Like their eounterparts in a handful of other remote Balinese villages, the ethnic Bali Mula of Trunyan are considered to be the ‘original’ Balincse, whose unique traditions predate all others on the island. Staunchly isolationist for the island. Staunchly isolationist for more than a thousand years, Trunyan is perhaps best known for its openair cemetery where corpses are left to decompose under a mystical banyan tree. The villages initial engagement with mainstream tourism has fallen on hard times: it was blacklisted by Lonely Planet for ‘aggressive’ behaviour, on an island renowned for the softest of welcomes. Yet, as Dave Smithson discovers, Trunyan offers a lot more than just skulls and surh guides.
Words and Images: Dave Smithson
It is not that the Bali Mula are more indidiggenous than anybody alse on the island: they have simply held on to their traditions for longer.
Maybe I should have taken Lonely Planet's guide to Bali and Lombok more seriously. Three times, they warn the intrepid: “Don't go”. I’m stopped at this remote village’s edge by a tough-looking man in his twenties who wants me to change a twenty-dollar bill for Indonesian rupiah. "And don’t worry about the exchange rate. “On his black T-shirt are near-foot-high white letters that read: 'YOU SUCK1”.
Welcome to Trunyan, one of the oldest villages in Bali. It’s easy to see why the people of Trunyan are so defensive of their territory. The view across Lake Batur beats any northern Italian backdrop. The locas call their caldera's lake 'the sea’: at more than 1,600 meters above sea-level, small, windwhipped waves cut across the deeply turquoise water. Opposite the over 1,000-year-old village, pistes of dark-grey lava from previous eruptions - the last iri 2000 - drip down the slopes of the still-active Gunung Batur.
Trunyan has never been high on the visitor’s list.
Like a handful of other villages scattered around the dark volcanic uplands, Trunyan is inhabited by the Bali Mula - the so-called Original Balinese' people - a once isolationist, disparate ethnic group that makes up nearly 3 percent of the island’s population.
But the Bali Mula of Trunyan are finally beginning to feel a little too isolated.
While the guidebook extols their ethnic cousins’ double ikat weaving in the more accessible village of nearby Tenganan (“Peculiar! Old-fashioned!... a real village, not a creation for tourists...”), the more remote village of Trunyan was largely cut off until its first patchy tarmac road to the world was laid in 2006. Its primary school - there is no secondary school - was built in 1975. Many of Trunyan’s elder residents cannot speak Bahasa Indonesia.
Largely agricultural, and unpractised in the dark art of handling international tourists, the aristocratic farmer-people of Trunyan have acquired a damaging reputation for aggression towards tourists. Their unique, simple draw - a jungle-cemetery where bodies are left in the open to disintegrate under a magical banyan tree - is regularly shunned by travellers on the time-sehsitive tourist circuit.
The black and white T-shirted Nyoman, 26, has decided I’m worth showing around (“You didn’t argue about the exchange rate,” he grins). We arrange a day’s guide-fee of Rp.250.000 and push off in a shaky canoe to the lakeside cemetery.
“This lady was a neighbour of mine - she died about six months ago”.
Under the shadow of the great banyan tree, Nyoman points out a corpse draped.in salmon-pink and ice-white shawls, protected from wild jungle dogs by a triangular bamboo cage. At the foot of the II cages are small woven baskets containing a collection of possessions that will accompany the dead into their afterlife: a comb; a pair of new rubber flip-flops; a plastic eating bowl; a radio; a single clove cigarette.
When a fresh body arrives, the oldest body is removed - its sun-dried skull and femurs placed on an elevated stone altarstep a few feet away. Only those who have been married, died from natural causes, and who show no obvious physical marks earn the exalted position. Villagers who have remained single, died from disease, committed suicide or been murdered are relegated to non-descript, rocky ground to the south.
Further away still is a third, tiny cemetery tucked tightly under the caldera's cliff - reserved for infants under five. These last two groups, Nyoman explains, are buried and covered with rocks "to prevent their sad souls from roaming among the living".
The scene is disconcerting. Even up close there is no smell of decomposition: only the steady, fresh breeze that bounces off the lake, scented by the parched undergrowth and brittle leaves around us.
Nyoman unravels the cemetery's secret.
Legend tells of the village goddess, Dewa Pancering Jagat,
Under the shadow of the great banyan tree, Nyoman points out a corpse draped in salmon-pink and ice-white shawls, protected from wild jungle dogs by a triangular bamboo cage.
who married a Javanese prince. Their union, it is said, was true happiness: but every time the goddess gave birth, her baby passed away. Some claimed it was a natural perfume emanating from the goddess's skin that was killing her newborn.
Desperate for an offspring; the Javanese prince ordered the village's dead to be left under; a banyan tree close by, so that the stench of flesh would negate the fatal scent of his wife. It worked. Heirs were produced jand the village survived, Indebted, the goddess possessed the banyan - called the Taru Menyan, or ‘sweet-smelling tree’, and after which the village is named - allowing Trunyan's dead to lie in peace, without odour, as a return gift from the goddess.
Like many graveyards, it is a restful place: until a motorboat of local tourists arrive at the water's edge and disembark. Skull are picked up and posed with. Femurs are held aloft. Group arrange themselves for family snaps on a double-handful o camera phones. A Rp.100,000 note is graciously left in the wo ven basket near a skull for the half-dozen guides who hang Ian guidly around the tree. A packet or two of local Gudang Garaim cigarettes are appreciated.
The tourist band disappears back into the flapping green and-white waves of the lake as if they had never been. Nobodj-bats an eyelid.
It's difficult to see how the Bali Mula of Trunyan can’t make;; more of their lakeside idyll and plentiful history, without relying solely on a curiosity that some may find anthropologically fascinating, others macabre and repulsive.
The lakeside temple is beautiful and growing, its unique ceremonies distinct from the rest of Hindu Bali. A walk through the narrow village walkways is eye-opening and humbling. The 45-minute hike to the tip of the crater hovering above Trunyan for a misty, ethereal daybreak is simply stunning, and beats battling with the official tourist guides who hike the Batur volcano opposite. More micro-pockets of Bali Mula, guarded by dogs, live on the crater shoulder of Mount Abang cultivating corn and tending cows. You may be given a gritty black coffee to wake you up at the top.
And the only people you will meet on the way down the crater lip are knots of children and old women carrying 10-20 kilo
parcels of firewood on their heads to be sold or used for cooking in the village below.
That the Bali Mula people - along with the rest of the island's 3.5 million ‘normal’ Balinese - have successfully stuck to age-old customs is exactly the reason most tourists continue to flock to this island. To blacklist a village for its aggression - read: long-term financial hardship combined with poor standards of education, natural mountain bluntness and a healthy distrust of potentially destructive outside forces - is economic damnation indeed. The key to Bali’s future, at least in financial terms, is its past. Tourism is big business: the island is the hon-eypot of Indonesia.
And if a visitor feels shunned or unimportant while straying into Bali Mula territory - rare if you are polite - it is historical, and nothing new.
The people of Trunyan - like the Bali Mula of Bayunggede, Tenganan, Pedewa, Bungaya, Sembiran and Asak - have all had plenty of practice at rejecting imperialist advances. Miguel Covarrubias, author of the landmark guidebook ‘Island of. Bali’ (1937), chose the ‘rabidly isolated’ Bali Mula village of Tenganan as somewhere special, “shut off from the world by a solid wall... Such is the obsession for isolation that there is an official appointed to sweep the village after the visits of strangers to obliterate their footprints"
Known until recently as the Bali Aga - a derisive term close to 'hillbilly', or 'the slow people' - the Bali Mula retreated to the remote volcanic uplands, escaping from the remains of the Hindu Majapahit kingdom that evacuated from nearby Java to Bali as Islam spread across the archipelago. The Bali . Mula were already content with their version of Buddhist-Animism, painted with a veneer of Hinduism previously brought to the island by seventh-century Javanese traders. The group simply chose to split from the program.
.The Bali Mula have always been a little different to the rest of Hindu Bali. •
No caste system exists. The Trunyan burial method is closer to the pre-Hindu Neolithic Agama Bayu sect, who worshipped the stars, the wind and their ancestors! In the 1930s, American anthropologist Margaret Mead and her husband, photographer Gregory Bateson, were also lulled by the Bali Mula, describing them as following a Baline.se culture 'stripped to its bare essentials rather than the wealthier, ceremonial-encrusted communities' of south Bali.
Other subtleties set Trunyan apart, even from other Bali Mula groups. The placenta of a new-born child is emptied into a coconut shell and hung from a tree rather than buried in the family compound. A baby's name is decided upon by lighting three candles and assigning each a name - the child is named after the candle that burns the longest.
Trunyan, unlike other communities in mainstream Bali, is split into two groups of right and left, each headed by a priest. The right and left are further divided into four separate groups of married men, married women, adolescent boys and adolescent girls. Each have their own bale. The village is democratic. A child may not marry an adopted brother or sister. Cousins, naturally, are forbidden to marry. On ceremonial days, the men's bale agung tends toward the.frantic trance of good gamelan and the 80%-proof arak flows. About 4,600 people live in the core village.
There is a surefire, deliberate, one-step-at-a-time slowness in the Trunyan routine: from the housewife stoking a kitchen stove to the arrangement of offerings during a village ceremony. All on Bali share the same racial roots at this convenient crossroads of historical shipping-ways. It is not that the Bali Mula are more indigenous than anybody else on the island: they have simply held on to their traditions for longer.
Many of the oldest people in Trunyan reach the end of their eighties. One is a healthy 102-year-old in a country where life-expectancy has only recently hit 67. Layers of Australian Aborigine, northern and southern Chinese, Malay, Polynesian, Arabic, Melanesian, Mongol and Indian have created a look among the Bali Mula that the painter Covarrubias sketched as 'ghostly, slender, aristocratic'.
These are people who are good at being themselves.
In this remote, strict Bali Mula community, sexual licence on the part of a boy or girl is a crime against the village magic and punished. The seka truna (virgin boys) and seka daha (virgin girls) - whose purity is jealously preserved - have special rites to perform in the village magic, such as maintaining the statue of the village's goddess Dewa Pancering Jagat, hidden from view in the temple from all but the purest of eyes. The statue itself is located underground, beneath the temple's largest pagoda and, it is said, grows several centimetres a year.
The goddess is the centre of all village ceremonies.
"May I see the statue?" I asfc'Nyoman.
"I'm sorry, but that's off-limits to you."
Not everything is for sale in Bali. ' ,
I ask the deputy-chief of the village, I Ketut Jaksa, why his community clings so fiercely to tradition while other parts of Bali are hungrily reshaping to swallow the annual island invasion of nearly 2 million visitors?
"After all," I suggest, "didn't the Bali Mula#of nearby Sembi-ran village abandoned their age-old custom of leaving their dead to the jungle in the 1960s?"
"Please understand that we wholeheartedly welcome tourists to our village", says Pak Jaksa. "But you must also understand that if they, or we, flaunt the most minor rule it will cause irreparable damage to us and bring sickness or death. None of us dare disobey our ancestors. We must protect our laws to safeguard our future."
However, changes do occur - even in a Bali Mula village -and all may not spell trouble.
Over a bowl of mujair lake-fish barbecued with onion and garlic, I quiz the village chief,;! Ketut Sutapa, about the future”.
of a village that has lain in its cultural timeline for a thousand years plus.
"Before our road was laid in 2006," the chief says, "women who were about to give birth had to take a canoe across the lake and hire a car to go to the clinic. Some gave birth on the lake. My wife's second baby began to come out while she was still in the car - his leg came out so we pulled. My son is crippled now. Education has changed. We've only got a primary school here, and a lot of our children got tired of canoeing across the lake every day to continue their studies. With the new road, it's much better. More finish secondary school, and some now go to university. Who knows - perhaps we'll even have somebody who graduates from tourism school and then we'll find out how they make so much money in the south..."
As we chat inside the coffee shop, a tanned white couple arrives on a motorbike. An elderly woman rushes forward to tie an offering of flowers to its handlebars and hovers for a donation. Nyoman moves in next, this time waving a redundant Australian $10 note.
These two newest visitors to this ancient village panic, pull a swift U-turn and disappear up the barely navigable hairpin road, back through the potholes and puddles, to the relative safety of civilisation.
Perhaps the oldest ways are the hardest to beat.
Words by : Dave Smithson
