Tana Toraja

After a couple of days in Makasaar, Alon decided to go on a three day trip to Tana Toraja, 9 hour bus ride away, where there was a lot to be seen.
It was good for both John and Alon to have a bit of time out after a long time together. It was also good to have a bit of time away from the boat and see a bit of inland in Indonesia.

Toraja is a part of the Sulawesi island where the majority of people are christian and there are a lot of different traditions around death and burial.

Working in the rice fields

The water buffaloes are everywhere over there

At one stage they used to bury their dead in holes they dug in the rock. Every door is a whole family. Then they put a manikin that represent the dead person.

A traditional funeral. All the bereaved sit around, eat and receive presents while everybody else is chanting and dancing around.

Lots of pigs were slaughtered that day...

After the funeral we went to see a cock fight. It's only legal when there's a funeral ceremony going on and it's a part of it...

The cock fighting ring, or "the cock ring"

A Torajan landscape. The roofs are in the shapeof boats, to symbolize their ancestors that came from the sea. On them they put a lot of buffalo horns because that's their most important animal.

...And there was a cave full of skulls and human bones. 200-800 years ago they used to just throw their dead in the caves. Incredible sight.

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Makasaar

We arrived at Makasaar, the third biggest city in Indonesia. Time to rest...
We stayed more than a week in Makasaar, doing a little bit of maintenance and errands every day and resting a lot. We decided to extend our visas here and that took some time.

Also, our anchor winch decided it was time to perish and we had to stay longer to fix it. But we're not complaining about staying here, Makasaar is just lovely and there's much to do around town. John bought a new chair for the deck and it's definitely the duck's nuts.

Alon took a few days off and took a bus to Toraja, 9 hour ride, where there is a lot of interesting stuff to see and a lot of European tourists to meet...

Just a day before leaving Makasaar we met a young French couple, Joe and Chloe, which joined us on the way to Kalimantan. It was good to have fresh blood on the ship, ours began to be really stale and stank a bit...

Starting to work at a young age...

Rickshaw Mister? Where do you go?

The Chair.

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Tanabiru - Boat making village

Tanabiru is a cute little village where the main occupation is boat building. The harbour is just full of beautiful indonesian boat and there were a lot on the beach.
The people in the village were most friendly, inviting us in for coffee and trying to help us out all the time, in exchange for only our friendship.

We found a great little restaurant in town and had chicken in satay sauce every evening, cheap as chips (literally)...
On one of our days there we took a bus to Bira, about an hour awayon the rough roads. Bira was a big suprise for us, we thought we're going to a big town and we discovered a beach resort type village, loaded with domestic tourism. It was a good day for all of us, had a couple of beers near the beach and relaxed...

The typical house around the Tanabiru area

Just floating along, in the middle of the sea...

Chicken came out for some air on the deck...

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Lambiko, aka "Venice"

It really did look like Venice! apart from the absence of any Italians, masks, culture, Gondolas, canals and all... but all those houses were built on stilts above the water, most impressive...

It was good to finally arrive at Sulawesi. We refueled and had a walk around the village, which was very nice and clean. They even had running fresh water from a spring nearby and taps on the street, sort of public showers...

John... Taking a shower on the street...

They had the pool table, but no rack or que...

Antaia at sunset

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Buru

Buru, a small island between Papua and Sulawesi. We really got into a crazy routine of doing over-night sails, stopping for a night and sailing again.
We need to cover a lot of ground in order to get through to Singapore before our visas run out, but we got really exsausted from sailing all the time, without seeing much of the country.

So in Buru we stopped for a couple of days and that was great. Buru used to be a prison island and that's how it's still marked on our charts...
We found a really nice waterfall and a friendly village, where every second house is a shop for some obscure reason...

Alon even found a good spot to climb on some rocks after 6 months without, where you just fall into the water...

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