The following article is written by R.Paulin who was in Taman Ujung or Ujung Water Palace in 1979 before the earth quake destroyed The Palace for the second time.
“About a month ago I was searching the web for pictures of the Ujung water palace that were taken years after it was destroyed. They showed the palace derelect and sitting peacefully in ruin. I originally got the pictures off the web, but in my recent search I could not find them, but I did come across the picture of the reconstructed palace on dee-bali.com.
In October of 1979 my brother and I were in Bali and visited Ujung sometime between the 15th and 22nd of that month. I had to find my old passport to check on the dates that I had entered and left Indonesia and I remember that we had spent about a week in Bali. We arrived at the palace late in the afternoon and I remember walking down the hill and around to the entrance gate after taking the picture you see here looking down at the building. They were ready to close and told us we could enter, if we didn’t stay too long. At that time you couldn’t walk out to the main building. We were told by other travellers in Kuta that the palace was occupied by two western academics who had made some sort of deal with authorites which allowed them to live in there, if they restored the building. There were no other tourist in sight while we were there and we saw none on our walk back around the tank and up the hill.
By this time the sun was getting low on the horizon. We made o! ur way back to Legian and were woken early the next morning by an earthquake, which we learned later was centered near Ujung. The pictures I have above are probably the last taken before the palace was leveled”.
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