Hi everyone,
Yes, I am still here in Bali, struggling with wifi down in Ubud for a couple of days and nothing special when back. Lots to tell but the wifi has made it difficult to keep up. I am TRYING to post my sketches on my quirkyartist blog on Wordpress every day, but even that is not easy.
I have had the book The Night of Purnama for many years. It is the story of an English couple who were living in the village of Iseh, high on Mt Agung in 1963 when the major eruption took place. It is a very dramatic story. For years I have wanted to go up there.
Yesterday we went up there, to all the places in the book, first surprise to me was that Sidemen was already high. We went on from there to all the villages named in the book. Many people died there (thousands), but the people who didn't die walked down to escape the lava, and back up to tend to their animals. The English woman Anna Mathews walked to Klung Kung. To see these places having recently re read the book was amazing.
They are quarrying the lava up there, and there is a constant stream of trucks bringing the stones down. The villages have road blocks and tax the trucks for ruining the road.
We went right to the top where the road ends at Pura Pasar Agung. We didn't go up to the temple. It looked like a million steps. We were so high that all the landscape looked misty and the lava quarry was way below in the distance. It was an amazing day.
Wendy