Last Saturday, Dayu and I rode on bike to Sanur beach and we had fun having our body meet the seawater. It's a refreshing thing after a week full of working or being in the 'town'. After the beach we went to Danau Tamblingan road to see what's on, and found this small warung and had lunch there. We had our dessert at Cafe Batu Jimbar and spent another two hours there.

We then drove to the South and stopped by at McDonalds to see what we could eat while waiting for Wahyu. Wahyu is my neighbor back in Awiligar, Bandung, who is also my schoolmate. He's been in Bali for three months now but we just managed to meet up just a week before in Dunkin' Donut, Teuku Umar. I asked Dayu to join us so they already met before.


Wahyu came at 5 p.m. with Ayu, a girl from his office, and the four of us drove our way to GWK, Jimbaran. It was my second time there and I personally don't really like it. But they are having a kecak performance we could watch daily for free every 6 p.m. (but the entrance fee is Rp 30,000 per person at the main gate so it's not really that free.)

To my disappointment, the kecak was not as great as I hoped for. The show began at 6 p.m. when the sky was still so bright and the background was merely a cream limestone without any dramatic relief like what we could find in the temple (I watched the Ramayana ballet in Prambanan Temple, Yogyakarta, years ago and it was so spectacular!) and they didn't play with any fire. Some of the kecak dancers seemed distracted with their own minds or by the spectators.

To make it worse, they filled one part between the scenes for some interactive session. They brought one dancer at a time who each asked two of the audiences to dance with them on the stage. This, for me, is a waste of time because I, as I think most of the spectator would agree, came to see the performance, not to dance on the stage. If I was a tourist, I would definitely go before it ends because not just the dance was awful but also because it made no sense to waste more than 10 minutes dancing around. It feels like a disgrace to the original kecak dance.

Kecak dance was never originally made by a Balinese nor it was a ritual for something. It was once made by a foreigner who thought the 'cak' chants sounded so beautiful to be made a performance. They added the dance from Ramayana epic later to complete the dance, but what had been done for years is the kecak dance performed by 50 men who make circle and to be 'in trance' with fire here and there to make it more dramatic and mystical.


Anyway it was still a pleasant day to me, because I've experienced at least another Balinese culture that day. It was okay for introduction of kecak, but I will definitely come to the one in Uluwatu Temple someday. The view from up there with the temple as background must be splendid. Who wanna come with me?