Holy Temples, Holy Snakes, last days in Bali

I depart tonight, 7 hours to Korea, 14 hours to DC, a 5 hour layover and one hour to Hartford. The heat here really is too much for me, searing in the day, but lovely about 6am and in the evening. I never thought I'd be looking forward to cold weather!

I am in Sanur on a small strip of land connecting the main island to a smaller "drop" sized portion of Bali at the south. It's a very upmarket beach town, but very quiet, its such a place that I can't afford to stay ON the beach, but there is a paved path that I walked on for miles yesterday morning. My hotel is across the road and is lovely, my room has ac but also a nice porch where I read in the afternoons, interesting to be reading "Walden" in such different conditions. This morning I visited a beautiful local temple, also quite early.

The last two days have been taken up with seeing cliff-side temples on "sunset" trips. Unfortunately non-Hindus are not allowed in them, and because they are on a cliff, not even that near them, so you get a good spot for the "photo" op. As much as I would have liked a closer look, I can also see why a huge amount of tourists would not be practical on cliff side temples. The ambiance is fun, I often enjoy just camping out somewhere and enjoying the parade of tourists.

Tannah Lot Temple


Often the strangest things about my trips alone are that there are no photos of me, so I obliged another tourist, just to prove that I really was there!

At Tannah Lot, there was the additional interest of the "Holy Snake" I could not understand what made it holy, but the two men who had the snake looked like pretty serious types, they had a brisk good business also getting people to pay to see the holy snake, which I also obliged.

The Holy Snake

The Holy snake

This morning on my early morning walk I came upon a beautiful local temple with a great deal of rock faces as well as bright polychromed painted images of a wild amount of deities, some recognizably Hindu, others nothing that I could understand, probably the mix of indigenous deities and Hinduism which is what makes a place like Bali so interesting. The temple is supposed to have ancient roots, a lot of parts of temple seem to be being "renovated" I hope too much of the older material is not lost. Unfortunately I had my camera on a setting where I can't upload the images here. Those kind of "finds" not on any tourist map, are often what I like the best, serendipitous finds.

Yesterday on my early morning walk I came upon a temple in the far north part of the Sanur beach, which seemed to be a local fishing community far outside of the tourist area. There in the place where there is an empty "seat" for the god was a taxidermied monkey, quite haunting as there was also a monkey in a cage,

Temple Monkey, not looking very "alive"
it was not the type of place that inspired me to hang around for very long. A bit south of that was a huge abandoned type of tourist or entertainment complex, however the beach in this part of Sanur was better than the "reefed in" beach that formed the main part of the tourist area, making all the more haunted in feeling. Fortunately it was a hazy morning as I had a 4 hour walk, the sun can get hot by 7am and later than that its positively searing.

Ulu Watu Temple, this in on the far south coast of Bali