True Tales of Survival from Cambodia

If you've ever imagined ghosts rising from their grave to haunt a dark cemetery, you'd have a pretty accurate picture of Phnom Penh's Killing Fields. Through the nearly 4 year nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, two million people were starved to death, worked to death, forced to farm fields studded with hidden landmines, beaten to death with hammers, rifle butts, and against the trunks of trees. 20,000 of them were dumped at this site, one of 300 around the country. Reconstruction efforts designated this place a site of remembrance and mourning, gathered the remains of as many victims as could be recovered, and placed them in a memorial stupa in the center of the field, a former Chinese cemetery. Many of the bodies were buried too deep and scattered too far for recovery, and now, 31 years after the fall of Pol Pot and the KR army, when the rainy seasons churn the ground to mud, chips of bone and scraps of cloth sift from the earth and float to the surface, occasionally fragments of skulls still blindfolded in traditional red krama scarves.

The older generations (meaning anyone over 35, since the average age in Cambodia is 18), remembers the KR and the following years of war vividly. They recall their own humiliations and suffering, but none who we've met will discuss their feelings about the leadership: not only Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, but the village chiefs who facilitated violence and starvation, the teenaged children who conducted the interrogations and murders. "Cambodian people remember, but they do not say,"one man told me, himself a former Khmer Rouge soldier until his parents were murdered. "We don't want to be angry, but we know which countries did this." Start with Richard Nixon, which orchestrated a coup and installed a corrupt, viciously anti-communist puppet who would allow the US military to carpet bomb Cambodia's eastern border, where Vietnamese troops were building bases. Consider Great Britain and France, who taught Cambodians how to lay land mines, still maiming farmers and children today. Blame also China, who traded guns for food with the Khmer Rouge at a time when Cambodians were starving to death, anticipating that the KR would use them against their ancient enemies, the Vietnamese. Cambodia is still awash in Kalashnikov machine guns. There's no one devil behind the atrocities, just the manipulations of superpowers fighting a proxy war over ideology.

I do want to share with you how amazing this country is: the people are humorous, giving, and show kindness without limit; the land is flat, covered in rice paddies and majestic, tall pagodas against a background of small hills, karsts, and mountains. Phnom Penh is a clean and sophisticated city with cafes, noodle stalls, silk shops, and a rich tradition of foreign communities and western ex-patriots who bring their own colors to the culture. But the crowds of street children and amputees keep prompting the same questions about the terrible history of the country. Instead of writing about our adventures, I'm going to try and share stories of some of the people we've met here, who've been generous with their time and every other resource they've had at their disposal.

Sokha Keo

Sokha Keo was the very first person we met in Cambodia, just about an hour after crossing the border from Thailand. We'd had a rough time crossing immigration: Julie had haggled down the price of our visa from $40 to $25, which I didn't think was even possible. The border guard wore no name tag and no shirt, and refused to give his name or any kind of receipt. It was a quick introduction to the corruption of public officials in Cambodia.

It was too late to reach Sihanoukville in the south, so we walked into town to seek out lunch. We had no Cambodian money, spoke none of the language, and had no hotel.

"Can I join you?" a man asked us from another table. "I am a student of English," he said, and proceeded to tell us about his teacher, an American who had left several years prior. Sokha recommended dishes for us to try, shared some food from his own plate, and said he would be happy to pay for our meal, though we rejected the last offer.

"Are you from Koh Kong," I asked him.

"No. I am born in Phnom Penh, but I am an orphan. My parents were killed, Khmer Rouge, so I come here to the orphanage in Koh Kong. Now I work at the social affairs and rehabilitation department."

"Oh," we said, not really sure how to respond, feeling uncomfortable, realizing that back home it's culturally taboo to ask questions about death.

"Do you want to come to my house?" he asked. We turned him down, feeling too green in Cambodia to know or trust people, but he gave us his number and asked us to drop in on him the next time we were in his town.

Receptionist at the Ankor Meas Hotel

We reached Phnom Penh the next day in the late afternoon. Reaching the capital city involved a 6 hour bus ride over smooth, new roads built by Chinese construction firms. We'd already checked in, and had spent the day exploring Phnom Penh: the Royal Palace, where the floors were covered in silver tiles, the National Museum, housing Hindu relics from Ankor Wat, and S-21, an old high school the Khmer Rouge converted to a detention and torture center where prisoners were kept immediately before transfer for execution at the Killing Fields. Now we were back at the hotel, chatting with the woman at the front desk.

"Are you from Phnom Penh?" I asked, wondering if she might recommend other cities in Cambodia.

"No, I'm from Kampong Thom," she said. "I moved here after the war."

"What do you remember from the war," I asked. "Do you remember the Khmer Rouge?"

"Always, poom-poom," she said, imitating the sound of machine gun fire. "Sometimes we eating, 'poom-poom', we have to drop everything and hide. We working, washing clothes, 'poom-poom,' we have to leave and run."

The woman was roughly our age, and I came to understand later that she wasn't referring to the Khmer Rouge, but to the years following their defeat--once the Vietnamese had invaded, chased Pol Pot into the jungle, and attempted to turn Cambodia into a colony. For nearly a decade, guerrilla battalions of KR soldiers held control of land in the south and east, making incursions into the cities to murder civilians.

Mr. Sreung

After visiting the ruins of Ankor Wat in Siem Reap, Julie had an idea to get as far away from the tourist circuit as we possibly could. In Kratie, roughly four hours south and east of Siem Reap, we could spot endangered Irrawady River Dolphins swimming in the Mekong, then take a boat to a small river island and stay with a family.

The home we found belonged to a slightly older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sreung had grown children who lived nearby and visited often, though none of them spoke any English. Mrs. Sreung had a point book through which we were able to communicate that we could stay for $6 a night and request meals, though I vigorously underlined the picture showing that I had trouble with entrails, and ignored the illustration of dried stingray.

Mr. Sreung returned home from work every day at around 7pm, and initially showed very little interest in us. When Julie and I attempted to teach him dominoes, he tried to teach us a Khmer card game. None of us could really follow the rules, which seemed a cross of blackjack and poker, and Mr. Sreung opened up a bit, revealing he was diabetic, and that he knew some French.

"I was working for the French," I think he said (though he might've also said he lived in France, or was going to France).

"Oh, so it was good for you to be away when the Khmer Rouge came."

"No, no," he said. "All the time, working. Always working." He got up and went to his kitchen, returned with a small amount of rice that fit in the center of his palm. "This was for one person, for one day. All we had to eat." He got up and went to the kitchen again, returning this time with a small bowl filled with rice, enough for a single pot. "And this," he said, "was a ration for 40 people."

Mr. Thriy

Mr. Thriy was our guide to Bokor Hill Station, a resort for wealthy French colonialists abandoned in the 1950's, then used by Pol Pot as an army base and prison.

"Don't worry about the guide," he said, pointing to a shy official in flip flops, carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. "There is no crime in the jungle; he only carries the gun if we run into the wildlife. Like in Bokor, there is still the black bear."

"Also," he said, "I know many books explain about the landmine, but don't mind about the landmine here, because I was army, and I know when we put the landmine, we only use them against the army, then when we leave, we pick them up again."

"What army were you in?" we asked him later.

"Khmer Rouge army," he said. He had joined when he was 21, when the KR was a collection of loosely assembled bands of rural villagers reacting to American bombing in the east and President Lon Nol's suppression of communist sympathizers in the cities. A year after Pol Pot came to power in 1975, he learned the Khmer Rouge had killed both his parents. He deserted the army and lived alone in the jungle, eating wild potatoes, fish, and any game he could catch. "If I heard a person talking, I would run away," he said. "I still knew how to talk, but my mouth couldn't make a sound."

After two years of living in the forest, Mr. Thriy was captured by Vietnamese soldiers, who had invaded to fight KR attacks against border villages. "They tied me to a tree. I thought they were going to kill me, but I talked to them, and they could understand me, slowly, so then I became a soldier for the Vietnamese army." Fighting against the Khmer Rouge in a later battle, he had stepped on a landmine. "But a small one, a plastic one, so no problem. I'm moving so fast, I can't stop, but I knew what to do: jump on my side and tuck my leg." The explosion shattered his shin, which wasn't repaired until years later. Now, at age 53, he takes tour groups on mountain treks to Bokor Hill Station, close to where he fought the Khmer Rouge.

These are only a few of the stories we've heard from people over the last month, traveling Cambodia west to east and back to the Thai border. We love this country--enough to overstay our month-long visa and deal with the hassle of corrupt border officials--and if any of you were considering a trip to Thailand, I'd recommend Cambodia first.

If you're interested in learning more about the Khmer Rouge, I strongly recommend Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. It's a complicated history, and the author explains it much better than I can.

Thanks for keeping up with us over the last few months. We're working on a statistics and retrospective entry that should be up soon. We leave the Southeast Asian peninsula on January 28th for Bhutan.

Mark and Juliah

Bite You Back!

On a Monday in December I was bitten by a centipede.

Coming from the States, you tend to picture these creatures as benign, sub-rock dwelling critters like salamanders, not the ferocious, thick-bodied nightmares that Thais use to spice their whiskey and whose bites can kill cats. Over breakfast of rice soup with squid, the bastard dropped on my leg from underneath the table, scooted up my bathing suit, and waited patiently for me to notice.

When the Thais saw me yelping, they rushed over, saw the insect dashing from my leg into the brush, and freaked out. I'd seen centipedes only once before, in Australia, where a bush guide had warned they were poisonous--could kill infants, in fact. Watching three guys rush screaming into shrubs after the beast did little to calm me. Though they failed to find the centipede, they did uncover a poisonous black snake, which they beat to death with bamboo sticks.

If you've never been been bitten by a centipede, I'll tell you what it's like: first a sharp sting sets in, the area turns red and swells, burning like a match head. Your loved one asks you to describe the pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and then you become an island celebrity: other tourists drop by to wonder why everyone else is staring at you; someone remembers someone else who got bitten by a spider some years ago, or the time they saw a snake in their bungalow, or a deer they saw on the hill. You struggle to pronounce the Thai word of the animal that got you: mak ue?
No, that's banana. Tak auw.
Tak ow?
No. Tak auwww.

And on and on. Days later, people you'd never seen before are still asking about the leg. The attention starts to wear like the residual pain of the bite, two red puncture wounds that fade day by day, your war story sounding less impressive every time you tell it.

-Mark

Mark and Juliah

Mark and Juliah in Big Tiger

With one spare day in Bangkok, we woke early to visit foreign inmates at Bangkwang Men's Prison, at the far edge of the city, last stop on the Bangkok commuter ferry. We'd heard conditions at the jail were awful, and the guys there, most of them incarcerated on drug charges, appreciated any kind of visitors and the gifts they might bring. It wasn't out of sense of charity that we went, but a drive to get away from the tour buses and banana pancakes, to do something a little off the beaten path in the city that had become the beaten path, plus a burning curiosity for a glimpse of life in a foreign prison.
The jail was surprisingly easy to find, guards shockingly friendly and obliging, and everything appeared much nicer than I'd expected. The man we'd intended to see, Jody Aggett, had been freed several months prior, and Julie and I were at a bit of a loss. "He go home,"the guard said, but gave us the name of another inmate he recommended we meet. Though we were the only foreigner present, besides a pair of Indian and Sri Lankan missionaries, the prison staff seemed used to dealing with visiting tourists.
Michael Connel had been caught at 19 trying to smuggle ecstacy into Bangkok Airport. He'd been acting independently,thinking he could turn a neat profit off the only drug not available in the Golden Triangle. His Thai lawyer told him not to worry: "'Given your age, and the fact that it was your first offense, I think I can get you off with 30 years,'" Michael related to me. The judge gave him life, with the contingency of a death sentence, should it be recommended by a higher court. I don't support foreigners trafficking drugs abroad, as it cuts into local business, but I can certainly see the screwed up logic of a 19 year-old trying to make some money on his vacation.
"But I'll be out of here in another 6 years," he said. Britain's working on a treaty for prisoner transfers with Thailand. America has a similar one, that allows US nationals to be charged and tried in Bangkok, but to serve their sentences at jails back home. "Once I'm there, I'll probably serve another 6 years, and be paroled." Michael had already served 7 years. He'd had his hair shaved short and looked in good health, wearing his own clothes--an adidas jumpsuit and baseball cap--rather than the standard orange jumpsuit, a privelige for good behavior. His manner was kind, courteous, relaxed, and altogether charming. When I lifted the gift sack of fruits, cookies, chocolates, and toiletries to the viewing window for him to see, he thanked us graciously.
"I'm sorry," I said, "we weren't sure what exactly you needed in there. I hope these things will be useful."
"Have you got any freedom in the bag?" he laughed. "Did you happen to bring any of that with you?"
I had no idea how to respond that.
"To tell you the truth, I'd rather serve out my sentence here than back home. Here, the guards are easy going and will leave you alone, so long as you don't cause trouble. I've got a job with the medical dispensary, and that keeps me busy. If you look around here, you'll see most of the guards sleep half the day. I imagine the British jails will be a lot rougher, full of gangs, with fights breaking out."
I told him I was confused; up til then, I'd been informed of Thai prisons only from reading The Damage Done by Warren Fellows, a memoir of eating rats to survive, of keeping one's head down to avoid sadistic guards.
"What you have to keep in mind is that that book was written 20 years ago,"Michael said. "It's nowhere near as bad as it was then."

Michael is a genuinely nice person. He made a serious mistake at age 19 and certainly deserved to be banned from Thailand, but it's very difficult to see the justice in any teenager being detained for 30 years to life, with the constant promise of a firing squad hanging over his head, then deprived of the chance to attend university or get any sort of professional training. If and when he's released, he'll be a much older, much sorrier person with far fewer resources for supporting himself, and he'll be alone.
Julie and I are asking you to do something kind this holiday: send Michael a postcard, a letter, or even a small care package to let him know people are thinking of him. You can reach him at:

Michael Connel
Bangkwang Central Prison
Building 12
1 Nonthaburi Road
Nonthaburi, Bangkok 11000
Thailand

If you'd like to contact other foreigners at Bangkwang, there's a roster of inmates here. All of them appreciate your support.

Mark and Juliah

Final Days in Laos

Just enough time to post a quick update on our travels. We were heartbroken to leave Vientiane yesterday. This was my third trip to PDR Laos in 8 years, though at first I felt like a bit of a freak admitting that much to other people. Slowly-slowly, though, we met others who'd been returning to SE Asia's only landlocked nation every other year, or every year, plus people who'd made Luang Prabang and Vientiane their home, and who looked as comfortable as the locals skipping about the cities on motorbikes. I was more than a little envious of them.
It's remarkable how, as a city and a capital, Vientiane has really come into its own. More than once, I got curmudgeony on Juliah, reminding her, "I remember when this city didn't have a single paved road! I remember when there were chickens in the streets everywhere! Now look at this place: cars! pet dogs! cops with shoes!" You can't quantify the level of growth that's occurred here in the last 10 years, since back when the country had a single airport that supported a single daily flight from Bangkok. I'm nostalgic for my first memories of the country, but also thrilled for the Lao people, who are desperately in need of development.
On our second to last day, we took the advice of a boorish Australian who'd hated every place he'd been except a single temple just outside central Vientiane. Wat Si Muang is one of many temples rebuilt after Thailand sacked the country in the mid-1800's. Though Thais and Laos share the same religion, Buddhism didn't stop the Thais from burning wats and wrecking images of the Buddha, just as it didn't prevent the Burmese from wrecking the temples of Ayuthaya prior to that. Inside War Si Muang is the city pillar, laid during the official founding of Vientiane. Underneath this several ton stone, it is believed, is the crushed body of a pregnant woman: a self-sacrifice or human sacrifice that pre-dates current Buddhist practices.
Wat Si Muang is Vientiane's most active temple, not only because it is the city's temple, but because the grounds and images inside are believed to have special powers of protection and blessing. A 20 pound molten Buddha statue, destroyed when the Thai wrecked the city, rests on a pillow in a room just outside the main prayer chamber, where the devout come to pray and the tourists come to take flash photography. The practice is to raise the statue above your head while silently meditating on a personal wish, and to return to the temple later with offerings of wax flowers, bananas, and incense. Inside the main chamber, the room was stacked with elaborate offerings. Outside, a small procession of students, families, and crippled people waited their turn to pray, against the backdrop of monks blessing families, performing baasi ceremonies to bind together spirits to protect the health and souls of the devout.
We're back in Bangkok to meet Julie's sister and enjoy watermelon shakes before heading to Koh Chang, off the southern coast. Pictures will be posted shortly to this page, but in the meantime please check out some of our other photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandjuliah/
Best,

Mark and Juliah

Thanksgiving in Laos

Thanksgiving in Laos found us in a cave. I was not sure what the holidays would feel like here, whether they would make us nostalgic or if we would even notice that we were missing them. We were in Muang Ngoi, a small town one hour up the Nam Ou river from Nong Khiaw by boat. Its a small town with a single dusty walking path below lush jagged mountains that stop you in your tracks. Every night groups of people sat by a fire in the middle of the single path. There are no roads. The only way to arrive in Muang Ngoi is by boat or by walking from the next village over. The town has been here since the 15th century, but none of the old temples survived the US bombing.

On Thanksgiving Mark and I walked down a footpath to a soccer field to a series of caves along a shady stream. Locals lived in these caves for years to escape US bombing during the war and farmed at night as bombs only dropped during the day.

We followed the path by the stream out of the woods until it crossed the stream. Women with no shoes carried large bags of rice by a strap across their forehead. We shuffled to get out of their way as they gracefully climbed over a cattle fence and through the stream. The path lead us to a wide plateau of rice fields which were being harvested by men in straw hats.

With some helpful directions from the rice farmers we arrived in the village of Bana and drank ginger tea in a small cafe with a couple from Switzerland. The owner pulled out a bottle of lao lao which is a local whiskey. It was a small water bottle with only a few inches of lao lao left, but he offered each of us a very small shot making the few ounces of hard alcohol last for three rounds for the five of us. Clearly, the sharing was more important than the actual drinking.

We played petang with the owner next to some old bomb parts. After lunch we were invited to drink more lao lao with the rice farmers as we were walking back to Muang Ngoi across the rice field. They already had a young Argentinian man with them in the shade of their baan ( a shelter used for eating and resting next to the rice field) but they happily made room for us. Soon a single glass of lao lao is circulating. I pull out a bag of peanuts and the Argentinian pulls out some bananas to share. Both are well received and soon sticky rice is passed to us. We talk about work, soccer, rice and how cool it is to be a rice farmer.

Soon a Spanish couple made their way towards our shelter. The rice farmer with the best English (who is now red in the face from drinking) stopped the woman and apologized for not inviting them to drink with us- the lao lao has run out. The Spanish woman thanks him and explains that she doesn't like lao lao and is happy that it has run out. They all laughed. After the Spanish couple left we sit for a moment and reflect on this Thanksgiving. Soon it is time for the soccer game back in Muang Ngoi and the rice farmers head back to town.


Pictures:
The vally near Muang Ngoi
The cave
Playing Petang (note the bomb part in the background)
For more pics see our flickr page: markandjuliah

Mark and Juliah

Adventures on Special K Island

If you look at a map of Indonesia, you will notice a large island in the shape of the letter K in the northeast of the country. This is Sulawesi. We started at the bottom of the left leg and worked our way to the north, transversing that large bay created between the right arm and right leg of the K. My only regret is that we didn't give ourselves more time on this beautiful and friendly island. We met many smart travelers that devoted their entire 3 and 4 week trips to Sulawesi.

When you visit Sulawesi you may go to a fascinating region of Toraja. Here Torajans live in strange boat-shaped houses that face north to remind them that their ancestors came from the north on boats. By day, Torajans farm coffee and rice, and by evening the rhythmic pounding of rice could be mistaken for drums echoing across vast valleys of rice paddies. If you are one of the lucky visitors to Toraja you may get to observe a funeral. Funerals are elaborate parties attended by -literally- truckloads of family and friends and neighbors who descend on villages. Torajans believe that a proper funeral is needed for the deceased to navigate through the various challenges of the afterlife. Torajans believe that their deceased ancestors will have to face many challenges as they travel through the afterlife. A proper funeral is needed support them on their journy.

A crucial element of the funeral is the buffalo sacrifice. Families may save up for two years before they can afford the water buffalos needed for a sacrifice ( the decease

d bodies are kept in the home in the meantime). Once you see one of these large and gentle creatures fall to their knees, blood spurting from the neck, you may feel a sense of relief. That was it; the buffalo sacrifice is over. But no, a good Torajan funeral needs 24 sacrifices. Those other buffalo standing around, obliviously batting their eyelashes- they are next. Lucky you, you get to see 23 more sacrifices.

When you are at a Torajan funeral, you should wear black and bring a case of clove cigarettes as a gift. Another pointer is not to stand too close to the sacrifices. While some sacrifices go well (the animal falls peacfully to the ground), sometimes the buffalo flails and thrashes for sometime before collapsing. You don't want buffalo blood on your one pair of pants.

Slaughtering Buffalo in Tana Toraja

Maud was getting on my nerves. The French girl had been on the bus with us to Rantampao, 10 hours from Makassar in the south. She was friendly enough, but I could sense there was something off about her. She followed us to a budget hotel and had been the one to tell us about the chance to observe a funeral ceremony that same morning, but when we met with Johnny, the guide, to arrange a tour the following day, she'd whispered conspiratorially, "You leave the negotiating to me."
"That Austrian couple you took today was on a honeymoon, and they had a lot of money to spend, but we're backpackers, and we're traveling for a long time, so you have to give us a good price, okay!" Her tone took us off guard; I think we'd expected her to be aggressive, but not belligerent. Haggling comes with the territory of budget travel, but getting in people's faces, shouting, and wrecking relationships for the sake of $5 usually makes us squeamish.
Johnny thought for awhile, wrote out his expenses on paper. He was a local, but as a Christian convert, had followed the tradition of taking a western name. He listed his costs, stated what he needed to make, and came down to about $50, from the $90 he'd charged the Austrians earlier that day.
"No, I said you have to give us a good price!" Maud yelled. "That's not a good price!"
The two of them bickered back and forth, he more politely than she, but he refused to budge from 450,000 Rupiah. Maud turned him down, then went back later that night to track him down and book his services. The next morning, when he met us for breakfast, she was still whining and badgering him about a discount.
Our tour turned out to be pretty fun. Torajans are fixated with death and the afterlife, and we visited sites where bodies had been interred in caves, a living tree where the corpses of infants where inserted into crevices and twists to grow into a part of the trunk, and saw life-sized tau-tau carvings, wooden effigies of the dead, which somewhat resemble muppets. In the last cave, dessicated skulls where gathered in piles on the floor and jammed into crannies. Above them were tau-taus looking out.
After visiting three sites, Johnny took us to a funeral celebration 30 minutes away by car. Maud slept in the front seat as we passed scenery of rice terraces and traditional villages.
Funeral celebrations in Tana Toraja are gorgeous and complicated events that last for days. The following is a mix of what we observed, plus some explanation provided later by our trek guide. In the center of a traditional village, the teardrop shaped coffin is placed on a palanquin resembling a Torajan house and marched from one end of town to the other, to the accompaniment of a parade of uncut cloth, beating gongs, and what can only be described as war-whoops. Torajan homes uniformly have 3 rooms, are shaped like ships, and face north, to remind the inhabitants that their ancestors were sailors who arrived from boat from the south. While the coffin is carried, the whole of the village follows, carrying an uncut length of white cloth, empty spirit chairs over their heads, leading water buffalo by the nose, and, shaking the palanquin.
They return to the village center, move the coffin to a special platform, serve lunch to all guests and say a special prayer before sacrificing two buffalo.
Tea and cookies are served as the men in the village get down to the grizzly business of flaying and butchering the animals. Dogs circle, flies hover, and choice cuts of buffalo are auctioned off to raise money for the local church. When this is finished, several buffalo are led down to the rice paddies to fight. We thought this would be inhumane and awful to watch, but the buffalo turn out to be fairly stupid, aggressive, and cowardly animals that will lock horns a few minutes if they just see another male in their direct line of vision, then turn tails and run away if they think they're outmatched.
Torajan cosmology holds that death is the start of a journey to the afterworld, but that journey cannot begin until a proper funeral has taken place. Often, families will spend 6 to 24 months saving for a ceremony after a member has died. During that time, the dead person is kept in the home, served regular meals, given cigarettes and betel nuts, and addressed by others as a living person.
The funeral marks the start of the deceased's journey to the next world. It's a long, difficult, and perilous trip over mountains and through deep caves. When the deceased arrives at their destination, they meet a judging god who examines their life and assigns them status in the afterworld. Someone deemed worthy and virtuous can be made a demi-god, and can go on to influence the destinies of their descendants.
A good funeral helps the trip and transition. It can give the spirit a head start on the journey, and make the dead look good in the eyes of the god. Women gather together and pound rice in large mortars during the funeral, to give the appearance to deities listening that the deceased was an important person with servants. Water buffalo, usually 26 to 100 of them, are sacrificed over the course of the day. They carry the dead and their belongings into the next world, and the quality and breed of the buffalo make a tremendous difference: two-toned buffalo are extra valuable, because the black color allows the animal to walk on land, and the white allows it to fly; a buffalo with a patch of white on its forehead will cast light in the darkness of a cave; for reasons unexplained to Julie and me, it's better if the buffalo has a long tail.
In the public markets, these buffalo sell for up to a few thousand dollars each.
I wasn't quite prepared for the slaughter of these animals, but Johnny was very excited for us to come and witness. We watched from a peanut gallery as a short stick attached to a ring in the animal's nose was raised high, forcing the buffalo's head up. Someone would dash in with a machete and, using a forearm swing, cut the animal's throat, wide and deep. The bull would fall down, make snuffling noises, kick its feet a few times, and the eyes would glaze over just as flies began gathering near the bright pools of blood. The other 25 buffalo, meanwhile, stand around the body of their companion, dumb and unfazed, chewing grass, probably thinking, "Well, it won't happen to me."
Johnny returned us to our hotel that evening, the Wisma Maria I, and we spent the night trying to avoid Maud while listening to our neighbor's cancerous hoiking and spitting. Everyone smokes here. No one considers it dangerous, and everyone in Sulawesi will tell you the same thing: It's a sign of friendship to give and share cigarettes, usually a sweet and aromatic blend of tobacco and cloves. On the hill trek the next day, Julie and I spotted a four year-old hanging out under the village rice barn, taking French inhales from a discarded, burning butt.
The trek was incredible, by the way. Photos on Flickr will do a better job illustrating the scenery than I can here: steep, emerald green, rice farming terraces; friendly families offering tea when we stopped to rest; village chiefs stuffing coffins into caves hewn from massive boulders and outcroppings, and spending the night in one of the traditional, boat-shaped homes. Everywhere, the mountains were dotted with fleets of these houses, all pointing north.

Mark and Juliah