As coronavirus crisis eases bull racing returns to Bali, the jockeys clinging on for dear life and the ground shaking while their charges, towing flimsy chariots, career around a circuit at 60km/h
- A traditional harvest celebration, bull races let islanders blow off steam. Cancelled in 2020, they’re having a limited revival with Covid-19 infections down
- Jockeys wielding spiked clubs race bulls at high speed, spectators closing in around them to urge the animals on. ‘Safety is not big here,’ a team boss says
The sun is still rising as Gidday Sudita drives out of his family compound on a beach in Bali’s far west, towards a plateau of mustard-yellow rice fields.
It’s September and the air is tainted with smoke and embers as farmers burn off the crop residue in their fields, as they always do at this time of the year.
For millions of globetrotters with fond memories of holidaying on the so-called Island of the Gods, that hope will be realised when they are able to return, but for the agrarian communities in this little visited corner so many worlds away from the usual tourist hang-outs in the south, that day is today – the makepung, or bull races, have returned to Bali.
Introduced by migrants from Madura, an island off the northeast coast of Java, and adapted with locally made chariots cut out of a Roman biopic, bull races give hardworking people here a way to blow off steam and celebrate the end of the rice harvest.