Before marriage and kids and mortgages and council tax and pensions and multivitamins and all that heavy crap that comes with being a proper adult, we spent a year backpacking around the world in 2005. Weirdly we experienced 3 different New Years’ celebrations that year; firstly in the UK before we left, then Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, then Balinese New Year in Indonesia, all within a couple of months.
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| Before Marriage and Kids... |
Balinese New Year was definitely the weirdest. We were staying in the capital Kuta (a tourist trap hell hole – seriously, if you’re going to Bali, avoid Kuta, there’s plenty of amazing alternatives for a week before heading for Australia. We spent our time learning to surf, dodging aggressive shop keepers and battling dysentery.
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| Bali New Year Celebrations |
Our stay also coincided with the six day New Year’s celebrations, which included lots of vibrant carnival style parades (below are some picture we took of the bizarre parade floats) where you’re encouraged to make as much noise as possible to rouse the evil spirits out in to the open. The third day is called Nyepi (meaning to “keep quiet”) where the whole island shuts down and goes in to 24 hours of silence. No flights, no traffic, no people on the streets and no lights allowed. The idea is that the evil spirits that were driven in to the open earlier will think all the polite locals and drunk tourists have deserted the place, leaving no one to torment or corrupt, and will themselves then leave the island, setting the scene for the people to magically reappear a day later to a freshly cleansed Bali.
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| Carnival Style Parade |
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| Giant Parade Floats |
With Kuta being the tourist capital of Bali, you can imagine how hard it is to enforce Nyepi upon on the thousands of tourists, who are instructed to hunker down in their rooms for the day, in silence, lights out. As the day wore on, and particularly in the evening, you’d notice a few apartment lights flicker on across the eerie darkened town, hear the odd set of scurrying footsteps outside and voices shattering the silence of the night. These instances of disrespect gathered momentum until the local administrators simply flicked the switch to the town’s power supply, shutting the whole place down until the next morning.
How did we know? Well we were watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies with the volume turned right down, when the TV clicked off just as he was about to scalp a baddie with a precisely thrown circular saw blade (hey, we’re only human).
We spent the rest of our time in Bali travelling outside of Kuta to various ancient temples, visiting the spectacular active volcano Mount Batur, and made a trip to the wonderful Tegalalang Rice Terraces in the countryside surrounding Ubud. These adventures reminded us that there was more to Bali than the litter strewn beaches and vomit soaked streets on Kuta. If fate should drop us on that provincial Indonesian island again, we’ll be driving right past Kuta.
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| Mount Batur |
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| Telgalalang Rice Terrace |
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| Balinese Temples |
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