Venerable Bones
I was in Sumatra, on a moped. I originally intended to be all Bear Grylls and ride a full-on adventure bike from Darwin to Aceh, but shipping it over the Timor Sea was more complicated than a vague planner like myself could cope with. So instead, I flew to Singapore, teamed up with my old road-buddy Teng and we zipped over the Malacca Straits to Medan, capital of Sumatra. There, we hired mopeds. Much simpler!
Riding in Sumatra was deceptively easy. You simply look where you want to go, pull full throttle and go. This applies to left, right, wrong way, right way, across and in-between lanes of any sized road you care to mention, footpaths, shop frontages and expressways. The only inviolable rule is that you sound your horn when overtaking, undertaking, thinking about either of those, turning left or right and when you see a friend. There is a lot of honking on Sumatran roads …
The other new transport-related issue we had to consider in Sumatra is multi-use road function and adaptation implementation (MURFAI). Explanation is required for this.
As soon as you leave any major town in Sumatra, the surrounding countryside is pure subsistence farming. Small clusters of huts grow their own rice, coffee, corn, tobacco, tea, palm oil, coconuts, betel nuts, peanuts, pepper and a wide variety of root vegetables too. None of them have fridges.
So to ensure the harvest of rice, coffee, corn, tobacco, tea, palm oil, coconut, betel nut, peanuts, pepper and the like doesn’t go off and start rotting, the only thing to do is dry the crop in the sun. That’s an easy call in Sumatra; the sun comes out a lot more than it goes in, and at a mere dozen or so kms from the equator, the province has powerful rays aplenty.
The most effective way to dry crops (and keep them clean) is to lay a tarpaulin on the ground and cover it with whatever you want dried. All you need to do is give it few days or so and there you are — next year’s dried dinner ready to store.
And (now this is the MURFAI link) what better place to lay your tarpaulin — for easy access, consistent flat surface and lack of shade — than the road? It’s a no brainer! So each and every roadside farmer in Sumatra has a tarp covered in newly harvested crops outside their home. Right across the road, absolutely, absolutely, everywhere. Year round.
Aha, I hear you ask — but what about the traffic? Don’t the passing vehicles squash all the carefully harvested produce laid out to dry on the tarp across the road?
Well, yes, that would indeed be the case if the trucks, buses, mopeds and occasional car ran straight over the tarp at normal road-user speed — but if the potentially crop-crushing vehicle is travelling slowly enough, it should be able to navigate around the edge of the tarpaulin, sparing the precious fruits of the harvest, right? A Good Result.
And the way the local people ensure this happens is simple — they lay a log right across the road. That sure slows the traffic down!
I have to admit, it’s not always as brutal as a log — sometimes it’s old tyres, a concrete pipe, bricks, even (sophisticated, eh?) a tarmac ridge. No matter, the MURFAI does its job very effectively, and becomes just another element of travel in Sumatra. So when I rode round a corner on Samosir, an island in the Toba volcanic crater lake and encountered a branch or two across a road, I wasn’t that surprised.
But this was different — there was no farm produce on a tarpaulin, just a sizeable tent, full of amazingly richly clad dancers, a band sweating profusely and playing nuclear-volume music plus probably a hundred or so more folks milling around eating chicken, mutton, rice and the like, and shouting at each other over the music. It was quite photogenic though, so I stopped and pulled out my camera.
A very nattily dressed elderly man came over to me, so I mimed “can I take a photo?” and he nodded yes. Then he called over another dancer/eater/shouter who, although rather casually dressed if I might say so, could nonetheless speak really good English. I asked him what was going on: “Is this a wedding?”
“No,” he said. “It’s a funeral.” He pointed at the natty elderly man “It’s his grandmother’s funeral.”
Perplexed, I asked how could this be? The natty man was probably at least 70, so his grandmother, even given a flexible birth regime, must have been well over 110.
“Oh no,” said Mr. Casual, “she died over 15 years ago. We are digging her bones up today and polishing them.” Well, that explained the dancing and eating and sweating.
Not exactly what I was expecting, but it turns out that this is the way the local Batak people venerate their ancestors. Once the oldies have shuffled off to the next world, they are mourned as per usual (with a fully anointed and ordained Christian priest in attendance) and given a regular burial.
Then, anything up to 20 years later, they are dug up, the bones cleaned thoroughly of any, err — ‘residual stuff’, rubbed with cinnamon and lime water and reburied (again with the consecrated priest again doing the honours), in a smart mini pyramid with little statues of the family perched on the top.
I had seen quite a few of these statue tombs by the side of the road as I rode around Lake Toba, but didn’t realise they were reburial sites. I was much more reverential from then on, and avoided honking spuriously near any of these secondary burial sites, even if I saw a friend coming the other way.
Who would have imagined, eh? Travelling to different places in our world can be dead interesting.
For more photos, click HERE. For more of my stories, click HERE.
