Erotic Temple

I thought the title should definitely catch some attention.

On Friday a friend and I decided to travel 3 hours by motorbike to visit a fabled Hindu temple (Candi Sukuh) located high on the slopes of Mount Lawu. It is referred to as an erotic temple because of its focus on male and female genitalia as part of explaining religious concepts.

Since my friend is an anthropologist, she knew all sorts of interesting stuff about the place. I can't remember most of it, but a lot had to do with how the temple was unique. First, the design more closely resembled temples in Latin America rather than the average temple shape here in Indonesia.

Second, the temple has a distinctly Javanese feel rather than incorporating more elements from India. For example, you can see here that traditional Wayang characters are displayed in the reliefs. They have a very Javanese-style artistic representation.

Finally, despite the temple being geared toward a god that is not necessarily associated with eroticism, the temple displays a great deal of it. Representations of the world are framed in artistic representations of Yoni (or female genitalia). Also many of the statues have a rather generous rendition of the Lingga (male genitalia). Since I am keeping this blog fairly family friendly, I only include one picture.

There were a lot of other representations, and we took a lot of fun pictures, but I don't want to dirty any of your minds with the erotic images. If you'd like to see more (some are pretty funny), you should e-mail me or talk to me in person.

The rest of the time in the temple, we took funny pictures with fairly innocent statues. Like sitting on these turtles, which are a part of the Hindu legend. They help steady the world or something like that.

I did my best cowboy impression. I definitely made it 8 seconds on that baby.

We also took some jumping pictures from the top of the temple to give the appearance that we were flying. Here is my best monkey jump.

Also took a picture with this angry giant (he's probably angry cause he's the only one without a large set of man-parts).

After an hour or so at the temple, we headed back down the mountain. Along the way we stopped at a waterfall (Air Terjun Jumog), which was beautiful.

It was also crawling with young couples who were pacaran, or becoming couples. It was cute to watch them. Many Indonesians are extremely awkward with dating. Since strict forms of Islam require that men and women do not touch until married, young couples maintain awkward distances while dating (this is only in public... lots of touching happens out of sight). I wanted to take a picture of some of them, but I am not Indonesian enough to just take pictures of people without asking permission.

Here my friend and I took our own picture to prove we were there.

On the way home we ate some sate kelinci, which is rabbit kabobs. The area is famous for them, and actually I think it was the first time I ate rabbit. It was really, really good. Why don't we eat more rabbit???

I was way too excited about it.