Epic Hikes of the World ( PDFDrive )

Whenever we reached a habitation, a crowd of happy kids followed in our wake,
calling us Dutch, sometimes for a half hour or more before turning around and
heading home.
Domingus, our Mamasan guide, led the way. Our supplies – sugar and
cigarettes for adult gifts, sweets for the children and package noodles plus water
for ourselves – were loaded on to a small horse handled by a tiny man with large
crooked teeth. The quiet horseman eventually divulged that he’d been working with
his beloved and well-cared-for beast for more than 17 years.
The hike had begun in hard-to-reach Mamasa, where simple buildings in the
flower-filled, buzzing town contrasted with the intricately carved banua sura
(traditional Mamasan houses) in the bucolic outskirts. Here, we were told, the
boat-shaped roofs are less curved, thicker and shorter than the more famous,
dramatically arched ones we’d find at our destination, Tana Toraja. The banua
sura were painted yellow, red, black and sometimes blue and the front and back of
each building were bedecked in rows of buffalo horns. As we travelled deeper into
the mountains, the walls of the houses lost their paint and the carvings became less
intricate but the sloped roof shape and buffalo horns remained.
© Luliia Shcherbakova | Shutterstock
a Tana Torajan village