Just back from a very good road trip around the mountains with Barrie exploring some of the Bali Aga villages.
For those who have never heard of the Bali Aga, they are the original inhabitants of Bali. The people whom most people refer to as ‘Balinese’ are in fact descendants of Javanese people who migrated to Bali in the ‘Majapahit’ and ‘pre-Majapahit’ eras. The Bali Aga have their own dialect which is different from Bahasa Indonesia and Balinese. I said ‘ken ken kabare’ (’how are you?’ in Balinese) to a Bali Aga woman and she didn’t understand me.
The origins of the ‘Bali Aga’ are not entirely understood but they do have some Polynesian / Melanesian cultural similarities including building long-houses and separate sleeping quarters for women and men. In 1993 I stayed with villagers in the Mentawai Islands off the coast of Sumatra. Totally out in the jungle and wearing nothing but a loin-cloth they too use the long-house, this time on stilts.
Barrie and I recently visited the Bali Aga village of Tenganan close to Candi Dasa in East Bali. The long-houses and village structure were still intact even if Tenganan had been turned into a tourist trap. The other really famous Bali Aga village that all the guide books mention is Trunyan in the shadow of Gunung Batur and on the shores of Lake Batur inside a volcanic crater. The village is totally cut off, accessible only by canoe across the lake and the villagers are said to be unfriendly. They have a village temple which dates back more than a thousand years and lay their dead out in a cemetery until animals have picked the thing clean.
It all sounded too interesting to miss and you will hear about our exploits very soon.
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