Indonesia has some amazing animist traditions going on and one that my friend Mike Hillis told me about was the Sea worm Festival, known as 'Nyale', which occurs once a year in Kuta Lombok.
On the 19th day of the 10th month in the Sasak calendar, people gather on the beach for a fertility ritual. Sasak people are Muslim and observe a strict code, but for one night a year romance is in the air. Young couples compete in a rhyming game called pantun. Huge fires are built and this creates an atmosphere of excitement. Thousand of Sasak people attend and the usually quiet Kuta Lombok is alive with people.
As dawn rises the sea worms surface for the first day of their breeding season. They are caught, cooked and eaten and a good catch signals a good harvest later in the year. Mike was staying in Senggigi last year and had just read about the festival. He set out in torrential rain on motorbikes with 2 locals. They got about 20 minutes down the road said it was too hard going, and turned around.
The Nyale festival is named after the sea worm, which is an aphrodisiac. According to local legend, the whole thing started when a princess drowned herself because she could not decide which man to marry. Her hair turned into sea worms. The young people sail out in separate boats and chase each other, it's a time, Mike said where future liason's might be arranged. Fascinating that in Muslim Lombok, an old fertility ritual is taken seriously to this day.
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