Village of the Jerky People

Yesterday plan changed slightly in that I didn't get that second massage or lunch at the Mimpi.  The massage was way too expensive (a local massage is 30,000 Rp, Mimpi wanted 360,000 Rp) and Bing Bing was getting bored with the food, so we left in the late morning and headed over to Lovina for lunch.  After eating and taking a few pictures of the monkey on a chain (there are no branches of the SPCA here), we arrived mid-afternoon at Lake Batur, up in the middle of a huge caldera in the Bali highlands.  Across for the hotel is a village that legend says contains the last original inhabitance of Bali (before Hindus/Dutch Colonists/Japanese Army/Drunken Australian Tourist came and took over).  They don't bury their dead in this village, but instead leave them out, covered with a loose mesh of thatch to turn into some sort of people jerky.  After the "natural processes" are finished, they take the skull and add it to a wall of others ancestors.  As strange as it sounds, the place is a bit touristy.  Everyone's got to make money, even the dead it seems.

I didn’t take a boat over to the village this time (you’ve seen one dead guy, you’ve seen them all), but instead walked around to see a natural hot spring flowing out of the side of the volcano.  To pop into the hot spring for a dip is a reasonable $5 American, but of course this is way, way too expensive for the locals.  They are regulated to a mud pit outside the wall of the hot spring where the waste hot spring water goes.  It’s kind of sad to see, especially since they are the people who live here and can’t really enjoy what’s in their own neighbourhood.

We ate at the local restaurant of the hotel, had a massage from the local massage ladies and went to sleep. This morning I went for a short 5km run up and down the mountain road around the lake.  Again I stuck out like a sore thumb running down the road dressed in my spiderman-like running outfit.