Your humble scribe and his esteemed travelling companion are now to be found in the small town of Tuk Tuk, on the shores of Samosir Island, Lake Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, and very nice it is too. We arrived yesterday after a short flight from Penang to Medan, a rough-and-ready bus journey from Medan to Parapat, and a ferry from there to the island whereupon rests this small town called Tuk Tuk. Lake Toba is a huge crater lake - the biggest lake in SE Asia and the biggest caldera world-wide: Samosir Island was formed by a volcano erupting inside a bigger volcanic crater, now flooded, and it's all on quite an impressive scale. However, it's not a World Heritage site because, presumably, no-one has bothered to lobby enough to make it one.

The natives are friendly. Very friendly. But it was not ever thus...

Indonesia is now nominally Muslim, but this official religion was superimposed on a background of animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and later Christianity brought in by that most pious of seafaring traders, the Dutch. All jumbled up in a melting pot, or cauldron.

There is plenty of evidence of the old tribal ways around here though - the locals had cannibalistic tendencies until a mere 250 years ago, and you can see the tombs and carvings of kings at local villages such as Tamok (where we went today). Also totem poles and stone seats in circles, where they used to hold court and pass judgement before killing their victims, who were mostly warriors from feuding neighbouring tribes, but could also have been serious transgressors of adat (traditional law), such as, I suspect, pesky women who were perceived as doing a bad job of running the home, family, fields and livestock while the men were busy feuding with neighbouring tribes.

All of which leads, in the latest of a series of seamless transitions, to...

What Afterlife

Part 9 (I think): Animism

Well, it's quite simple really, at least around here. Everyone believes in tondi, a sort of spirit or soul forming the essence of a person's individuality. You throw in a bit of cosmology (the creation myth is one of the omnipotent god Ompung creating the creatures of the Earth from the falling branches of a banyan tree), mix in a tad of ancestor worship and spirit worship, and stir in a hot cauldron.

The 'What afterlife' deal? Simple. You worship your ancestors, and you keep your tondi happy with a few sacrifices (lest it leave you and cause you to be temporarily ill, or even die). Then, when you're dead, your tondi lives on. Your descendents worship you a bit and look after their own tondi in turn. If you're a king you get to be buried in a stone tomb, which makes you a bit easier to worship when your tondi has done a bunk.

Not sure what happens to your tondi if you've transgressed the adat and been ritually eaten, but I'm looking into it.