Tag: Bali

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Two temples by the sea

 

 

Pura Tanah Lot is a Hindu sea-temple founded in the 16th century and located on Bali’s southern coast.  It sits on top of a pedestal of rock that, when the tide is in, becomes an island and is inaccessible from the shore.  When the tide is out, a rugged, rocky shelf forms a causeway connecting the temple and its pedestal to the mainland.

 

My partner and I arrived there one afternoon while the tide was out beyond the temple.  The shelf between it and the shore was a messy palette of seaweed-greens and damp-looking greys and browns.  Here and there, pools of trapped seawater glinted in the sun like shards of blue glass.

 

 

The rock supporting the temple has a froth of vegetation, including trees, growing along its landward side while the temple-buildings are clustered on its seaward side.  Flights of stone steps coil up the rock but, when we visited, most sightseers had to be content with wandering about the drained shelf around it.  Only a few folk, serious worshippers, were allowed to ascend the steps to the temple itself.

 

 

We made our way to the temple’s southern side, mainly to get out of the heat and glare of the afternoon sun, which was so fierce it created a glowing white band across the sea.  There, we scrambled up onto a higher level of the shelf, where parts of it were carpeted in mushy brown growths, like pulped kelp.  Viewed from this position, the temple and its pedestal had the shape of a sagging haystack.  But we couldn’t go the whole way around the temple because we came to a fracture in the shelf, which extended to the bottom of the temple-rock from the ocean.  The fracture had created a gorge, with seawater racing tumultuously along its bottom.

 

 

Predictably, vendors and pedlars were selling their wares among the throng of sightseers between the temple and the shore. One was hawking kites and had one up in the air, shaped like a galleon with fancy, multicoloured sails.  Meanwhile, along the shoreline, at the bottom of the miniature cliffs there, were some cavities that looked like cave entrances.  One had a queue of people waiting to go inside and a sign above saying ‘ULAR SUCI – HOLY SNAKE’.  This was explained by the temple’s website: “The cave is inhabited by some holy sea snakes, which are believed as (sic) incarnations of shawls of Dang Hyang Nirartha (founder of Tanah Lot Temple).”  In other words, Dang Hyang Nirartha is said to have created the sea snakes from his shawl, or sash, to protect the temple against evil spirits.

 

 

The ground overlooking Pura Tanah Lot is home to an attractive temple complex.  It has well-maintained green spaces and handsome statues that, unlike the discoloured and lichened ones I’ve seen in other Balinese temples, are clad brightly in gold-coloured robes and armour.

 

 

Pura Luhur Uluwatu is another of Bali’s famous sea-temples.  It’s further south, is located on the western tip of the Bukit Peninsula and was officially established in the 11th century, though a small place of worship may have existed there site earlier.

 

After the entrance and ticket desk, the approach to the temple was through a pleasantly leafy, wooded area.  However, a stark red sign warned us of potential dangers ahead: “BE CAREFUL IN BRINGING ITEMS SUCH AS SUNGLASSES, HATS, HANDPHONES, ETC., BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY MONKEYS IN THIS AREA.  IF YOUR STUFF IS TAKEN BY A MONKEY, REACH FOR (sic) OUR OFFICER.  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET THE STUFF BACK WITHOUT ASSISTANCE FROM OUR OFFICER.  The information about the monkeys swiping phones particularly alarmed us.  Currently resident in Singapore, our smartphones are laden with important Singaporean ID, banking and  transport apps and we’d be screwed if we lost them.  So, we agreed that, during our visit, one of us would take photos with their camera-phone while the other kept a lookout for marauding monkeys.

 

Further on, in the temple complex, we found a sign giving more details about the local monkey population.  There are 11 hectares of woodland surrounding the temple, known as Uluwatu Forest, and in it live some 400 grey long-tailed macaques.  These are divided into six groups – named riting, tapak, melem, celagi, amplung and gading – whose members range from 50 to 150.  The fact they were organised in gangs made them seem more criminal then ever.

 

The woodland extended right to the temple, so that its grounds were bathed in green-tinted light and rippling shadows.  But because the place is perched on a cliff, 97 metres up, this eventually gave way to dramatic views of the Indian Ocean.

 

 

Having looked at the temple, we set off down some flights of stone steps and along a path that followed the clifftop to the north.  Below, the glassy blue of the sea changed to a mottled blue, white and teal near the shore, and became a turbulent white froth along the rocks at the cliff’s base.  The cliffs themselves were largely bearded in green vegetation, with a sprinkling of scarlet flowers at the top.  We came to a viewpoint at the path’s end, took some pictures – still guarding against monkeys – and headed back.

 

While approaching the temple again, we heard ahead of us a chorus of shrieks – female ones.  The monkeys had raided a party of Chinese lady tourists.  And a few minutes later, back at the temple, we saw one monkey crouching on a wall besides some steps, playing with somebody’s floppy white hat.

 

Another path ran along the clifftop to the south. It was scenic too but the landscape there was less spectacularly contoured than it was along the northern path.

 

 

This temple also contained some interesting statues.  There was a crouching, snarling, winged creature, its maw crammed with short tusks, like a canine variant on the Hindu / Buddhist / Jain half-bird, half-human deity Garuda.  There was a statue of Ganesha, left arm raised and crooked at the elbow as if scratching his head.  I have to say this was the most monstrous representation I’ve seen of this usually genial, elephant-headed deity.  The effect was because of his big, blank, boiled-egg-like eyes and his tusks, which were more like fangs, short and thrusting up from his lower jaw.

 

Finally, there was a statue of the monkey-god Hanuman, in an Action Man pose, wearing battle armour and screaming with exertion.  However, lots of little monkeys were swarming around him, climbing up his legs and arms.  I know he’s supposed to command a monkey army, but in this depiction it looked more like his minions were attacking him.

 

 

Either that, or they were trying to pinch his phone.

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A water garden, plus ghouls

 

 

Another holiday dispatch from Bali…

 

After the atmospheric, scenic but heavily tourist-orientated experience of Bali’s Lempuyang Temple, it was a relief to visit Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden (or Water Palace, depending on which travel book or website you read) in the same area.  You weren’t shepherded around, you didn’t have to queue, the be-all and end-all of the place wasn’t to have some cute pictures of yourself taken that you could slather over your social media pages.  Although, inevitably, there were some folk at the Water Garden obsessed with taking cute pictures of themselves.

 

Rather, this was a place where you could wander freely and immerse yourself in the gorgeous surroundings – whilst keeping a sensible distance from the selfie-fanatics.  Also, for a morbid creature like myself, there were some unexpectedly dark things lurking in a back corner of the site, which I found fascinating.  More on those later.

 

The antiquity of the garden’s appearance hides the fact that it’s a relatively recent construction.  It was designed and built by the King of Karangsem in the late 1940s.  (So enthusiastic was the King about the project that he literally built it, for he was one of the labourers digging out its pools and ponds.)  However, despite its modernity, it already has a history of being razed and ruined.  In 1963, the nearby volcano Mount Agung, the scenic backdrop for the countless photographs being taken at Lempuyang Temple, erupted and destroyed it, and it had to be rebuilt.

 

 

After passing through the entrance, which contained a tall, narrow candi–bentar-style gateway with different-coloured, florally-patterned ceramic plates embedded in its brickwork like lines of giant buttons, we descended into the garden.  Across to the left was South Pond, a large, rectangular body of water with a long, thin island stretched across its middle, almost dividing it in two.  The island had the dramatic name of Demon Island, although rather than demons the only things on it were a row of fountains.  The bridges attaching Demon Island to the ‘mainland’ at either end were decorated with dragon-cum-sea-serpent creatures with scaly, rippling bodies.

 

 

The garden’s main attraction, however, was to the right of the entrance steps and paths.  This was the smaller but more ornate Mahabharata Pond, whose attractions were threefold.  First, its waters were full of grey and pink carp, some of them truly big and torpedo-like.  People were buying bread and throwing chunks of it at the carp, causing much tumultuous splashing as they surged up to feed.  Secondly, the pond’s surface was dotted with statues, maybe four or five-feet tall, depicting sitting or crouching figures in elaborate Balinese headgear.  They were slightly dilapidated, in a picturesque way.  Their white surfaces were partly discoloured and scabbed with flaking grey or brown lichen.  Little fern-like plants sprouted from their bases just above the waterline.  Their faces occasionally had so many blotches they resembled Harlequin masks.

 

 

And thirdly, running along the pond’s surface and threading between the statues were lines of stepping stones.  Really, these were the tops of octagonal stone pillars standing on the pond’s bed, which poked a couple of inches above the water.  Needless to say, the stepping stones were a big draw for the photo-obsessed visitors and lots of people were posing for pictures on them.  Sometimes couples tried to pose together on the same stone and looked in serious danger of tipping over into the pond.  I assumed the carp weren’t carnivorous.

 

 

The garden’s other features included a handful of further ponds and pools, an amphitheatre and an auditorium.  But the most impressive item was Nawa Sanga Fountain, which stood at the far end of Mahabharata Pond and resembled a tall, slim, eight-tiered pagoda.  Seen from a distance, the water weeping past the edges of its tiers enclosed it in a shimmering halo.  Green, mouldy growths had gathered on the eternally-wet segments between the tiers, but somehow the mould didn’t diminish its elegance.

 

 

Oddly, the accounts of Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden I’ve read online have all failed to mention something I discovered at the far right-hand corner of the premises.  This was a compound that had at its centre a ring of seven statues, presumably representing Balinese and / or Hindu deities.  Four of the seven, endowed with physical attributes typical of deities in this part of the world, such as having four  arms, or having three faces, or having unfeasibly big hands, looked fairly innocuous.  Their faces were serene, their heads topped with Balinese crowns or tiaras.  But the other three statues were, frankly, monstrous.

 

In the notes I made at the time, I described one as having ‘…splayed, scalpel-ended fingers… a skirt of long, dangling things, like headless snakes… a mouth gaping horribly, a tongue pouring out of it… goggling eyes, long, matted hair’ and looking ‘…like a marauding zombie.’  Another, I wrote, was ‘…less monstrous…’ but ‘…still alarming… like a particularly rabid vampire…’ with ‘…a gaping mouth, snaking tongue…’ and ‘…long, scratchy fingers.’  Its hands were like ‘…clusters of carrots, Nosferatu-style.’

 

 

The third statue was ‘…a truly ghastly thing…’ with ‘…fingers so long and sharp its hands resembled tree-roots.’  It was ‘…seemingly neckless and shoulder-less, its head a mound of horribleness piled on top of its torso.’  The head had ‘…a mane of long, worm-like things…’ that I wasn’t sure were supposed to be ‘…weird, sprouting growths or just tresses of (very manky) hair.’  Its mouth contained ‘…a big row of upper teeth…’ and a ‘…protruding tongue bifurcating and bifurcating again until it resembled a cluster of starfish.’  This shambling creature would have given H.P. Lovecraft sleepless nights.

 

 

On the site’s map, I think the compound was described as a ‘meditation centre’.  I would have found it difficult to meditate there in the presence of three of its residents.

 

And that was my unexpectedly-creepy last port of call in the grounds of the otherwise beguiling and decorous Tirta Gangga Garden Royal Water Garden.

 

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Instagrammers at the gates of dawn

 

 

One nice thing about 2023 was that my partner and I managed to have a couple of international holidays for the first time since the start of the pandemic.  Here’s a dispatch about Bali, which we visited in June.  In it, your grumpy blogger makes a few uncomfortable discoveries about the nature of 21st century vacationing. 

 

Not having done much research about Bali beforehand, I knew little about Lempuyang Temple other than that it provided a spectacular view, especially at sunrise, and was on every visitor’s must-see list.  Two days after arriving in Bali, we embarked on our first tour and Lempuyang was the first thing on the schedule. The tour began at a fiendishly early hour. Our tour-guide collected us at four o’clock in the morning and we spent the next two hours in his vehicle, speeding along dark, mostly-empty roads to make sure we got to the temple early.

 

Just before six, we arrived at Lempuyang’s car-park, changed to a miniature, open-sided shuttle-bus, and were transported up to the temple’s reception area. We were given sarongs to wear, to comply with the place’s etiquette. Then we had to ascend a steep slope on foot to the temple proper. It wasn’t that long ago, we were told, that there was no shuttle-bus and visitors had to walk the whole way from the car-park, which would have been a slog.

 

 

We emerged onto a flat area that had at its back three stone staircases climbing to three doors.  Presumably, the stairs and doors led to the temple’s inner sanctum, which was out of bounds to visitors. They were extremely ornate.  The doors at the top, bathed in shimmering white light, were set in stone frames that resembled gothic pagodas.  But the most striking features were the stone dragon-heads flanking the staircases at the bottom.  Each had a lantern glowing within its jaws, so that crimson light seeped out through its fangs – though the straggles of stone in their maws looked less like fangs and more like the baleen of plankton-feeding whales.  In the pre-dawn darkness, the lanterns’ glow made the heads blurry and ephemeral. It was as if they weren’t made of stone, but of still-malleable lava.

 

At the other end of the area was a classical Balinese temple candi bentar (split) gate.  Its outer sides were steep and tiered, with decorous, upward-curling prongs, while its inner surfaces were vertical and blank. As the sky beyond changed colour from black to an ashy blue-grey, then to indigo, and then to a paler but smoky shade of blue, the sacred Balinese volcano Mount Agung became visible in the distance. The two sections of the gateway framed its rounded summit with perfect symmetry.  Alas, the view rapidly clouded over and the mountain vanished again.

 

 

On the area’s other two sides were lengths of roofing, held up by wooden columns, white lights shining along their edges. Sitting under these roofs were a growing number of tourists, half of them Westerners, half of them Asians, nearly everyone accompanied by Balinese guides.  We’d all come for a supposedly crucial part of the Balinese tourist experience – getting your photo taken in Lampuyang’s split gateway or, as it’s called, ‘the Gates of Heaven’.

 

Once the sun had risen, a crew of local guys started taking photos of each tourist, or couple, or group, while they posed between the Gates of Heaven.  Ideally, this would have been with Mount Agung as a backdrop, though by this point it was no longer visible.  I’d read complaints online from people who’d had to wait for hours until their turn to get photographed.  This explained the roofing.  Later in the day, with long queues, people would need shelter from the blazing Bali sun while they waited.

 

Our guide had whisked us there so early that we were number 12 in the queue.  We should only have to wait a few minutes, get a quick picture snapped of us, and then be on our way to the next place on our itinerary.  Right?  Wrong.  It wasn’t that straightforward. The subjects of the photos were allowed to strike a number of poses within the gates.  And many of them milked that.  They posed endlessly.  I suppose this was our first encounter with the culture of the Instagrammers and social-media ‘influencers’ who infest Bali these days and clog up the Internet with images, clips and accounts of their marvellously exotic, interesting and well-travelled lives.

 

Some cringy poses were struck.  I was particularly irked by one where the poser (in all senses of the term) would turn, show their back to the camera and point meaningfully towards Mount Agung in the distance – not that you could see it today, buried in the murk – as if they were an explorer who’d just discovered it.  Also annoying was a pose popular among couples.  He’d lean against one side of the gateway, she’d lean against the other, and both would look quizzically towards the camera.  As if to say: Ain’t we a kooky couple?  (Well, no…)  Or one where the person or people simply jumped.  They’d spring up and be pictured in mid-air with arms and legs splayed, looking like characters in a 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon being zapped by a powerful electrical shock.

 

To get your photographs, you handed your phone to the team of locals and they snapped you with its camera.  It was rather a cheat, incidentally, that the photographer took the pictures with the phone positioned above a horizontal mirror.  This created the impression that you and the gateway were standing at the edge of a pool of crystal-clear water, with a perfect reflection plunging beneath you.

 

Finally, our turn came.  As all the previous subjects had done the jumping thing, and the photographer was in the habit of shouting “Jump!” in the middle of each photo-shoot, I gave him a stony stare when I handed over my phone and intoned, “No jumping.”  So he took a few pictures and we struck a few affectionate poses within the gates – holding hands, embracing, nothing fancy. But he kept taking photos and kept telling us to strike new poses. We quickly ran out of ideas, and had to improvise, and ended up looking dorky.  What an ordeal.  This exhibitionism was not our cup of tea.  Of course, all the social-media butterflies who’d come had probably spent days beforehand planning, deciding on and rehearsing the many poses they were going to make.

 

 

That was the main business out of the way, thankfully.  Afterwards, we and our guide took a wander through the lower levels of the temple.  I thought the Gates of Heaven actually looked better from below.  They stood imposingly at the top of a grand flight of stone steps and above stone terraces adorned with clumps of ferns and clusters of white and red flowers.  More dragon-heads loomed here too.  A couple of chickens were making their way up the steps at the time, and I hoped some Instagrammer / influencer, narcissistically posing for photos in the gateway, would have their shots disrupted by the poultry sticking their heads over the threshold behind them.

 

As we descended the steep slope, to be picked up again by the shuttle-bus, the cloud obscuring Mount Agung furled itself into a long, white strand and revealed the volcano’s slopes and summit in their immense, pale-blue glory.

 

 

A treat awaited us.  Our next stop was a more rewarding tourist attraction: Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden.