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WHEN THE HERONS COME BACK TO PETULU... One afternoon, Lisa and Ann headed north of Ubud, Bali to see what had been recommended to us as a not-to-be-missed sight-- thousands of herons returning to the village of Petulu to roost for the night. What had been anticipated as a touristy experience became a memorable afternoon. Local legend is that there were no herons near Petulu until one afternoon in the fall of 1965. On September 30, 1965, an attempted communist coup led to the downfall of founding Indonesian president Sukarno and the emergence of General Suharto, who ended the coup. Afterwards, the communist party was outlawed, and an anti-communist witch hunt swept over the nation. In Bali, the national political differences were bound up with existing tensions over the caste system and land reform. Religious traditionalists led the search for communists, and many people were brutally murdered, often clubbed to death by mobs. Exactly one week after one of the worst of the massacres, thousands of white herons, said to be the souls of the slaughtered, appeared in Petulu, where no herons had been seen before. They have been coming every afternoon since. We had been told that the birds arrived
at four, so we hired a driver and Arriving in Petulu, we walked
cautiously down the main road, noting the At the far end of the village, we spied a tiny store, and perched on a bench outside to drink some tepid cokes. We soon learned with dismay that the birds were expected at six, and we had two hours on this bench. Our boredom was soon eased by the appearance of a bottle of arak, distilled palm wine. We spent the next two hours sharing the local firewater with each other and a young villager while watching the storeowner make her palm offering trays for the next day and her children play with empty soda bottles. As the afternoon waned, the daily
return of the tourists to Petulu began, by the bemo-full.
(A bemo is a local form of transport, usually a minivan.)
And at six, the herons began to arrive, first a few at a
time, then by the score. |
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