One of the last great bastions of tradition in increasingly modernized Indonesia, Sumba remains a wild and wonderful adventure. Tim Hannigan takes a detour far from the beaten track.

Sumba eases up over the horizon an hour before sunset, long after the green hills of Flores have fallen away in the wake. Below deck the cargo of seasick pigs grunts unhappily. I lean against the rail of the ferry’s upper deck and watch the long, dark ridge of the island rising in the dusk. Sumba is an island apart. Riding south of the main chain of Nusa Tenggara, the string of small islands east of Bali, it stayed aloof from the rest of the archipelago for centuries. Hinduism, Islam and Christianity did not cross the Sumba Strait; Dutch colonialists arrived only in the early 20th century, and long after Independence Sumba kept the rest of the world at arm’s length. Today it remains one of Indonesia’s most intensely traditional islands.

The day after coming ashore at the little port of Waingapu I visited Wunga. Sumba is famous for traditional villages with soaring roofs of shaggy thatch, and according to legend, Wunga was the prototype. It was here that the first Sumbanese settled after arriving in the island sometime in the first millennium AD.

A dozen houses, roughly built and roofed with great witch-hat peaks of dried grass, stand on an escarpment of old limestone, looking out over the strange, barren landscape of East Sumba. The place smells of wood smoke and chickens.

Everything here is as it had been since the days of the ancestors, the villagers tell me. No modern building materials are used; even metal nails are forbidden and the floors and stilts of the houses are made of uncut branches bound with palm fiber.

Ancestral tombs between the houses are built from unfinished stone, and the hand-woven cloth of the village is plain and unembroidered. All the people in Wunga follow the traditional, ancestor-worshipping religion of Sumba, known as Agama Marapu.

The Marapu religion is a complex system of ritual and custom. The Sumbanese believe they are protected by ancestral spirits – the Marapu – that dwell among the sacred heirlooms in the high roof space of the village houses. Life in Sumba is governed by strict taboos, and by the dualism of masculine and feminine.

Elsewhere in Indonesia I had often seen Islam and Christianity making strange compromises with older beliefs to produce complex syncretism, but here in Sumba I was among people who follow a faith that belonged only to their own soil.

But Sumba is changing. The next day I travel west by bus through the center of the island. The landscape softens; there were more trees here, and small fields of red earth. Villages with high roofs stand beside the road, and enormous sarcophagi of carved limestone mark the burial places of venerated ancestors. But there are other buildings too: simple churches of whitewashed concrete.

Some guidebooks say half the population of Sumba still follow the Marapu religion. That was probably true a little over a decade ago, but the percentage of Sumbanese who declare themselves to be ancestor-worshippers is probably in single figures now.

When I stop in the district of Anakalang – a place where village houses huddle conspiratorially on low hilltops and long ranks of buffalo traipse through the fields – there are churches everywhere. Cheap crucifixes hang from the necks of village women with betel-stained teeth and it seems tevery child is called Maria or Matthias.

The first Christian missionaries in Sumba did not fare well. A Catholic outpost in the late 19th century was abandoned after the local “heathens” proved too unruly, and the Dutch were too preoccupied suppressing headhunting, tribal war and insurgency to bother with conversion. But in recent years a majority of Sumbanese have become Christian.

Waikabubak, the main town in West Sumba, is a remarkable place. It has a scruffy main street with fly-blown warungs and dusty hardware shops, and men stalk through the market with long machetes tucked into the twists of woven ikat cloth around their waists. But what makes it special is that on the little hilltops of the town are some of Sumba’s most traditional communities.

Kampung Tarung, a hundred meters up a narrow lane from the Waikabubak bus stand, is far removed from the busy street. It is a beautiful community with every house built in traditional style, adorned with buffalo horns from the bloody sacrifices that accompany Sumbanese funerals. The people offer me betel nut and invite me into their homes. They say that the village is an important part of the Marapu traditions. It is strange that it is right here, so close to the government offices and shops that constitute modernity in Sumba, traditions are at their strongest.

After a couple of days in Waikabubak I travel south on a rented motorbike. The countryside pours away in interlocking spurs and ridges, running down to a lonely ocean. I follow backroads through dry forest, finding empty beaches at the end of rough tracks and carved tombs standing sentinel on windswept hillsides.

After pushing the motorbike across a river and climbing a steep footpath I reach the village of Sodan. Sumbanese villages occupy these defensive hilltops for good reason. Unlike other areas of Indonesia, Sumba was never unified by a local king. Warfare between neighboring villages continued long into the last century. Many villages still have a “skull tree”, the dead branch where the heads of slain enemies used to be hung; the last headhunting raids took place in the 1960s.

The thatched houses of Sodan are strung along a high ridge. This is still a stronghold of the Marapu religion, and I sit on a bamboo veranda chewing betel nut with one of the Rato, the Marapu priests. He explains that his role is to communicate with the ancestors. The spirits, he says, send messages to the living which could be read in the intestines of a sacrificed chicken or in the liver of a freshly slaughtered piglet.

The ridgetop fastness of Sodan is well-designed to hold out against change, but back at the bottom of the hill there is a new church.

As I travel further from Waikabubak the roads become rougher, the countryside emptier, and my arrival prompts near hysteria in the villages that I visit. But always there are the crude concrete churches and the crucifixes.

At sunset I reach the fishing village of Pero, a Muslim enclave on the lonely southern coastline. I stopp the night in a simple homestay, and in the morning I wake under a billowing mosquito net to the sound of goats and chickens outside my window.

From Pero I walk west along the coast. There are no hilltops here, but the roofs of the thatched houses in the village of Tosi are almost as tall as the bending palm trees. There are great ranks of tombs built on the cropped grass beside the track. Tosi is one of the venues for the famed Pasola, ritual horseback battles held each year in February and March, but now the patch of grass where the riders fling spears at one another is abandoned.

The people in the village tell me stories of the journey of the Marapu ancestors from India, down through Southeast Asia and across the sea to Sumba. Then they tell me they are Christian and ask for cigarettes. It seems to me that they are at a sad and strange stage of conversion.

I wander on along the coast. A little way beyond Buku Bani Kampung I hear the sound of a gong tolling in the trees. A boy in a red T-shirt is wading through the chest-high dead nettles and he calls out to me.

“Come on, there has been a death in the village, come and see!” I don’t want to intrude, but he insists.

Dozens of people mill around in the glaring sunlight outside a traditional house. The tarnished metal gong – used to announce the death – is set up at the end of the bamboo veranda. People clear a space for me to sit and give me food and water, and a man in a black sarong with a twist of red cloth around his head explains that a young man from the village had died in hospital in Waikabubak the night before.

His body has been brought back to the village and he must lie in the family home for three days while a tomb is prepared. When it is ready the body will be interred and buffalo, horses and chickens sacrificed – to join the spirit of the dead man.

It is dark inside the house, and it smells of smoke. The body lies just beyond the doorway. He is swaddled in folds of rich ikat cloth and a single candle burns beside his head. His face is beautiful and calm, with the corners of his mouth turned into the beginnings of a smile. The women of the family sit around him, mourning silently.

The man whispers to me, “There is no crying. This is what we believe in Sumba: when the body is still in the house we cannot cry.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because his spirit is still here, and crying and noise will make him angry and dangerous. We can cry after the sacrifices when he has already gone to the Ancestors.”

The eyes of the women are hollows of stoic sadness.

“What is your religion?” I ask dreamily.

“Christian,” he says, “we are all Christian here.

Belonging to a “modern” religion is seen by many – both inside and outside traditional societies – as a requirement for full membership of an Indonesian nation and a modern world. But as I walk away from the village, through the trees and into the sunlight, I feel more confident of the future of Sumbanese traditions. Right now the island is in transition into the accommodating syncretism that characterizes much religion across Indonesia.

In 20 years there will probably be no true followers of the Marapu religion, but traditions will still be strong; they will still be building houses with the towering roofspace for the spirits and heirlooms.

And as in the village I had just left, they will probably still be sacrificing buffalo for the spirit of the dead when it goes to join the ancestors.

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