Trails are convoluted and often wet and slippery, so a guide and hiking boots are equally useful, though not essential. If you are not wild about having sweet potatoes for three meals a day, critical foodstuffs, such as chocolate and peanut butter can be found in Wamena, supplemented, with luck, by vegetables bought on the trail and cooked by your faithful retainer - in his own pots and pans. Alcohol is not available in any form in the valley. Mosquitoes are rampant all over Indonesia and the Irian Jaya's only city, Jayapura is malarial, so check the Health page. But the environment is not the only picturesque part of Torajah.
Death is also colourful, curious and exquisitely arranged.
Extravagant funeral ceremonies are a social and religious necessity in this Christian-Animist society because families have to impress the gods with the importance of the dead. If not, the soul of the dead person may not be able to enter heaven and will stay on earth, causing trouble for the relatives. Families keep the corpse of their kin in their strangely shaped three room houses for two or three years, while they save up for the sumptuous wake. This fond and funky farewell involves the construction of an entirely new village of bamboo out of town, sometimes with more than a hundred rooms, in which to entertain thousands of guests for up to seven days. Stage One of the event is the transportation of the red and gold covered coffin, and the effigy, from the relatives' home to the funeral village.