Preparations for Royal Cremation in Ubud, Bali

Some photos taken of cremation preparations for Coq Suyasa of Puri Ubud . Ubud is planning a royal send-off for the King of Ubud and also a second member of the royal family. Look closely and you can see there are two bulls (the sarcophagi). These photos were taken July 13 and the cremation is July 15; there is still a lot of work to do.

See more on cremations going on near Ubud right now.

It takes a village...

Checking the progress

Hard at work by the palace.

This tower will carry the remains to the sarcophagus. Many people will be needed to
support it, and this is a much bigger tower than is used for people who are not royalty.

Tourists aren't the only ones taking photos. Note the Balinese man from Ubud with cameral at the lower left. These bulls are much bigger than the sarcophagi used for non-royal people.

Cremation Preparations, Padang Tegal

Some photos taken of cremation preparations in Padang Tegal follow. Padang Tegal is the area of the Monkey Forest and also on and about Jln. Hanoman (which is considered to be Ubud in casual speech and tourist guidebooks).
See more on cremations going on near Ubud right now.


Making offerings on Jln. Hanoman




Structures built in the Monkey Forest to house individual places for each deceased where ceremonies take place before the cremation. Inside are a photo of the deceased, clothes, and other objects. This is not where the remains are cremated.

Sanur, Bali, Kite Festival

Before I start posting photos for cremation preparations, I'd like to post a few from the Kite Festival I attended in Sanur yesterday. Kite flying is a competitive sport here in Bali, and there is something about that I just love. No tackling people, no knocking it into the goal, just kite flying. Though I found it is a bit dangerous, when we had to dash away as a kite threatened to fall on us. Some of those kites are 100 meters long, so being clobbered by one is no laughing matter.

Hey, I told you this is a popular sport. Check out this crowd.


The front of a 100 yard kite.
More kite flying hopefuls from a different village.


My silversmith, Dedo, is also a buddy. Here he's buying us some roasted corn. I chose the chili sauce, he chose the sweet sauce. Dedo was flying a kite competitively here with his friends from Batubulan the day before. And they won! Because they kites are so large, they require several people to operate them.

Kids on the beach, just to the side of the kite flying field in Sanur.

Cremation Season in Bali

I generally avoid going to Bali when I know there are a lot of cremations going on around Ubud, which is my base. As anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with Bali knows, cremations mean about two months of intensive labor before the big event and a month of ceremonies after.

The time the banjar (community group) requires of its members to prepare for cremations is no less than the time required by a full-time job. For those who actually have full-time jobs, they are run ragged. So that is why, despite the pomp, ceremony and undeniable photo ops, I try to avoid visiting Bali when my close friends are in the middle of cremation preparations. Unless I am close with their village and actually helping in those preparations myself, I know my friends will barely have time to see me during the month ir two preceding a cremation. .

Because cremations are extremely expensive, bodies are normally buried, and every five years or so the entire village digs up their dead for a fiery send-off. People of stature may enjoy their own cremation after only a month or two in the ground – or possibly awaiting the event above-ground by the benefit of preservatives

But whichever is the case, the final fire and smoke is the least of the labor. There are offerings to be made, multitudes of baskets to be woven, huge towers to transport the remains to be built, and of course, sarcophagi to be built in the shape of animals, such as lions and bulls. These are hand-painted in detail and hold the final remains when the torch is lit. The bodies are transported to the cremation grounds in the towers with much fanfare, ceremony, music and excitement. There the remains are transported to the sarcophagi. In villages near the tourist eyes, it is, in fact, a huge tourist attraction.

I remember when I was living with friends in a distant, hidden village preparing for village-wide cremation of 20 people.. As I shopped for an appropriate sarong and black lace for my kebaya, cunning vendors tried to pry from me where the cremation was taking place – so they could charge tourists to transport them there. I’m not much of one for a circus, so I demurred to give this information..

But in Ubud, a tourist town, there is no getting away from the fanfare. A Balinese friend from the area recently told me that when important royalty is cremated, filming rights are sold to big news stations. The last big royal cremation in Ubud, he told me cost over $1.5 million U.S. – this does not include labor, because of course the men and women of the village are not paid for their work, it is part of their civic duty. The rights were sold for over $ 2.5 million U.S .- A tidy million dollar profit for the very rich banjar of Ubud.

After I bought my ticket to Bali, I was sad to hear that the “king” of Ubud had died. I did not know him personally, but just about everyone I knew around Ubud did. The Coq (a royal title) was a sociable and popular man. There was to be a cremation for him two months after my arrival. Of course, this meant that any friend from Ubud I normally hung out with would be too busy to do much but go to work and go to banjar. It also meant a lot of traffic jams as work was done at the palace right off the main road.

The main reason I was going to Bali was to see ‘Tut anyway… and he is from Padang Tegal not Ubud. (Casual tourists think Padang Tegal is part of the same banjar as Ubud, but in fact Jln. Hanoman, the other tourist drag that runs parallel to Monkey Forest Rd. and, indeed, the Monkey Forest itself is all the Padang Tegal banjar.) So you can imagine how I looked up to the heavens when Janna told me Padang Tegal had decided to hold a huge cremation for 87 people June 17. That meant the entire time I was in Bali Janna would be deep in cremation preparations and we would be lucky to catch even a few minutes together here and there. There go the travel plans around Indonesia. Well, I went anyway, and the cremation date was extended to July 19, partly because they needed to get more wood from Java.

So in the next few posts, I’ll put up a few photos of cremation preparations around Ubud.