I can't really remember everything we did during our three days in East Bali, but it was pretty laid back. One of the more interesting excursions was a visit to Tenganan. As you'll remember, Bali has been Hindu seemingly forever, but there was a big influx of Hindus from Java in the 1300's when Java was overrun by Muslim kingdoms. These Javanese Hindus were apparently too cutting edge for the Hindus already living in Bali, so they retreated to remote mountain villages, Tenganan being the most important. Supposedly, one of the Hindu kings lost a horse, and had offered a reward for finding it. These original Balinese found its corpse lying in the field, and inexplicably, as a reward the king decided to give these villagers all the land surrounding the dead horse. The new village was to be given all the land from which you could smell the stench of the dead horse. So the king's minister came out to lay the boundary, and it ended up being an enormous plot of land, as the stench seemed to carry forever. But actually the villager who was accompanying the minister had hidden a piece of the rotten corpse in his clothes to maximize the land grab.

So the upshot of this revolting story is that the village is hugely wealthy, and they do no work but have workers come farm their vast land. They live off the proceeds, and instead devote all their time to a complicated series of religious rituals throughout the day, every day. They've been doing these rituals for at least one thousand years, and believe that if they are not performed exactly as proscribed, the village will be destroyed. Sort of like the computer in Lost.

You're free to walk around the village, which truth be told doesn't look that wealthy.