Episode 3 - the Bakar Batu

One of the highlights of our trip was being able to see a "bakar batu" (burning rocks) up close. We had heard that this event was going to occur at a church near where we were staying so that morning we wandered down to find out what time etc... Some said 9:00 am, others, obviously more in the know, said about 2:00 in the afternoon. So in the late morning we saw the smoke from the fire heating the rocks. The rocks are ready when all the wood is burned. In the meantime, the women go to their gardens and gather lots of vegetables - green leafy stuff, ferns (yes, the really enjoy ferns there), corn, and sweet potatos. I saw some ladies washing their veggies in a nearby stream.

A pig flu had made its way through the valley and so there were only four little pigs available for this event. To make up for the lack of pig meat, the people had ordered frozen chickens from Wamena (a city about 1.5 hours drive away, provided the road isn't washed out by a landslide...). Unfortunately, the people have no experience with frozen chicken and didn't realize just how frozen it gets. They had not taken it out to thaw hours earlier. So they got busy cutting the chicken in half and then soaking it in water and laying it out on leaves to thaw in the sun.

Then the rocks were ready and they took them out of the fire pit with split sticks and dropped them into the holes that already had banana leaves and veggies in them. Then the chicken and on top of that the pig and then more veggies.
In the meantime, the guys were shooting the breeze with some of the locals... One guy spoke a bit of English and enjoyed talking with Dad.

Hugo got to meet some of the church leaders. They told us that the Dutch missionaries came in the 1950's. Some of them still wanted their kids to learn Dutch and some could still remember some words of Dutch.


Meanwhile the food was cooking under that hill. Normally it is done in 30-40 minutes but because the chicken was kind of frozen, they cooked it for an hour and then the ladies got in there and took all the food out. Most of it was laid on banana leaves.

We were then presented with banana leaves of veggies. I tried a tiny bit of the green leafy stuff. Kind of tasted like it had sand on it.
Then they handed out the sweet potatoes and corn. The corn was rather chewy. They don't have good crisp sweet corn like back in Canada... By this time, the whole process had taken hours, we were getting rather crisped from the sun and it was getting late and as I needed to cook dinner on a wood stove and needed about an hour to get the stove warm enough for cooking. So we said our thanks and left. They really wanted us to stay and have some meat but we did not feel good about taking meat when we get to eat meat all the time and these folks hardly ever get to enjoy it. Not only that, my back was killing me from sitting on that log...
So that was our first bakar batu experience! I actually hope I get to have more! It's a great social event!