Perched on the slope of Mount Mangu, 1100 meter above the sea level, the village Kiadan, naturally offers a cool climate and a foggy morning in the rainy season. With the majestic mount Mangu on the background and surrounded by the combination of dense forest, lush coffee plantation, and mesmerizing rice field, in short, the village of Kiadan offers stunningly beautiful views to behold.

This village now develops its ecotourism project known as JED or Village Ecotourism Project supported by Wisnu Foundation and Starling Kencana Tours. This is not a so-called “ecotourism” project, with has neither respect to the surrounding environment nor involvement of the community and all its profit goes to the travel agent pocket. The ecotourism project (JED) in Kiadan village is a grass root movement; it is designed and managed by the local Subak community with local guides, local foods and local accommodation.

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As all things Balinese, Balinese villages are peculiar, complicated, and extraordinarily diverse. There is no simple uniformity of social structure to be found over the whole of the small, crowded countryside, no straightforward form of village organization easily pictured in terms of single typological construction, no “average” village, a description of which may well stand for the whole.

Rather, there is a set of marvelously complex social systems, no one of which is quite like any other, no one of which fails to show some marked peculiarity of form. Even contiguous villages may be quite differently organized; formal elements–such as caste or kinship–of central importance in one village may be of marginal significance in another; neither simplicity nor uniformity is Balinese virtue.

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