It's Sunday morning and we get into our taxi. Still rather sleeping, all five girls in the car are quiet and doing their own thing. Reading, listening to music, watching Snapchat videos, scrolling through Instagram. I look outside the window, as I am not appeased by the beauty of Balinese nature.

Today it's temple tour day and we are on our way to the biggest and the most important temple in Bali, Pura Besakih or the Mother Temple. As we arrive and are all struggling with our sarong, the driver tells us that the locals will try to stop us and tell us that the temple is available only with a guide. But he says that that's not true and that we should just shake them off and go alone. But he also warns us not to tell them that he said it, because "it's dangerous for me". Little confused and scared about how big the risk could be, we leave the driver behind and go on our tour.

The Mother Temple

We are discussing the best strategy to shake these men off. We decide to go with the "no English" card, and not even a minute later, we are stopped by a group of local men. We pretend not to speak a word of English, and therefore the guide is unnecessary. I speak Dutch to Leonie and Nicole and Maggie speak Spanish. Our strategy, however, is not working. Even though we repeat "no English, no English" all the time, they are very annoying. At the end we give up and say (in fluent English) that we don't want a guide, that we don't care that the temple is closed for tourists without a guide, that we don't care that there is a ceremony and that we don't care it's a 1 km walk - we will walk back if we decide to take a guide anyway. All they were telling us were obvious lies.

The walk was really rather long. As we are approaching the temple, a group of local women come to us and force an offering and candlesticks into our hands. "No, thank you," I say politely, giving it back. "Offering just for the temple, you must," she mutters in broken English and I'm starting to believe that this is really the local tradition. How naive.

After we confusingly accept the offerings and walk on, they say "20 thousand." Classic. Leonie gets quite pissed and argues with the woman who forced the offering on her and now wants her money. Even though it was hard, we managed to get rid of all the offerings and not pay. But not for long.

At the temple's entrance, another group of locals stops us and prevents us from entering unless we pay for a guide. We are all really done with this. We try to negotiate, but these people block the whole way and we have no intentions of physically fighting them at a temple. We give in and start negotiating the price. While we could get the guide for 100k down, they won't budge. In the end, we spent 120k.

The guide, in fact, turns out to be a pretty awesome thing to have. Now we get a lot of information about the temple and also get to see some hidden places only locals know about. As we tour the huge complex of several temples, he explains the history of Balinese Hinduism.

Bali was not always a Hindu land. Before, Hinduism was prevalent in Indonesia, but after the Muslim invasion in the 15th century, Indonesian Hindus turned to an island which soon adopted its own version of Hinduism and came to be called Bali.