Living the good life in Bali: A royal farewell: Part One

One of the advantages of living close to a temple is that you can see activity which gives you an inkling of something interesting about to happen, I am living in a laneway that is about 30 metres from the main Tebesaya Temple so I wander through the Temple grounds every day.

For the last few

days there has been a flurry of activity: students sweeping, men creating a huge tower and other bamboo structures, women weaving offering baskets and ornate decorations and everyone getting organised for some sort of event.

The event turned out to be a royal cremation for a member of the Royal family. She was Nelly Sukawati and she died at the age of 98. She was in fact originally Dutch and came to Indonesia to teach in 1947. She eventually married the son of the President of East Indonesia at the time and they travelled the world when he was appointed into diplomatic posts and eventually as Ambassador. She was considered to be Balinese and the cremation was the first time ever that a non-Balinese born person was given a royal cremation in Ubud.

In a nutshell the cremation involved a procession which travelled a couple of kilometres along the main street of Ubud to reach the Tebesaya Temple for the actual cremation.

There were three components of the procession:

- a huge black bull with lots of gold chains and a gold flap covering a hole in its backside into which the coffin was placed for the actual cremation. The choice of animal apparently suggests she was of high status, It was placed on a platform of bamboo poles and carried by a vast number of men from Temple Agung dressed in orange and white shirts.

- a bamboo walkway to allow the coffin and family members to be deposited in the tower. It was erected over a large truck (which meant the men from the Temple didn't have to carry it)

--a beautifully ornate multi level tower to carry the coffin to the cremation. Again it was carried at an amazing pace by the men from the Temple.

I wouldn't like you to think that this only took a few minutes as it went on for hours starting with the Holy man blessing all of the offerings that were then attached to the bull and the tower, and women chanting as they distributed the offerings. He was very resplendent in his impressive hat whilst he rang his gold bell and flicked holy water over the offerings.

Eventually the coffin was carried up the walkway followed by her son (?) and other family members who crammed into the small space with the coffin, and were consequently carried down the street as part of the tower (not a journey I would like to take as it all looked fairly precarious to me!!).

Eventually the men started to gather to carry the tower and there was huge shouting and cheering when the walkway was actually disengaged from the tower and nothing collapsed!

The pictures tell the story but unfortunately blogspot won't let me move them around: sorry they are in the wrong order. I will tell the second part of the story in the next post which is appropriate as I missed the next stage of the cremation as I had to go to Indonesian language lesson. So as the bull and the tower headed off on their journey to 'my' Temple a couple of kilometres away on the shoulders of hundreds of men, I had to leave the masses of followers and head to the library!