Showing posts with label Pura Uluwatu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pura Uluwatu. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 11, 2007






We had resisted traditional dance shows for the entire trip, but we broke down on our last day while watching the tourists watch the sunset at Pura Uluwatu. We went to see a dance show afterwards, which consisted of about forty young men mostly sitting in a circle singing. And by singing, I mean swaying to music and chanting something like "Uga, uga, uga". It sounded more like a football cheer than anything Balinese. At least it wasn't as scary as most Balinese dancing, which consists of heavily made up girls with enormous eyes, shifting their eyeballs back and forth to the rhythm of the music.


















The other must-see temple in the area is Pura Uluwatu, one of the directional temples that protect all of Bali. The temple itself is distinctly unimpressive despite its importance. However, its location atop a cliff jutting into the ocea is spectacular. Relatively quiet by day, at sundown the place is swarming with tour buses as every tourist in Bali comes to see the sunset. This is odd, since the sunset can be seen in equal measure all along the west coast, and the beauty of this location doesn't depend on the sunset, so it should be much more popular during the day, and correspondingly less chaotic at sunset. But such is the sway of tour operators that everyone is kept on pretty much the same schedule. And such is the sway of guidebooks that, although we were driving independently, we came at sunset too.