Tuk Tuk, Sumatra, Indonesia

Tuk Tuk is a place on the island of Samosir (island in Lake Toba) in Sumatra, Indonesia and has round about 2000 inhabitants. The people living here are called Batak (indigenous people on Samosir). Although Marco Polo reported rumors about man-eating mountain peoples, which he called "Batta", when he drove past Sumatra in 1292, it was not until 1824 that the first Europeans traveled to the Batak country.
The Batak developed a warlike culture with many battles between the individual villages and practiced headhunting with ritual cannibalism. There is evidence of ritual ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms and the use of pupuk as a magic ingredient. Pupuk is said to have been prepared from human flesh (the brain and other parts of the body of a robbed and murdered child). Although you can still drink mushroom shake all over here, I think there will be no human meat in the BBQ tonight.
The Batak bury the noblest of their dead in ancestral houses, which are decorated with carvings similar to their houses, or in stone tombs (the Tugu). The Batak houses have mighty curved gable roofs. Their wooden skeleton structure is traditionally covered with straw. Today, straw has often been replaced by corrugated iron. The different groups of the Batak have each developed characteristic house and architectural forms. A three-part structure consisting of the substructure, wall zone and roof can be roughly distinguished. The houses stand on piles, their front and back walls are inclined outwards and carved or decorated with decorative laces.
The Batak came late under the influence of Dutch colonial rule compared to the other peoples of Indonesia. It was not until 1907, with the death of the last charismatic priest-king of the Batak, Sisingamangaraja XII, who had waged a long guerrilla war against the Dutch, that the Dutch gained complete control over the Batak.Read more