From 28 to 30 August, Tanah Lot will host the seventh art and food festival. Every day, as sunset approaches, a parade of gebogan offerings moves across the grounds to a baleganjur percussion orchestra, and a food fair with Tabanan cooking runs alongside it. The organisers expect around 10 thousand people a day.
A gebogan is a festive offering of fruit and pastries that women carry on their heads. This year they are stacked in three tiers of equal height and decorated in the tridatu colours: red, white and black. The baleganjur that accompanies the procession is an ensemble of gongs and drums.
For the first time, the parade has been entrusted to a single village — the one on whose land the temple stands. It has fifteen banjar communities, and they come out five at a time: the first five on 28 August, the next on the 29th, and the last on the 30th, along with the festival's closing.
Tabanan's cooking is built around ulam carik — dishes made from what lives in the flooded rice fields: eel, field snails, river fish. The same dishes are prepared in front of the audience at cooking classes. The fair has forty stalls, with another twenty-six opening in the evening at the night market.
Over the three days, the complex's management expects local vendors to turn over 10 billion rupiah.
The grounds open at 10 in the morning, the parade is set closer to sunset, and Balinese musicians play in the evening. The temple itself stands on a rock in the ocean, and you can only reach it on foot at low tide.
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