Ha-ha-ha. Absolutely priceless comment!
I've been to Trunyan a total of four times, but a long time ago (first encounter in 1973).
I was still a novice traveller in the early 1970s. The "road" from Penelokan down to Kedisan was a dirt track. It didn't help that I drove down there in a 1946 Willy's jeep, with left-hand drive and four bald tyres.
And stoned, as well (high on some
Frank Sumatra grass). Well...it
was the 1970s!
There were four other stoned people in the jeep. It was a kind of "
Five Go To Bali" trip. We parked the jeep next to a jetty, got suckered into hiring a dug-out canoe and proceeded to paddle our way to mysterious Trunyan.
Halfway across Lake Batur, a small motorised boat passed us full of laughing Balinese. They were laughing at
us! No problem. We laughed back at them, and waved as well (good grass).
Some big black clouds suddenly swept over the crater rim and hovered ominously above us. Was it going to rain? Anybody got an umbrella? Will we get killed by a lightning strike?
They seemed to pass as quickly as they'd arrived (either that, or we were more stoned than we thought - maybe even imagined the clouds).
We finally landed our floating log at Trunyan. Not sure who was more surprised...the locals, us, or both. Whatever. I believe that they were quite impressed by our efforts to get there.
Then the "tour" began. We saw a few bamboo cages on the ground with some bones inside. Given the year, they
might have been human bones (not chicken or something else).
Various old Chinese coins were pointed out to us (the ones with a hole in the centre). The magical tree that eliminates the smell of rotting corpses was also highlighted.
We then walked into the village proper and were taken to what I think was a classroom.
Communication was a bit of a problem - nobody spoke English, and many of the locals didn't speak Indonesian.
We were told about a giant statue in the village, but were not allowed to see it (even
if actually exists).
We were pretty tired after all the rowing, and a bit bored so we left.
No - we
didn't row back the way we came. We thought we'd be smart(er) and paddled across the lake to Toyabungkah.
There was no road between there and Kedisan then, only a tortuous dirt track strewn with very sharp volcanic rocks (and boulders).
We managed to get the motorised "ferry" and were glad to see that our jeep was still where we left it.
Trying to drive back up to Penelokan was a nightmare. We got stuck on an incline with a gradient of about 1:2. But that's another story.
My later visits to Trunyan were not so good. A kind of mafia element emerged. People were hassled halfway there to pay more than the agreed price.
Others were not allowed to leave unless they paid more. On the other side of the lake, a similar (maybe the same), mafia-like group refused to let people climb Mt Batur without a "guide".
Of course, many people complained and I
think the governor of the Bangli regency put a stop to this in the last year.
It's been at least 25 years since I last went to Trunyan. After the last time, I vowed never to go back there again. Tourists, travellers, backpackers, anthropologists, etc, have different agendas.
And different experiences, of course.
Roy, a formerly highly prolific poster on this forum had this to say in June 2011 on
Lonely Planet's Thorntree:
Roy calls himself "ubudian" these days on
Thorntree.
Bali-Java - Lonely Planet travel forum
You could also check out the following links for more information:
Trunyan - The Bali Aga of Trunyan
Trunyan Village - Bali Forum - TripAdvisor
Trunyan Village, Bali, indonesia on Vimeo
The Vimeo video isn't really about Trunyan. There are
some photos taken in Trunyan - the rest are main-frame Bali. (The soundtrack is pretty awful.)
CONCLUSION
By all means go to Trunyan and see what it's all about for yourself.
A much better "Bali Aga" village, IMHO, would be Tengganan (near Candi Dasa in East Bali).
There
are some little-known others, but I'm not gonna tell.
:indecisiveness:
