Dear friends and family - It is 7:15 am and mercifully cool in Denpasar. Although it is the rainy season, it hasn't rained since we arrived. Indra took us to the ashram in Denpasar, the busy, gritty, traffic clogged city of Bali near the airport. He recently installed airconditioning in his own bedroom (maybe Felicity's idea?) and insisted we stay there. It WAS a good idea because we were pretty out of it after 22 hours of travel.
Our tour guides are young people who live in the ashram: Yuni, Puji, Gede and Mangde. They are all between 18-29 years old and live, work and worship here. We could hear them chanting at 5 am when we awoke this morning.
I'm not fluent yet on all the gods - but Puji keeps reminding me there is ONE GOD in Hinduism and there is Tri Murthi - the Hindu trinity: Brahman, Vishnu and Shiva. Every house and every businppedess has an altar and many are wrapped with gold and white cloths.
Yesterday My dear associates started to take me to the Safari Park - expensive and full of foreigners - They could tell it wasn't my cup of tea though, so they took me to the bat cave temple that faces the sea. It sits at the mouth of a cave and the guardian snake - VERY LARGE - was slithering its way up one of the altars. Yup, between the hundreds of thousands of bats and the HUGE boa-like snake - I'd say the temple is pretty safe from your average human.
Today we head for Lombok, a mostly muslim island. puji is from there. See you next time.
Genia,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, so glad that you have made the first part of the trip safely! THe bat cave sounds AMAZING! Did you actually go in? Did you have guides that explained the significance of what was inside the temple? Its interesting that it seems to be designed to keep humans out, since I'm assuming that priests/priestesses moved the snake in as a guardian. Can't wait to see more photos and just love the postings! I hope you and Phillip are both staying well. Trip sounds fascinating so far.
xxxx,
k