The ticket booth still had a price list pinned to the counter. Fifty thousand rupiah for adults. Twenty-five for children. Someone had scribbled “tutup” across it in red marker, and the ink had run in the humidity until the word was barely legible. I stood there for maybe thirty seconds before I realized I was holding my breath — not from anticipation, but from the smell. Rotting canvas. Wet concrete. The particular sweet-sour tang of vegetation reclaiming something that was never supposed to be left alone.
Bedugul Taman Rekreasi — Bali’s abandoned theme park — sits about two hours north of the tourist strip in Kuta, up in the highlands where the air gets thin enough that you notice you’re breathing. I’d seen the photographs that circulate online: the cracked dragon slide, the jungle swallowing a ferris wheel, the faded murals of cartoon characters whose faces have been bleached to vague shapes by years of tropical sun. Every travel photographer I knew had made the pilgrimage at some point, and most of them came back with the same set of images — the same angles, the same light, the same carefully composed shots of decay that made it look like a film set rather than an actual place where people once spent their Sundays.
I wanted something different, which was my first mistake. The second was deciding to go on a Saturday afternoon.
The road up from the coast is deceptive. It looks straightforward on a map — a single main route through rice terraces and small towns, climbing gradually into the hills. What the map doesn’t show is the traffic. Saturday is market day in the villages along the way, which means the road narrows to a single lane where trucks are parked and chickens wander into the street and nobody seems to be in a particular hurry. I’d left Denpasar at what I thought was a reasonable hour, around eleven in the morning, and by the time I reached the turnoff for the park, the sun was already starting to slant toward late afternoon.
The entrance was unmarked. I’d expected a gate, a fence, some kind of official barrier that would announce you were trespassing. Instead, the road just ended at a concrete wall about chest-high, with a gap where someone had kicked through the bottom. A faded sign overhead read “Taman Rekreasi Bedugul” in letters that were peeling away from their backing like sunburned skin. Beyond it, the trees closed in.
I climbed through, carrying my camera bag in one hand and trying not to think about what was living in the undergrowth. The path was still paved, but the pavement had cracked and heaved in places where tree roots had pushed through. Every few steps, I had to step over or around a puddle that had no business being that dark. The sound of running water suggested a river or a drainage channel somewhere nearby, but I never found it.
The first structure I reached was the carousel. The canopy had collapsed on one side, and the painted horses were slumped at odd angles, their poles bent. One of them had lost its head entirely — a clean break at the neck that looked deliberate rather than accidental. I spent maybe twenty minutes walking around it, trying to find a frame that didn’t look exactly like every other photograph I’d seen. I couldn’t. Every angle that worked had been shot before, and every angle that was different looked wrong — too cluttered, too dark, too much of the surrounding mess instead of the subject itself.
That’s when I started to understand that the place wasn’t cooperating.
A local named Wayan was sitting on a concrete bench near the old ticket booth when I came back around. He was maybe sixty, with the kind of deep tan that comes from a lifetime outdoors and a woven basket of fruit beside him — rambutan and mangosteen, the ones that stain your fingers purple. He nodded at me the way people nod at strangers in small towns, not unfriendly but not inviting conversation either. I asked if he knew who owned the place now.
“Many owners,” he said in English, gesturing toward the park. “This one dead. That one in Jakarta. Nobody wants to pay for cleaning.” He peeled a mangosteen with his thumbnail and offered me one. “You take picture?”
I said I was trying.
“Better in the morning,” he said. “Morning, the light comes through the trees different. Now, the shadows are too long.”
He was right. I’d been so focused on avoiding the cliché of a sunrise shoot that I’d ignored the basic physics of jungle photography. By three in the afternoon, the canopy was filtering everything into a flat, greenish gloom that made every shot look like it had been taken underwater. The highlights were blown where the sun managed to break through, and the shadows were impenetrable black. I was shooting into a contrast nightmare and I knew it, but I kept clicking the shutter anyway, hoping that digital post-processing could fix what bad light had broken.
It couldn’t. I checked the screen after every few frames and watched my confidence drain.
The ferris wheel was the centerpiece — the image everyone comes for. It sits at the back of the park, past the collapsed bumper cars and the empty swimming pool that’s filled with leaves and rainwater. From a distance, it looks almost intact. Up close, the rust is alarming. The metal is flaking in sheets, and some of the gondolas have fallen off entirely, leaving only the brackets where they used to hang. One of the remaining gondolas was still rocking slightly in the breeze, and I stood there for a long moment wondering if it had just now come loose or if it had been doing that for years.
I set up my tripod at what I thought was a safe distance and tried a long exposure, hoping to smooth out the ugly light. The shutter clicked open and I waited, counting seconds in my head. When the exposure finished, I checked the result. It looked like a photograph of a ferris wheel that had been poorly composited onto a generic jungle background. Nothing about it felt like the place I was standing in.
I packed up and moved deeper into the park, past the shooting gallery where the plastic rifles had melted into waxy puddles and the prize counter still held a row of faded stuffed animals that looked like they might disintegrate if touched. Past the bumper cars, where the metal floor had buckled and the cars themselves were nested into each other like sleeping animals. Past a small building that might have been a snack stand, the counter still stocked with bottles of what had once been brightly colored syrup, the labels now unreadable.
The light was failing faster than I’d expected. In the mountains, sunset comes earlier than on the coast, and the trees made it feel like dusk had arrived an hour before it actually had. I was starting to think about the drive back, about navigating those narrow roads in the dark, when I found the dragon slide.
It was tucked behind the main buildings, almost hidden. A concrete dragon, its body forming the slide itself, painted in what must have once been bright greens and yellows. The paint was mostly gone now, leaving the raw concrete exposed like a scar. The dragon’s head was intact, its mouth open wide enough for a child to climb through, but the slide itself was cracked and uneven. A fern was growing out of a fissure near the top, its fronds reaching upward like a hand.
This was the shot. I knew it immediately. Not because the light was right — it wasn’t — but because the dragon felt like the truest thing in the park. It wasn’t trying to be photogenic. It was just sitting there, being eaten by the jungle, indifferent to whether anyone was watching.
I shot it from every angle I could find. Low angles, making the dragon look monumental. Wide angles, showing the encroaching vegetation. A close-up of the fern emerging from the crack. I even lay down on the damp concrete to get a shot looking up through the dragon’s open mouth into the canopy above. The camera’s screen showed images that were technically flawed — blown highlights in the sky, not enough detail in the shadows — but they felt honest in a way the carousel shots hadn’t.
By the time I finished, the light was genuinely gone. I packed up quickly, my fingers fumbling with lens caps and zippers in the gathering dark. The walk back to the entrance was faster than I’d expected, maybe because I was eager to be out, or maybe because the path felt shorter in one direction than the other. Wayan was gone. The bench where he’d been sitting was empty. The basket of mangosteen was gone with him.
I climbed back through the gap in the wall and stood on the road, catching my breath. A motorbike passed, its headlight cutting a narrow cone through the dusk. The driver didn’t look at me.
The drive back was exactly as bad as I’d feared. The roads were narrow and unlit, and the traffic had thinned to almost nothing, which meant I was sharing the asphalt with motorbikes that appeared out of nowhere and dogs that slept in the middle of the lane. I stopped once for petrol at a roadside kiosk — a glass bottle full of yellow liquid that the attendant poured into my tank through a funnel. It cost about thirty thousand rupiah, and I had no idea if it was any good, but the bike ran fine for the rest of the trip.
Back in Denpasar, I downloaded the images and spent the next two hours editing. I pulled shadows, dropped highlights, added contrast. I desaturated the greens because they were too aggressive. I sharpened the dragon’s eye until it looked almost alive. The final images were technically competent, visually interesting. But they weren’t the images I’d imagined. The dragon shots worked, mostly because the subject was strong enough to survive the conditions. The rest of the set was a collection of near-misses and compromises.
A week later, I went back. This time, I left at five in the morning. The road was empty. The market wasn’t running. I reached the park just as the first light was hitting the treetops, and the difference was everything I’d been told it would be. The ferris wheel caught the sunrise on its upper rim. The carousel horses had shadows that gave them back their shape. The dragon slide glowed like it was still made of paint.
I shot for two hours and came away with more keepers than I’d gotten in the entire first afternoon. I also found a section of the park I’d missed the first time — a row of small houses, maybe staff quarters, their roofs caved in and their interiors filled with the debris of someone else’s life. Shoes. A plastic comb. A photograph, water-damaged beyond recognition, of what might have been a family.
I didn’t take that photograph. It felt like something that shouldn’t leave.
On my way out, I stopped at the bench where I’d met Wayan. He wasn’t there. The bench was empty. But the ticket booth still had that same faded sign, and the price list was still pinned to the counter, and the word “tutup” still looked like it might wash away in the next rain.
📷 Photos: Tuan Vy (Pexels), Kimberly McNeilus (Pexels)
