•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   
•    EYEWITNESS   

The minibus was full of the sour scent of betel nut. I was crammed into the front passenger seat between the driver and two old men with thin, wiry limbs. All of them were wearing heavy, knee-length sarongs of local ikat, or traditional woven fabric, and their voices were blunted by the wads of the scarlet-colored betel they were chewing.

We were bouncing along a mountain pass southeast of the little West Timor town of Soe. My fellow passengers were talking about the new raja, the king, whom they said was maintaining the adat, or traditions.

He had actually been second in line to the throne, but his older brother had moved out of the kingdom and had “entered Christianity” and so lost his right to rule.

It was a simple enquiry from the driver about my destination that had kicked off this tantalizing conversation. The king the passengers were talking about was the hereditary headman of Boti, the remote village where I was heading.

On a high promontory above a sweeping panorama of mist-chased hills, the driver paused and pointed. Far below a clutch of pale roofs poked through the canopy of trees. “There it is,” he said. “Boti!”

About 50 kilometers from Soe, Boti is West Timor’s most famous traditional village, known for its unique “independence.”

Under a succession of self-styled rajas, the hilltop community has kept the outside world at bay, rejecting first Dutch colonialists and Protestant missionaries, and later the Indonesian state with its offers of education, language and infrastructure.

But the previous raja, the father of the present incumbent, demonstrated that he was not simply a hostile isolationist.

While government services and prescribed religions might have been rejected, there was one outside influence that Boti had allowed in, on its own terms: tourists.

The place was, I had heard, not only a bastion of traditional Timorese culture, but also a model for responsible cultural tourism.

I bade goodbye to my betel-chewing companions at a roadside market, and a young motorbike driver took me several kilometers further down a rough track.

A stony river bed was as far as he could go, so I shouldered my pack and continued on foot. The sky above was pale and bleached, and beyond the hissing of the river there was a tapestry of birdsong.

It was an uphill walk to the village. Pigs and chickens foraged in the undergrowth, and here and there a neat little house with shuttered windows stood in a clearing of packed earth.

A clutch of wide-eyed schoolchildren led me to the threshold of a beautiful half-wild garden.

At the end of the path stood what passes for a palace in Boti — a little wooden cottage with a wide veranda. Outside the dark doorway a gaggle of village women were chatting and chewing betel nut.

They reacted as if they had been expecting me. In a few moments I was sipping sweet coffee with Mama Tua, the queen of Boti, while the others resumed their conversation, their heavy beads and bangles clicking together as they spoke.

Guidebooks and tourist brochures give the idea that Boti is completely cut off from the rest of Indonesia, but this is not entirely true.

Many villagers — including Mama Tua — speak some Indonesian, and a new generation of Botinese children are enjoying an Indonesian education in the government school on the edge of the village.

Other hints of the outside world seep in as well, though sometimes a little late.

In the gloomy front room of the raja’s house, amongst the doilies and old armchairs, hangs a formal portrait of President Suharto, of the kind displayed in homes and offices everywhere a decade and a half ago.

The royal house stands in Boti’s inner sanctum, ringed by a fence of brushwood.

Two families live here, Mama Tua told me.

In total 70 households come under the direct rule of the raja, and “315 souls” still adhere to Boti’s original ancestor-venerating Halaika religion.

According to legend the first people of Boti descended from a nearby mountain called Lunu.

Legend also states that the royal bloodline is mixed with that of the birds, which explains why small birds are offered protection in the village.

“When they are being hunted in other villages the birds fly here to be safe,” said Pah, a young member of the royal family.

As the light thinned into evening I walked through the village. It was studded with traditional Timorese buildings, the beehive huts known as ume kbubu , which simply means round house, and the conical meeting places known as lopo.

It is not surprising that a place as beautiful and peaceful as this draws interested visitors, and the guestbook showed that there had been around 200 tourist arrivals in the past year — a trickle, but a steady one.

The cornerstone of the little tourist economy here is the hand-woven ikat cloth made by village women. Ikat is everywhere in Boti in the form of blankets, scarves and sarongs.

In other villages in the region the arrival of a tourist often means it’s time to step up the hard sell, but in Boti the community shop — a low, thatched building — is simply left unlocked, and visitors are free to discreetly wander in at will and pick up a few pieces at a fixed price.

To accommodate these travelers there is a simple village guesthouse, and after a meal eaten by lamplight under the portrait of Suharto, that’s where I slept.

There is no electricity in Boti, and the night was thick and velvety as I settled down under an ikat blanket to a chorus of insect noise and softly falling rain.

In the cool, clean light of the morning, I met the Raja Nama Benu, known as Bapa Tua. He was a lean, upright man in his forties, with long, frizzy hair bound back in a loose ponytail (all married Boti men must wear their hair uncut).

 He welcomed me, and then introduced a translator to field any questions.

I was not entirely convinced that this total lack of Indonesian was genuine — most of the other Botinese of Bapa Tua’s generation speak it quite well — but it was a powerful statement of Boti’s independence.

While the rough roads keep visitor numbers low, those that do make it to Boti are handled with an understated calmness that the slick professionals of bustling resorts would do well to learn from.

Payment for food and accommodation is left to guests’ discretion, as is their choice to buy a piece of ikat.

My own stay in Boti was only a short one, and after breakfast I thanked the raja and made my way back out of his little kingdom towards modern Indonesia.

As I took one last look at this strange, dreamy place, deep in the hills, I felt that between their easy approach to tourism and the rule of Bapa Tua, things would continue to remain the same here for a long time to come.