There’s a version of Bali most people never see, and it sits about two hours northeast of the terraced rice fields and beach clubs, at the edge of a volcanic lake inside a crater most tourists photograph from a distance and never actually enter.

Trunyan is a village on the eastern shore of Lake Batur, reachable only by boat, and home to one of the strangest burial customs I’ve come across. The Bali Aga people who live there don’t cremate their dead, which is the standard Hindu Balinese practice everywhere else on the island. They don’t bury them either. Instead, bodies are laid out in the open, under bamboo cages, beneath a giant banyan tree the village is named after.

The name is the explanation

Trunyan comes from Taru Menyan, two words that fuse together into the village’s name. Taru means tree. Menyan means fragrant, the same root behind kemenyan, the Indonesian word for incense. Put together: fragrant tree. The name isn’t decorative. It’s the whole premise of the place. Locals say the tree swallows the smell of the bodies decomposing beneath it, absorbing the odor rather than simply masking it, which fits the way the tree is talked about generally, less like a plant and more like something alive and watchful, a guardian presence at the center of the cemetery.

Older than the Hindu Bali you know

The Bali Aga are often described as the original Balinese, descendants of the island’s population before the Majapahit Empire arrived from Java between the 14th and 16th centuries and brought with it the courtly, caste-structured Hindu-Javanese culture that shaped most of what we now think of as “Balinese.” Cremation, as practiced across the rest of the island, is largely a product of that later layer. Trunyan, isolated in the mountains, kept something older.

That isolation shows in how selective the custom is. Not everyone qualifies for a place under the tree. You have to have died of natural causes, no accidents, no suicides, nothing unnatural. You also need to have been married. Only eleven bodies occupy the site at once; when an eleventh arrives, the oldest set of remains gets moved aside to a stone platform to make room. There’s also a gendered rule around the burial procession itself: only men carry the body to the site, based on a belief that a woman’s involvement could bring disaster to the village, a landslide, an eruption.

What it actually looks like, and smells like

We saw two bodies that had been placed there recently. Wrapped in cloth, face left exposed, fenced in by bamboo. Nothing hidden, nothing softened. Relatives leave offerings for the dead, placed in the same ordinary, unceremonious way you’d see at other grave sites around Bali, except here there’s no attempt to seal anything away afterward.

As for the smell the tree is supposed to swallow, it isn’t gone. There’s an odor, and it isn’t good. But it’s nowhere near what you’d brace for walking into an open-air site with recently placed bodies. Most accounts claim the site is essentially odorless, which overstates it. What’s actually true is somewhere more modest and, honestly, more interesting: noticeably less than expected, not fully absent. Whether that’s the tree, the lake air, or something else doing the work, something is clearly happening. It just isn’t magic.

Then there were the rats. Feasting, unmissable, completely undisturbed by our presence. Nobody intervenes, that’s the point. The place runs on the idea that nature handles what it handles, without human cleanup or embalming getting in the way. Monkeys scatter bones and belongings around the surrounding forest for the same reason. Nothing here is tended the way a Western cemetery would be tended.

The boat, the price, and the discount nobody mentions upfront

Getting there means a boat from Kedisan harbor, and the pricing is informal, unregulated, and notoriously inflated for tourists. We paid 900,000 rupiah for a group of four, which, split four ways, is a fair rate by most accounts I’ve since read. Some travelers get quoted 1,200,000 with zero room to negotiate; others, going it alone with a rented canoe, pay a fraction of that. There’s no fixed tariff, just whatever the operator thinks you’ll accept that day.

Three of the four in our group were local, and that almost certainly worked in our favor. Without a posted price, a boat operator is pricing the moment, not the service, and a boat full of mostly Indonesian passengers gets priced differently than a boat full of obvious tourists. We likely paid something closer to a fair local rate rather than getting the markup foreign visitors usually describe.

On top of the boat fare, dropping another 100,000 as a donation is considered good manners, and worth doing, given this is a living, working burial ground for an actual community, not a government-run attraction. Just worth knowing it’s informal. There’s no official rate, no receipt, no fixed expectation. It flexes with who’s asking.

The UNESCO claim, clarified

One thing worth correcting, since it came up on-site and gets repeated a lot: Trunyan isn’t a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and neither is its cemetery. What is UNESCO-recognized is the Batur Caldera as a whole. Mount Batur and Lake Batur were added to UNESCO’s Global Geopark Network back in 2012, for geological and scenic value. Trunyan happens to sit inside that geopark. It’s a real designation, just a different and much lower-profile one than “World Heritage Site,” and it has nothing to do with the cemetery or the burial tradition specifically.

Was it worth it

Macabre is the right word. Not staged-macabre, genuinely so. No glass case, no curated distance, no museum framing. Just a tree that’s supposed to swallow the smell and mostly does, some bamboo, and the plain fact of death handled the way this particular community has handled it for longer than most of the island’s current customs have existed.

The driver

If you’re arranging this yourself, our driver can be highly recommended. He organized the whole day trip for a reasonable price. Putu Christian Natanael, WhatsApp +6287861592989.