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WARNING: If you are a dog/cat lover I recommend you do NOT read any further; unless getting a genuine glimpse of the 'Macabre Market' in Tomohon, Indonesia is of cultural interest. To put it in context - the Minahasa tribes here in Indonesia have a reputation for 'eating everything with 4 legs, apart from the table and chairs'. In addition much of Indonesia (Bali included!) has streets full of feral cats and flea-covered wild dogs, these dogs run in packs and are left to roam. OK - context over. We visited the Tomohon market 3 times, to see the main stalls, customers and to get some photos. The most interesting day was the Saturday ahead of Easter Sunday when it was insanely busy. The layout of the market is traditional Asian; Large concrete and metal fish/meat market area and smaller tarpaulin or cloth and wood structures for smaller stalls then ad-hoc sellers selling random goods anywhere they can set up. There are many vegetable, clothes, fish and meat sections. There were 'Easter Special' stalls - a guy with chicks a few days old all coloured individually, red, orange, green, blue etc.! There were many secondhand clothes stalls, cloth stalls and women aplenty sat cross-legged selling various exotic vegetables. We often sat in one of the small tea-houses and had 'teh panas' black tea laden with sugar. Sheryl even ate there a couple of times having a local soup-noodle dish called Mie Dal. Anyhow, my interest was piqued by rumours I heard of the meat market. The meat sections are, in my opinion, always the most culturally interesting. This market (pasar) at Tomohon was certainly no exception. Ambling around the alleyways I saw tables of huge python some around 15 inches girth, maybe 6-9 feet long - cut up and hanging for sale. A guy cutting raw pieces off, weighing them on old suspended scales and pricing them. Then the bats. Wings cut off and bodies 'cooked' with a high temperature flame - their teeth all bared as the flesh contracts. They looked like little plastic vampires all stacked up neatly on blood covered tables, their mouths still dripping blood. Next the cooked rats on sticks, hundreds of them. They too are hairless and charred black, cooked, with a wooden stick inserted analy. They were very popular. These are 'de-sticked' prior to bagging. There are wild and domestic pigs there too, butchered already and pig-heads adorning many blood-splashed tables and chopping blocks. Next - cats - sold for 50,000IR - £2.50. A guy sells them either alive, from a cage or drowned - he drowns them, dries them, removes the fur with a high temperature blow-torch and sells them in bags. He pre-cooks so he had a batch of 4 sat there all black and charred. The smell was not too bad, just the smell of burnt fur or hair as the meat-men flame char the animals by the cage-load. Finally we heard the constant yelping of the 'street dogs'. There were maybe 30 there crushed in 2 small cages, baking in the 30 degree heat. Many were in poor shape with injuries, damaged eyes and looking very un-appetising! These are dogs without tags that are captured off the street and cooked then sold. With another 20-30 already 'prepared' same as the cats, rats and bats - blackened, bloated and teeth bared. Some butchers will chop the head off, if you prefer or sell just a portion. There were dog-heads, part dogs (all cooked) lying all around the counter tops. The process was very matter of fact; butchers drag a dog out of the tiny cage and club its neck with a wooden mallet, then again. For most that is enough although one guy I saw clubbed a dog at least 10 maybe 12 times. Still twitching and tail-wagging the men start the de-furring and cooking - often doing this on the very cage top within which the next victims are yelping and hiding from the flame. The smell is strong and it certainly is a contrast to our 'clinical' blood free meat in blue packages, prepared behind closed doors. The Tomohon 'Macabre Market' was a unique glimpse into a culture that has changed little for centuries, an unusual experience with some shocking photographs.
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