There is a remote region in Indonesia where people are present with their dead at a length we can’t even begin to conceive—the holy grail of corpse interaction. For years I thought visiting this place was beyond my reach. But I had forgotten one crucial thing: I knew Dr. Paul Koudounaris.
One day in the spring, I sat in the home of Dr. Paul, scholar of the macabre and longtime Los Angeles cult treasure. By sat, I mean I perched directly on the hardwood floor. Paul’s home in Los Angeles, which he calls the “Moroccan pirate castle,” has no furniture. There are, however, clusters of taxidermied animals, Renaissance paintings, and Middle Eastern lanterns suspended from the ceiling.
“I’m going to Tana Toraja for the ma’nene’ in August,” he said, with a nonchalance only Paul can pull off. For the last twelve years he has traveled all over the world photographing everything from burial caves in Rwanda, to Czech churches decorated in human bone, to mummified monks in Thailand covered head to toe in gold leaf. This is a guy who, in order to transport himself to rural Bolivia, caught a ride on a World War II paratrooper plane that hauled frozen meat. The only other passengers were a farmer, his pig, his sheep, and his dog. When the plane hit turbulence, the animals scattered. As Paul and the farmer lunged to capture them, the copilot turned and screamed, “Stop shaking the plane, you’re going to make us crash!’ ” Paul is the type of person who can handle a trip to Toraja.
Then, he invited me to tag along. “But to warn you, the trip itself is a pain the ass.”
SEVERAL MONTHS LATER we touched down in Jakarta, the largest city in Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 islands and boasts the fourth largest population in the world (behind China, India, and the United States).
To catch our next flight we shuffled through passport control.
“Where are you traveling to in Indonesia?” asked the pleasant young woman at the desk.
“Tana Toraja.”
An impish grin crossed her face. “You are going to see the dead bodies?”
“Yes.”
“Oh—really?” She seemed taken aback, as if her initial question was just to make polite conversation. “The dead bodies, do you know, are they walking by themselves?”
“No, the family holds them up. They aren’t like zombies,” Paul replied.
“I’m afraid of them!” She turned to share a nervous laugh with her coworker in the next booth as she stamped us through.
When we finally arrived in Makassar, the capital of the island of South Sulawesi, I had been awake for thirty-nine hours. As we exited the airport into the heavy air, Paul was swarmed like a celebrity. I forgot to mention that Paul in person looks just as outlandish as his house—a claim I lay with the utmost aesthetic respect. He has thick dreadlocks, a beaded wizard’s beard, and tattoos. He traveled in a purple velvet frock coat and a top hat with an ermine skull attached to the brim. No one knows his age. He was once described by a mutual friend of ours as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton.” Paul refers to himself as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.”
Men ceased their frantic taxi hawking in order to get a closer look at Paul’s tattoos and his skull hat. Paul’s visual strangeness gets him through locked doors and into secret monasteries and bone caves that no one else would have access to. People are too confounded to refuse him.
There was no time for a nap at a hotel. We found our driver and were whisked away on our eight-hour drive north. Green rice fields stretched out on either side of the road and water buffalo plopped languidly into baths of mud.
As we navigated the southern lowlands, we heard the Muslim call to prayer pumped through the speakers of roadside mosques. The majority of Indonesians are Muslim, but in the remote mountains of Tana Toraja, the people followed an animistic religion called Aluk to Dolo (“the way of the ancestors”) until the Dutch introduced Christianity in the early 1900s.
We hit the mountains not long after. Our driver barreled the SUV up winding two-lane roads, dodging and swerving around mopeds and trucks in a never-ending game of automobile chicken. Not speaking his language, I finally had to act out the universal symbol for “Seriously, bro, I’m going to vomit.”
By the time we arrived in Toraja, I was starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep. But Paul, who had enjoyed multiple naps on the plane, wanted to photograph a series of nearby burial caves before dark.
There was no one at the Londa burial caves when we pulled up. Up against the cliff, set on rickety scaffolding, were stacks of coffins made of uru wood, shaped like boats, buffalos, and pigs. Radiocarbon dating shows that coffins like these have been used in Toraja since 800 BC. Skulls peeked out of cracks in the wood like nosy neighbors, watching our arrival. As the wood of the coffins decomposes, the bones they contain will go rolling and spilling down the side of the cliff.
Even more surreal, the coffins sat next to rows and rows of tau tau, the Torajans’ realistic wooden effigies of the dead, seated like an important village council. They represent the souls of the anonymous bones scattered in the cave. The older tau tau are crudely carved, with oversized white eyes and straggled wigs. More modern tau tau are distressing in their realism, with finely lined faces, convincing warts, and veined skin. They wear eyeglasses, clothes, and jewelry, and look ready to pry themselves up by their canes and welcome us in.
Inside the darkened cave, skulls lined the crevices and natural ledges in the stone. Some were artfully arranged in pyramid-shaped stacks and rows, while some were left upside down. Some were bleached white, and others were vivid green, covered in moss. Some had cigarettes posed jauntily in their mouths. A lower jawbone (missing the rest of its skull) smoked two cigarettes at once.
Paul motioned me to follow him through a small hole, to what I imagined was another chamber of the cave. Crouching and squinting into the darkness, I saw that this move would require crawling on my stomach through a tunnel.
“Yeah, that’s okay, I’ll stay here.”
Paul, who sometimes breaks into abandoned copper and pumice mines in the Los Angeles area (because, of course he does), crawled away. The tails of his velvet frock coat disappeared into the hole.
My cellphone, my only source of light, was at 2 percent battery life, so I powered it down and sat in the dark among the skulls. Minutes went by, maybe five, maybe twenty, when a lantern broke through the darkness. It was a family: a mother and several teenagers, Indonesian tourists from Jakarta. From their perspective, I must have looked like a possum trapped by car headlights against a garage wall.
In gracious, elevated English, a young man positioned himself at my elbow and said, “Excuse me, miss. If you will direct your attention to the camera, we will create an Instagram.”
Flashes started going off, sending my image to #LondaCaves. Strange as this felt in the moment, I could see why the discovery of a six-foot-tall white girl in a polka-dot dress in the corner of a cave filled with skulls would be an Instagrammable moment. They took several pictures with me in different poses before moving on.