Paluang Car Temple, Unique and Sacred Holy Place

     Saturday, 2 July 2016 4:07 PM   Wonderful Nusa Penida   3268 views

The uniquenesses of Nusa Penida seem to be endless to be explored. Not only regarding the marine life and culture, the spiritual side is interesting. As Hindu predominately practiced by the people here, many temples spread to the entire island. On western cliff, there is unusual temple called Paluang temple, has a variety of oddities and one of them there in Bali or even the world. There are two strange buildings with car shape as main shrines. This temple is the look of the building is very different from the millions of temples in the world. Remember, cars are not the real car but it’s just a form of shrines to form a complete car with the wheels, the hood is made of stone.

Paluang Temple is located in the village of Karang Dawa, western area of Nusa Penida. The trip to this temple needs time around 40 minutes from Nusa Penida Port. The temple be guarded by hundreds monkeys as its ‘rancangan’. Imagine, this temple standing just above the steep cliff and quite far from the village of Karang Dawa. The temple ceremony done every six months based on Balinese calender.

As the local story, the building a car has been in existence since time immemorial. No one knows when the first time when it was built. Few years ago, the car building made of wood since the wood has begun loss does not eliminate the size, shape and design of the building renovation was repeated by using the stones to make it more durable and long lasting.

When the village get collaps since of ‘gerubug’ kind of bad epidemic, Ida Bethara will come to cure the villages. Paluang Temple is very quiet atmosphere for meditation and conduct the activities of other religious rituals. There are also awesomeness ancient statues which very strange, the statues were built 500 years ago but nowadays, some part losing with age.