Dolts
Rule
It’s always fun visiting the Odd Zone; it’s
the very best of your diarist’s former domiciles, for all sorts of reasons,
most of them a cause for wry smiles or irritated grimaces. There’s the traffic,
for one thing. It largely obeys the road rules and even stays in lane; what’s
more, at traffic lights if there are, say, three lanes of traffic marked, none
of the vehicles present attempts to create eight lanes. It’s very confusing for
drivers accustomed to Bali’s road system (sic) and driver behaviour.
But the very worst of the Australian experience, for those citizens of
the Odd Zone who have exchanged You’re Being Watched resident status for the
significantly better benefits of Frequent Visitor, is the bureaucracy in
general and the customs and quarantine and airport security you encounter in
particular.
On our way back to Bali from Perth the weekend before last, for example,
the Diary and Distaff lost some valuable soft cheeses – the finest products of
Western Australia no less – on the risible grounds that they were “gels” and
thus suspected of being potentially explosive.
We all value airport security and agree that mad shoe bombers and others
of incomprehensibly suicidal intent should be detected and diverted from their
proposed criminal acts. But a little common sense wouldn’t go astray among
those whose daily duties arm them with bureaucratic instructions that an
imbecile would instantly recognise as stupid.
If the two Aussie border control heroes who fished around in our cooler
bag had exercised common sense when they detected brie and haloumi (we had to
insist they dropped it down the disposal chute while we watched – we’re not in
the business of providing free gourmet foods to anyone) they’d also have
confiscated the prime soft Tasmanian blue with which we were also armed.
But they didn’t. For that
oversight they and their over-prescriptive masters should be shoe-ins for a
Dumbo award.
There’s a serious side to this.
Frequent visitors have plenty of other places they can choose to go
instead, where you’re much less likely to get cheesed off by doltish buffoons
on food patrol.
Bit
of a Stumble
It’s not always as much fun as it should be
returning to Bali. This time The Diary stepped on a hidden road-level metal
guardrail on alighting from the bus from the plane to the terminal and
overstretched a hamstring. Perhaps it is
there to deter bus drivers from motoring up the terminal steps. But the
embarrassing limp that resulted has not been a Favourite Moment.
In the terminal, we ran into some nattily
dressed customs and excise officers who, while presumably present to clamp down
on the informal system of paying under the counter for extra alcohol above the
one-litre limit attempted to extort even more. Unfortunately for them they had
to deal with the Distaff, who was not in the best of moods. We paid, but not on
the basis of their aberrant and singularly profitable mathematical concept.
Flagging
By happenstance, the day after our return
from the Odd Zone (Western Division) the Perth online newspaper WA Today ran an
article headlined “Where the bloody hell are all the tourists?” Coarse language
(along with bad grammar) is only one irritating element of life as it is lived
in the continent of kangaroos.
We tweeted that, suggesting that perhaps all the tourists were in Bali.
They’re not, of course – for some strange reason Aussies are also travelling
elsewhere overseas on cheap holidays – but one of the reasons they’re not
packing Western Australia’s many attractions is the cost of doing so. We
sympathise with WA’s tourism marketers and agree there are a great many reasons
to be a tourist on their patch, among them the beaches and the wineries. And
beaches might be a mass market chance, except that most Australians already
live within reach of perfectly adequate alternatives to flying 3000 kilometres
to sit on one in WA.
Other tourism options are largely for niche markets. It’s a tough
business, as Bali itself is finding out.
Pursuing quantum figures in tourism is fine if you’re only looking – in
the Australian context and here – for the Yeh ‘n’ Neh crowd and big sales of “I
Drink Beer and Have the Belly to Prove It” vests.
The Diary looks forward to regular trips to WA where, in the south-west
particularly, there are many establishments offering prime potable products. On
our recent visit to home territory we dined and drank at both Voyager (whose
Girt by Sea pinot noir is fabulous and not only for its name, which comes from
a memorably ridiculous line in the Australian national anthem) and Wise, a
personal favourite because it looks over an expanse of generally calm
north-facing ocean and has a Provencal air. Voyager affects a Cape Dutch
architectural style (quite well) and has lovely roses – and perhaps the biggest
flag in Australia apart from the double-decker bus-sized flutterer atop
Parliament House in Canberra.
Quality
Counts
On the question of looking for quality rather than quantity (and the
higher per visitor spend that results) it’s cheering to hear that Bali proposes
to shift its focus that way. We’re under siege here, after all, though not
solely from foreign tourists: all those chaps who bring their cars with them on
holiday from Jakarta and Bandung and Surabaya, and their road manners and
driving skills too, are a nuisance.
It’s long overdue, even if
we’re pitching for three million foreign tourists to write another record.
Bali’s infrastructure – not just the roads and the pathetic power system – is
literally cracking under the strain of the tourist load. Provincial second
assistant secretary Ketut Wija recently pronounced upon this at a planning
meeting on economic development held appropriately enough in Lombok (which
should be taking a larger portion of the tourist load, except that Bali keeps
putting rocks in the road of that endeavour) when he said: “We no longer will
prioritise the quantity of tourist arrivals, but will now place the emphasis on
quality of those visitors.”
Wija said Bali – an island of
only 5632 square kilometres, 0.2 percent of Indonesian national territory – has
between five and six million visitors annually. It is also a magnet for
Indonesians from other islands seeking work, with about 400,000 arriving to
settle each year.
Skippy’s a
Winner
The Diary’s side trip on the Australian tour – mentioned in the Diary last
issue – was by Qantas flying Perth-Canberra-Perth. We’re now a mere bronze QFlyer (the halcyon
days of pointy-end platinum status are long gone) but a happy confluence of an
accommodating friend at head office and unoccupied seats in business class
resulted in upgrades both ways. It was delightful to have space to stretch the
legs, food to match the ambiance and actual metal cutlery to eat it with, and
an unobstructed view out of the window.
Both flights were into the gloaming and
then the night, affording the Diary an opportunity also long forgone to feast
the eyes on the amazing light-hues off to the south in the stratospheric
distance and to imagine all that ice-waste far away beyond the Southern Ocean.
It stirs the Muse, that sort of thing.
Another stirring element of
the flight was a dangerous confection, the work not of the Devil but of Maggie
Beer, who may be one of his culinary agents but is certainly an Australian
icon. Her burnt fig and honey ice cream is to die for, though one naturally
hopes not immediately.
The Purser on the flight
agreed, when we beckoned him over and said: “Maggie Beer is a bad, bad woman.”
A big smile lit up his face and he replied: “Oh I know, I know. But I’m lucky.
I live only 30 minutes up the road from her shop.”
It’s a Riot
It is the lot of the unlucky diarist to be elsewhere when something
happens. We had to watch the unfolding drama of the Kerobokan prison riot
through the imperfect prism of Australian television. Matt Brown was measured – and by far the best
– on ABC. The commercial stations were their usual breathlessly uniformed
selves. And that’s such a shame because
most Australians get what passes for their news from tabloid TV.
The Kerobokan insurrection
was hardly unexpected. It beggars belief that the custodial authorities are not
provided with sufficient funds to properly house all those that their companions
in crime, the police and the judicial system, insist on jailing.
A solution is more prison space so that at
least the basics of human existence can be practised in clink. There are some
useful human rights rules the government could read up on, in that regard, too.
Oh
All Right Then
Last issue’s guarded reference to Titian
and ladders – it was in the context of the Renaissance exhibition at the
Australian National Gallery – brought a rash of requests to expand upon it. So
OK, we were wrong to attempt to be decorous. Here’s the limerick in question:
While
Titian was mixing Rose Madder
His
model reclined on a ladder.
The position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he ran up the ladder an' 'ad 'er.
The position to Titian
Suggested coition,
So he ran up the ladder an' 'ad 'er.
Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday, and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz. Hector is on Twitter (@scratchings) and Facebook (Hector McSquawky).
The diary is also posted at this blog: http://8degreesoflatitude.wordpress.com
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