Kintamani

Mount Batur, the active stratovolcano at the heart of Kintamani, sits inside the rim of a much larger ancient caldera — the bowl you stand on at the Penelokan viewpoint is the wall of that older crater, formed in a vast eruption around 30,000 years ago. The smaller Batur cone has grown up inside the bowl since, fed by the same magma chamber that produced the original blast.

Its most recent significant activity was in 2000, when a series of small eruptions sent ash drifting across central Bali for several weeks. At the foot of the cone lies Lake Batur, the largest crater lake on the island and the source of irrigation water for most of central and southern Bali.

On the eastern shore of Lake Batur — reachable only by boat — lies Trunyan, one of a small number of Bali Aga villages. The Bali Aga are the descendants of the original Balinese, who arrived on the island long before the 15th-century Majapahit invasion from Java. While most of Bali eventually adopted the courtly Javanese-flavoured Hinduism of the Majapahit, the Bali Aga held onto an older animist tradition. Trunyan today preserves practices that elsewhere on the island vanished centuries ago — including, most famously, a funerary rite involving no cremation at all.

Above the village of Songan, on the inner caldera rim, stands Pura Ulun Danu Batur — one of the most important water-temples in Bali. It is dedicated to Dewi Danu, the goddess of lakes and rivers, and serves as the spiritual head of the entire subak network that draws from Lake Batur. In Balinese sacred geography, water flows downhill from this temple — physically and spiritually — to every rice paddy as far south as the coast, which is why the priests of Ulun Danu have historically held influence over the lowland courts that depend on their blessing. Its ritual partner is Pura Ulun Danu Beratan in the cool highlands of Bedugul, the second of Bali’s great lake temples.

In Trunyan, bodies are not cremated. Instead, the dead are wrapped in cloth, placed in open bamboo cages, and laid out on a stone platform beneath a single ancient tree — the Taru Menyan, or “fragrant tree”. The tree gives off a chemical that neutralises the smell of decomposition, allowing eleven bodies to lie in the open air at any one time without disturbing the surrounding village. The skulls of those who have decomposed are arranged on a separate stone shelf. Boats can be hired from Kedisan to visit the site; visitors are asked to behave with respect and not to photograph the bodies directly.

One Balinese origin story explains the caldera as the work of the giant Kebo Iwa — a hero of the pre-Majapahit kingdom of Bedulu — who is said to have dug the lake basin with his bare hands to win the favour of a princess he loved. The story carries an undertone of loss: Kebo Iwa was eventually tricked into his own death by the Javanese conqueror Gajah Mada, ending the kingdom of Bedulu and beginning the long Majapahit-influenced era. The lake remains as his memorial.