Ceremonial Cleansing

Ceremonies are the backbone to Balinese culture.  They are performed everyday and usually are the cause of the one main road that is two lanes wide around the entire island being blocked off.  We took a ride to the East Coast with Ketut and Nyoman and their entire extended family of a couple hundred to perform a ceremony that hadn't been done in 5 years.  The main idea of this ceremony was to cleanse the souls of all of their ancestors.  Everyone is fully dressed in traditional garb and snacking on various dried banana treats and peanuts.  In groups of about 30, people file toward the ocean holding offerings and essentially attempting to cleanse their ancestors souls.  One man carried a live chick and duck on the end of a bamboo stick over his shoulder to dunk in the water in preparation for their later sacrifice.  The second stop was across the street at the water temple where the entire extended family (about 150 people) prayed and offered gifts to the ancestors.  The temple was set right next to a bat cave where a couple thousand bats nestled and shrieked in the background.  We ended at the main village temple where everyone had rice and noodles out of brown paper and did their last cleansing gestures.