Celebrate Nyepi Day - Bali's Silent New Year

taken from tanahlot.net

Nyepi Day is the Hindu New Year in Bali and is based on the Saka Calendar, a lunar calendar originally from India. The actual day changes every year but falls sometime in March or April of the Gregorian calendar, on the day after the full moon. Nyepi Day is also known as Bali's Day of Silence. So called because it is meant to be spent in reflective prayer and silent meditation. While visitors may not follow the same beliefs, they are required to observe the silence when visiting this mystical and spiritual island on Nyepi Day. The purpose of this is to ensure that the evil spirits roaming the lands will pass over the island when they see that no one is around hence restoring the balance of good and evil for the New Year.

As a tourist in Bali, there is not much you can do except to remain in your hotel especially if you are in areas which enforce strict observance of these rules. Shops, restaurants and tourist attractions will be closed. Vehicles are not allowed to ply the streets and local officials will be going on their rounds to ensure that the silence is maintained. The airport will be also be closed for 24 hours, so don't even try to leave!

Being confined to the perimeters of your hotel, you might take the opportunity to enjoy the facilities there. Therefore choose to stay in a hotel or villa where you can attend a cooking class, enjoy a spa treatment, yoga class or laze by your own private pool. For the more amorous, your hotel room and room service would be ideal but do keep the noise level down since the silence in the air will only serve to have an amplifying effect on every whisper.

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Bali Vacation: Bali Arts Festival 2009

The Bali Arts Festival 2009 is a wonderful spectacle and a great introduction to Balinese artistic traditions and culture. It will held from Saturday, June 13th 2009 till Saturday, July 11th 2009. This yearly even is the largest cultural even in the island. This even it self has been held for the 31 times since 1979. The festival is the biggest event of its kind in the country and it seems that the whole island attends the festival at some point during the month. The festival generates a great atmosphere and tourists are very much welcomed to join in the fun and celebrations.

The month-long festival will feature 180 art performances from 12 provinces in Indonesia and eight foreign countries - South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, India, China and Mexico and the United States. It's a full month of daily performances, handicraft exhibitions and other related cultural and commercial activities during which literally the whole of Bali comes to the city to present its offerings of dance, music and beauty. The Bali Arts Festival on display are trances from remote mountain slopes, forgotten or recently revived village dances, food and offering contests, classical palace dances, stars of Balinese stage, odd musical performances, "kreasi baru" (new creations) from the dance schools of Denpasar, as well as contemporary choreography and dance companies from other islands and from abroad.

It begins in the villages, where the seka or cultural groups are selected and organized at the regency level, vie with each other to perform the Arts Festival and thus display in front of a large audience the uniqueness of their village of birth and resting place of their ancestors.

Each year, the Bali Arts Festival, beside the fed classical dances of the island, such as the legong, gambuh, kecak, barong, baris, mask dances and the like, is based on the theme around which new “dance choreography” is produced and old village dances and activities revived. Over the years, the whole range of classical Balinese stories - Ramayana, Mahabharata, Sutasoma, Panji - have thus been turned into “colossal” Sendratari Ballets. Click here to view the 2009 Bali Arts Festival Program.

The festival is thus a unique opportunity to see local village culture both "live" and at first hand. Tourists who take a vacation are warmly welcomed.

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