Pura Besakih, the biggest and most important temple in Bali.
On Thursday we visited Pura Besakih. It's the biggest temple in Bali and built way up on a mountain. Like way way up. It's astonishing that people were able to build stuff like this a bazillion years ago without the help of trucks or backhoes or safety regulations. That's how you can tell they were really into their Gods. Or that the internet just wasn't invented yet so they didn't have much else to do.
The temple itself is actually still in use. And since we happened to be there roughly the same time as a full moon, there were a bunch of people worshiping. In order to walk around, we had to rent sarongs. It was some religious thing. Since we were white tourists the rental fee was something crazy like $3 for one or $10 for two. I don't remember specially how much, but I do remember that it was more expensive, per sarong, to rent two instead of one. Either something was lost in translation or the rental lady was bad at math. Or like I said, we were white tourists and she knew we'd pay whatever she asked. Probably that last one. I mean, what were we going to do, drive two hours to the temple and then scoff at the $10 sarong rental, turnaround and head home?
Jenny and I in our stylish sarongs. I think they match my bright green Sounders sunglasses pretty well. Oh geez, I'm also wearing a Sounders shirt and an ECS hat. And Sounders colored shoes. This is getting a little ridiculous, someone stage an intervention or something.
Dressed to the nines in our over-priced rental sarongs, we headed to the temple. We hired a guide, which wasn't necessarily required but you sort of seemed like a jerk if you didn't. Our guide didn't really speak English and was pretty bad at taking pictures, but in an endearing sort of way. He had a super ineffective original technique where he grabbed the front of the camera with one hand and wrapped his fingers around it to reach the shutter button, using his other hand to shield the sun from his eyes. It resulted in mediocre pictures but was highly entertaining. I wish we'd thought to get a picture of him taking a picture.
The temple itself was amazing. Being high up on a mountain, it had some of the best views that we saw in Bali. Like I'd mentioned earlier, there were also locals who were actively worshiping while we were there. It was cool to see some of their culture. But while we were doing that, there were also vendors trying to sell us stuff. Fruit, snacks, souvenirs, post cards, beer. You name it, they had it. It sort of felt like we were watching people go to church while those guys from baseball games walked up and down the aisles hawking hot dogs and cotton candy. It was a weird juxtaposition of a (at least what appeared to be) traditional authentic ceremony next to a glaringly obvious consequence of the tourism industry. I probably can't complain about the vendors since we were exactly the thing that resulted in them being there. But it was definitely weird to have six-year-olds trying to sell us postcards in a place where we were told we had to wear sarongs out of respect for the religiousness stuff that was going on. But hey, it gave me an excuse to use "juxtaposition" in my Bali blog, so there's that!
Some of the full moon ceremony stuff.
When our tour of the temple was over, we drove to get lunch.
We ended up at a restaurant on a cliff with a spectacular panoramic view of mountains, and lakes, and countryside. We laughed at how in the US, any restaurant with this multi-million dollar view would be $60 a plate easy. Instead, this place as an all-you-can-eat buffet where you don't really want to eat all that much.
Pictures can never quite due views like this justice.
On the way home we stopped at the White Sand Beach. That was the name of it. White Sand Beach. Every beach with white sand was named White Sand Beach, which seems like would become confusing.
Getting to the beach was actually a bit of an adventure. It was pretty secluded with no real way to drive your car all that close. So we attempted to find a back way in, following a windy narrow road around to what we expected to be a nice short path to the beach. Instead, we ended up at a dead end where it would be impossible to turn the car around and had to nearly bushwhack our way down a cliff to the beach. We made it though. And despite being so secluded, the beach had Bintang. Awesome.
Beach. Bintang. To be continued...
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