Unique Place To Visit In Bali

By Author: Sofia Deluca
Total Articles: 8
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When in Bali, take a visit to Tenganan and be taken back to the way many saw life in the earlier days. At one time the island was populated by pure Indonesians, an ancient people who filed and blackened their teeth. They lived in small communities, family clans ruled by a council of Elders who acted as the priests of their religion. Their cult centred in the worship of the powerful spirits of nature, and especially those of their ancestors, with whom they continued to live, a great family of both the dead and the living. Occasionally, by means of mediums and sacrifices, they brought their ancestral spirits down to this earth to protect them. They buried their dead or simply abandoned them in the jungle to be carried away by the spirits.The pure descendants of these people, calling themselves Bali Aga or Bali Mula, the " original" Balinese, still live, isolated and independent, in the mountains where they found refuge from imperialistic strangers.

Hidden in the hills of East Bali, near Karangasem, lies the village of Tenganan, where the most conservative of the Bali Aga preserve the old traditions with the greatest ...
... zeal. Tenganan is a rabidly isolated community, socially and economically separate from the rest of Bali, almost an isolation in Tenganan that there is an official specially appointed to sweep the village after the visits of strangers, to obliterate their footprints.

Unlike the rest of the villages in Bali, there is hardly any vegetation around the Tenganan houses,which are all exactly alike and are arranged in rows on each side of stone-paved avenues. In the central place is the council house where the Elders meet, a long shed about ten feet wide by some seventy feet long, strongly built and apparently very old, Farther along are other buildings for public use, the purpose of some kept a secret. The most curious are the unique mill for grinding kemiri nuts to obtain oil.

The dwellings are all very similar: a small gate reached by a flight of steps leads into a court in which are the sleeping quarters, the kitchen, and a long house for relatives and for storage. There is also a small empty shrine where the spirits may rest when they visit their descendants.

The people of Tenganan are tall, slender and aristocratic in a rather ghostly, decadent way, with light skins and refined manners. The majority of the men still wear their hair long.The village of Tenganan owns communally enormous tracts of fertile and well cultivated lands that fill every need of the village and make it one of the richest in the island.

This extraordinary village mustnot,however, be taken as a typical Bali Aga community. Tenganan was deliberately cut off from the natural development of the rest of Bali and remains today a unique village with a strong community that seem to take pride in doing things "differently" even from the rest of the Bali Agas.
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