The Beauty of Bangle Village - East Bali

A small rough road off the main street at Amed Village leads us to a small village named Bangle. It surrounded by mountain with its beautiful terrace field on its side. Mots of the people are still practicing traditional rice farming, ploughing the field helped by the cows and all the planting and harvesting are done by hand. The villagers are still living in a very traditional ways. The whole day they would spend it on the field doing their farming to produce food for their family. Kids are diligently helping their parents doing a little work on the field or cutting the grass for their cattle.


Women are patching water from the nearby natural spring and carry it home on their head for cooking and drinking water, picking up fire woods as most of the cooking are still done in traditional wooden stoves.


The village life is absolutely a contrast of the life in Amed which has been so much different over

the last few years because of the tourism facilities development where its people have been adopting much of the western influences and modernisation, but the traditional way of life that's still exist in this village is truly offering much more peace and harmony to our spirit, a peaceful and tranquil place for the body and soul.

Little girl carrying a piece of firewood to home from the field.
Girls are busy cutting the grass to feed the cows that are used to plough the field for growing rice.
Two little girls are carrying the grass on their head, heading home.
Grandmother carrying stack of firewoods and green for the pig.

Man busy ploughing the field for growing rice, helped by the cows.
Girls are cutting the grass along the irrigation canals along the paddy field for the cows.

Spider

We live in a very tropical country and its richness of flora and fauna making us familiar with many wild animals live around us. One of a kind that we can see easily on Bali is spider and I love to share with you on how we can have such a great fun with spider. It is a friendly one, very harmless and it is even eatable if we want to call it a very special delicacy.

I often invite my clients to have their photographs taken with one of them as they look so great in the picture. You can have it on your face, body, hand, etc and he is going to be just friendly friend of us.

Please have a look at some of the great pictures below for references, and I am waiting you to have your own photographs taken with any size of the spider when you would have time to visit Bali.

Natural Bubbles

When I was a child, by living in a small farming village there was not much to do to have fun except playing around our farming village and making toys out of the anything that grow around us. We have many castor trees that normally grow along the fences of our farms. None of us was having any detergent to make bubble at the time as it was very expensive and our parents will not allow us to use it for playing and having fun with it. We love making bubble and we are using the sap of the castor trees to create our bubble and we had much fun making our own bubble with the sap of the tree as there are so much growing in our village so we never run out of it in making our bubbles.

We just picked the stem of the leaf and broke it, but still having a little bit of the skin of the stem left to create the little hole where we can blow the sap to create the bubbles. From one stem we can create hundreds of bubbles but it depends on how good that you broke it and how good that you blow it.

If you will ever visit Bali, let me teach you making your own bubbles from the castor tree’s sap and you are going to have lots of fun. I often teach my tours clients to make their own bubbles and they are all having great fun.

I love to demonstrate my bubble's making from the sap of the Castor oil Trees. It is more fun than using any soap or detergent.

Ubud Cremation - September 07, 2007

It is the Bade of Puri Carangsari Royal Cremation in 2005

These two pictures are the Bade which was devoted to the last queen of Ubud, the grand royal cremation on July 24th, 2004.

People are starting to rush into the center of Ubud Village to witness another royal cremation for a member of the Ubud Royal family. It was a woman who died and is being cremated today.
The cremation tower was about 90 feet tall and there were also couple wooden sarcophagi that were built in the shape of a black wooden bull.

Thousands of tourists and locals were coming to witness the grand cremation even if it was a bit sunny and hot today but they were all so excited to see the procession. I was hanging around the palace for about 4 hours to wait for the ceremony to start. It was around 1.30 PM, when they started to lift the tower to a bamboo ladder for the purpose of placing the coffin into a platform at around the middle height of the tower itself. The crowed was flocking into the area around the tower to get a close look at the people who were carrying the body onto the tower. There are three men from the royal family sitting next to the coffin all the way to the cemetery ground where they are going to cremate the body. The tower was carried by hundreds of men, and because of the weight of the tower, the procession moved slowly in between thousands of spectators who flooded the street all the way to the cemetery ground.

A couple of fire trucks kept following behind the tower to spray water to the carriers of the tower to keep them cooler as the heat was not only coming from the sun but also coming from all the people who were flooding the street telephone and electric workers have taken away all the wires that were crossing the street to allow the tall tower to go through, they got the tower to the cemetery ground and people were taking the coffin off the tower to place it on the wooden bull where it is going to be blessed with the final blessing and ceremony before they start to light the fire to get the whole thing to burn into ashes. The tower was burnt separately from the body which was creating a huge flame that spread a tremendous heat around the graveyard.
Short, it was quite a spectacle for everyone who was there to witness this rare ceremony.

The tower is moving slowly to the cemetery ground

The lit the fire on the wooden bull where the bidy is placed.

Placing the body on to the tower
Procession starts

Men bringing the ceremonial things and the coffin onto the tower
The tower slowly moves

Nine layers of roof-Symbol of the heaven
Wooden Bull
Moving the tower closer to the bamboo lather
Black Lembu-wooden bull.

View of the Bade (cremation Tower)from a distance
Backside of the Bade with a picture of Bhoma (Son of the earth)