Seat of Our Pants

It sounded like a slightly gory but interesting enough add-on to our Kelimutu program. We’d ride motorbikes up to an isolated village where they had a mummy on display.

We got to the village after an hour drive, arriving in the middle of a roof-laying feast that the villagers were throwing. People were buzzing with excitement: not only was it roof-laying feast day, there were foreigners to behold as well!

While we waited for the headman to show up with the key to the mummy’s abode, we were offered a drink of local specialty. The buzzing of the crowd of villagers increased as the burly headman, Mr Paulus, arrived. With the help of a big key and a machete, the seldom-opened door creaked open, and we were allowed inside.

The mummy, a village Chieftain that supposedly died 125 years ago, rests in a green coffin. He is very short, probably around four feet tall. A small window in the coffin allows you to view the mummy’s face – something that was very hard to do in the darkness of the mummy house. The only way to see any of his features are in fact to flash him with your camera. Also, the norm is that you have to sacrifice a pig (at least) to be able to open the mummy’s house. We were able to pay Mr Paulus off with a 10 dollar donation instead.

I guess the mummy itself wasn’t so much the entertainment as the fanfare and buzz surrounding the opening of the house. We were in and out of it in three minutes.

Stuff like this… I don’t know. It’s a bizarre meeting between tourism and traditional life. I’ll remember it as a strange thing to do, paying to view a dead guy in a coffin somewhere off the beaten tourist track in Indonesia.

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