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I N D O NES IA At the Perangian Village collection site in Northern Toraja, locals happily welcome visitors. THE FIRST DUTCH PLANTINGS in Indonesia began at the tail end of the 17th century and made their way to West Java through Jakarta. Since the 1700s, there have been severe highs and lows in Indonesia's coffee history: leaf-rust blights that nearly ended the coffee industry, colonial exploitation of coffee workers and Dutch coffee traders exposed via Eduard Douwes Dekker's (aka Multatuli) 1860 novel Max Hevelaar, in recent times, the expansion of certified coffee production—a success story in the making. This is a place where coffee's history has ebbed and flowed, and yet today it seems on the cusp of a new identity. In the early 21st century, Indonesia is a bustling nation with an emerging economic growth fueled by foreign investments and a seemingly widening disparity between vast rural areas and enormous, sprawling cities. Indonesia is truly a massive country and now ranks fourth in the world in terms of Arabica coffee production. This has created hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the country's coffee belt. It has yet to be determined where Indonesia is going, but its coffee industry—despite recent lows in the C market—is expanding with new plantings in all three islands I visited. the South Sulawesi province's capital city of Makassar. You take a winding road that straddles the Makassar Strait until you reach the town of Pare-Pare. From Pare-Pare you begin to leave the coastline and climb up into the highlands. Toraja is a quintessential highland tropical garden with a multitude of crops, including passion fruit, cloves, rice, vanilla, cassia, and coffee. Toraja's jutting, mountainous terrain is one of the most striking geographies I have ever seen. Toraja's name in the local Buginese language translates to "people of the highlands," or, according to a local I met, "land of the mighty." Whichever it is, this place is a rhythm of vivid colors from the layered green rice paddy fields, to zigzagging roads and steep sweeping formations of ancient volcanic origin. The air seems light and charged. Sunsets are thick with a magenta hue and massive cloud formations usually carrying early evening rains this time of year. The Torajan culture is unique. Torajans are an indigenous people who speak Bugis. Though there are few Christians in this majority Muslim nation, this particular area is dominated by the Torajan people who keep their ancient beliefs alive. They are polytheistic in their religious/spiritual view. This is called Aluk, or "the way." Beyond being a religious belief system, it spills into political, social, ancestral, and even agricultural expression. Ritualistic ceremonies SULAWESI By car, Tana Toraja (or Torajaland) is about eight hours north of www.baristamagazine.com 37