Goa Gajah

This guide opens with the joke in the name Goa Gajah, the Elephant Cave, on an island where elephants never lived, and follows a 1923 discovery when a Dutch official went looking for old inscriptions and found a huge carved face with a mouth stretched wide as a doorway. You'll hear the competing theories about who that face represents, and step through it into a hand-cut passage built around the ninth century as a hermitage for meditating priests, with altars and a statue of Ganesha inside. Listen for what the guide says was still hidden here for decades after that first discovery.