About Indonesian

It's easy to see why the people of Trunyan are so defensive of their territory. The view across Lake Batur beats any northern italian backdrop. The locals call their caldera's lake 'the sea': at more than 1,600 metres above the sea-level, small, windwhipped waves cut across the depply turquoise water. Opposite the over 1,000-year-old village, pistes of dark-grey lava from previous eruptions - the last in 2000 - drip down the slopes of the still-active Gunung Batur.

Like a handful of other villages scattered around the dark volcanic uplands, Trunyan is inhabited by the Bali Mula - the so-called 'original Balinese' people - a once isolationist, disparate ethnic group that makes up nearly 3 percent of the island's population. But the Bali Mula of Trunyan are finally beginning to feel a little too isolated. Many of Trunyan's elder residents cannot speak Bahasa Indonesia.

The lakeside temple is beautiful and growing , its unique ceremonies distinct from the res of Hindu Bali. A walk through the narrow village walkways is eye-opening and humbling. The 45-minute hike to the tip of the crater hovering above Trunyan for a misty, ethereal daybreak is simply stunning, and beats battling with the official tourist guides who hike the Batur volcano opposite. More micro-pockets of Bali Mula, guarded by dogs, live on the crater shoulder of Mount Abang cultivating corn and tending cows. You may given a gritty black coffee to wake you up at the top.

And the only people you will only meet on the way down the crater lip are knots of children and old women carrying 10-20 kilo parcels of firewood on their heads to be sold or used for cooking in the village below. And if a visitor  feels shunned or unimportant  while straying into Bali Mula territory - rare if you are polite - it is historical, and nothing new.

The Bali Mula have always been a little different to the rest of Hindu Bali. No caste system exist. The Trunyan burial method is closer to the pre-Hindu Neolithic Agama Bayu sect, who worshipped the stars, the wind and their ancestors. In the 1930s, American anthropologist Margaret Meas and her husband, photographer Gregory Bateson, were also lulled by the Bali Mula, describing them as following a Balinese culture 'stripped to its bare essentials rather than the wealthier, ceremonial-encrusted communities' of south Bali.

Trunyan unlike other communities in mainstream Bali, is split into two groups of right and left, each headed by a priest. The right and left are further divided into four separate groups of married men, married women , adolescent boys and adolescent girls. Each have their own bale. The village is democratic. A child may not marry an adopted brother or sister. Cousins, naturally, are forbidden to marry. On ceremonial days, the men's bale agung tends toward the frantic trance of good gamelan and the 80%-proof arak flows. About 4,600 people live in the core village.

Many of the oldest people in Trunyan reach the end of their eighties. One is a healthy 102-year-old in a country where life-ecpectancy has only recently hit 67. Layers of Australian Aborigine, northern and southern chinese, Malay, Polynesian, Arabic, Melanesian, Mongol and Indian have created a look among the Bali Mula that the painter Covarrubias sketched as 'ghostly, slender, aristocratic'.