins have opened. At Lemo the graves are square holes cut forty feet up a bare face, each with a balcony beside it, and the figures on the balconies are carved from jackfruit wood, dressed, and recut when the weather takes their faces off. At Kambira an infant was laid inside the trunk of a living tarra tree, sealed with fiber, and the bark grew over the opening.

At Bori' Kalimbuang, twenty minutes north of town, the standing stones are set in grass with nothing fenced and no sign, and nobody explains them to you unless you ask.

January: rain most afternoons and often all night; the cave floor at Londa stays slick past noon
February: the wettest stretch of the year, and almost no ceremonies, because the fields are being worked
March: rain easing, the terraces under Batutumonga turning green
April: the first house blessings; days near 82 degrees, nights near 62
May: coffee picking starts on the upper slopes, 4,000 feet and above
June: families begin setting funeral dates and the month fills from the middle
July: the heaviest month for funerals, three or four within an hour of Rantepao on one day
August: the least wet month at roughly four inches, and the Bolu market at its fullest
September: ceremonies still running, the coffee harvest ending, cloud gone by nine

Weathered limestone pavement seen from directly above, deep fissures still wet

What the ceremony asks of you

A rambu solo' runs several days on ground the family builds for it: bamboo pavilions on stilts around a rectangle, roofed, put up in a week and pulled down after. Guests come in black, in groups, called forward by family. The gift is read out loud as it arrives, a sack of sugar, tins of coffee, a pig, a buffalo from a family that owes one back, and the reading is the point. You will be given sweet tea and left alone for long stretches while nothing at all happens.

Then the animals. They are led into the rectangle one at a time and killed by hand with a single stroke, in the open, and the meat is cut and shared out by rank while everyone watches. The count is the whole ledger of a family's standing. An ordinary buffalo runs 25 to 40 million rupiah; a piebald one can pass 500 million. None of it is hidden and none of it is staged for visitors. If you want a photograph you ask first, and the guide will tell you when to lower the camera.

Down to the Gulf of Bone

The road east out of Rantepao climbs to about 4,900 feet and then loses all of it in roughly 25 miles of switchbacks. The driver pulls over twice on the way down, which is what every driver does on that grade. Palopo is a working port on the Gulf of Bone, the fish landing at its busiest around five in the morning and finished by seven, the water about 84 degrees in every month of the year. Two nights are held there mainly so the return is not another ten hour day on top of the first.

The way back to Makassar runs south through Sengkang, where the looms are in front rooms and a length of silk takes weeks off one. The hour on Lake Tempe is part of the booking: the lake spreads to something like 13,000 hectares in the wet and shrinks to a third of that by September, and the houses on it float on bamboo and get poled to new ground when the water moves. That hour is run by a local operator licensed for that water, under its own permission, and it goes on the invoice of the company that runs the trip rather than on anything of ours.

What Pine Gazette Bookings LLC does is put your dates in front of that company and come back to you with a written figure, which takes two to four working days from the moment we have the dates and the number of people. We hold title to nothing described above: not the vehicle, not a bed, not the boat on the lake. The operating company confirms the reservation, sends you its own invoice on its own paperwork, and collects from you directly. Getting yourself to Indonesia is your own arrangement and this office arranges no flight. Nothing is collected here at any stage.

The office is at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, Louisiana 70001. Call +1 (504) 832-6194 or write to bookings@thepinegazette.com with your month and the number of people, and if something on this page reads wrong to you, corrections@thepinegazette.com goes to the person who maintains it.

Send a booking request

This form takes booking requests 24 hours a day. A person reads it and answers within one business day. Sending it is not a reservation, it costs nothing, and this office will not telephone or text you unless you ask it to.