Asia 2008-09

Good news: more orang utans in Borneo.

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In Constantinople, in the time of Justinian, gangs used to fight in the streets. Nominally linked to chariot teams at the hippodrome, the Blues fought the Greens in a daily Old Firm derby. Aspirant politicians were connected to both mobs, and once they combined to try to bring down the Emperor.

In Thailand, the reds have been fighting the yellows, and now the mysterious blues have turned up. The PM has declared a state of emergency. It’s business as usual, then.

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Tradition has it that Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 by U Thong. In fact there was already a town called Ayodhya on the east bank of the river, where the oldest wats are to be found. But when his town, Lopburi, was hit by an outbreak of smallpox, U Thong founded the new town in a strategic location entirely surrounded by three rivers. Ayutthaya is no mere eyot: the island, which is very nearly square, must be two miles across. Canals used to run through it.

By Thai standards Ayutthaya is a fairly new town. Indeed ‘New Town’, Chiang Mai, is older, being founded in the thirteenth century. Sukhothai dates from the twelfth century, Nakhon Si Thammarat from the eleventh, Nakhon Pathom from the sixth, U Thong from the third.

King Ramathibodi (or maybe Boromoratcha II) II of Ayutthaya captured Angkor in 1432, at which point it was the dominant power in the entire region. (Alliances, as always, were cemented by marriage. Ramathibodi was the son-in-law of the Emperor of China.) Six years later Ayutthaya finally acquired Sukhothai, and thereafter concentrated its energies in the Malay peninsula, where it constantly tried but failed to take Melaka. The Portuguese got there first. Ayutthaya became the capital of Siam in the fifteenth century, and remained so until sacked by the Burmese army in 1767.

At the centre it was a strong and centralised state, where the king possessed absolute power. He was much more remote than the kings of Sukhothai, and he was, of course, a devaraja, and an incarnation of Vishnu. There was no law of succession - there still isn’t – and so civil wars were very common. There were 33 kings of Ayutthaya between 1351 and 1767, belonging to several dynasties.

Ayutthaya controlled dependencies all over Siam. From the north came hard wood, sappanwood, eaglewood, molasses, iron, hide, rhinoceros horn. From the south came spices, pepper, tin, gold, seafood, salt and jaggery. From the east coast came spices, pepper and gems, from the northeast forest products, silk, cotton and tin, and from the west tin, spices and pepper. From the delta of the Chao Praya came fish, rice and fruit.

From the sixteenth century Ayutthaya constantly came under threat from the expanding Burmese kingdom, which expanded into Chiang Mai and Laos. In 1569 Ayutthaya was taken, and Ayutthaya became a vassal state of Burma, a Pétain being installed on the throne. This state of affairs did not last very long, though, as one of the princely hostages taken back to Burma organised military resistance upon his return to Ayutthaya. This was King Naresuan the Great.

The Burmese army marched to Ayutthaya and fought the Ayutthayan army at Nong Sarai. Naresuan defeated and killed the Burmese crown prince, Maha Uparaja, in a duel on elephantback. Like jousting, or man-to-man challenges in Greek and Roman times, this was the honourable/chivalrous way of going about a fight. Elephants were used as war machines and as pack animals. A hundred and fifty elephants are still kept in the kraal in Ayutthaya.

In the late afternoons you see them, dressed up, carrying tourists around town. I had had enough of elephant rides by then.

Ayutthaya became a great centre of international trade. Ayutthaya traded with China, Japan, Champa, Melaka, Java, Annam, Persia and Mocha in Yemen. Each nationality had its own enclave there were, at least, Chinese, Cochins, Malays, Makassarese, Japanese, Chams, Mon and Khmer. Indians came to sell textiles and to buy elephants, ivory and tin.

The Portuguese arrived in 1511, fresh from taking Melaka. They were granted permission to trade in 1516. The Dutch received permission to trade in 1592. The newly-founded VOC arrived in 1604. They found a thriving port city with goods for sale from all over Asia. They were looking for a water passage to China, but stayed on to trade. The VOC established a factory there, where they bought hides, sappanwood, tin and pepper. Jerome van Vliet, head of the VOC factory, wrote an account of the usurpation of the throne by Prasat Thong in 1629.

Other Europeans also began to arrive in the 17th century. King Narai allowed many countries to establish factories at Ayutthaya. Bizarrely, his foreign minister was a Greek, Constantine Phaulkon. After 1664 Narai decided he no longer wished to rely too much on the violent Dutch, and he turned to France. He allowed French missionaries in, to run hospitals and schools. Envoys from Louis XIV arrived at the court of King Narai in 1685; there is a picture of the event at the Grand Palace in Bangkok. Narai sent an envoy back, and Kosa Pan was received by Louis XIV at Versailles in 1686. The English East India Company maintained factories here from 1612-23 and 1675-89.

All the foreigners had enclaves because they came to trade but had to wait for the monsoon. Each settlement had its own kapitan, who handled judicial matters. The foreigners were free to keep their own religious laws and customs.

Golden times. In 1765, however, Burmese armies invaded Siam. In 1767 they besieged Ayutthaya, which capitulated in 1767. It was looted and burned, and its priceless libraries, artworks and archives destroyed. That was the end of it. When Taksin got Siam back together, he built a new capital south of Ayutthaya at Thonburi.

On the east side of the river, the Wat Yai Chai Mongkol (or Mongkhon) was founded by U Thong, the first king of Ayutthaya, in 1357 and enlarged by King Naresuan in 1592. In 1766 Ayutthaya was sacked by the Burmese army. The wat was destroyed and abandoned, and only re-established in 1957. The wat was rebuilt on a smaller scale in 1979.

It is surrounded by Buddhas in the defeating Mara position.

The huge chedi was built by King Naresuan in the sixteenth century to commemorate his victory against the Burmese in 1592.

The Wat Phanang Choen is a Chinese-Buddhist temple, and much-used. It is easy to tell the difference: there is Chinese lettering everywhere; a lot of red; lots of subsidiary shrines within the building; no space; and people stick gold-leaf sheets on to all the statues.

These are offerings to Ganesh.

The main image is a very large Buddha. As I arrived an enormous orange cloth was unravelled to cover the heads of the congregation. Dunno why.

The wat is on the bank of the river, and you can walk down to a jetty and buy food to feed the catfish. They hang around in such large numbers that they make the river boil.

Wat Na Phra Mane was built in 1499 AD - by Indra, apparently. It hosted a peace conference between Siam and Burma in 1569. In 1760 the Burmese King Alongphaya, then attacking Ayutthaya, fired a cannon from the wat at Ayutthaya. It exploded, and the king was seriously injured and died on the way back home. So it’s a place with patriotic overtones and the Buddha image within is believed to have saved Ayutthaya; it takes a negligible stimulus to produce a patriotic response in your average Thai person.

In the gable at the front is a teak carving of Narai riding on a garuda, stepping on Naga’s head. The Buddha inside is 6.60m high, in early Ayutthaya style. In Ayutthayan style, the Buddha is relatively slim with a V-shaped torso and figure-hugging Batman robes. Buddha may have renounced his wealth, but he was a prince, and Ayutthayan Buddhas are often dressed royally and crowned; the kings of Ayutthaya liked to emphasise the power of the monarch.

Next door, in the viharn noi, is a nice Dvaravati Buddha from maybe the sixth century AD. It is held to have come from Sri Lanka. Buddhism arrived in Thailand by the second to third centuries AD at the latest. In central Thailand there was a kingdom known as Dvaravati (from Sanskrit), which flourished in the sixth and seventh centuries. The artistic style known as Dvaravati was employed throughout Thailand between the sixth and eleventh centuries. Quite a few stucco-covered stupas date from this era. In the Dvaravati era there were also a lot of images of Avalokitesvara, lord of the six syllables: om mani padme hum.

There was a Wat Maha That in every provincial city. It always contains a stupa with a Buddha relic in it, and is the most sacred place in town. In Ayutthaya the relics appeared miraculously, just when they were needed. Royal ceremonies were held there and it was considered the centre of the city.

In Ayutthaya the presiding stupa was a Khmer-style prang, but there are chedis and prangs all over the place; it is a large site. Most of the chedis are reduced to brick, but you can see that they used to be covered in stucco.

The wat was founded under the third king of Ayutthaya, Borromaratchathirat I (phew), in 1374, and completed under Naresuan, who reigned 1388-95. It was originally 44 metres high, but collapsed during the reign of Songtham (1610-28). It was renovated in 1633, after which it was 50 metres high. It was badly damaged in 1767, and the wat destroyed, and the prang collapsed again during the reign of Rama V in 1911.

It feels a bit like Pompeii. Subsidiary prangs lean at angles.

It is in the grounds of the Maha That that the iconic image of Ayutthaya is found: the Buddha head in the bodhi roots. The bodhi tree has grown around the head so that now it is incorporated into the tree.

The Fine Arts Department excavated only in 1956. Six nested stupa-shaped reliquaries were found buried 17 metres under the prang. The actual Buddha relic is perhaps a third the size of a grain of rice.

With the reliquaries was a lot of treasure, among which was a gilded stone container in the shape of a fish, inside which were 19 beautiful gold offerings. There were also images made of gold, silver, bronze and tin. Votive tablets were found, too, made of tin, clay, and gold and silver foil, all dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

They are now in the museum in Ayutthaya, and naturally the relics are part of a shrine. While I was looking at the objects I was given a banana by the museum staff. This had been part of the offering to Buddha earlier in the day, and I was told it would bring health if I ate it. All the staff were eating bananas.

Maha That was the first place in the country that Buddha relics and treasure had been unearthed, and this sparked a wave of chedi robberies. The crypt of Wat Ratchaburana was robbed in September 1957. Inside the crypt was a gold prang, originally a metre high, which may have contained a Buddha relic. The robbers had torn it apart to make it easier to transport. The robbers were arrested but only a few pieces were recovered. It was only then that the Fine Arts Department was instructed to excavate the crypt.

Also in the crypt were Buddha images in Pala, Dvaravati, Sriwijaya, Lopburi, Sukhothai, U Thong and early Ayutthaya styles, which is pretty much all of them. There was also a set of royal utensils (jars, trays, boxes etc) including betel nut set, and a water pot with a lid topped with the faces of Brahma; and jewellery. These are also beautiful objects. Gold objects were inscribed variously with Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Arabic scripts. Royal regalia were also found. Five items symbolised kingship: crown, sword, walking stick, fly whisk and slipper. The sword was found.

The wat was founded in 1424. On the site itself there are two newer chedis. Boromaratcha II built the chedis to commemorate his brothers, who had managed to kill each other in a duel on elephantback.

The site was badly damaged in 1767 but the prang is in perfect condition, decorated with garudas, nagas etc.
You can go down to see the crypt, which was decorated in a dark red mural.

The ubiquitous mynah.

The Wat Phra Mongkhon Baphit houses a huge Buddha, 12.45 metres tall, in bronze. It is also in early Ayutthaya style. Its head and right arm were broken during the catastrophe of 1767. The viharn was restored in 1956, and it still looks very new.

At the centre of Ayutthaya, the Grand Palace was a gargantuan complex. Three concentric walls surrounded the king’s residence. There was an administrative and ceremonial area in the middle part, and Wat Phra Si Sanphet, the royal wat, stood in the outer layer. Almost nothing now remains. It housed the Phra Si Sanphet, the largest standing metal Buddha ever known. Now the Wat Phra Si Sanphet contains three chedis in a line. They were built to house the remains of three Ayutthayan kings.

It was at Si Sanphet that I finally received my own usnisha.

I still have not started work (it will happen one day), so this week I went for three walks in the southeast. The Met Office predicted a deluge on Wednesday; it is now Friday and it is yet to arrive. False Noahs.

On Monday I walked from Manor Park to Epping via Chingford. The second part of the walk is more rural and more pleasant. The route goes through Epping Forest, which was used as royal hunting grounds from at least the twelfth century until the late Stuarts, who didn’t care for hunting much. Queen Victoria gave it to the nation in the last century, to provide a rural recreation area for the growing working population of East London. While walking I saw lots of crows, magpies, tits and robins, and a jay, a woodpecker and a skylark. Here is a peacock at Wanstead Flats.

On Tuesday, down the river from Kew to Hampton Court via Ham House. Ham House was built from 1610 and retains some interesting décor and paintings from Tudor times, and some interesting old-fashioned formal gardens.

There were snake’s head fritillaries, our only native fritillary. They grow wild at Magdalen College, Oxford, but are usually cultivated.

The first part of the path, between Kew and Teddington, is much prettier than the second. Almost all of it used to be attached to one royal palace or another, and much remains Crown land. I saw about twenty cormorants, including a group just roosting in a tree, which I have never seen before, as a fox strolled by beneath it annoying the crows.

And well over a dozen grey herons. This one was in Richmond.

All along the river from Ham House onwards you can see and hear rose-ringed parakeets in the trees. They – and the other wild parakeet species in the southeast - are descended from captive birds liberated forty or more years ago; there is a story that they escaped from Shepperton Studios during the filming of The African Queen, or were set free by Jimi Hendrix, or escaped from a container at Heathrow. All of these could be true, but there were certainly escaped parakeets in England from the nineteenth century. The ancient Greeks kept the Indian subspecies as pets, and the Romans likewise kept the African subspecies, and there are feral populations along the Rhine and in Barcelona, and in Japan and Florida. They now range, in their thousands, from Croydon to Esher; they have even been seen in Peckham. They are very pretty and very jolly, but it is likely that they displace local species such as woodpeckers, nuthatches and starlings. Like many invaders, they thrive partly because they have no natural predators.

The gardens in Hampton Court are covered in flowers right now.

Here is a deer in Bushy Park, which used to be the hunting grounds for Hampton Court Palace. The winter fur is just being moulted and the antlers are growing. There are so many deer in the park that the ground is carpeted with deer droppings.

Another heron, in Bushy Park.

On Wednesday I walked over the cliffs from Hastings to Cliff End and then along the Royal Military Canal to Winchelsea. Hasting and Winchelsea are two of the seven (yes) Cinque Ports. Hastings is kiss-me-quick hats, bingo, amusement arcades and mini golf, but also a good place for cockles, eels and whelks.

The cliffs above are covered in gorse, currently in flower.

The path goes through Fairlight, a windy place on top of the cliffs, where every cottage has a ceramic nameplate on the wall. Union and St George flags fly on poles. The natives are friendly, so long as you’re white I expect. It is part of the constituency of Hastings and Rye, which, surprisingly, has a Labour MP with a majority of 2,000. Until 1997 it was a thumping Conservative majority. The local district council has a large Conservative majority, and the local ward elected three Conservative councillors.

Winchelsea is an interesting place. You pass through a medieval gate and then have to walk half a mile to the village itself. The village used to be one of the most important ports in England, and was then much bigger. But the meadows upstream were reclaimed and farmed and the river consequently silted up.

It has an interesting church, which is merely the chancel of a much larger church. Mmm, lichen on gravestones, isn't it?

It is not clear whether the nave was ever built, as around that time the French kept on coming over to Winchelsea and sacking the place. Here, in the church of St Thomas, is Edward II, above the tomb of an admiral of the Cinque Ports.

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And here are some more pictures of Nha Trang, Vietnam. A purveyor of sunglasses.

A view towards the sea.

Outside Nha Trang is a well-preserved Cham temple, called Po Nagar. It sits on a hill.

The other tourists there when I visited were Vietnamese.

It is still used, although converted now to Buddhism.

After the funeral, Rudi, Marta, Daniele and I visited Sankompong Sadan, a village that specialised in selling ikat cloth to tourists, and no doubt to making it too. A couple of women sat weaving at back looms. As in Flores, it seems that women spend almost all their times weaving.

It is slow progress. As Wallace found in Makassar:

The time of the women was almost wholly occupied in pounding and cleaning rice for daily use, in bringing home firewood and water, and in cleaning, dyeing, spinning, and weaving the native cotton into sarongs. The weaving is done in the simplest kind of frame stretched on the floor; and is a very slow and tedious process. To form the checked pattern in common use, each patch of coloured threads has to be pulled up separately by hand and the shuttle passed between them; so that about an inch a day is the usual progress in stuff a yard and a half wide.

Inevitably technology and the tourist market have changed the nature of the textiles used. Cloth was made of cotton or banana, both grown locally. Now many ikat weaves are of rayon or polyester. Modern dyes predominate too, and understandably so: they are brighter and easier to handle. Traditional dyes are indigo (for dark blue); chilli (red); saffron (yellow) and clay (brown). It is only tourists who see the old dyes as more authentic. But the very concept of authenticity is problematic, even inauthentic. Are our cars less authentic than they used to be? If local people use cloth dyed with modern dyes, are they less authentic?

The village is laid out in two parallel lines. On the left are the houses, all with horned roofs. The oldest are four hundred years old or more, and they are built without nails. All the wooden panels are carved and decorated, but the paint has faded. The roofs are thatched with bamboo, which lasts a very long time; it only has to be changed once a century. Vegetable matter grows freely in it.

Many of the houses boast columns of buffalo horns on the verandah. (Some of the houses in Flores have just the same decoration.) A pair of horns must be added each time a family member dies.

Opposite the line of houses are smaller buildings in a similar style, the rice barns. Modern Torajan houses and barns are still built in the same style. The only difference is that they are now roofed with corrugated iron.

The following day I went for a walk with Rudi. He was wearing white plimsolls and carrying nothing, which I correctly took as a signal that the walking would not be too hard.

From Lempo we again pass a lot of rice barns. They are in good condition: one states that it was built in 1905, restored (‘renopasi’) in 2006.

Each barn has a door with a buffalo design on it.

Each panel around the barn is decorated in swirly patterns, which look abstract but convey meaning; apparently they tell the story of the owner and the family.

Even in this remote village in the middle of Sulawesi flags and posters promoting the local political wannabes proliferate. A general election is approaching. Rudi, an educated man, is favourably disposed to the rule of Suharto and other generals. He says Indonesia needs a strong man to run it, and better security. SBY is too weak, so it is time to return to the family of Suharto; there will be no terrorism and plenty of jobs. [The most famous relative of Suharto is his son Tommy, who ran the state-owned car firm, Timur Putra Nasional and diverted its funds to his own companies. In 2002 he was finally convicted for the murder of a supreme court judge, but was released after only four years in 2006. Thankfully he is not running for office.]

We walk from Lempo to Berurang, where there is a church, then across the padi fields and up towards Batutumonga (‘stone look upwards’). Rantepao is surrounded by hills. The view on the walk to Batutumonga is lovely. Walking down from Batutumonga towards Pana we walk down the slopes of the highest mountain in the region, Sesean.

Every now and then we passed palms with notches cut into the trunk to enable the nimble to climb them. You see these everywhere in the region, as coconut trees are carved in the same way. Under the crown, where branches have been lopped, are bags for stoppering the flow of sap, or collecting it. These are sugar palms, Arenga saccharifera, from which palm wine and palm sugar are made. I have seen them before in Java and elsewhere. A little to the south of Tana Toraja, near Bantimurung, Wallace used to hang around the dripping sugar palms, collecting flies.

Ascending to Batutumonga Rudi’s bronchioles start whistling like a harmonica. He is asthmatic, but as an Indonesian man it is his moral duty to smoke. He talks about giving up, but with little conviction.

Heading down was quite a scramble. If there was a path, it lay elsewhere. We walked and hopped down the terrace walls, as I had done eight months before in Sapa.

At Pana there are some ancient cliff graves. The graves are carved into cliffs, perhaps to deter robbery. The doors covering the graves are very simple and very old. Each door has a buffalo design, which means that the person entombed had sacrificed 25 buffalo. Some have a human being on the front; this means that the buried person had, in life, fought bravely.

Some of the graves are so old that the doors have fallen off. Inside the niches you can see rolled up blankets. Inside the blankets are bones.

Most of the graves are about 500 years old, says Rudi; 1,000 years, says the village head. In those days, and indeed until recently, Torajans were animist. Every year the family would come and open up the door for a ceremony with the ancestors. When the time came that the hole needed to be reused by a younger occupant, the old bones would be moved to coffins, lying on the ground at the bottom of the cliff. And they would sacrifice a pig or dog or two.

Near the graves we took coffee with the kepala desa, the village chief. He has six children. Inside his house he showed me old wooden beams, and doors with carvings of people. The human figures are similar to the tau figures on the banana scarf I bought in Sankompong Sadan. They are made of jackfruit wood. They were taken inside to prevent them being stolen.

Naturally the conversation moves into Torajan language and my attention wanders towards a butterfly the size of a bat, black and white with an orange patch: a Troides species, probably. When we speak in English, they tell me that my accent is difficult to understand. It is easier for them to understand French or Italian people who speak English. I have a strong accent, they say.

A lot of antique grave doors are offered to tourists in Rantepao. They have been covered in fats and oils, and buried for a few months to antiquate them. The real antique doors are very valuable, and are kept in the houses of families or village chiefs; they are probably not for sale. And if they were, you would need an export licence.

In mid-afternoon the heavens opened and we stopped in a pavilion for Rudi have a much-needed cigarette or two. Rudi tells me that Torajans eat monkey and dog in order to get wood.

After the Bali bombing, tourism in Toraja stopped. There was also a civil war in central Sulawesi, a little to the north, which cannot have helped. The tourists have not come back in anything like their old numbers. Hotels have closed and people have lost jobs. Tourists used to visit all year round; now there is a strong peak in July and August and not much at other times.

Rudi has a degree in economics, and his wife has one in management. Yet he is a rice farmer and doesn’t like it. He wants to move his wife and children to Makassar when the two children are a little older; then he and his wife can try to get government jobs and send the children to good schools. (You would have the same aspiration in France. Not in the UK.)

The following day I go to see the livestock market at Bolu, just a few miles from Rantepao. Approaching the livestock market you pass lots of people selling vegetables on blankets by the side of the road: courgettes, spring onions, garlic, all sorts of chillis, cacao beans, aubergines, cabbage, long beans, bananas, avocado, sweet potato, carrots, ginger, tomatoes, mint, rocket, dried pigs’ fat, potatoes, taro, eggs, peanuts, squashes, limes, oranges, coconut, tobacco, Torajan coffee, betel and lime, rice (black, red and white). And that’s just what I can recognise.

Was once the beauty Abishag:

Many of them sell tuak in hollowed out bamboo cups. And most have a chicken or two on sale too.

After the groceries, you get to the market proper: pigs, trussed funereally, and cattle, washed and shining.

Each buffalo has a ring through its nose, and an attendant dressed like a cowboy.

We are only a few degrees south of the equator, and well above sea level. The white cattle suffer from sunburn.

From Bolu I took an ojek to Nanggala, where once again I saw traditional houses and rice barns. This village was more touristy than others, in that several houses were set up to sell knick-knacks. One thing the Torajans are very good at is carving wood, and I would happily have bought several of the carvings.

They were planting rice on the day I was there. Knee-deep in mud, a line of adults swept slowly up the field planting green bundles.

In another part of the field, children collected snails. It is hard work.

Afterwards, I think, I walked to Marante, where I saw a lot of well-dressed funeral figures, pretty much life sized.

These predate Christianity and are made with more seriousness than the tau tau at the funeral.

The bones go into communal coffins, and these have rotted and split to reveal gruesome piles. Sometimes a large tree trunk, carved on the outside, will be used to contain bones.

Skulls and long bones lie everywhere.

Too necromaniac: let's have some more cowboys.

In November the Papua trip ended and we returned to Bali. As ever, I had no particular plans, but soon decided to head to Sulawesi – where we had landed on our way back from Biak.

Incidentally - and obviously irrelevantly, but I am the editor here – the most famous of all ‘living fossils’ is of course… the coelacanth. (Perhaps ‘the fern’ is perhaps a better answer. Half a point for the crocodile, the shark or the ratfish, a point for a lamprey or hagfish.) The youngest fossil coelacanth is 80 million years old, and they were thought to be long extinct, but a coelacanth was caught off South Africa in 1938. (A beautiful example of how a single data point can sometimes disprove a theory.) The same J L B Smith who described the experience of being stung by a stonefish in one of my previous posts spent much of his career studying the coelacanth. Understandably, it was thought to be very rare, but at the turn of the millennium a coelacanth was found in a market in Sulawesi; and it turns out that coelacanth is present in large numbers off the coast of northern Sulawesi. Since the Indian Ocean and most of the Indo-Malay archipelago lie between these coelacanths and South Africa, the Sulawesi version may well be a different species; it is certainly a different colour.

Unlike most modern fish, coelacanths are lobe-finned fish. They are related to lungfish. It was an ancestor of the lungfish that first went walkabout on land.

Makassar was not particularly interesting, and so I soon decided to head north to Tana Toraja, where the Torajan people live. In the province of South Sulawesi (SulSel, as it is known locally), there are Buginese, Makassarese and Torajan people, and they all think they are the best, naturally. Buginese and Makassarese are Muslim; the Torajans are Christian, but not very.

While in Lombok, Alfred Russel Wallace heard about a man running amok, and the gates of the compound in which he was staying were closed. It turned out to be a false alarm. Wallace described it as a form of honourable suicide.

Macassar is the most celebrated place in the East for "running a muck." There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten, or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is the national, and therefore the honourable, mode of committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows out his brains with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages to one suicidally inclined. A man thinks himself wronged by society--he is in debt and cannot pay--he is taken for a slave or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery--he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on, with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at everyone he meets. "Amok! Amok!" then resounds through the streets. Spears, krisses, knives and guns are brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can--men, women, and children--and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excitement of a battle. And what that excitement is those who have been in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea. It is a delirious intoxication, a temporary madness that absorbs every thought and every energy. And can we wonder at the kris-bearing, untaught, brooding Malay preferring such a death, looked upon as almost honourable to the cold-blooded details of suicide, if he wishes to escape from overwhelming troubles, or the merciless of the hangman and the disgrace of a public execution, when he has taken the law into his own hands and too hastily revenged himself upon his enemy? In either case he chooses rather to "amok."

Emil, the fixer at the hotel in Makassar – spoke reasonable English, arranged tours and taxis for a sizable fee, offered repeatedly to pimp for me – offered to do a tour of Tana Toraja for me, driving me around in the hotel’s SUV. Emil was Torajan and he knew what he was talking about. But I didn’t have the budget to be driven around in a car on my own for several days, and it was no surprise that his fee was too high. Emil would have charged about $500. In the end I think the entire trip, including return transport and hotels, cost $100 or so.

So I took a bus to Rantepao: a twelve-hour ride, perfectly comfortable except for the aircon. If the bus has aircon, the ticket is more expensive and the aircon must therefore be used – even when you are in the hills and the sun has set.

The first part of the journey led up the west coast. Not far to the east, fantastic limestone outcrops burst from the earth. I had seen them from an aeroplane and they were even better at ground level.

To the west of the outcrops, the landscape is flat, and covered in paddies, egrets and buffalo, just like most of Vietnam.

The primary crop is rice. Tana Toraja is hilly country, and so the rice is cultivated in terraces. Indeed, the landscape closely resembles the countryside around Sapa in northern Vietnam.

But Toraja’s most famous crop is kopi, coffee. Indeed, if there is anything that Sulawesi is famous for it is coffee, and that coffee comes from Toraja. Most of the exported stuff is arabica, but robusta is drunk in Indonesia. In Indonesia it is ground into the finest powder, added to piping hot water and simply stirred. If the water is hot enough the grounds sink. I am constantly invited to find Torajan coffee the best in Indonesia, although in reality that in Java and Bali seems just as good to me.

I stayed in a little compound of wooden buildings run by Martin, and through him I arranged to go walking with his friend Rudi. I refused the offer of a driver and demanded an ojek – a taxi-motorcycle – which kept the cost down. I think it cost about $8 a day to hire an ojek. It is a better way to get around anyway, unless it is raining.

The most common form of public transport in Indonesia is the becak, a tricycle rickshaw. In Rantepao they are attached to a moped and are called sitor.

On the eve, I was approached by an Italian couple who asked whether they could tag along. Certo, as we shared the price of the guide. Marta works in an ethnological museum in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, not far from Milan, and Daniele works in a hotel in Rimini. Both take very good photos.

Rudi took us first to a field of megaliths and grave houses at Kalimbung Bori. Torajan graveyards are a little different. The dead stay in their own houses. A grave house is called ‘a house with no smoke’ in the Torajan language.

A traditional Torajan house is extraordinarily handsome. The roof is convex, with a saddle point in the middle, the highest points reminiscent of buffalo horns – given the buffalo fetish, this seems to me the likely source – and the gables at each end are very steeply pitched, perhaps 70 degrees.

The roof, traditionally, is covered with thick grass shoots, and replaced every few years. It is a form of thatching. The grave house is a miniature version of the same thing.

There are some Torajan objects in Marta’s museum, and so she quizzed Rudy on the symbology. I wandered off and chased butterflies at this point.

However, from what I remember, the chicken and circle symbol – which you see on every building – is called a katik. The cockerel is a symbol of liberty for the Torajan people. The circle is the moon.

The quantity of kupu kupu – butterflies – does not match those at Bantimurung to the south (qv), but they’re still impressive. Rudi tells me that kupu kupu malam – ‘night butterflies’ – does not mean ‘moths’ as you would expect, but ‘prostitutes’.

Other remains are stored in caves hollowed out of the rock. It takes weeks and many dollars to chisel out a cave from the hard rock. The bones are buried with belongings. At the entrance to the cave, to deter robbery, is a carved door. These doors are wonderful objects. More often than not, they depict a buffalo, but sometimes they have human figures.

If I ever get a grave door I want Spiderman on it.

After visiting the graveyard we attended a funeral at Malakiri. The Torajans are famous for their funerals, and it is easy to understand why anthropologists find them so interesting. A funeral is not merely a big event. Expenditure on funerals dominates everything else. A family that has to choose between a lavish funeral and the education of a child has no choice but to spend the money on the funeral. Torajans travel in large numbers, especially to Makassar, in order to earn and save lots of money – to pay for funerals.

The largest funerals last for three days. The big party is held on the second day, and this is what we visited.

Rudi taught me a few words in Torajan but I have forgotten most of them, along with about half of my Indonesian. But “thank you very much” sounds like kuré sumanga. A big house is a tongkonan. A funeral ceremony is tomate.

As in the Baliem Valley, although to a far lesser degree, pigs are important. They are sacrificed by the dozen at funerals. A tax is paid on every pig killed; 70% goes to local government, 30% to central government. The price of a pig depends, of course, on the size, and also on colour. An adult black pig costs Rp 2 million or more: over £1,000.

But buffaloes are the Torajan obsession. They are perhaps the main store of wealth. Torajan men famously take much better care of their buffaloes than their wives. You see people washing their buffaloes. Swap cow for car and it’s like walking around Surrey of a Sunday afternoon.

A buffalo, if black, will fetch Rp 40 million. A black and white buffalo is much more valuable: it is worth Rp 150-170 million: £10,000. That is, of course, a vast amount of money in the rich world. In Toraja it buys tracts of land; but the cow is more important. A black and white cow is a symbol of nobility. If a black and white cow is sacrificed, it means a high-caste person has died.

The conspicuous consumption of the obsequy challenges belief. It is as if the members and guests drove cars to the funeral and set fire to them.

We heard the funeral well before we saw it. Around a clearing, which contains old and holy stones, is arranged a set of temporary buildings shaped like an eye. In the middle of the clearing is a wooden tower. This used to contain offerings to the spirits; now, in the Christian era, it houses an enormous speaker system.

Opposite the reception area is a man in traditional gear – most guests are formally dressed, as you would expect at a funeral - and he yells into a microphone. His commentary issues from the loudspeakers at a volume sufficient to melt your entrails, and he never stops. He is like a salesman on a cable shopping channel. It is quite an art; I assume he is a funeral professional.

As we arrive he is reading out names. Each family attending brings livestock as presents. The animals must be registered for tax purposes before they can enter, and there is a large queue outside the funeral area. He announced when the formalities are over and a family can enter.

A queue: o wonder! I have not seen one all trip. It brings a nostalgic tear to the eye. Later on, the guests also queue with admirable discipline to pay their respects.

Most of the gift-animals are pigs. A buffalo is one thing: you can lead it around by the nose.

But pigs don’t cooperate, so they are trussed, so tightly that they cannot move a muscle, and carried by bamboo rods over the shoulders.

All are trussed by the same recipe. Two poles are laid down parallel to the pig’s spine, one above and one below the trunk. Bamboo planks are strung between the poles to support the pig. Then the pig is tied, very tightly, with bamboo strips. A strip goes along the body, and other strips restrict the neck, chest and waist.

The restrained pigs lie still with their eyes closed, on the whole. Every now and then a pig begins to kick and scream at great volume, and then many of the others join in. It is a piercing and distressing sound. The combination of the amplified commentary and the screaming pigs amounts to an oppressive aural siege.

Around the enclosure are the temporary buildings. There are perhaps a thousand guests in sixty or more numbered enclosures. An extended family occupies each enclosure. They have brought along their own food and booze; it is a long day. Pigs are seared in the clearing; much of the food eaten is pork.

We are invited into one of the pavilions. We are fed items prepared by the women of the party: ikan mas (‘gold fish’, probably a carp), eel, pork and vegetables, accompanied by an utterly delicious red rice. The drink of choice is tuak: rice wine. The tuak is egg-white in colour and tastes a little sour, like wine on the turn. But you get used to it.

The family of the deceased – greatly extended – are dressed in black, dripping with gold jewellery. Others are not; they are dressed in finery woven with gold.

They queue – again – and parade past the tau tau, which is dressed in a red jacket.

These days, the Torajans, being Christian, the tau tau is a crude effigy, the sort of thing they burn in Patna when slightly cross about someone. In the past it would have been a fine statue.

The queue continues past the tau tau, past the area where the animals are sacrificed – all is caked in blood and excrement – to be received in the pavilion opposite.

First, the women. Each wears a red necklace and a hat like a Vietnamese limpet hat.

But these are special funeral hats, very finely made; indeed, they are beautiful objects.

In the pavilion are hostesses – family members? paid hostesses? – dressed in gold. They receive the guests, at which point the women remove their hats. As an offering, they carry betel nuts in rather nice velvet bags.

Then come the men. They are dressed with less formality on average, although most are in sarongs. In place of betel nuts they carry cigarettes.

The name tau tau is interesting. Tau refers to the human figure in ikat woven in Sumba. The figure represents ancestors. It is a common and ancient motif in Austronesian art, and appears elsewhere in the region. The Torajan tau tau is the same thing in three dimensional form.

After the long queues pass by the pavilion, like mRNA at a ribosome, a group of women from the village offer coffee, tea and cake. Afterwards, the bereaved family moves to the second resting place. Before that, the family read out the names of all those who have donated pigs.

Traditional Torajan society is caste-based. There are three castes: high, middle and low. The low used to be slaves - no surprise there. Even low-caste families with wealth cannot have funerals like this. That’s what a caste system means, after all.

People invariably used to marry endogamously, within the caste. Nowadays Romeo and Juliet can marry between castes – although it is difficult. Such marriages raise questions. To which caste to the offspring belong? What do you do if your father supports Liverpool and your mother Everton?

Alliance between high and low is particularly frowned upon by the noble in-laws. “Don’t shove shit in my face,” they say, nobly. Their own status is reduced, they feel, if they must attend the funeral of a low-class person. I’m not completely bewildered in such society: it’s like visiting Harrogate.

Low-caste funerals last a day, and take place the day after the death. Later on, a single buffalo will be sacrificed. At a middle-class funeral, at least fifteen buffalo will be sacrificed, if I have got it right.

In Tana Toraja, as in old England, a churl can pay to become a thane. In the north you must pay 7,777 objects to the local nobles. (Objects are – you guessed it – pigs, buffaloes, etc.) In the south the magic number is 100. So the vulgar rich subsidise the impoverished nobility, like everywhere else.

We leave. It is odd that we can shut our eyes but not our ears or nostrils; so most claims in nuisance relate to noise or smell. Many other mammals are better equipped. As we leave, we pass the place where the pigs are being butchered. Blood and tripes are everywhere.

Happy New Year.

In England, until 1752, New Year’s Day was celebrated on 25 March. It is surely a much better time of year to celebrate it than circumcision day.

• ***

On the tour of Papua, after walking in the Baliem Valley, we spent a few days on the island of Biak (the ‘k’ is hard), a little north of New Guinea. At 45 miles long and 20 miles wide it is the largest of the islands of Cenderawasih Bay, in northwest Papua.

Upon arrival we were met by Filip, a rotund, voluble Christian. He is our fixer on Biak. Filip, it turned, out, was obsessed with Israel. His dream was to promote Biak as a tourist destination for Israeli tourists. On the wall of his house there fluttered an Israeli flag. He was planning to change the name of his company to the Zion something or other.

Our trip to Biak turns out to be a bit of a farce. Filip lies more easily than he walks. The prices we are quoted are quite absurd. He tells us, for example, that it costs $120 to hire a minibus for the day, for example; $30 would be fair. Another example: I have been looking forward to diving in Biak, but Filip quotes a price, through the only dive operation, of $180 ($50-$70 is normal for two dives). And all the while he preaches evangelical Christianity at us.

We are taken by minibus from Biak Town to the beach at Bosnik, at the southeast point of the island. The south coast is dominated, a few hundred yards inland, by raised coral cliffs. People visit Bosnik from Biak Town at weekends, and the beach is covered in broken glass. Behind the beach looms the skeleton of a resort hotel, abandoned during the economic crisis of 1997. Two people sit in a cabin by the beach. They try to charge us $5 each for the privilege of using the glassy beach – OK for the Riviera, perhaps, but not here. If the locals pay anything, it is not $5. It is just an ad hoc attempt to fleece us; it happens every time you try to pay for anything in Biak. We decline to pay anything. By this stage, we are as a group in effect refusing to deal with Filip, and were generally inclined to be cynical in dealing with any of his associates.

Some of us went snorkelling at the beach. I was expecting great things: Biak is in the middle of Cenderawasih Bay, north of New Guinea, and there is little reason for the marine life to be much disturbed. As it was I was very disappointed. Perhaps the marine fauna were affected by a tsunami, which hit in 1996. The whole experience is lame.

On the way back we visit a bird park, which is better than expected. Cassowaries wander freely throughout the park. I am very wary of them: they have strong legs and long claws, and can disembowel people quite easily. Cassowaries are native to New Guinea as well as to Australia; indeed they are the largest indigenous animal in New Guinea. Most of us give them a wide berth.

We see hornbills, cockatoos, lories and parrots, crowned pigeons and pheasant pigeons. We’re east of the Wallace Line: the cockatoos, parrots and lories would be considered Australasian birds by Wallace.

Plenty of butterflies fly around. I go chasing them and lose contact with the rest of the group.

We also stopped at a Japanese war memorial. A concrete crescent is the memorial itself. Inside it is a corridor, containing half a dozen large, shiny steel boxes. Until recently each contained the ashes of a fallen Japanese soldier; last year the ashes were taken back to Japan by the families. In front of each container are photographs of the soldiers and of their families, and prayer papers. Some of the photos are fairly new; they must be children and grandchildren.

Biak was an early stage in Macarthur’s plan to roll up the Pacific from New Guinea. Biak was strategically important, as there three airfields on the south coast. One of the airfields is now the civil airport, the transport hub of the region. The main airport, and the objective of the US operations, was the airfield at Mokmer.

Allied reconnaissance estimated that there were 2,000 Japanese soldiers on the island. In fact there were over 10,000 defenders, with tanks, and field and antiaircraft artillery. But on 9 May Japanese Imperial Command in effect abandoned it strategically, withdrawing the perimeter defence line to Sorong and Halmahera; Biak was left to its fate and the orders were to defend it to the last man. (Two days after the invasion the imperial command changed its mind and drew up plans to reinforce Biak. A few reinforcements got through.)

After three days of heavy bombing, Allied forces landed at Bosnik on 27 May 1944 with 12,000 troops and 12 tanks and 28 artillery pieces. They were allowed to land unopposed, but it was a trap. Most of the defences were concentrated around Mokmer. Once the invaders got to Mokmer they were attacked hard, and some units were forced to withdraw by sea.

(The strip was only captured on 7 June and Japanese mortar attacks kept it unusable for another week, so that the invasions of Palau and Yap did not use Biak as an airbase as originally planned. It was, however, used in the invasion of the Philippines.)

Unknown to the Allies, the island is woodwormed by coral caves and tunnels. There are tunnels to the west and north of Mokmer. Japanese forces based themselves in the caves, stockpiling food, ammunition and water, and carried out hit and run attacks. As at Iwo Jima, the fighting was slow and grim. American forces used heavy bombs and flamethrowers to capture or bury the caves.

The battle for Biak lasted from 27 May to 20 June 1944. Six thousand Japanese died, and only a few hundred prisoners were taken. The US forces lost 474 killed and 2,400 wounded, with 3,500 cases of fever.

We also visited Gua Binsari, now known as Gua Jepang, which was home to several thousand Japanese soldiers.
Between three thousand and five thousand (surely an overestimate) were killed by bombs in the cave. The hecatomb is a dismal, cold, dripping place.

Near the entrance to the cave are a few burned-out planes and guns, and a jeep.

Across the road is a room-museum where the relics have been collected: grenades, mortars, machine guns, pottery, glass bottles. Dirk recognised the helmets of Japanese officers.

As everywhere else in Indonesia, much of the land is off limits and occupied by the military. On Biak there is a large naval base.

The following day we charter a crowded minibus to Wandos, where we stay in a small stilt house for a couple of nights. Filip does not accompany us, of which we are glad.

Wandos is a nice location. The owners of the house charge us a lot of money to cook for us, but they do well by us, as we dine royally on fresh grilled snapper.

It turns out to be not worth snorkelling, as the barrier reef is too far away to reach and the intervening lagoon too shallow to swim in. We spend the time walking down the beach, on the lookout for murderous falling coconuts. They land every now and then nearby with a great thump.

Amanda walks on water at dawn.

Maurits meditates.

There are tens of thousands of hermit crabs on the beach. Every shell on the beach has a tenant. The shells are those of sea snails, and the crabs behave much like snails. They congregate wherever there is corruption, organic matter or excrement. They congregate especially on logs. They run away or retreat into their shells as you approach.

Duncan, who was nearly as keen on the crabs as I was, recently informed me that they make popular pets. There are hermit crab owners' clubs in the UK and US. Owners write tributes to their deceased hermies.

Inland is a jungle-covered hill, from which emanate raucous noises. The hill is home to cockatoos, parrots and crows.

A pair of (perhaps) sulphur-crested cockatoos patrols above the hill, squawking loudly.

Especially at dawn and dusk, red and blue parrots collect in the coconut palms by the shore and argue noisily. It is difficult to see, but there is one in this tree.

As everywhere on the coast of southeast Asia, an eagle patrols.

One morning we walk up the hill. After an hour we have seen nothing and are not at the top but the guides decide that they want to go back. But three of us press on with two guides, and I am left by default as the makeshift interpreter, without being asked. I am not happy. It is very hard walking through dense forest. You cannot see a thing; there is no chance of seeing the birds that we can see from the foot of the hill. We can only see butterflies.

There are also spiders. This an orb-weaver, Argiope species.

In Biak Town I dropped a bog roll in the mandi by mistake and abandoned it. Dirk, amazingly, retrieves it and dries it in Wandos. After his years in a prison camp he does not waste anything.

Just behind the house is a cage in which a booby sits forlornly. Every now and then it is allowed out to catch fish for its owner.

On the way back from Wandos we stop at some waterfalls. Again, it takes some negotiation to fix a price that is not ludicrous.

Some locals jump from the top for our amusement. I am not especially amused.

Our stay in Wandos is pleasant enough, without being special. It seems a strange use of our time after our trip to Baliem. The tour blurb says that there is a botanical garden near the beach, and that we can walk up the hill to see the birds. Neither is really true. Indeed the blurb on Biak as a whole is perhaps sufficiently inaccurate to found a case for misrepresentation. Kate, our tour leader, has to work absurdly hard to make anything happen, and all the prices are hyperinflated. We feel as though the locals want to strip us of cash instantly, without regard for the future. It is such a sad contrast to Bali and the rest of Indonesia, where tourism is more developed and tourists are warmly welcomed and treated well.

Biak would benefit from tourism, but at this rate it will not get much. We advised the tour company not to take any more tours there.