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Village Priest Blames Bali's Underwhelming Volcano Eruption on Tourist Sex

Too much banging and menstruating made the mountain angry, he said.

Bali's Mt Agung has finally erupted, two months after tens of thousands of residents were evacuated from their homes. But if a local priest’s theory about the eruption being caused by mountain-top tourist sex is correct, well, the sex must have been pretty average.

In September, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a village priest in Munting, which sits inside the volcano excavation zone, said the mountain (a popular hiking spot) was angry because tourists had been having sex and menstruating on it. But as far as Indonesian volcanoes go, Mt Agung’s eruption has so far been the equivalent of sex after a dozen Bintangs.

The ABC reports that Tuesday night’s eruption was small and cause for no further evacuations. I Dewa Made Mertayasa, the head of the Mt Agung volcano monitoring post, told the ABC that the eruption was a "phreatic explosion," meaning that it’d ejected mostly a bunch of steam, without any lava. For that reason there was no reason to broaden the evacuation zone which currently extends about 7.5 kilometres around the crater.

When Agung last erupted in 1963, more than 1,000 people were killed, most by clouds of hot gas. The most recent eruption, that occurred Tuesday 5:05 PM local time, was small change in comparison. While the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is urging Australians to stay beyond the exclusion zone, flights in and out of Bali’s Denpasar international airport are continuing as usual.

And for any Australian tourists who’ve booked a 10-day villa retreat in Seminyak, that’s all that matters.