One of the things I love about Bali is that anyone is welcome at festivals and sometimes you can even be lucky enough to find one at your hotel’s front door.
In February 2011 I was in Kuta during Bali’s new year celebrations which lasts for 3 or 4 days and is a series of festivals and ceremonies.
I was staying at a beachfront hotel and one morning a procession of hundreds of Balinese began converging at a spot on the beach. Family groups, friends, children, whole villages were all dressed in white long sleeved shirts, white sarongs and colourful cummerbunds and origami hats. Women carried tall baskets, boxes and statues filled with offerings on their heads, many people carried brightly coloured and tassled traditional umbrellas, some with as many as 3 tiers, men played drums and gamelans or kettle gongs and a deep chanting throbbed through the procession.
This was a Melasti ceremony, one of the first of many ceremonies during the Nyepi celebrations of the Balinese new year and it was one of the biggest ceremonies I’ve seen in the many times I’ve been to Bali. Melasti is a cleansing ceremony and all the effigies of their Gods are taken from their temples to the ocean (or a lake or river) where they are bathed before being taken back home to their shrines.
On the beach, right next to a lifeguards hut, hundreds of families sat together as the offerings of flowers and fruit piled high on a table dressed in bright yellow. Tall, skinny traditional flags were posted throughout the crowd, colours fluttering in the stiff onshore breeze. Some family groups had matching cummerbunds or sarongs and many women wore elegant hair pieces in the shape of a formal bun on the backs of their heads. Young boys fought with wooden swords or played chase by the water’s edge until they were admonished quietly by their parents and I was even surprised to see bags of fairy floss for sale on the footpath leading to the beach.
The ceremony took most of the day and that evening as I sat on the beach side of my hotel, drinking cocktails with friends, the procession took a couple of hours to leave the beach the way it came; thousands of Balinese in white, colourful umbrellas fluttered in the evening breeze, drums and kettle gongs beat time to the chanting, all backlit by the deep blue sky seen at the very end of a day and of a night just beginning.
