Tangokan houses

What I liked the most in Torajaland was the countryside.

Hiking through Torajaland with Adam and Kate we met the local people wandering through rice fields and villages- playing with school kids, chatting with farmers, and staying the night in home-stays. We also saw lots of wildlife - huge butterflies, colorful birds flitting through the coffee gardens, and hawks hovering over the valley. The wild setting bore an uncanny resemblance to Wallace's own observations in rural Sulawesi so long ago.

"Every bit of flat land was cleared and used as rice-fields, and on the lower slopes of many of the hills tobacco and vegetables were grown. Most of the slopes are covered with huge blocks of rock, very fatiguing to scramble over, while a number of the hills are so precipitous as to be quite inaccessible." A.R.W

For me hiking in Torajaland was like picking through a sort of eden. Rice fields march up the hillside in terraced snaking designs. Ducks and pigs wander between the paddies. Stands of coffee, cacao, banana, cassava and tall bamboo border the trails and jut out like islands from the rice fields. The vaulted roofs of tangkonan rice barns jut over the villages like the hulls of boats. And many a lazy water buffalo with a rope through the nose lolled in the mud beside each house. It was a lovely place, full of the beauty and nostalgia that Wallace so loved about rural Sulawesi...