In March 2017 I visited Bali for the first time with my old Camera Club. It was a fast paced trip where we arrived at our hotel about midnight on the Friday night, were up at 4am for an amazing and well worth it sunrise on Saturday followed by two days touring the temples and lakes of Bali, amongst other things.
I fell a bit in love with Bali during that trip which prompted our visit in November 2017. Now everything has been edited I wanted to share some of the photos which I took. As I took quite a few I think there will be a few posts of my Balinese adventures!
Day 1 – Morning
As I said above we woke up for a 4am start on the Saturday morning so that we could travel to an outlook where we could see Mount Batur, Mount Abang, Mount Agung and Lake Batur. The sunrise was quite frankly beautiful and gave me an opportunity to play around with my camera settings including slow shutter speeds.
Here is my favourite photo of the sunrise:
After our sunrise shoot we travelled by car to Batur Temple on Lake Batur. The setting and Temple was beautiful and provided a lot of photo opportunities:
Whilst we were in Bali it was Nyepi Day which is Bali’s day of silence celebrating the New Year. Leading up to Nyepi Day, pilgrimages take place where pilgrims from around Bali will walk towards the coastlines and lakes for purification ceremonies.
The streets are filled with Balinese people on their pilgrimages and you will find ceremonies by the water before the day.
The villagers all converge on the Temples and leave offerings in anticipation of Nyepi Day and whilst at Lake Batur we were invited inside a Temple where the ceremony was taking place which was lovely to see and very unexpected.
After the Ceremony we continued on our journey and visited Tirta Empul Temple which is a Hindu Balinese water temple. At the Temple the public could enter the water for purification. We didn’t partake in that but it was very special watching people doing it.
The Temple itself was beautiful and it was very peaceful and quiet to wander around with the odd tourist taking their selfies.
This rounded off our morning in first morning in Bali