The World's 3rd Largest, Almost Invisible, Statue


As my flight was approaching the international airport in Bali, I noticed a giant statue on the horizon that was about 15 kilometers away, but appeared as though it must have been hundreds of feet tall.  I decided that I would visit it while I was on Bali.

My last day on Bali, I decided to hire a taxi to take me to the Gurita Vishnu Kencana Statue, which depicts Vishnu riding on Garuda.  Including the pedestal, it is 122 meters tall (30 meters taller than the Statue of Liberty) and the winged Garuda's wingspan is 64 meters.  And the statue is so massive it can be viewed from up to 20 kilometers away. It is the tallest statue in Indonesia and the tallest statue of a Hindu deity.

When the taxi I hired arrived at the park entrance about a kilometer from the statue, we found that the site was closed indefinitely.  I couldn't take a picture, because you couldn't see the statue at all through the trees and it was obscured further by the terrain.  My intrepid driver attempted to follow a side road to near the front of the statue, but we ended up at a dead end.  As you can see, the cows in the pen where the road ended were slightly amused by our predicament as our view of the humungous statue was totally impeded there too.  

We drove for 40 minutes and were totally unable to get any view of this massive monument.  "What kind of strange statue was this," I wondered, "where you can see it from your airplane while landing and from 20 kilometers away on the ground, but it is not visible when you are almost under it?"

Finally, the taxi driver agreed with my idea to drive around a side hill, so that we could at least get a view of the back of the statue.  Even that proved difficult, but we finally found an old gravel road and ended up eventually at another cow pen with a "bird's ass view," so to speak, of the Gurita Vishnu Kencana. Even from this peculiar, backwards/sideways panorama the GVK, as it is called by the locals, it was still quite an impressive sight and I got to make friends with all the cows in the neighborhood in the process.








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