Bali celebrates biggest royal cremation in decades

By Sara Webb

UBUD, Indonesia (Reuters) - Miguel Covarrubias, the Mexican artist who lived in Bali in the 1930s and who did much to promote its image as a tropical island paradise, wrote that the Hindu Balinese seemed to have "their greatest fun" at their cremation ceremonies.

Not much has changed in that respect.

On Tuesday afternoon, tens of thousands of Balinese gathered in Ubud, central Bali, to celebrate the biggest royal cremation in nearly three decades.

It was a culmination of months of elaborate, carefully choreographed rituals, carried out at vast expense so that the souls of the dead could be freed amid much cheering and laughter.

"Sadness is a very natural thing, when left behind by one they love," Tjokorda Raka Kerthyasa, a younger brother of one of the deceased royals, told Reuters in an interview.

Crowds lined the streets and swarmed into the cemetery to watch as the bodies of Tjokorda Gde Agung Suyasa, who was head of the Ubud royal palace, and another royal, Tjokorda Gede Raka, were carried along Ubud's main thoroughfare to the cremation site on enormous carved bamboo and wood towers.

Groups of 250 men took it in turn to carry the 28.5-metre-high tower -- 7,000 relay-runners in all -- to the cemetery where the two royal bodies were placed inside two giant black bull sarcophagi, presented with offerings, and set alight.

"This part of the ceremony is a chance to bury that sadness, to be accepting, of birth, life and death, freeing of the spirit. We are not allowed to have tears on the body," said Kerthyasa.