December Highlights In Bali

December seems to be the most special month amongst other months in 2010. Three main holidays from three different religions will appear on December. Surely, as the community who tolerate other religions’ celebration, Balinese will respect any celebrations and hope everything will go smooth. December this year will be also filled by various festal events to welcome New Year 2011. Take a jaunt to Bali and experience the festal celebration of life!




7 December Moslem New Year
The celebration of Moslem New Year is as not festal as the celebration of New Year’s Eve on December 31^st. Even it could be said that there is no celebration, the city is just like usual. No fireworks, no trumpet, no feast. Moslem community goes to mosque, pray, and goes back to their home. However some shopping centers or communication products often give special discount on this day.

8 December Galungan Day
Galungan is Hindus’ main ceremony to celebrate the glory of righteousness against the wickedness. As the sign of the glory, Hindus create Penjor (decorated long bamboo) and stick it in front of the gate. Hence, when you come to Bali on this day you will see how beautiful Bali with the festal decoration of penjor. They celebrate Galungan day during three days. On the core day, Hindus go to temple and enjoy the togetherness with family staying far away from them. Every family cooks traditional dishes such as suckling pig and lawar then on the core of Galungan they gather and eat together.

18 December Kuningan Day
Kuningan is celebrated 10 days after Galungan to pray and demand prosperity from the God and ancestors. Balinese people believe that on this day, the ancestor spirits will return to heaven at mid-day. For this reason they conduct the ceremony and finish all things before 12 pm.

18 December Makotekan
Makotekan is identified as a celebration and ceremony to purify the village and as a symbol of never ending battle between virtue and evil. You can’t enjoy Makotekan at Kuta or Ubud, or Seminyak, since Makoketekan is the privileged ceremony held in Mungu village, Mengwi, Badung. This was a celebration of the glory of Mengwi Kingdom against to Blambangan. All male from Mungu carry Kotekan, long wood decorated with leaves and tamiang and pray firstly to ask for the blessing for the success of Makotekan. They then unite their kotekan forming a mount. Sometimes there is a guy climb it up and stand on the top peak to make another group fall down. It is worth to see! It is a battle where fun covers all the procession.

26 December Pangerebongan
Pangerebongan is another sacred traditional ceremony which aims to protect the village from the disease. This ceremony is also identified as mass trance ritual in which trance people will stab kris to their body.
Unbelievably, they are all ok, without blood or wound. Surely the procession is not all about mass trance. This sacred ritual started at 9 pm till afternoon in the courtyard of Pangerebongan Temple is followed by various rituals such as praying to the Lord, Tabuh rah, summoning ritual, and encircling the wantilan.

25 December Christmas Day
Although Bali Island is dominated with Hindu community but all people enjoy the friendly Santa Klaus in front of the mall entrance or any shopping centers in Bali. All shopping mall will be decorated with typical Christmas-tree decoration. Besides most of great resorts in Bali will do the same; even make special events to mark the coming Christmas. Enjoying Christmas in Bali will be a distinctive experience.

28-30 December Denpasar Festival (Gajah Mada Town Festival)
Starting from 2008 local government of Denpasar holds Gajah Mada Town Festival at Gajah Mada area to recall Denpasar community’s memory. Gajah Mada area was the most interesting area since it provided entrainment as well as shopping center in 1950s. However, nowadays because of the massive modern mall’s development Gajah Mada area turns to be forgotten. By presenting hundreds of various booths showcasing art works from many ethnics, culinary, and band performances, local government has helped Denpasar people to be entertained with something rare to be found in Denpasar. Although there is no official statement that Denpasar Festival will be held in this year yet but for you who plan to have vacation in December should add this event to your list to visit.


31 December New Year’s Eve
Bali will be flocked by many people coming from abroad or other areas in Indonesia to experience how festal Bali in celebrating New Year’s Eve. There will be a lot of fireworks, trumpet, music festival, and many events where people can enjoy the happiness and great entertainments. Welcome the first sun rise in 2011 in the Island Of The Gods.

source : blog.baliwww.com

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Living in the shadow of Indonesia's volcanoes

By Andrew Marshall

Photograph by John Stanmeyer

All hell is about to break loose, but Udi, a 60-year-old farmer from the village of Kinarejo on the Indonesian island of Java, will not budge. Not even though a mere three miles (five kilometers) separates the smoldering peak of Mount Merapi from Kinarejo. Not even though columns of noxious gas and the nervous tracings of seismographs signal an imminent explosion. Not even though the government has ordered a full-scale evacuation. "I feel safe here," he says. "If the Gatekeeper won't move, then neither will I."

Merapi is a natural-born killer. Rising almost 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) over forests and fields, it ranks among the world's most active and dangerous volcanoes. Its very name means "fire mountain." An eruption in 1930 killed more than 1,300; even in less deadly times, plumes drift menacingly from the peak. Some of the surrounding area, warns a local hazards map, is "frequently affected by pyroclastic flows, lava flows, rockfalls, toxic gases and glowing ejected rock fragments." As the volcano's rumbling crescendoed in May 2006, thousands fled the fertile slopes and settled reluctantly into makeshift camps at lower, safer altitudes. Even the resident monkeys descended in droves.

Not Udi and his fellow villagers, who take their cues from an octogenarian with dazzling dentures and a taste for menthol cigarettes: Mbah Marijan, the Gatekeeper of Merapi. Marijan has one of the more bizarre jobs in Indonesia, or anywhere else, for that matter. The fate of villagers like Udi and of the 500,000 residents of Yogyakarta, a city 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the south, rests on Marijan's thin shoulders. It is his responsibility to perform the rituals designed to appease an ogre believed to inhabit Merapi's summit. This time, the rituals seem to have fallen short. The warnings grow more urgent. Volcanologists, military commanders, even Indonesia's vice president beg him to evacuate. He flatly refuses. "It's your duty to come talk to me," he tells the police. "It is my duty to stay."

Marijan's behavior might seem suicidal anywhere else, but not in Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands that straddles the western reaches of the hyperactive Ring of Fire. It's a zone of geophysical violence, a juncture of colliding tectonic plates that loops more than 25,000 miles (40,200 kilometers) around the Pacific. Geography has dealt Indonesia a wild card: Nowhere else do so many live so close to so many active volcanoes—129 by one count. On Java alone, 120 million people live in the shadow of more than 30 volcanoes, a proximity that has proved fatal to more than 140,000 in the past 500 years.

Death by volcano takes many forms: searing lava, suffocating mud, or the tsunamis that often follow an eruption. In 1883, Mount Krakatau (often misspelled as Krakatoa), located off Java's coast, triggered a tsunami that claimed more than 36,000 lives. The name became a metaphor for a catastrophic natural disaster.

For Marijan, though, an eruption is not so much a threat as a growth spurt. "The kingdom of Merapi is expanding," he says, with a nod at its smoldering peak. In Indonesia, volcanoes are not just a fact of life, they are life itself. Volcanic ash enriches the soil; farmers on Java can harvest three crops of rice in a season. Farmers on neighboring Borneo, with only one volcano, can't.

On a less earthly plane, volcanoes stand at the heart of a complicated set of mystical beliefs that grip millions of Indonesians and influence events in unexpected ways. Their peaks attract holy men and pilgrims. Their eruptions augur political change and social upheaval. You might say that in Indonesia, volcanoes are a cultural cauldron in which mysticism, modern life, Islam, and other religions mix—or don't. Indonesia, an assemblage of races, religions, and tongues, is riveted together by volcanoes. Reverence for them is virtually a national trait.

If the Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, the government agency that keeps eight seismograph stations humming on Merapi, represents modern science, Marijan, the Gatekeeper of Merapi, is Indonesia at its most mystical. When a Dutch hiker went missing on the volcano in 1996, Marijan reportedly made the thick mist vanish and found the injured hiker in a ravine.

It is often hard to distinguish the kind of volcanic spasm that builds toward a convulsion from the seismic restlessness that settles back into quiescence. But monitoring technology has grown more sophisticated. Overnight, government volcanologists have raised the alert to its highest level. The lava dome might collapse at any moment. Hasn't Marijan heard? The entreaties leave Marijan unimpressed. The alerts are merely guesses by men at far remove from the spirit of the volcano. The lava dome collapse? "That's what the experts say," he says, smiling. "But an idiot like me can't see any change from yesterday."

INDONESIA'S MOTTO, "Bhinneka tunggal ika—Unity in diversity," speaks to some 300 ethnic groups and more than 700 languages and dialects. The government officially recognizes six religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism, but mysticism riddles all faiths and bares their animistic roots. Sumatra, the vast island northwest of Java, is home to the Batak people, converted to Christianity by European missionaries in the 19th century. Yet many still believe the first human descended from heaven on a bamboo pole to Mount Pusuk Buhit, an active volcano on the shores of Lake Toba. The Tengger, Hindus who live around Mount Bromo in East Java, periodically climb through choking sulfurous clouds to throw money, vegetables, chickens, and an occasional goat into the crater. On Flores, the Nage, Catholics like most on that island, are buried with their heads toward Mount Ebulobo, whose cone fills their southern horizon.

Likewise, on largely Hindu Bali, volcanoes are sacred, none more so than 10,000-foot (3,000 meters) Mount Agung, its highest peak. It is said a true Balinese knows its location, even when blindfolded, and many sleep with their heads pointing toward it. In 1963 a catastrophic eruption of Mount Agung killed a thousand people. Others starved to death after ash smothered their crops. "The very ground beneath us trembled with the perpetual shocks of the explosions," wrote an eyewitness. Yet what once was spoken of as divine wrath is now seen as a gift. The rock and sand thrown up by the eruption built hotels, restaurants, and villas for hordes of foreign tourists, who started arriving in the 1970s. Despite attacks by Islamic terrorists in 2002 and 2005, which killed more than 220 people, tourism remains Bali's biggest industry. And by the grace of Agung and its neighbor, Mount Batur, houses that once nestled in fields of chilies and onions now overlook quarries filled with workers shoveling volcanic sand into trucks.

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National Geographic : Merapi Eruption

Nationalgeographic.com

Smoke rises Monday from Indonesia's Mount Merapi, one of the world's most volatile and dangerous volcanoes. Thousands of people living on the volcano's fertile slopes began evacuating as Merapi started erupting Tuesday, sending hot ash and rocks high in the air. (See an Indonesia map.)

Scientists had been warning for days that pressure building in the rumbling volcano has the potential to set off an especially violent eruption. (See related pictures of the ten most dangerous U.S. volcanoes.)

"The energy is building up. ... We hope it will release slowly," Indonesian-government volcanologist Surono told reporters, according to the Associated Press. "Otherwise we're looking at a potentially huge eruption, bigger than anything we've seen in years."

Meanwhile, officials in western Indonesia are racing to deal with the aftermath of a deadly tsunami that struck the remote Mentawai Islands late Monday, killing at least 113 and leaving hundreds more missing. The killer wave, triggered by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake centered offshore of the island of Sumatra, had many recalling the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which devastated the same region.

While it's unclear whether Monday's earthquake and the Merapi volcano eruption are linked, neither event is uncommon in Indonesia. The archipelago sits along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a series of fault lines that stretches from the Pacific coasts of the Americas through Japan and into Southeast Asia. (See "Deadly Java Quake Highlights "Ring of Fire" Dangers.")

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Garuda Indonesia Launches Onboard Visa Processing

Garuda Indonesia has introduced visa onboard processing facilities on all direct flights from Sydney to Jakarta, allowing passengers to fast track through immigration, avoid currency exchanges and notorious airport queues.

Garuda Indonesia passengers taking advantage of this new service will have their visa processed by immigration officials onboard the aircraft and payment will be processed when checking-in at Sydney airport.

Garuda hopes to extend the facility to other of its services departing Australia. So, let's make your flight be enjoy and happy with Garuda Indonesia Airlines.

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