The most pleasant trip out of Amboyna is also the shortest. The village of Soya Atas, perches 400 meters up the flank of 950-meter Mount Sirimau. A pretty little church sits in Soya Atas’ clean village plaza, and it is faced by the raja’s house, filled with momentos from the days of past splendor, when this raja controlled the city. But there is something strange about Soya Atas.
In colonial times, Nenek Luhu, the daughter of raja of Soya Atas, fell in love with a Dutch official. Her father disapproved of the match and the girl drowned herself out of grief. Her spirit, it is said, has never found peace and occasionally returns to this area: to kidnap a foreign man, to replace the babies she never had. The kidnappings all follow the same pattern. The victim disappears completely for a few days, then is discovered, sometimes dead. If not dead, he is in shock, dazed, or in a trance. The “cure” is for the victim to be given a drink of water by the Raja of Soya. Then all is well, except the victim can never recall what happened.
“[Soya’s] best documented kidnapping took place just before the Second World War, when Indonesia still belonged to Holland,” writes Shirley Deane. “The Dutch Governor General came to Amboyna on an official visit, and stayed with the Dutch Resident in his house above the city. He disappeared, while taking a stroll alone round the well-guarded gardens before dinner. There was, of course, a full-scale, frantic search, with the entire army and police force, and most of the population of Amboyna looking for him. He was found in a trance three days later, quite near Soya, in a place which had been thoroughly searched before, by the present Rajah who was then a little boy of nine. The boy’s grandfather, Rajah then, brought him round with water from the well—and was rewarded, at his own request, with scholarships for his sons to be educated in Batavia.”
When in Soya, it’s best to not think about this too much, and instead, walk past the neat village houses and up a little rise to perhaps the best preserved (and certainly most accessible) baileo, or ritual meeting place, on the island. The meeting place includes ancient megaliths and stone seats for dignitaries. The main path next to the balileo winds upward to about 700 meters where there is a sacred site at the top of the hill. A stone throne, encircled by croton bushes, faces a splendid panorama—Mount Salahutu, the Lease Islands, Leitimur’s southern coast, and sometimes, in the faint distance, Banda’s Fire Mountain.
The shrine holds a sacred urn, the Devil’s Urn, that never empties of water even during the driest parts of the year. The water cures illness, brings prosperity, and can even encourage the affections of the person of your choice.
If you are visiting Soya Atas on the second Friday of December, you can witness the Purifying the Village ritual. An ancient rite preserved despite Christianity, the ceremony rids the area of evil influences, and assures the land’s fertility and the people’s good health. In addition to the magic, the down-to-earth locals scrub their houses inside and out, wash the streets and clean up all the garbage.
For the ambitious, several paths (you need a guide) lead downward to Leitimur’s southern coast from the Soya Atas area. All offer beautiful scenery and the chance to witness traditional Amboynese life, but the path past the isolated villages of Hatalai and Naku is the most interesting.