Hector's Blog

HECTOR'S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Jan. 25, 2012

2012-01-25T09:14:00.000+08:00

Something in the Air

They’re always at it at Ubud, or so itseems; thinking about navel engagements, that is. A delightful piece by MarieBee in the latest edition of La Gazette de Bali – the great French languagemonthly journal for the Francophone community – discusses what one can do whenit is the saison des pluies and going out invariably involves getting wet.

Bee, who is La Gazette’s Ubud scribbler, suggests that the answer is tostudy the Indonesian language rather than get out your poncho and rubber boots.And that seems fair enough to a dilettante like your diarist. Mlle Bee’s busylittle voyage of discovery this time relates to the invisibility of the penisin the Indonesian-French dictionary of 1980 and its discovery (as an item oflexicographical interest at least) by 2001.

These days, of course, they are ubiquitous in Bali. You can even openbottles with them, though why you’d want to is quite another thing.

Anyone who reads French should definitely catch up with Mlle Bee’sengaging discourse in La Gazette. Itpiques several of the senses. Among other observations, she notes that elementsof the search for the lost penis would certainly have interested Proust. It’son page 30 of the current edition and is headed En Quête du PénisPerdu (it sounds much better in French, doesn’t it?).

These are literary matters. And on that topic there’s a couple ofinteresting writers’ workshops on the books in Ubud. The first is a course,Write for Your Life, being held from February 5-11 with the participation ofAmerican penman Jeremiah Abrams. Details are available at www.writeforyourlife.posterous.com.

The second is the work of Australian Jade Richardson, who should by nowbe well known to Diary readers, since she keeps popping up with revealingideas.

She’s offering four short courses for aspiring scribblers in Februaryand March, under the broad subject heading Write Like an Angel: CreativeTurbo-Boost is designed to inspire and energise beginners, blocked writers,stuck novelists, lazy poets and cathartic free-writers who want to learnfinesse; Advanced Creative Writing in which participants will explore their ownwork for signs of genius; Travel Writing, for people who want to turn theirnotes, insights and adventures into travel stories fit for publication; andErotica, where we assume the cerebral side of sex will get an outing.

Ifyou’re interested, contact Jade at passionfruitcowgirl@rocketmail.comor by phone on 0958 5727 0858.

Surf’s Up

A friendly wave is certainly along-standing part of Bali’s culture – along with the odd unfriendly one – andno more so than on the surfing scene, an invention (like so much else) of thefaraway 1960s when the first waves of young riders appeared, appropriately fromoverseas.

A whole industry has grown up from the first sprouts of mass foreigninterest in the island and its culture planted by young people – like Hector,these pioneers were young in the 1960s – who flocked here to ride waves on bitsof wood (they are now mostly artificial material).

So the next exhibition at Ganesha Gallery (Four Seasons Jimbaran) is ofparticular interest. It features the work of Olli Fraenkel, the Germanaficionado of all things Bali. Like many others, he was attracted here by thesurf and kept here by his fascination with the Balinese culture that he foundwhen he wasn’t at the beach.

His exhibition, entitled The 3-Dimensions of Asie.one, demonstrates hispower as an artist of graffiti –Asie.one is his tag – and reminds us all, oldfogeys and others, that art is a very broad church indeed and that theRenaissance painters, for example, were often the rebels of their era.

Fraenkel’s exhibition opens on February 9. It’s not to be missed.

By happenstance Hector will be able a day or so later also to see theBergamo collection (of originally outré and subversive Renaissance art) at theAustralian National Gallery in Canberra. It is an opportunity not to be missedon a rare visit to the Australian capital.

Hey, Sucker!

A friend got a really interesting email theother day, from something called the Thailand Internet Lottery Organization of88C Phetchamnork Avenue, Bangkok, Thailand. Director General Shompoo Prachaporsent his fonds regards – no, that’s not a misprint – and advised that the emailaddress in question had drawn a prize of US$1,068,000.00 as one of two winnersof the jackpot in the fifth category.

Our friend was advised to contact lottery coordinator Prawatt Wensat,providing personal details etc (surprise!), to claim the money. Mr Wensat wasexpecting this response by the 30th of next month. Oh dear. February usuallyends on the 28th though this year – apparently it’s supposed to be a Leap ofFaith year – it stretches to the 29th. What a shame that’s still one day shortof the notional deadline for the notional funds.

Incidentally, shortly after this our friend got a much more interesting email.It came, it said, from the second wife – surely that should now be second widow– of the late and unlamented Libyan leader Muammar Muhammad AbuMinyar Gaddafi. It offered to send US$40 million for investment andsafekeeping because otherwise those who think unkindly of her hubby might seizethe funds.

This pitch was no surprise. What was a little surprising was the claimby Safia Farkash al-Baraasi, the said second widow, that she had found ourfriend’s contact details in Colonel Gaddafi’s email address list.

There You Go

One joy of the modern age – there are afew: digital music and books among them – is that you can keep abreast of yourinterests, of whatever provenance and in a timely way, and of the people whoprovide this essential life-preserving service. The Diary is a great fan ofSarah Crompton at the Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, for example. Shewrites a weekly email – you have to be on the DT’s list to get it – that isjust as eclectic as she. In the fine newspaper for which she scribbles,Crompton writes about art, film and other cerebral matters; and she writes asports column too.

In one recent weekly email –apart from reminding the Diary that leaving was a mixed blessing, by referenceto all manner of things that could be enjoyed were it not for the fact thatLondon got a goodbye wave in 1969 – Crompton noted that she loved an odd fact(don’t we all?) and mentioned a couple.

Didyou know that carrots – which as wortel are an important element of Indonesiancuisine – were originally purple and were turned orange by geneticallymanipulative Dutch growers to secretly show their support for William of Orange,the Protestant princeling who was instrumental in chucking the Papist Spaniardsout of the Low Countries? Neither did Crompton; nor your diarist.

But her favourite fact for that particular week was that the Alsatianfilm star Rin Tin Tin – a dog, not a Deutsch-Lautsprecher from the west bank ofthe middle Rhine – died in the arms ofthe Hollywood star Jean Harlow.

It surely cannot have been after this sad event that she famously said,“When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” But Harlow – who as wesay in today’s tediously socially aware language was “sexually active” – wascertainly no dummy, blonde or not. She also noted: “No one ever expects a greatlay to pay all the bills.”

Keep Jogging

Lombok Hash, the fun running group of whichWalter Jamieson of Windy Beach Resort – and originally from the Shetlands,magic islands off the north of Scotland whose inhabitants are more Norse thankilted caber-tossers – is a leading light of very long standing, celebrated amilestone on January 20. Its regular run that day was on the 27th anniversaryof its first ever event and was held in the same area – scenic Batu Layar justsouth of Senggigi.

Holey Cake

We are indebted to something calledWhatsNewBali.com, which alleges it has “The Most Complete Events and Listingsin Bali!” – the initial capitals and the exclamation mark are apparentlyimportant – for a delicious little heads-up on the plush afternoon tea forthose with fat wallets who fancy dropping in at the St Regis in Nusa Dua.

It says, of this extravagance, that the Classic Afternoon Tea on offerat that establishment is born of a distinctive legacy, since afternoon tea wasa hollowed tradition at the original St. Regis New York.

Pun Run

Hector has an old and dear friend, a formerAustralian senator who now lives in what passes for retirement (Stan is anactive chap) in the delightful hinterland of Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. In idle moments, he – like Hector – loves apun. And the other day, being a fine fellow, he sent along a small compendiumof them.

Several had instant appeal. But this one, for some reason, struck yourdiarist as being particularly apt in present circumstances hereabouts.

Here it is:

Ananthropologist was recording folk remedies with the assistance of an Amazonian tribalelder who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure curefor any case of constipation. When the anthropologist expressed doubts aboutthis – apparently in South America it is important to be quizzical rather thangullible – the elder looked him in the eye and said:

“Letme tell you, with fronds like these, you don't need enemas.”

Hector's Diary is in the print edition of the Bali Advertiser, out every second Wednesday, and on the newspaper's website http://www.baliadvertiser.biz/ . Hector is on Twitter (@ Scratchings) and Facebook: Hector McSquawky at http://facebook.com/wotthehec.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser January 11, 2012

2012-01-09T17:02:00.000+08:00

Super Idea

Proposals for a redenomination of the rupiah which haveresurfaced from Bank Indonesia are essentially sensible and should be welcomed.There is however one difficulty with the proposal – insofar as the details areknown – to knock three zeroes off the currency under which Rp1000, Rp2000, Rp5000,Rp10,000, Rp20,000, Rp50,000 and Rp100,000 would become Rp1, Rp2, Rp5, Rp10,Rp20, Rp50 and Rp100.

This is because byreducing Rp1000 to Rp1 you lose the capacity to divide below the primarynumber. Rp1 would therefore become the minimum available currency value. Itwould mean no one could mark up prices by Rp500, for example. Or reduce a priceby the same sub-unit amount (assuming there was ever a blue moon).

The central bankcould reintroduce the sen (cent) of course. But we have heard of no plans to doso. And in any case, it would then be better to strike four zeroes off the facevalue – converting the current Rp10,000 into the new Rp1, divisible into 100sen.

That’scomplicated. There is another way to simplify things and reduce the confusionwrought by zero-overload. That is to superscript the zeroes on banknotes and theRp1000 coin. Like this: Rp1⁰⁰⁰;Rp2⁰⁰⁰ ;Rp5⁰⁰⁰; Rp10⁰⁰⁰; Rp20⁰⁰⁰ ; Rp50⁰⁰⁰;Rp100⁰⁰⁰. Leading retailers already do this in stock displaysignage. It would also need only a minor redesign of banknotes and existing lowerdenomination coins could remain in use.

Dig it, Dig it

According to Lombok Network, the online site that’s widelyregarded as probably the best source of information on the island and itsattractions, the forested slopes of 3726-metre Mt Rinjani, Indonesia’s secondhighest volcano, perform a vital task (hitherto unsuspected: read on).

The website saysthat Mt Rinjani is so high it creates its own weather. They mean it rains a lotup there, in other words. This benefit is then multiplied because thewell-timbered and therefore un-eroded slopes “act as water-collectors for thehole of Lombok.”

We think Lombok’sa magic place. It’s not a hole at all.

Mopping Up

This is the time of year for whimsy. Well, Hector enjoys itanyway, even though what has been exercising his mind is more Stephen Donaldsonthan Tolkien. From the constant cacophony endured at The Cage over several longdays (and even longer nights) recently, he speculates that Santa’s latest attemptto annex Bali has been defeated, a cheering thought for everyone who’s utterlyover fat little men in silly red suits.

But judging fromthe noise around the Bukit that began before Christmas, including what seemedto be a massive fire-fight on the night of December 31-January 1, mopping upthe raiding parties of elves and Kris Kringle lookalikes that General Jollygentpeppered the place with is proving to be a long and arduous process. It went onat full pelt well into the New Year and may indeed not yet be over by a longchalk. Perhaps the new Dragon will manageto end it all on January 23.

We’ve been a bitworried at The Cage, because some of the firing has seemed pretty close. We’vebeen sending out our own patrols during lulls in the combat just to make surethe immediate surroundings are clear of elves. They have been so far; and noreindeer have been seen trying unlawfully to befriend the local cattle either.

We made inquiries,of course, as we do every year, about this annual insurrection. The localBanjar tried to tell us it was only people letting off fireworks. Yeah! As if anyone would believe that fairytale.

Top That

Being fair-minded, the Diary dropped back into PepitoExpress at Bukit Jimbaran after writing an item (Hector’s Diary, Dec. 14) thatrather castigated the place for having recently acquired the ambience of atrade store. We wanted to check whetherwe’d been unkind.

We hadn’t. There was indeed insufficient room in theaisles to swing a tikus (rat), let alone a small cat, although it should be noted thaton this occasion the fresh greens – which on the previous visit had been aslimp (and as inviting) as dirty wet socks – actually were fresh.

It was ChristmasEve, however, and our mood, already buoyant, was given an immediate lift whenat the check-out we found that a very svelte young creature was present torelieve us of our money. She had managed – doubtless under management direction– to team her invitingly revealing Kebaya and very clingy sarong skirt with a lovelypair of antlers.

Things looked upeven more keenly when she blushed very prettily after we said:“Itulah topi yang indah yang Anda kenakan” (“That’s a lovely hatyou’re wearing.”)

We were beingpolite in our best dictionary-derived Indonesian, of course. We could have just said “Phwaar!”

Do Drop In

We love wildlife. There’s so much of it at The Cage, for onething. But there’s also too much of a good thing sometimes, and so it is withthe geckos (big and small) that are quite deaf to suggestions that they shouldrespect the space of the frighteningly huge creatures that also live in thehouse, play loud music and, even more scarily, seem to run around on two legs.

These thoughtsare currently at the forefront of the collective mind at The Cage, since someof the larger geckos seem to have adopted the habit of defecating from a greatheight upon the stairs linking the living level and the bedroom suites. We don’t really mind if that’s their realopinion of us, and indeed might even be persuaded by reasoned argument that thisis to be understood.

But the resultsare tedious. Lately Hector, normally amild-mannered chap to whom an accusation that he was being uncouth would betantamount to a death sentence, has been heard to mutter as he (again) gets outthe brush and dustpan: “These geckos are giving me the shits.”

Chilling

Another good reason to visit Ubud has emerged, trafficpermitting. It’s the Chillout Lounge in Jl Sandat off Jl Raya Ubud in themiddle of town. Lloyd Perry, chief chill person at the establishment, tells us it’sbeen open for business for three months. He has some theme nights on the go,including something called Giant Twister, on the first Tuesday of every month,which is for the yoga adherents of Ubud and involves them in trying tooutstretch each other.

This might not suit everyone, especially yourdiarist. It sounds more like a dead-set way to seriously dislocate oneself. Butit suits the ambience of Ubud where – as the Diary’s favourite fun gal,globetrotter-blogger and passionfruit cowgirl Jade Richardson likes to remindus (please don’t stop, Jade) – the guruhood has its fingers firmly on the hotlittle go-buttons of a great many who are seeking satisfaction of one sort oranother.

There’s also aWho Wants to be a Millionaire night. What a ridiculous question. And anyway such contests – even if only fora million rupiah – so often provide risible displays of the focusednon-functionality of people who should not have got out of bed that day. Andthat’s fun.

Thanks for theheads-up, Lloyd. We’ll drop in one day.

Uncorked

The idea of an annual all-expenses-paid tipplers’ trip todistant parts has a certain appeal. Perhaps the wine teams at the St Regis andLaguna resorts at Nusa Dua could find a vacancy for a superannuated cockatoo?No? Shame! But never mind, we can get a vicarious vigneron fix from JackDaniels. That’s local identity John M., not the old guy from the distilledquietude of scenic Lynchburg, Tennessee – though some wits do say Lynchburg’snot such a great place to hang around – whose product rightly graces barshelves everywhere.

We learn from arecent item in Daniels’ Bali Update – which Jack likes to remind people wasonce dubbed the Pravda of Bali; apparently he has forgotten (or perhaps he’s neverknown) that while pravda is the Russian word for truth, the infamous Soviet-eranewspaper of the same name retailed nothing of the sort – that this year thelads (and lassies we hope) toured some of Western Australia’s finest winecountry, having last year plonked themselves down in France.

The Diary readthe latest report from the field with interest and not only because we dodevoutly hope St Regis and Laguna understand the critical difference betweenVin Ordinaire and Vin Very. Margaret River is an old stamping ground – almostancestral territory in fact – so it was interesting to see some familiar names.

A couple struckone as odd, however. We hadn’t heard of Moos Wood winery (perhaps it doubles asa dairy farm) though the products of Moss Wood, which by astonishing coincidenceis in the same area, are excellent. And when we’re next down that way – itwon’t be long – we’ll try to find Pimberton, even though it’s not on any maps.

Pemberton is,though. It’s not all that far from Moss Wood, at least at Australian trafficspeeds. We like to go there whenever we can, to visit some lovely people we knowvery well who in their lifetimes never moved from their pleasant little Karriforest timber town and now never will.

Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz. Hec is on Twitter (@Scratchings) and on Facebook (Hector McSquawky)

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Dec 28, 2011

2011-12-27T14:47:00.000+08:00

A Beautiful Mind

Only the brightest get to Balliol, thecream of Oxford colleges. Christopher Hitchens, the British polemicist whosewriting and advocacy put him at the forefront of political, social, religiousand scientific debate, and who died in December (far too early at 62) was oneof them and is a figure who will be sadly missed. His atheism angered manycritics – one cannot imagine why, since if there is any existence after deathHitchens will now have proved himself wrong, though in common with all who havegone before he won’t be back to tell us about it – and his politics manyothers.

Christopher Buckley, a friend and argument-foil of 30 years, wrote in ablog note on The Atlantic magazine site (Hitchens wrote for the magazine foryears after moving to America in the late 1970s, saying later he jumped thepond because Britain was “like Weimar without the sex”) that Hitchens was “afeast of reason and a flow of soul, and, if the author of God Is Not Great didnot himself believe in the concept of soul, he sure had one, and it was a greatsoul.”

The television channel Al Jazeera posted some memorable quotes fromHitchens as part of its reportage of his death, including this one: “[George W.Bush] is lucky to be governor of Texas. He is unusually incurious, abnormallyunintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured,extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things.”

Hitchens said this in 1999, a year before Bush became US President. In2003 Hitchens was a staunch supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq. He later railed against waterboarding, atorture technique favoured – until rightly banned – by the US military.

He wrote 17 books, including The Trial ofHenry Kissinger, God is Not Great, and a memoir, Hitch-22 (he was Hitch to hisfriends). His final publication of a collection of his essays, Arguably, wasreleased this year.

It was perhaps apt – it is certainly poignant – that in the month of Hitchens’death astronomers confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitablezone” around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600light-years away, is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperatureof about 22C (despite global warmists’ alarms, Earth’s mean surface temperatureis still around 15C,where it’s been during the whole galactic nanosecond sincehomo sapiens discovered how to measure it).

Kepler 22-b – named for the space telescope that is busy spottingdistant parts of the neighbourhood – is the closest confirmed planet yet to onelike Earth: a planet on which it is conceivable that advanced intelligent lifecould occur; such as, say, a life of Hitch.

Sun Don’t Shine

We tweet on Twitter (@Scratchings if you’reinterested) to a select few who have chosen to follow Hector’s ephemeral flightpaths and were thus pleased to see the other day that something called the BaliSun – though its website and Twitter page call it Bali The Sun – had elected tofollow us. It’s nice to have followers. No former leader writer should bewithout them.

That day, there were only two tweets on its Twitter page. Both said itwas an on-line tourist papper (sic). It’s “about us” page on its website was similarlyuninformative. The single entry there said its popularity was 5 percent. Itdidn’t say what it was 5 percent popular with, but we couldn’t ask because thewebsite doesn’t say who’s in charge.

It is said that if you can’t say anythingnice then don’t say anything at all. But diarists couldn’t possibly surviveunder such restrictive rules of engagement. A far better rule is that ifsomething pops its head up above the parapet, shoot at it.

Perhaps the Bali Sun will shine one day. But it will need to put a fewmore additions (oops, silly, we must mean editions) up on its site before anyilluminating flashes of light reach us from the heavens.

Speaking of illuminating moments, the other day we inadvertently boughta week-old copy of another local newspaper, the Bali Times. We’d parked outsidea Circle K so the Distaff could negotiate some laundry next door and thoughtwe’d better drop in to buy something at the convenience store, just to showgoodwill. It was two days after the new edition should have been on the shelves,but sadly we weren’t paying attention and forked out Rp10K for an oldfish-and-chip wrapper instead of a new one.

It wasn’t all wasted effort, though. The Times, which continues toassert that it reveals the real Bali all the way from distant Ireland, turnsout to be still on its inexplicable vendetta against the British novelist WillSelf, whom, granted, some regard as tendentious and tedious, not to mention fartoo far up himself. Some time ago it reported “Man Throws Self off Cliff,”which surprised us no end because we had no idea he was even on the island. Inthe edition of the paper we just inadvertently bought is a story with thisheadline: “Man Sets Self Alight OutsideState Palace.” (He must have recovered from his Uluwatu plunge and gone toJakarta.)

Clearly someone’s out to get poor Will. We didn’t think his densely fantasticalpiece de resistance, Great Apes, was thatbad. But should he be planning further Indonesian trips, he might considerdoing so under an assumed name. We’d considered proposing Safe, since thatsuggests a measure of surety against unfortunate incident. But no, thatwouldn’t do. The Bali Times would just report that robbers had blown him up.

She’s Our Hero

Robin Lim, who operates the Bumi Sehatfoundation that provides health care and maternity and prenatal care to womenin Bali who might otherwise not get it, was deservedly named CNN Hero of theYear 2011 this month, selected from among 10 finalists. She got US$250,000 forher win, having already received $50,000 for making it onto the finalists’list.

Lim is truly a hero. She said atthe awards (in Los Angeles on December 11): “Every baby's first breath on Earthcould be one of peace and love. Every mother should be healthy and strong.Every birth could be safe and loving. But our world is not there yet.”

Hear! Hear!

Kindling Thought

We had a lovely dinner party recently. Twopeople we got to know from their business activities but who are now friends –he’s a real estate broker, she is manicurist to the Distaff – joined us at TheCage for a western meal with Asian flavours, judged sufficiently Halal for mildMuslims, with background music by iPod, Hector’s latest toy. He’s very proud of the playlistshe has managed to create from a mix of iTunes and burned CDs and is in dangerof becoming quite boring about it all.

Amidthe evening ambience – The Cage sports a sort of deep crimson light-pool atnight, courtesy of some table lamps that inevitably propel one’s thoughtstowards the more classy among Parisian and Chinese brothels (Hector is not atall unhappy about this) – talk turned among other things to the developingworld of ebooks and specifically to the Kindles now on the inventory at ourhouse.

It will be great when a far larger body of literature in BahasaIndonesia is available in electronic books, especially since bookshops in Baliare seriously deficient at the sentient end of literature’s envelope.

The Diary is at present rereading (though perhaps that should bee-reading) James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, a long-time favourite as well asthe spark for that grand old pub-crawl, Bloomsday. (It’s on June 16 every year,but you need to keep in training year round.)

Itis particularly memorable for Joyce’s use of some lines from William ButlerYeats’ 1892 poem Who Goes with Fergus? They include these two lines, sageadvice in any vicissitude:

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery

Santa in Seminyak

We expect Santa is now taking his customarywell-earned rest after the oh-so-busy pre-Christmas period he and the reindeer,not to mention the elves, have to endure each year. One of the many spots hedropped in on in Bali in the lead-up to Present Day was The Cornerstore in JlOberoi at Seminyak.

That was on Saturday, December 17. Informant Sean Cosgrove told us thered-suited gent would be there from 9am to noon. We do hope the sleigh didn’tget held up in the traditional traffic jam that gridlocks Kuta-Legian-Seminyak ona permanent basis.

Animal Capers

Someone kindly alerted us to a list of themost popular dog names this year – OK, it was in New York, which is one veryself-absorbed apple – which lists Bella as No. 1. Presumably that’s for ladydogs. The Diary’s personal favourite was way down the list, at No. 49. We don’thave a dog, but we’re always calling “Oreo.”

Guess there’ll be a new list next year.

That’ll be 2012, which from January 23 is the Year of the Dragon. We’re just leaving the Year of the Rabbit, inwhich some among us have found that we have been the bunnies. It can only getbetter.

Happy New Year!

Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

On Twitter: @Scratchings. On Facebook: Hector McSquawky

HECTOR'S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Dec. 14, 2011

2011-12-14T08:42:00.000+08:00

Pep Talk Required

When Pepito Express opened on Jl Raya Uluwatu near GWK onthe Bukit a couple of years ago, the occupants of The Cage along with manyother nearby residents rushed its doors. Inside there was not only a good rangeof products often otherwise unobtainable in Bali shops, but also aisles downwhich one could progress without first having to become bulimic to fit. It wasa treat.

Sadly, and nodoubt in search of immediate feet through the door rather than a steadybuild-up of high-spending local consumers, things have changed. The place hasbecome a calling point for huge buses which disgorge crowds of confused andapparently impecunious Taiwanese and Korean tourists (they never seem tounderstand the marked price or have the right money). The aisles have beenstuffed with convenience foods (seaweed snacks seem to loom large) and there isno longer room to wheel your trolley down them with even the vague hope thatyou might find a regular Oreo as well as your normal range of western consumerproducts.

One eveningrecently when The Diary and Distaff called in on a substantial resupply missionthe place was impossible. The aisles had assumed trade store dimensions (andthe assorted obstacle courses of cardboard cartons that goes with this genre ofshopping); the staff apparently had better things to do than look aftercustomers; and the salad shelves were full of listlessly limp post-greens.

We may just havehit them on a particularly bad night, but the result of this un-Pepito-like experiencewas that the facilities of our formerly favourite emporium much further away,Lotus on the bypass at Jimbaran, suddenly looked rather attractive again.

Leap Before You Look

One of the more engaging of the local habits is the practiceof walking out into the traffic and signalling a sort of pelan-pelan(slowly-slowly) instruction to oncoming drivers and riders. It’s a way ofgetting across an otherwise virtually gridlocked road, certainly.

In many ways itis not dissimilar to the happy habit in Hanoi, Vietnam, where pedestrianswishing to cross the most frenetic of roads (and worse, intersections) simplyplunge into the mayhem and walk steadily and on a fixed course in their chosendirection. They are confident the ubiquitous motorcycles will miss them. Thebuses sometimes don’t, though that’s another matter.

But (thatessential codicil!) you have to know what you’re doing. It helps, too, to knowwhere you’re going. If you are unsure ofeither of these things, and especially if unsure of both, do not attempt totempt the traffic.

Near Ungasancrossroads the other day there was a lovely little incident. A chap in avehicle – a Bule of course; no fists would have been raised otherwise – who was(un)happily crawling along at 10kmh in the lengthy line of traffic behind yetanother defective and overloaded yellow truck, was horribly surprised when apassing local gent suddenly leaped from the footpath (sic), put up his hand,and walked out straight in front of him. The vehicle’s driver slammed on theanchors: It’s so much easier than finding out the idiot you’ve just nudgedhappens to have 5,000 cousins in the immediate vicinity.

In true Balifashion, the incident was locally viewed as entirely the fault of theBule. After all, if he hadn’t been onthe island, he wouldn’t have been involved.

Jingle Belles

The Diary got a lovely invitation from jewellery designerTricia Kim – we go back such a long way, she and we, all the way back to the2009 Yak awards where we ran into each other upon the steps at the then newCocoon and didn’t know each other from a bar of soap, something now pleasantlyrectified – to attend the launch of her 2012 collection on December 7.

It would havebeen delightful to be there, for Tricia’s svelte and energetic company througha relaxing afternoon, the new collection of course, and the afternoon teaincluding cupcakes (can’t resist them) and sandwiches along with mojitos. Acomplimentary mani-pedi available on a first come, first served basis wouldhave been good too. The claws could do with a buffing.

And then therewas the venue: Di Astana Villa at Kerobokan (it’s in Jl Batu Belig on the waydown to the beach there).

Unfortunately wewere in Ubud on other duties at the time and couldn’t make it. But we’ll catchup with the collection later.

No Need to Duck

Sakinah Nauderer, the decorative and delightfully enigmaticproprietor of Senggigi’s Asmara Restaurant – a place of fine resort when inLombok – tells us her Christmas plans this year include no more rubbery localducks. Imported turkey will fill that role (and a lot of tummies) this season.

She plans aChristmas Brunch Buffet on the day itself, starting from 12 noon, and at 1.30pmthe children’s gospel choir from Ampenan will entertain guests with appropriatevocals. This Christmas treat costs Rp175K for adults and Rp50K for childrenaged six to 12. If you’re under six, you don’t pay at all. There’s a lucky drawafter the turkey and the choir.

Here’s the menu:Welcome drink and bruchetta; creamy lobster soup; stuffed turkey with gravy andcranberry sauce (prawns are available for non-turkey-eaters); spiced redcabbage; cauliflower and broccoli cheese; potato croquettes and roast potatoes.Desserts on offer are cheesecake, apple pie and chocolate cake with whippedcream. There’s coffee and tea to follow if by then you’re not as stuffed asyour turkey.

Cook Up

Janet DeNeefe’s new book collecting recipes and photos ofBali and just published by Pan Macmillan Australia has been snapped up by akeen cook in Australia who – naturally enough – read about it in The Diary. Hetells us he’ll be trying out his personal top choice from the menus when nexthe arranges a candlelight dinner.

After ouroriginal item in The Diary last issue, DeNeefe told us copies of her book(Bali: The Food of my Island Home) were a little scarce hereabouts. They were“still in Surabaya.” We sympathise. So much that should be cleared through thewharves and customs in no time flat instead finds itself in limbo as a resultof that pernicious and endemic disease, Surabaya Syndrome.

Hill Town Daze

We took some very special visitors to Ubud recently – TheDiary’s sister and her husband, who spent a week with us just out of the UK viaBangkok on their way to two months in Australia. The Diary is a Wayan – so isthe Distaff, which occasionally creates problems of precedence – and the BritSis is a Made. All this was made clear over a gin and tonic or three.

Ubud was its usualself: spiritual, quaint, eclectic and jammed with huge charabancs quiteunsuitable for the little town’s streets. We stayed at Beji Ubud Resort atSanggingan, where sadly, this time, the internet connection was rather belowpar; we dined one night at Cafédes Artistes, refreshed ourselves at The Three Monkeys (de rigueur for diaristswho die for pumpkin ravioli and who are now looking forward to trying out thenew T3M at Sanur) and did a few other eating and musical things, including thenew-look Jazz Café. Oh yes,and we made sure we walked right past Naughty Nuri’s. We like a little elbowroom with our eating experience rather more than we like the in-crowd.

Sister Made was onher way to see our other sister (she’s a Nyoman; there’s a Ketut brother wholives in the USA) who long ago made the chilly choice to reside in Canberra,the country’s notional capital 600 metres above sea level in the frankly frigid Southern Tablelands.The Diary worked in that fair city for some years, on a FIFO basis, and was alwaysglad his office was in Parliament House. It always has a plentiful supply ofhot air.

The travellingsister’s Australian itinerary does include more sensible parts of the country,including tropical – and thus truly warm – Queensland.

Merry Christmas

Christmas has long since been a global retail opportunity, acelebration of consumerism and a far cry indeed from its origins in theChristian faith and its belief that Jesus Christ was born in a cow byre inBethlehem. Nonetheless, amid all the commercial pap, it does serve to remind youthat charity and goodwill, along with forgiveness, are essential elements oflife.

So Merry Christmasto all.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser print edition published every two weeks and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

You can follow Hector on Twitter @Scratchings and join him on his Facebook (Hector McSquawky)

HECTOR'S DIARY The Bali Advertiser, Nov. 30, 2011

2011-11-30T08:52:00.001+08:00

Holiday Break

The Diary has just spent two weeks enjoying the pleasantambience of the Nerang River in Queensland. It was, though not in the wayHyacinth Bucket (“It’s ‘Bouquet’”) achieved it, a riparian delight. We werewell away from the faux glam glitter of the Gold Coast’s beachside touriststrip and – courtesy of some lovely friends of very long standing whocourageously opened their home to Diary and Distaff – enjoyed all manner ofdomestic comforts.

It gave us achance to catch up with people we haven’t seen for many years (at least six,since we left Queensland for the sybaritic delights of Bali) and to reconnectwith what for the Diary is truly home. We also spent a couple of days wellinland, on a formerly frequently visited farm, the domicile of other dearfriends. It is a place with plentiful cups of tea and long views of beautifulmountains: the sort of landscape thatthe weather and Bali’s love affair with dysfunctional internal combustionengines so often conspire to deprive you of at home.

We drove downinto New South Wales to visit another old haunt, Byron Bay, and had a beer andsome lunch, but were blown back from the beaches by a stiff northerlyhalf-gale. Ah well, never mind; next time perhaps. We went up to the GoldCoast’s own special “mountain,” Mt Tamborine, a 500-metre high ridge nowadayslittered with wineries, and sampled a few vintages. These are mostly fromQueensland’s distant Granite Belt which is so high and so cold you actually cangrow wine grapes there. We dropped in on a liqueur maker who was doing aroaring trade (the wattle myrtle vodka is a killer –Zavashe zdorovye!). Hector left a note in the visitor’s book. We lunched at a Bavarian restaurant, far toowell, and had to take the rest of the afternoon off.

Idiots’ Week

The peculiar Australian custom of “Schoolies Week” – anannual event during which young people who have just finished senior school gooff and have a holiday with their mates – is a pernicious occurrence not onlyin Bali, where little idiots arrive and do foolish things, but also at the GoldCoast in Queensland. This year’s risk of choice there, among the mindless, wasbalcony jumping. That’s one way of bringing yourself down quickly from a partyhigh, we suppose.

But it was eventsin Bali that enraged the Diary; events as portrayed of course. A segment ontabloid television’s “current affairs show” ACA related the sad case of someother little idiot who had travelled to Bali to run amuck and had injured hisfoot in a motorbike accident. The enragement was less because the accidentoccurred – they do, with depressing regularity, though they mostly involvelocals who are of no interest to visiting Aussie tabloid TV teams – than withthe fellow’s determined refusal to acknowledge that he had been the author ofhis own misfortune because he was (a) drunk and (b) stupid.

In that regard itwas good to see BIMC chief Craig Beveridge on the programme explaining that hisestablishment sees plenty of such cases. Perhaps some lapsed parents in Australia saw that and took it in. Well,just perhaps: sentience tends to be a genetic thing.

Blog for Health

High profile conferences and diplomacy are of course vitalto the business of managing international relations and bringing assistance tocountries and communities that need help (in whatever form) but it is at thelower, less visible, end of the equation that most of the practical work getsdone.

     So it is with theAustralian aid agency AusAID’s great Indonesian gig to get bloggers to helpincrease awareness of HIV/AIDS and of World AIDS Day (December 1). Activebloggers were invited to enter a dynamic online competition themed “HIV andYouth.” The competition called for young Indonesian bloggers to write abouttheir own experiences or opinions on HIV/AIDS.
     Australia’s ambassador, GregMoriarty, says of the competition: “Indonesia has one of the fastest growingHIV/AIDS epidemics in South East Asia. We need to do all we can to raiseawareness of this disease.”
     The competition was aimed at tappinginto Indonesia’s thriving social media scene – which has 38 million Facebookusers and more than 3.2 million bloggers – to expose the country’s browsingcommunity to inspiring and easy to read information about the disease. It washeld by AusAID in partnership with Viva News, one of Indonesia’s leading newssites. Submissions closed on November 30.
     The winning blog entries will beannounced on December 20. The top three bloggers will win computers, camerasand high-tech phones.
     In 2010, Australia’s $100 millionPartnership for HIV provided services to 50,000 prisoners, helped 26,000injecting drug users to gain access to clean needles, methadone maintenanceprogrammes and harm reduction services, and improved access to medicines forpeople living with HIV.

Dream Road

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was among thesquadrons of international political leaders who attended the East Asia Summitin Bali two weeks ago. These jamborees are important – genuinely, they’re notjust photo opportunities or occasions for grandstanding as some of the morejaded among us might sometimes think – even if, for most of the populationunder the flatfooted footprint of the attendant VIP protection effort, they arechiefly occasions for mass inconvenience.

Gillard took the opportunity of the summit tovisit the Bali Bombing Memorial in Legian on November 19. She described it as amoving experience. It always is, of course. The Diary visits the memorial atleast once a year to read (silently) the 202 names listed.

Amid tightsecurity, including roof-top snipers, Gillard placed a wreath at the memorialsite and chatted with Australian tourists. She met Governor Made Mangku Pastika, who as Bali’s police chief in 2002led the investigation into first bombing.

But what causedthe Diary a particularly dyspeptic sigh was the ABC report that said she thenleft to return to Nusa Dua “about 20 minutes drive from the memorial.” Yeah,right. That would be about the travel time, if you’re in a high-speed VIP motorcadeand everyone else has been shoved rudely out of the way.

Great Idea

The big bash at the Westin Nusa Dua from November 16-19included, as is the fashion with modern day international group navel-gazingevents, a number of side events and bilateral meetings. These were conducted atthe Bali International Convention Centre and at the Westin itself.

One of them was athink-in about Women’s Empowerment, hosted by Indonesia’s Ministry of Same andchaired by First Lady Ani Yudhoyono. Now that’s an area where a lot of work isneeded.

What’s Cooking?

Janet DeNeefe, Fragrant Ricist and Festival Founder, is backin print with another little tome on Bali cuisine. Bali: The food of my islandhome, runs to 272 pages and was published by Pan Macmillan Australia onNovember 8.

It’s always a joyto read publisher’s blurbs. This one invites potential readers to follow Janeton a spice trail through Bali and its rich food culture, with chaptersexploring sambals, rice dishes, curries and coconut, street food, ceremonialfood, modern offerings and sweets. Itnotes that each recipe is accompanied by an insight into the local culture,while key Balinese ingredients – such as kencur, candlenuts and shrimp paste –are explained in an extensive glossary.

And it says thebook is not only a cookbook but also an incredible photographic journey. Itsounds like a dream. Perhaps it willfeature in 2012’s writers’ and readers’ festival.

Artist in Residence

If the Diary ran to an artist in residence, then we shouldhave to choose Leticia Balacek. This is not just because she’s a decorativeArgentine, or even because her art is first rate. It has to do with vivacity,verve and vitality. You need all those to properly engage with people.

So it was goodto hear that more of Balacek’s work is on show at Black Sheep (Jl Drupadi 69,Seminyak). It’s a mix media collection that includes Textures (Life is Paradise– Bangkok; and Transformations - Buenos Aires) and a work she hasn’t shownbefore, For a Little Bit of Sun, from Berlin, in A4 size. The show runs until Saturday (Dec. 3).
Gaya at Ubud is also showingBalacek’s work in an exhibition to celebrate the Mother as the central point ofhuman society. The organisers say the conceptwas born of the desire to honour and connect to the Mother through creativeexpression. It’s true that everyone hasan individual story that relates to this theme, which has unquestionably createdwho we are. Works scheduled to appear atGaya from December 17-24, by various artists in many media, include painting,photography, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, written poetry, video projection, song,spoken word poetry, dance and music.

We hear, by theway, that Balacek will be exhibiting in Jakarta next year.

Back Home

It’s great to have an alternative to Virgin Australia on theBali-Brisbane route and Air Australia, formerly Strategic, is filling that rolevery well. The Diary flew both ways with them on the recent trip to the oldhome town.

While the airlineis using Airbus A320s on the route there is the little matter of the “technicalstop” on the uphill leg – the 320 doesn’t have the range to fly Brisbane-Balinon-stop against the headwinds and lands at Darwin to refuel. The downhill legis fine. Pushed along by a friendly tailwind the Diary made Brisbane in aroundfive hours and twenty minutes on November 11. The return trip on November 25was somewhat longer.

When Air Australia(then Strategic) commenced its Brisbane-Bali service it was using an Airbus 330which doesn’t need to drop in on the Northern Territory capital en route. Maybe we’ll see the bigger aircraft back onthe route sometime.

Air Australia hasbig plans – and not just for Bali, from where one imagines it should pick up agood proportion of the Bali-originating Brisbane trade. We’ll be back on board.

Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser November 16, 2011

2011-11-16T04:32:00.001+08:00

Mum-in-Law Says

Domestic order has been disturbed at The Cage, domicile ofDiary and Distaff, by the departure of our prized pembantu. She was apparentlyprised from our grip by the iron grasp of her mother-in-law, who seemingly sawbenefit in depriving her household of one of the two regular incomes itreceived.

We think shedidn’t want to go. She’d been with us as our housekeeper for four years; we allenjoyed a joke and a laugh together; we gave her extra money for additionaltasks, and her husband too, for providing overnight security (and messingaround with our TV) during any of our absences from home; her work schedule wasregularly (or rather, irregularly) amended to meet her need to attend ceremoniesand to the other, many, demands of local life; and there were other benefits,including a regular supply of clothing for herself and her child brought to ourhouse by visitors from overseas who had heard about, and often met, our Wayan.

It’s a shame. Itpoints up the impossibility of applying here employment rules such as mightexist in more formal economies (notice? what is notice?). It reinforces withstark clarity the single most significant fact of life in Bali for foreignersliving here: that they are ATMs, nothing more, and rate only the label ofPublic Convenience.

But worse thanthat, it demonstrates that those who promote the concept of women’s equality(or even basic rights) in Indonesia have a long and very hard row to hoe. InIndonesia generally, and in Bali’s iconoclastic and restrictive societyparticularly, a woman’s place is in her home. Doing what her husband and hermother-in-law tell her to do.

Just So You Know

We dined some little time ago at Dava, the signaturerestaurant at The Ayana Resort and Spa, the guests of Ayana’s chief spruikerMarian Hinchliffe, who couldn’t be with us on the night but had nonethelessarranged a complimentary glass of nice Chilean red.

The occasion wasto sample the degustation menu of Singapore chef Jusman So, over which Davadivas and other paying guests have been swooning. And so they should – it’s toptucker. We opted for a five-course sampling (the Distaff, who lately has beenbreaking out, chose two desserts) and added our own purchase of a bottle ofsaid Chilean red (the Lapostalle merlot) to help the medicine go down. Thatcost a pembantu’s monthly salary plus extras, which is why Dava doesn’t see usall that often.

For those withthe readies, however, the degustation menu is just So ... fabulous. Should a lottery win eventuate, theDiary might dine at Dava very regularly indeed. There was no lavosh among thecomplimentary breads, unfortunately, but Ottmar Leibert seemed to be providingthe tunes to chomp to, which almost made up for its absence.

The Diary had thegorgonzola, duck foie gras, purple potatoes, wagyu beef and fondant. TheDistaff made it through a salad and fish (grouper) and beef dishes beforehoeing into her two desserts.

So is also nowpresenting his full a la carte menu, by the way. We might come back to that. But you shouldn’tmiss it, if your plastic stretches far enough.

New Look: Aussie colour in the air

Go Green and Gold

Strategic Airlines, the Brisbane-based carrier that servesBali from the Queensland capital, changed its name and its livery on November15. It became Air Australia and went green and gold – the country’s sportingcolours – instead of red, white and blue.

As well as this,it went low-cost, dispensing with cabin service included in ticket costs infavour of the buy-on-board option. It has big plans to become Australia’s truelow-cost carrier – Virgin Australia long ago having junked that idea,preferring instead to reinvent the airline duopoly that served Australia in thepast – and plans to expand its Bali services among many other developments.

It will beretaining business class on its aircraft, however.

Rovers’ Return

Many years ago the Diary gave up on both the UK and southernAfrica and moved to Australia, shortly thereafter adopting Brisbane –appropriately the city is named after a Scotsman – as his place of domicile. Itserved admirably in this capacity for some 35 years before the Distaff, herselffrom another extremity on the Australian continent, sold the house andcontents, packed the remnants in her dilly-bag, and moved us to Bali.

That was sixyears ago and was (and is) a move in no way regretted. It’s warmer here, forone thing. And Australia’s vast and uncontrollably growing regulatoryenvironment wouldn’t thrive in Bali either. Since we prefer to live freely byour own (reasonable and lawful) rules, and hate the very thought of a nannystate, let alone Big Brother and all the other meddlers, Bali’s where we haveto be.

Nonetheless,thoughts of home drift into consciousness now and then, and we flew down toBrisbane on November 11 – on Strategic (Air Australia) as it happens – for atwo-week fix, our first since the big move though we regularly go toPerth. It’s only a short visit, and abusy one at that – so much to do, so little time – but it’s great to see oldfriends and old haunts, to smell the eucalyptus, to enjoy long, smog-freevistas of distant gum-blue mountains, and visit favourite places.

These includethe Queensland Museum of Modern Art (in Brisbane) where there is a photographicexhibition on that the Diary is going to see come hell or high water, and thethoroughly seductive Byron Bay, scene of many past delights.

In the Pink: Organisers of the Bali Pink Ribbon Walk at thisyear’s event

In the Money

Gaye Warren, originator of the Bali Pink Ribbon Walk, tellsus this year’s event – it was on October 22 – was highly successful. She didn’tmean that this was because Hector wore pink and wowed the crowd. She meant –and this is really good news – that fundraising here and in Jakarta, and inAustralia and Britain, looked likely to bring on purchase of a mammogrammachine in 2012.

Breast screeningis an essential element in detecting breast cancer early enough to makeremedial treatment a viable option. At present most women in Bali who are foundto have breast cancer have gone to the doctor only very late in the progress ofthe disease. Having a mobile mammogram unit will help the Bali InternationalWomen’s Association (BIWA), which supports the Bali Care Cancer Foundation setup by doctors at leading hospital Prima Medika, to ensure that more womenreceive treatment early.

The Bali walkalone raised Rp200 million, bolstered by similar amounts raised in Britain andAustralia and a quilt made by Jakarta quilters was auctioned, raising furtherfunds. One woman in a wheelchairtravelled from Jakarta and wheeled her way around the course. That’sdedication.
Another breastcancer fundraising event, a charity lunch organised by the Rotary Club BaliSeminyak at Metis in Seminyak on October 28 and attended by nearly 200,raised close to Rp110 million.

On Your Bike

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Nyoman Minta, the BaliTourism Development Corporation gardener who made monkeys of the presidentialsecurity corps in Nusa Dua a couple of weeks ago. Minta pedalled his pushbikeright through the middle of the select throng chosen to hear the latestpresidential pronouncement on the occasion of some international conference orother. He did so because, as he later told police, he always rode throughthere.

Medals are inorder. For Minta, we suggest the Medal of Freedom (from thought and everythingelse). For the commander of the presidential security corps, who said everyoneelse was to blame, we recommend the Grand Star of the Order of My Friend Did It(with Inventive Excuse clasp), even if he doesn’t also get the JDS (JanganDatang Senin, known in the English-speaking world as the DCM – Don’t ComeMonday). And clearly the three cordonsof security goons through which Minta insouciantly perambulated while they werewatching, rapt, as the Indonesian Air Force put on an aerial display,collectively and individually deserve conferment of the Dereliction of DutyMedal with Nincompoop clasp.

Perhaps thepresident himself should get a gong. He is reported to have ordered police totreat Minta humanely. The change of policy – a welcome shift from beating everymiscreant in sight with batons – is to be commended.

That’s the Spirit

You’ve got to hand it to Tom Hufnagel at JP’s Warungclub inSeminyak ... he gets all the big acts. Star of their Halloween Monday NightSpecial on October 31 was Amy Winehouse, who they said would dance again foryou all. Well, she might have been there in spirit. The non-ethereal soundeffects were by Sound Rebel. Revellers who wore a Halloween costume got a freedrink. The late Amy would have liked that.

The Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website at www.baliadvertiser.biz.id

HECTOR'S DIARY The Bali Advertiser, November 2, 2011

2011-11-02T10:34:00.000+08:00

Island Interlude

A week in Lombok is not a long time, especially if most of it is spenton Gili Trawangan, aka the Party Island. It’s always been an eclectic little community so far as expats go,strongly focused on accommodation and recreational diving.

On a recent trip across theWallace Line we stayed first in Senggigi, at the usefully central Puri Bunga,just across from the Art Market, where the tariff’s not a killer and waitress Novi,by now an old friend, remains as helpful as ever at breakfast.

On Trawangan, we stayed atGili Villas, the Manta Dive-linked operation just up the street from the GiliDeli next to the night market. They arepleasant little villas and the cleaning, cooking and security staff members areenthusiastic, at least for the most part. And the limit-of-two-users free Wi-Fiwas just manageable for a household of three heavy users.

New Experience

Flying into the new Lombok International Airport for the first time wasan interesting experience. The tourism-oriented locals up Senggigi way call itBandara Hutan (Forest Airport) since it is 47 kilometres and at least an hourand fifteen minutes away from where most tourists want to be. They’ll probablyget over this angst if the airport begins to pick up additional internationalservices.

We flew Garuda (we have tokeep adding a few unusable frequent flier points to the piggy-bank) and landedat Bandara Internasional Lombok, near Praya in the middle of the island, in theswiftly gathering gloom of post-sunset. By this time, 11 days after it hadfinally opened, its lighted signage was proclaiming “ANDARA IN-ERNASIONALLOMBOK” and the “K” was looking as if it wouldn’t be around for long. Still,the runway lights seemed to be in place and working.

The new highway that is supposed to speedhonoured guests to the booming cash points in Senggigi and the boats to theGilis so they can begin parting with their money to the greater glory of theisland’s economy is, after the fashion of things in Indonesia, a cross betweenhalf-completed and notional work-in-progress.

Our taxi driver skilfully negotiatedhis way through the narrow gap between two large signs clearly warning (inIndonesian) “road closed ahead” before he worked out he was on one of thework-in-progress bits and nearly drove us into the cavernous ditch at the endof this enterprise.

Fine Dining

A great highlight of our Trawangan visit was dinner with the delightfulDiane Somerton, who markets The Beach House and the neighbouring Kokomo resort.Kokomo’s restaurant serves very fine fare indeed and the wine, chosen bySomerton, was a real prize.

We saw her too at The BeachHouse for two of the Rugby World Cup finals series matches, including the onein which the All Blacks knocked the Wallabies out of their way while chargingtowards their first cup win in 24 years.

This was hard for Hector,who’s been wobbly for years; especially since his travelling party on the tripincluded a Kiwi. Still, never mind; they do say rugby’s only a game.

Rock of Ages

Dream Divers, old friends from our own days in Lombok, took us to GiliTrawangan from Senggigi. The coastal road up to Teluk Nara/Kode and beyond mustbe Indonesia’s finest highway. It is really very good and some of the tighterbends have actually been engineered properly.

While we were waiting atDream Divers’ landside facility for our boat to Trawangan we went to pay ourrespects at Gerd’s Rock, the memorial stone placed there by Dream Divers staffafter the death last year of founder Gerd Bunte.

One of the workers on handtold us Gerd had chosen the rock himself. It seems that after his death lastyear they had been unsuccessfully looking for a suitable rock and, emptyhanded, were driving back to Senggigi, when the fine specimen now residing atTeluk Kode plunged down the hillside directly in front of their vehicle.

Taman Tales

Peter Duncan, Lombok resident, tells us the disputed ownership ofSenggigi’s Taman restaurant has now been finally resolved. It was sold in acourt ordered auction in mid-October; the buyer was Wiwik Pusparini, who is hiswife.

Taman, once a leading lightalong Senggigi’s restaurant row and former place of beneficial Duncanmanagement, has been far from gleaming for a long time, after one of thoseinterminable ownership rows that so afflict business in Lombok andelsewhere. We’ll leave those detailsalone but it’s good to hear that the Duncan connection has triumphed and thatTaman is likely soon to be spruced up and gleaming (and trading) profitablyagain.

In the Pink

The Bali Pink Ribbon Walk on October 22 raised sums unspecified atdiary deadline time to support breast cancer prevention programmes for localwomen, helped along by a wide range of generous commercial sponsors. Hector nowhas a pink T-shirt for his own effort in walking the allegedly five kilometrecourse around the manicured gardens and streets of Nusa Dua’s star hotelsprecinct (most of the walkers opted for their own shortened course) and alsogained an insight into modern forms of entertainment.

For some reason, the organisersthought a bunch of cross-dressing trans-gender boys acting the goat (well, thejenny perhaps) and pretending to (a) sing and (b) be Beyonce was just thething. It’s certainly the nearest Hector has been to a raunchy nightclubperformance in quite a while; probably since the days long ago when he might,unwisely perhaps, once or twice have worn a pink shirt.

October is Breast CancerMonth globally. But the 2012 Bali Pink Ribbon Walk, organised by the BaliInternational Women’s Association (BIWA), will revert to May when the weather’sless likely to be humid. It’s on Saturday, May 26.

Growing better: The Sole Men collect a welcome donation from BanyanTree Ungasan General Manager Reinhold Johann at the plush resort’s infantbanyan tree.

Great Feat

Robert Epstone, originator of the barefoot Bukit Walk for a SustainableFuture which took place from September 22-25, tells us it raised around US$2,000 forthe ROLE Foundation with more money still coming in. The walk promotedsupport for Homeless children in Indonesia, women’s and children's literacy andvocational skills training and environmental restoration projects in South Bali.

Epstone, Rotarian Sole Man UK;Rotarian Sole Man French Daniel Chieppa; and Swiss Sole Man Beat Schmid deGruneck presented to money to Mike O’Leary, ROLE Foundation’s founder;and the president of both charities, Mangku Ariawan, Hindu priest, politician,humanitarian and owner of Bali Island Home, who said: “It is great to have twoimportant organisations combine their efforts and ‘go that extra mile’ to dogood together. “

Epstone tells us the walkpresented a wonderful opportunity to share their story as well as hear thestories from people living on the Bukit. “Along our way we made many newfriends, meeting with the local Balinese, hotels, owners of businesses, villasand restaurants; and the Uluwatu surf community,” he says. “We also discoveredsome inspirational 'silent heroes' actively trying to make our planet a betterplace.”

Mike O’Leary adds this: “TheBukit peninsula and Badung regency is experiencing huge tourism developmentwith new luxury resorts and world class waves attracting a global surfindustry. Expansion is a given with progress but must also be sensitive toculture, social needs and the environment. When the coastline and land is beingredeveloped we need to make sure simple communities such as seaweed farmersaren’t marginalised and people, women in particular, are given newopportunities to make a basic living.”

Yum!

A little while ago the Diary dined at The Ayana’s great Davarestaurant, where Jusman So, Singapore culinary sensation, was presenting asix-course degustation menu. We’ll talk about that in the next edition.

Post Script

The Hong Kong Journal, an online effort that over 22 issues has soughtto bring important issues into the public domain, is no longer beingpublished. A statement from editorRobert Keatley tells us the Smith Richardson Foundation, whose generositybrought the Journal into existence six years ago and has been its main funderever since, is not renewing the grant that made its publication possible andthat it has not been possible to find sufficient alternative funding. Althoughthe Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will maintain the Hong KongJournal’s archives on line for some time, there will be no future issues.

Issue 22, posted some weeksago at www.hkjournal.org, includes ananalysis by Anthony Cheung, President of the Hong Kong Institute of Education,explaining why so many Hong Kong residents are unhappy with their governmentand current social trends. It also has a report by Louis Pauly of theUniversity of Toronto that outlines the reasons why he believes theadministration needs more aggressive economic policies if Hong Kong is toremain an affluent, global financial centre in the coming years.

The demise of the Hong Kong Journal is ashame. We need to see free thought from China’s only really free city.

Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

HECTOR'S DIARY in the Bali Advertiser, October 19, 2011

2011-10-19T16:31:00.000+08:00

Lights on the Hill Again

Ubud, known to Hector as Guruburg and to his friend, the blogger VytKarazija, as Literati Downs, has been agog this month, celebrating the annualwriters’ and readers’ festival which threatens to conjoin the two entities withpossibly far-reaching, not to say astonishing, results.

    Some people – among them theBali-resident Australian QC Colin McDonald, whom we ran into at the airportrecently while both on visitor pick-up missions – assert that Janet DeNeefe’seclectic shindig has become too commercial. That’s easy to say, of course, buteven navel-gazers have to eat, and ones from distant parts of the Lintospherehave to get here as well and are unlikely to pay for that travel themselves.
    So, as with much else in themodern world, sponsorship is a must. The UWRF was fortunate to have gained theassistance this year of the big Australian bank ANZ, through its local Paninsubsidiary, to boost the substantial official Australian support it already gets.The festival’s overtly commercial pitch (as McDonald himself noted) was lessintrusive than with last year’s no longer lamented naming sponsor Citibank. AndANZ had some lovely customer relations staff on hand at the festival to makeyou feel all warm and fuzzy. That can’t be bad, can it?
    A success: We look forward toUWRF 2012.

Bali revealed: Yellow Dog, one of the Leticia Balacek works on show atEl Kabron this month

From the Art

Leticia Balacek’s art that’s been on show at El Kabron, the new chill-spaceon the Bukit above Bingin Beach that sybarites serious about cocina español and value for money shoulddefinitely check out, has both an attractive naivety and cerebral clout. It hasélan. Some could even suggestchutzpah. Balacek, who is also an architect, might prefer to say energencia, sinceshe comes from Buenos Aires; the Argentine capital is surely the New World’s classiestand most energised urban collective outside Manhattan and, anyway, in the BigApple they too often forget about the essential first two letters of the wordclass.

It was nice to see a lengthyQ and A with her in the latest Yak – Bali’s best glossy magazine by, oh, aTibetan plateau or two, we’d suggest – though it was a shame they didn’t makeher the subject of an interrogative and interpretive piece. It would be fun todraw her out.
The Diary’s favourite work fromthe collection on show at El Kabron – for the SOLEMEN charity: deadlines beatus on this edition but we’ll get back to the outcome of the auction on October15 and other action later – is Yellow Dog, reproduced here. Balacek tells usit’s her favourite too.

Con Brio

The desirable Jade Richardson – who rates a major 7 on the Hector ModifiedScent of a Woman Scale (that’s the one that measures brain power) – has recentlypenned a delightful polemic that describes, from a Jade’s eye view as it were,the pitfalls of seeking good karma through yoga courses and their not infrequentconsequential outcomes, often sexual, among the guruhood in Ubud.

   It was such fun to read thatHector nearly spilled his precious sultanas while doing so. The beak and otherbits were so much agiggle that keeping a firm grip on small wizened grapesbetween the claw and the maw was terribly difficult.
    She titled it The ExcellentDeath of Mr Happy. If you’re on Facebook and have a mind to read it, you can doso on Hector’s FB (friend him at Hector McSquawky). It’s highly recommended.
    Richardson tells us she wasflitting around the scribblers’ fest earlier this month. She once had aconnection there. Perhaps she was looking up old friends.

Go Pink

Don’t forget the Bali Pink Ribbon Walk at Nusa Dua on Saturday (October22). It’s to benefit breast cancer prevention and treatment support, which is avery good cause indeed. Plus you’ll get the chance to see Hector in a pinkshirt. It hasn’t been his colour – in shirts or anything else – since youthful daysnow long gone when he occasionally fancied himself a bit of a Beau Brummell.

BIWA (the Bali InternationalWomen’s Association) has all the details. Visit www.biwa-bali.org/or make them a friend on Facebook.
It’s not the only breastcancer benefit on the calendar this month (Breast Cancer Month). SeminyakRotary has a charity lunch at Métisin Seminyak on Friday, October 28. We heard about this from many people butalso from old friend Melly St Ange, who now busies herself promoting Rotary. Melly,who is so energised that we believe she must plug herself into a power pointdaily, used to be president of BIWA.

Welcome Ideas

The Murdoch University-based Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) – it’s in Perth – has been given nearly A$400,000by the Australian government to develop an innovative “Indonesia from theground up!” programme. We’ll forgive the unnecessary exclamation mark inthis instance.

    ACICIS founder and director ProfessorDavid T. Hill, Chair of South East Asian Studies at Murdoch, says the programmewill give teachers a chance to immerse themselves in Indonesian culture on a12-day study tour.
    “We know that if students areto have the best chance of learning a language, language instruction needs tobe supported across all curriculum areas, with the involvement of non-languageteaching staff,” Hill says.
     Teachers of history,geography, arts, business, environment, media and citizenship, who would notnecessarily have Indonesian language skills, will be invited to participate andto become “Asia advocates” who can incorporate their new knowledge of Indonesiainto their teaching and inspire their students. “They will have a dramaticimpact on the teaching of Asian studies and make a substantial contribution tosupporting language learning,” says Hill.
    Another sign of theincreasingly deep relationship between Indonesia and Australia was theinaugural Indonesia-Australia Dialogue held in Jakarta on October 5. Thedialogue – the Australians have dubbed its participants “Citizen Diplomats” –is designed to promote people-to-people links.
    The first talks were led byveteran diplomat John McCarthy as Australian co-convenor and Dr Rizal Sukma,executive director of the Indonesian Centre for Strategic and InternationalStudies. Twenty Australians drawn from a wide cross-section of Australiansociety – from politics, business, academia, and media – visited Indonesia forthe discussions.

Yellow Press

The Invisible Times, edited (if that’s the word) from Ireland, had abit of a scoop at the end of September. We only saw it because we were at aloose end one cloudy afternoon and resorted to web-browsing, the preferredpursuit of those suffering terminal ennui.

     It breathlessly related thatformer Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is seriously rich anddoesn’t live in Thailand because, well, some people there think he’s a stinker,dropped in for a three-day stay in Bali. Readers were told “the Bali Times canreveal” Thaksin held a series of meetings during his stay, apparently also withhis sister, who is the current Thai PM, after he arrived by private jetpreceded by a posse of aides detailed to provide security for the billionairerunaway.
    The paper also reported that Thaksinstayed and held the meetings at the presidential villa of C151 Seminyak, acomplex of luxury villas (his private security detail apparently took up fiveother villas).
     The sting in the tale was aquote from C151 Resorts owner Hanno Soth who said Thaksin felt at home in Bali.“He said he finds the Hindu culture of Bali similar to Thailand and the styleof service like in Thailand. He said he plans to return.”
     The Invisible Times did notthink it necessary to tell readers that Soth is its proprietor. And it stillhasn’t reported that several C151 villa owners are suing him because, theyallege, he cost them money.

Hector's Diary appears in the fortnightly print edition of the Bali Advertiser and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

The item below was not published in Hector's Diary in the Bali Advertiser but followers of his blog might like to read it.

Made to Order

Many friends of Hector still remember, with just as much glee as Hectorhimself, that in the aforementioned Invisible Times long ago a little spatoccurred with the guru of gardens and bad language, Made Wijaya, and that, as aresult, Wijaya unfriended Hector’s helper on Facebook.

Much water has passed undermany bridges since that time, along with Hector’s involvement with theoffending publication. Thus, recently, because Wijaya claims to possess acertain centrality to events of a peripheral nature in Bali, Hec’s helper senta friend request with a nice little note suggesting they should try again. Hedid expect a polite refusal but, you know, one has to try.
He got the refusal, but itwasn’t polite. It read: “Eat shit and die you twerp.” He’s all class, Wijaya, and in this instancealso disastrously misinformed, as he is so often. Twerps are expectant goldfish. Neither Hectornor his helper is genetically equipped for pregnancy. And Hector might carp,but he’s a cockatoo.

HECTOR’S DIARY in the Bali Advertiser, October 5, 2011

2011-10-05T09:02:00.000+08:00

Great Event, But No Sex Thanks

We like to party, so it seemed like a good idea to bowl on out to ElKabron, which has a prime cliff-top position at Pantai Cemongkak on the Bukit, onOctober 1 for the first of three extravaganza afternoons – that’s what theysaid on their Facebook anyway – featuring art, food, dance and music.

    It was the Distaff’s latest21st birthday next day, indicating a requirement for immodest celebration. Andsince Hector holds firmly to the belief that he is not a day over 30 – and withthe assistance of a wig, a face-mask and a couple of uppers on the way therehas occasionally managed to fool adjacent revellers until they have had to callan ambulance – frivolity seemed in order.         Considerable further appeal was addedby these parties being well outside the so ho-hum beer-and-footy confines ofthe local Anglosphere, or even its upmarket offshoot that prefers wine andcheese.
    This one had tapas, as befitsa Spanish restaurant, live music and the opening of an exhibition of art byLetitia Balacek on the theme “the dynamic lines and colour of Bali.” OrganisersDavid Iglesias Megias and Hellen Sjuhada promised fun and frivolity. El Kabronapparently also offers something else, called Sex on the Cliff. But yourdiarist did not try this. He has never had a head for heights.
    Three events were scheduledon successive Saturdays. The October 1 opening, headlined Sunset Chillout,precedes an October 8 limited-seat dinner (yum!) and fundraising event to benefitthe SoleMen project – the SoleMen have just completed the inaugural Bukit Walkassociated with the ROLE Foundation. Last in the trio is an October 15 bashincluding an auction of Balacek’s art, also for charity.
    Over the three weekends,Balacek was geared up to adorn El Kabron’s sea-view veranda with her remarkabledrawing and live-art. You’re invited to come along and engage, talk, or simplyget inspired. Sounds fun! The opener certainly was.

Bank on a Good Show

This year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (October 6-9) got underway this week, bolstered by some very nice funding from ANZ Bank via its localPanin Bank operation and, as always, Janet DeNeefe and her team put together agreat programme.

    There’s one book launch onthe programme that should attract lovers of poetry, especially if they arefamiliar with the nuances of Australia’s much misinterpreted working classculture. It’s Bearers of Fruit, by Nancy Inglis, whose CV includes nurse;mother; environmental and social activist; historian; winemaker; poet; and writer.
    The book contains 327 poems,documenting Inglis’s experience from her forties into her eighties. Its artworkis the work of Inglis’s daughter Linda Buller, herself a painter and known inBali as the heroine for Ubud street dogs. Inglis and daughter put on their roadshow on October 7.
    On the music front there’sbeen something of a coup, with the acclaimed Al-Izhar High School CommunityChoir & Orchestra coming from Jakarta to join creative forces with thegamelan orchestra of SMAN 1 Ubud High School. That’s also on October 7.Festival organisers warn there’s a risk that audience members might catch Goosebumps.
     On a different intellectualplane the festival features two African writers in conversation at the Alilaresort: Nigerian born Chris Abani is arenowned contemporary novelist and poet, a man of huge talent who has beenvilified, imprisoned and harmed for his outspoken words. Ugandan born IndianMohezin Tejani has been roaming the world for four decades since being exiledfrom his home by that silly old despot Idi Amin. They will be sharing theirstories with international journalist Hassan Ansah. There’s plenty of food for thought in that,and food of the other sort will be provided in the form of a North Africanfeast designed by foodie and mystery woman Peta Mathias.
    We should mention, for anyonefeeling jaded by modern existence and apt to reminisce about their disgraceful formerlives, that famous bad boy scribbler DBC Pierre is having a leisurely lunch atthe Four Seasons Resort (the one near Ubud). He is offering some truths behindthe tall tales that made headlines across the globe when he won the Man BookerPrize in 2003 for his acclaimed novel Vernon God Little. The fellow now livesin an isolated rural village in Ireland, a world away from his previousperformance envelope. He’ll be chatting (audibly) with his good friend SalenaGodden, billed as queen of Britain’s spoken word circuit and herself a literarybombshell.
    You can find full details ofthe 2011 UWRF programme on their website and Facebook.

Dogged by Rabies

Keen observers would have noted that September 28 was World Rabies Day.That’s something of intense interest in Bali, where upwards of 130 people havedied of the disease since it broke out in 2008. The painful saga of the initialresponse is now history, and it does seem, on the latest carefully doctoredreports to be released for public view, that it is on the way to being acontrollable emergency.

    Australian consul-general inBali Brett Farmer said this at the World Rabies Day function in Denpasar: “Human deaths from rabies have now dropped by68 percent compared to the same period last year, but we want to see thisfigure fall to zero.”
    Well, yes, that would be a goodplan. There’s no need for anyone to die of rabies – it is untreatable andinvariably fatal once symptoms appear – provided adequate human rabies vaccineis available (adequate in quantity and quality) and hugely expensiveimmunoglobulin can also be provided. Thus far, that hasn’t been the case.People who have had a full preventive vaccination course do not need theimmunoglobulin, only the post-exposure vaccinations.
    Since 2008 Australia hasprovided a total of A$1.1 million towards combating the disease in Bali. Mostof this has gone to the dog vaccination campaign. So let’s all hope we hear even more cheeringnews next World Rabies Day.

He’s Our Star

We read in the estimable diary column in The Australian newspaper –it’s called Strewth, one of the lesser adjectives commonly heard in newspaperoffices – that historian Ross Fitzgerald, a long-time friend of Hector (well,the guy who ghost-writes for the lazy buzzard at least) may soon beimmortalising himself on the little screen as well as in print.

    Strewth reported on September28 that fans of Larry David and Austen Tayshus (they’re Aussie icons; that’sall you need to know) would be pleased to hear of a new project. Fitzgerald,columnist with The Australian and co-author with Rick Murphy of the recentbiography on Austen Tayshus (Sandy Gutman to his parents) titled Merchant ofMenace, tells Strewth a pilot for a TV series based on the book is in thepipeline, starring the man many call the most controversial performer inAustralia.
    “The show will be like LarryDavid’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, partly scripted but much improvised,” Fitzgerald toldStrewth. “Five minutes of each episode will involve Sandy seeing a real femaletherapist who specialises in treating children of Holocaust survivors.” Theworking title is Standup. Plans are also being made for Gutman to play thecharacter Grafton Everest in a TV series based on Fitzgerald’s novel Fools’Paradise, co-authored with Trevor Jordan.
    Fitzgerald is a Bali regular.He and his wife Lyndal Moore prefer the sybaritic delights of Ubud to thoseoffered elsewhere on the island.

The Far Queue No Longer

While musing about the products of Australia’s halls of academe, weshould record that the government there has just announced it will loosen somevisa requirements for international students in an effort to draw more peopleto Australian universities.

It released a report thatcalled for a shake-up of immigration requirements and said it would introduce amore streamlined visa process for overseas students who want to complete atertiary degree in Australia.
In a stunning reversal oftraditional practice, the authorities say they will not now deal withInternational students planning to attend Australian universities as if they areall potential illegal over-stayers, regardless of which country they come from.The government will also relax some of the onerous financial requirements forstudent visas and issue a new work visa for foreign students who graduate inAustralia.

Yak On

Hector couldn’t make the Yak Awards this year (a previous engagementintervened) but we’re sure it was the usual hoot, as befits affrays organisedby super Sophie Digby and her crew. This year’s event was at Tugu Bali. Last year’swas at Cocoon and is remembered by your diarist, who at that time wasscribbling for Another Newspaper (The Invisible Times, now edited from Irelandwe understand) as the occasion on which he completely missed notable yakkerSusie Johnston, who won Yak Woman of the Year 2010. Susie memorably saidafterward this must have been because she was wearing the most eye-catchingdress of the evening and flashy new specs, and was yakking nineteen to thedozen.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser's fortnightly print edition and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

HECTOR’S DIARY in the Bali Advertiser, September 21, 2011

2011-09-22T10:28:00.000+08:00

Literary Moments

On its first reading, 50 years ago, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondagestruck your diarist as an immensely clever narrative and its chief character –he is not the hero of the tale by any stretch – Philip Carey as a vaguelyannoying young man. At that time your diarist was a vaguely annoying young manhimself.

     Now, via the new world ofKindle, a second reading is being attempted. This is a hard task because in the intervening half century Philip, whois possibly as selfish as Madame Bovary, has turned into an absolute wretch; acrucible of indecision; a fulcrum offoolishness. Where, before, you could (albeit barely) sympathise with the youngman’s obsession with Mildred Rodgers, or at least understand it, now you can’t.The fellow’s an idiot.
    Of course, on that firstreading all those years ago, faint echoes remained of the English world of(then) 50 years before that Maugham sought to describe. There was still anessential civility about things in the 1950s. The empire was but newly dead –its corpse barely stiffened, you could say – and there remained some certitudeupon which one could fix one’s gaze while hoping for the best.
    This is no longer the case.England is now run by Mildred Rodgers’s. Wastrels like Philip Carey have disappeared and have been replaced by a “good-thinking”class of very dubious provenance. One supposes Maugham might be rolling in hisgrave to think of this.
    But never mind, he stilltells a good story.

Bank on it (Again)

This year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (October 6-9) was throwna life-ring on September 1 when PT ANZ Panin Bank – the Indonesian subsidiaryof the big Australian bank – fronted up with lots of naming-sponsor money. Wecan all be glad of that, because the UWRF is now an institution as well as aperennial calendar date and it does a marvellous job of reflecting Indonesianwriting to the world as well as bringing international literary interest here.

    ANZ is justly reputed for itssupport of the cultural and sporting world. It backs Australia’s famedArchibald prize (for portrait art), the Royal Flying Doctor Service and theAustralian Open tennis. Its commitment to commensurate levels of sponsorshiphere, through Panin, is very welcome indeed.
    UWRF director and founder Janetde Neefe said in her September 1 announcement: “On the eve of launching what we believe isour most enthralling and inspirational programme ever, we take great heart fromknowing that ANZ, our newest and most generous sponsor, shares our aim to makea positive difference in people’s lives.”
    Last year’s festival wassponsored by Citibank in a deal promoted as a three-year naming-rightsarrangement, though apparently this was on the basis of an unsigned email. Ahwell, this is Bali.
    Citibank then ran into a fewlittle difficulties with grand theft within its precincts and revelations thatits outsourced credit card debt collection service left rather a lot to bedesired, since in one instance it converted a defaulting account into adeceased account.
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, itlater pulled the pin on the UWRF. Now that ANZ has filled the breach – in arather more generous way, we understand – De Neefe and her fellow fiestanistasat Ubud can probably allow themselves two sighs of relief. One for the moneyand the other for the departure of a sponsor whose public image is perhaps notquite in line with the festival’s preferred position on literature, socialresponsibility, and several other things.
     De Neefe said: “This is a happy, happy day for this, oureighth Festival. When our 2010 naming rights sponsor defaulted at almost theeleventh hour, we were devastated, but determined that Indonesia’s premierliterary event would go ahead untarnished and proud.”
    ANZ’s local CEO, JosephAbraham, said of the deal: "We are pleased to support the ANZ Ubud Writers& Readers Festival, rated as one of the world’s top six literary festivals.The festival also enables us to show our support for Bali and the developmentof Indonesian literature and culture. It is also a great proposition for ourcustomers, especially our retail customers and credit card holders,"stated Joseph Abraham, ANZ CEO Indonesia.
    Visit www.ubudwritersfestival.com for fulldetails of UWRF2011’s programme of events.

Good Works

Those among us who do good works in support of the Balinese communityare being very active at the moment. On September 23 Christina Iskandar and othersare staging Heartstrings, an artistic showcase by the children of the YPACcentre for the handicapped. It’s at newly refurbished Warisan restaurant inSeminyak.

    The event is sure to be fun –especially since we understand that Bali’s dishiest spruiker, Diana Shearin, isemceeing – and those who fork out Rp450K for the set menu dinner will do so inthe knowledge that a portion of those proceeds will go to YPAC. There are otherentertainments involved, including an hour-long cocktails and canapés session,further fundraising efforts, and entertainment later by special guest starsOzlem and Andy, Jasmin Suteja and Lisa Soul and Band.
   Fund-raising of a moreenergetic kind has been set for September 22-25 with a four-day barefoot walk –the first Bukit Walk for a Sustainable Future. The ROLE Foundation and SoleMenhave joined forces to support children and women’s education and Bali’s environment.
    SoleMen Robert Epstone,Daniel Chieppa with his Balinese wife Yatna, and Beat Schmid de Gruneck will walkbarefoot a circuit that will take them around the Bukit peninsula. During theevent they will visit the Bali Life Foundation orphanage on the Bukit and anon-profit waste management project, Eco Surf Rescue Uluwatu.
    During the walk, ROLE Foundationhopes to attract new students. ROLE has invited unskilled women from the Bukitarea to sign-up to its free education programme with courses in literacy andvocational skills training.
    The Bukit Walk for a SustainableFuture starts from ROLE’s Town Leaning Centre in Jl Siligita at Nusa Dua onThursday, September 22, and passes through Ungasan, Pecatu, Uluwatu, PadangPadang, Dreamland and Jimbaran. The final leg includes Tanjung Benoa and NusaDua and ends with a children’s fun day at ROLE’s Eco-Learning Park at Sawangan onSunday, September 25.
     ROLE was founded by Michael O’Learyin 2007. It is a registered charity in Indonesia.

Set for a Scrum

The rugby world cup is in full swing, which we expect will shortlycreate some difficulties at The Cage since we are to host an old and dearfriend visiting from Australia. No problem there, but this fellow has remaineda New Zealand citizen, which is also not a problem unless rugby is involved. Weexpect some interesting exchanges as the competition progresses.

In Bali, of course, we haveour own rugby completion. The 2011 XP Xclusive Property Bali Rugby Fest is onat the Canggu Club over the weekend (September 24-25) organised by the BaliRugby Club. As before the competition is in three divisions: Open Men's 10's;Indonesian Men's 7's (Incorporating the Indonesian National 7's championship);and Open Women's 7's.
It might not quite match theshenanigans in New Zealand, but it’s always fun. Details are available from theBali Rugby Club.

Diary Date

Don’t forget the Bali Pink Ribbon Walk. The annual trot-out is beingheld on October 23 to raise awareness of breast cancer. There’s a bazaar, musicand entertainment, an auction and raffle, children’s activities – and spacabins and food stalls provided by leading hotels in the Nusa Dua and TanjungBenoa areas.

There’s a modestregistration fee for the event, which starts from in front of the BTDC officeat Nusa Dua. And you get a free T shirt. Hector’s a starter.
Details are available from theBali International Women’s Association. They’re on Facebook and the web.

He Said It

Former Australian prime minister John Howard issued a statement afterthe death in mid-September of former Liberal minister and long-serving federalMP David Jull, who made a name for himself in many worthy ways during hispolitical career but is mostly remembered, by those who keep a tally ofdemerits, as the minister who had to resign early in the Howard years for notknowing some of his colleagues were rorting entitlements. It was anembarrassment for the then new PM.

Here’s what Howard said: "Hewas a widely liked MP who enjoyed friendships across party divides. Janette andI extend our sympathy to his family and many friends, who will miss himgreatly."
Jull, a bon vivant and wellknown to Hector in his former political years, was 66. He died of cancer.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser, out in print every fortnight, and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz.

CELEBRATING MY FRIEND JAN FLETCHER

2011-09-08T22:00:00.000+08:00

These are some thoughts I contributed for a celebration of the life of Jan Fletcher, my friend, held in Brisbane, Queensland, on September 8, 2011.

Jan and I developed a close working relationship in the Queensland Opposition Office between 1998 and 2002, when I left the building. She was anindispensible part of the operation there, truly the keeper of the keys – andof all sorts of documents including policy documents that we should probablyall have memorised minutely and hadn’t. Jan had all the answers and if – andthis was rare – she didn’t, she’d say so. She was in every sense the mostvaluable colleague you could have.

I didn’t knowmuch about Jan’s personal life. I did come across her husband Ian from time to time. Heseemed to be playing the role of corporate spouse on most of those occasionsand I sympathised, having had years of experience of the same phenomenon after my wife, Lea Crombie, left daily journalism and joined the arcane world of corporate relations.It can be trying, attempting to look interested and yet not too interested,lest those among whom you are circulating in a sort of tolerated way begin tothink you might know more than you should! Emma (Jan's daughter) I knew by repute. She was onesubject on which Jan would never be silent.

All of us have ourfavourite memories of Jan. Mine flow from a delightful corporate practice thatwe developed, she and I, which involved visiting a number of wining and diningestablishments in Albert Street (in Brisbane's CBD). We would repair to one or other of these fromtime to time – not too frequently, since you ask! – and set about the businessof intensive policy discussion.

When we left theselittle soirees we were each convinced that we had solved all the world’sproblems, not to mention those of the Queensland opposition. It was always anasty shock to discover on returning to the office we hadn’t, or that someone,known or – worse – unknown, had in our absence created new ones.

Those little excursionswere a great time of laughter and fun, as well as for serious chatting. Theyweren’t all beer and skittles. In fact, I don’t think we ever had a beer. Aswell as a workplace and a political conviction, Jan and I shared a deep lovefor that nicely matured fermented grape juice you used to find in good qualitybottles with corks in them. I think we would have benefited from the modernpractice of screw-tops.

Jan was my friend.No – IS my friend. Times change; people move on; sometimes, sadly, they passaway. But the good ones are never forgotten.

Jan Fletcher died, of cervical cancer, on August 30.

HECTOR'S DIARY in the Bali Advertiser, September 7, 2011

2011-09-07T10:48:00.000+08:00

Put Budapest on Your Liszt

Hungary’s capital city, the city of Liszt and Theodore Herzl, is agreat place to visit. There’s not a lot of money around, but it’s surprisinglywell served by public transport and, give or take a former communist scowl ortwo from people still employed (in most cases astonishingly) in the oversizedstate enterprise sector. And it’s peopled largely by citizens who like tosmile.

They have good reason to,even if the week we spent there was hideously hot, as inland south-easternEurope can be in summer. The coffee houses are full of locals, the restaurants– apart from in the tourist rip-off strip – likewise, and there is a surprisingamount of visible history around even if the Russians, Americans and Britishcompeted heavily with the retreating Germans during the bloody endgame of WorldWar II to obliterate the former co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Portions of the city wererebuilt in period style. Others were given over to communist-era blocks offlats that offend the eye as well as the conscience. But the city centre andthe Danube littoral have a pleasant ambience that is very far from thesterility of Vienna, say, or other western European cities. Budapest isn’t awestern European city in either geographic placement or mindset. And that’swhat makes it such a lovely place to take a break.

There’s even an IndonesianTrade Promotion Office for anyone with business on their mind.

Hussars and Horse’s Doovers

It was St Stephen’s Day while we were in Budapest, named for the king(Istvan) who formally embraced Christianity in the eleventh century and whoseday, August 20, was the Saint’s day until the 17th century. On August 20Hungary celebrates its national pride with some military overtones – flypastsand the like, and a display of military hardware past and present at HeroesSquare where the six Magyar chieftains who brought their people from centralAsia to the Hungarian plains in the ninth century look on with the impassivenature of the statues they are. Above them sits the mythical Turun, the hugebird that legend says guided the Magyar people – Huns – to their new home.

The best bit, from theDiary’s perspective, was when on our morning walk that day, sitting at an AndrassyStreet coffee house having a mid-perambulation restorative caffeine shot, amarching band (of comely young ladies twirling sticks and doing little jigs), aband playing Germanic marching music, some veterans in similarly highlyGermanic uniforms, and a half troop of Hussars trotted past on their way toHeroes square.

Despite the historicconnotations of the event, it was accompanied by every modern convenience. Anambulance idled along behind the mounted hussars, lest one should fall andinjure himself (or herself – there were two lady hussars present).

And bringing up the rear were twowash-and-wipe appliances of the city sanitation department, tasked withremoving any unfortunate equine deposits.

We drank our coffee quicklyand followed them up the avenue. The tail-end sweepers were kept very busy.

Home Base

Budapest has the full range of accommodation options that you’d expectof any major city, but we chose to stay at a lovely up-market (and up fiveflights of stairs) B&B called the Kapital Inn. It was just off AndrassyStreet in the central city area. Paris has a close match for Andrassy. It’scalled the Champs Elysees.

The Kapital was capital formany reasons – including the breakfast omelettes provided by Albert, itsexcellent host – and was conveniently close to a metro station. The Diaryprefers to amble, since this provides much rich street-scene material andaccess to the frequent coffee houses, but the metro was useful on many occasionswhen Budapest’s unusual August heat became a tad de trop.

Albert’s establishment istruly a home away from home for visitors. It rates six Hector stars.

Eat, Drink and...

Well, practically anything, really. Budapest is a city where sybaritesof any class and every disposition never need to suffer deprivationsyndrome. The Diary doesn’t do low-life,except in the Jeffrey Bernard sense, but that’s available for those who do. We do food though, and there’s plenty of that.Nothing much beats a cinnamon ice cream and an espresso as a late-night walkhome treat, either.

We went one day to the FaustBorpince cellars under the Hilton Hotel on Castle Hill on the Buda side of theDanube, for a decorous wine tasting and some little Hungarian savoury scones.It was a perfect substitute for lunch.

The cellar is a proper winecave underground in the UNESCO World Heritage-listed remains of the Dominicanmonastery that once was on the site. Around 80 Hungarian wines are availablefor tasting along with some 30 Palinkas (distilled spirits).

We left the spirits alonebecause we had to walk home to the Pest side afterwards.

Side Trip

We treated ourselves to a long lunch in Vienna one day. It’s a two-hour-fifty-minutetrain trip each way – though without any border crossing formalities since bothAustria and Hungary are Schengen states – which makes it a very long lunchindeed.

But it was definitely worthit. We found a lovely little Beisl in Stiftgasse in the Museum district whichoffered both a great menu and wine list and a cool, leafy arbour in which tospend a few hours eating and drinking. And it was only a two-stop trip on theMetro back to Wesbahnhof for the Railjet train back to Budapest afterwards.

If you’re in Vienna, drop inat Amerlingbeisl. The food was so good we quite forgot to have a strudel.

Take a Bath

It’s a must-do in Budapest, where a tradition of communal bathing onthe Turkish model long ago emerged as one of the better gifts of the Ottomanexperience. It’s not for everyone – and especially for people whose home isBali and for whom discreet massage and spa treatment is an established personaltradition – but it is immensely popular with Hungarians and most tourists.

We visited the Széchenyi baths in the Városliget park at the end ofAndrassy, just past Heroes Square. There are others you may visit, but Széchenyi is best for couples sincemixed bathing is always available there. At other places there’s a roster mostdays.

It was crowded (it was a hotday) but the thermal pool we chose, the 39C cauldron, had plenty of spare waterspace for newcomers. The recommended 20 minutes maximum was all we wanted,however.

Transports of Delight

Visitors from Indonesia would be amazed at the range of publictransport available in Budapest, and at the smooth and on-schedule way it runs.There’s a Metro system – Budapest pioneered this in continental Europe – thatis being expanded, an extensive light rail (tram) network, and trolley-busesand buses as well as a suburban railway network. Around 60 percent of peopleuse public transport in Budapest.

What also caught our eye, aswell as our fancy, was the way traffic stops at pedestrian crossings (try thatin Bali!) and gives way at intersections. It stops at red lights and doesn’t go again until the lights are green.And drivers manage to stay in lane. And all this even on narrow side streets.Next time a legislative committee is looking at transport regulations, it couldusefully schedule a trip to Budapest to see how it can be done.

Prodigal’s Return

Our remaining lost luggage – one of two suitcases that fell victim tothe incompetent vagaries of Paris CDG airport or some other travel demon –finally found a way to be reunited with us on our last day in Scotland by whichtime, with Budapest the next stop, the warm clothing it contained was ratherredundant.

Well, we say it found us.Actually we found it, since we had to drive to Edinburgh airport to get it.This was irritating because we had provided full address and telephone detailsfor delivery. It was also irritating to find that the case had been opened,though in the absence of an official sticker to this effect we think not bycustoms. Some items were missing and others were broken because whoever openedit didn’t bother to re-connect the internal straps.

Two lessons from this: Do notgive lost luggage at Budapest airport the access code to get into your case;and, if at all possible, even on a longer trip, travel with carry-on baggageonly.

Welcome Home

We like travelling but it’s always good to get home, and it wasespecially the case this trip because on September 1 Ganesha Gallery at FourSeasons Jimbaran opened a new exhibition of works by Balinese painter Wayan KunAdnyana, entitled Body Theatre.

The Bangli-born painter explores the immensecapacity for cross-fertilisation of cultures provided by Bali’s unique role asa crucible in which ancient Hindu religious and social precepts blend withimported Western values.

He’s been on the art scenesince 1966 and has published numerous articles and books and organised severalmajor exhibitions. His work displays a deep knowledge of human anatomy.

The exhibition is on untilOctober 3.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser's fortnightly print edition and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

HECTOR'S DIARY The Bali Advertiser (August 24, 2011)

2011-08-24T20:50:00.000+08:00

A Temporary Sea Change

The Cage at Ungasan, from where the Diary is generally contributed, has a delightful sea view. It’s a panorama that is always missed when we are absent and gratefully enjoyed upon return. But this Diary is being written against the soothing backdrop of a very different sea view, equally delightful even though the water is frigid. It is Hector’s childhood summer holiday view, from the little bit of the Scottish borders that is as well the ancestral home. As we write, on a chill summer afternoon, the Fife coast 60 kilometres away across the Firth of Forth is clearly visible and beyond that, distantly blue, are the hills of Angus. And but for the beautiful folds of the Lammermuir Hills, we fancy, we might even have chanced a glimpse of the faraway Grampians.
    All this is of course peripheral to the Bali scene, to which – after a forthcoming sojourn in Budapest – we shall soon return refreshed, rested, made robust by a renewed stock of memories, and anxious to get back into the joys of living in Bali, our chosen home.
     It is 24 years since we were last here, 40 since we departed for a new life in Australia, and half a century since the last of the regular summer holidays spent fossicking about the stones and boulders of little windswept beaches, freezing in the North Sea breakers, mucking about in boats at our little harbour, and drinking in the rustling, rushing spirituality of the forested ravines of our local stream (a burn hereabouts, and utterly unpolluted) wherein lie occasional trout and the chance of an otter sighting.
    It is peaceful, this little corner, and warms the heart. Lives long ago made new by emigration are generally better than those that might have been lived at home, but the migrant always feels some sense of loss in the leaving – it would be dull and wrong not to – and a rare return, while a joy, is also perversely, a renewal of sadness. You get on with life, of course, and are forever grateful for the opportunities presented by an adopted homeland. But it’s never the same and in gaining much you know in your heart that you have lost a lot.

Lives Celebrated

This visit to the old country was prompted by a family occasion, to which people – siblings and their spouses – came from places scattered around the globe to join their cousins and others in celebrating, with a surviving brother, the lives of another son of the Borders and his wife, our father and mother.
    There was a little ceremony, informal of course and not specifically religious but one with which a Balinese might find particular empathy, to scatter the ashes of father and mother in the sea. A cousin played a lovely lament among the rocks and a toast was drunk – in whisky for the father, champagne for the mother – and some little speeches made.
    Prior to this, a plaque was dedicated to their memory in the local kirk. Later that day a spirited cèilidh was held at which much food and drink was consumed and plenty of loud music played.
     The weekend by chance was that of the annual village flower show. The flowers were nice but the scones were even better. There was a full moon that night and a clear sky rewarded us with a silver pathway across the water from the headland far off to the east right into the wavelets rippling in to the shore beneath the cliff at the bottom of the garden. Nature came to the party too.

A Long Lunch

The celebratory weekend wound up with a long, late lunch at The Creel, a justifiably renowned restaurant in neighbouring Dunbar. It’s down near the harbour, set away in a sunny little side street, and is itself blessed by association with celebrity chef Rick Stein. That’s not why we were there. We went for the assiette of Inverlochy smoked salmon, local dressed white crab meat and prawns served with dressed baby potato salad, spicy tomato and red onion salad.
Well, that wasn’t all. The main course offered braised belly of pork, iron skillet seared Gigot steak of Borders lamb and roasted breast of chicken served with creamy crushed potatoes, mélange of fresh vegetables, salsa verde and cranberry jus.
If you had room afterwards (we did) you could choose between classic vanilla bean panna cotta with macerated raspberries and Creel marble slate duo of cheeses with homemade stem ginger and garden vegetable preserve. Coffee and homemade chocolates followed. Yum!

Two Hectors

The family memorial weekend and several days following were spent at a cousin’s house (though we lodged for the week next door in a weekender rented at mate’s rates for the occasion) and were slightly confusing for two of those present – Hector the diarist and Hector the cat.
Hector the cat is a fine tabby of considerable vintage. In cat years, senior even to superannuated diarists who hide behind sulphur crested cockatoo masks. An accommodation was attained, however. Hector the diarist agreed not to spend his day dashing in and out of the cat doors. And Hector the cat (eventually) conceded there was little point in acting the scaredy-cat since Hector the diarist is a lifelong cat softie.
There remained a few confusions, however. It can get ugly when cat and cockatoo respond in synch to food calls and the like.

What a Pest

It is often said that every cloud has a silver lining. Unfortunately the reverse is also true. We made our way from Bali to Scotland via an overnight stop in Budapest, Hungary – to which we returned afterwards – but, clearly in error, chose to do so via Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. These are the people who hold world ranking as specialists in losing people’s luggage.
One of our two cases managed to join us in Budapest. The other, at time of writing, was still AWOL. Fortunately none of the items on our Scottish schedule – which included a day in Edinburgh where the International Festival is in full swing and the book festival that runs with it was our primary interest – required anything like a full dress-up.
Edinburgh’s annual festival is a fixture on the global calendar. It is tempting to consider making it such in our own. This year, aside from a programme of classical music performances that make you weep with delight just from thinking about them, Ravi Shankar was performing. The book festival speaks for itself. And the concurrent Festival of Spirituality and Peace features two performance events it would have been good to see:

Tenchi Shinmei: The Ocean, by Ensemble Rivelta, Japanese masters of the Shakuhachi (bamboo vertical flute) and Koto (Japanese lyre), which presented melodies from ancient Japanese to modern Spanish tango. Tenchi Shinmei: The Mountain featured Tokara, one of the most versatile taiko drumming groups to emerge from the mountains of Nagano, which presented powerful and jazzy rhythms and was headed by Art Lee, the only non-Japanese ever to win Grand Champion at the Tokyo International Okaido Championships.
Still, back on the prosaic front, it would have been nice to have a change of shoes to hand, so to speak. Not to mention a wider selection of socks and underwear, or even a shirt. And we won’t even mention the matter of access to the minor compendium of medicines with which most modern post-middle-agers attempt to regulate, or at least to ward off, the ravages of time.

Shame to Miss It

Well, it is the Rock Bar, so it’s not surprising that music of that nowadays broad genre is frequently heard at that cliff-side location in Jimbaran along with the exquisite (and other) tweeting of the establishment’s well-heeled clientele.
Nonetheless, and despite the fact that your diarist was enjoying badly behaved music long before punks were born, let alone imagined that they had invented musical invective, the soft punk performances of Superman is Dead are a favourite.

It is therefore a pity that the only Indonesian band on American Billboard chose to have both its sixteenth birthday and a magical unplugged performance at the Rock Bar at Ayana in our absence. Their scheduled ticket-only gig was on August 18, the day after Independence Day.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser, published every fortnight, and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz.

HECTOR'S DIARY The Bali Advertiser (August 10, 2011)

2011-08-21T19:38:00.001+08:00

Life’s a Breeze in Ubud

We like to drop in on Ubud now and again – it’s such fun to be in a place where nearly everyone else seems to be dropping out – and we were there one weekend recently, staying at Bali Breezes, an establishment not previously experienced but, under the watchful eye of Pak Ketut helped out by Pak Nyoman and Ni Nyoman, is a delightful pension-style accommodation that offers stand-alone villas, some with swimming pools, at very reasonable rates. It was the first time we’d stayed at the Pengosetan end of town and we were pleasantly surprised to find Jl Pengosetan itself a resort for those seeking both retail therapy and comfortable digs.

    Among the nearby pleasures is the ARMA museum and gallery and of course ARMA Café, where the espresso is first class and – on a very cool and blowy afternoon – the potato soup is a must.
    Ubud was buzzing with tourists and (unfortunately) awash with huge buses that would block a German autobahn, never mind an Ubud street. Why such monsters are allowed anywhere near a narrow defile is one of the many mysteries of Balinese public policy.
    But never mind. The Hectormobile, a venerable Feroza who answers to the name Francesca, or informally Franny, manages to squeeze into – and through – many small spaces that alarm both visiting passengers and Mrs Hector. Having learned to drive in London and honed these skills with exposure to the delights of such European traffic-friendly megacities as Rome and Paris, Hector finds Bali’s traffic problems placed in a very reasonable perspective; we’d choose Simpang Siur over Trafalgar Square any time and tiny Ubud is a doddle compared with Barcelona on a busy day. Australians who intone “Sheeze!” at our traffic should remember that at home they have the privilege of driving conditions that if they only knew it are the envy of the world.

Oh, Yum!

We dined one Ubud night at Café des Artistes in Jl Bisma. It’s not to be missed, and not only because of its commodious off-street parking. The cheese and fruit platter from the dessert menu as an entree shared by three was a delight, especially since it included Bali’s own sharp little black grapes. The party then went on to delicious steaks (in two cases) and a spicy grilled chicken breast for the third diner. A half-litre carafe of house Shiraz helped out.

The restaurant was very busy and this was good, because it provided a fine field of view of the eclectic mix of patrons – locally based and visitors – and their habits. The art of surreptitious observation is a fine skill to acquire. It makes dining out, for example, such conversational fun.
This practice occasionally gets Hector into trouble; though never with those whose astonishing behaviour and manners becomes the subject of comment. Corrective imprecations are sometimes heard from Mrs Hector, but these are generally ignored. This leads to further trouble of course, but sport is, well, sport, and cannot be denied.

Monkey’s Uncle

There was an amusing little incident one lunchtime when Hector, who had elected to remain at home at Bali Breeze with his laptop computer rather than shuffle round the shops, arrived at the designated eating point ahead of the shopping party.

    Advising the attentive waitperson (a decorous and smiling young woman) at the Three Monkeys in Jl Monkey Forest – where else? – that he was joining two ladies for lunch and would look for them among the tables, she propelled him towards one nearby at which sat a delicious young lady and said: “This one?”
    She was Russian, possibly, so may not have understood the smiling “I’m so sorry” offered in apology by your embarrassed scribe. But perhaps the body language told the story.
    The shopping party arrived shortly thereafter, thankfully, meaning that Hector could cease pretending to commune with the Koi in the restaurant’s decorative fishpond and turn his full attention to the business of the moment.   Which turned out to be a nicely minted spinach ravioli.

Eat Up, Help Out

We’ll have to miss two not-to-be-missed events (being off-island is a reasonable excuse but it’s a shame) – a UNICEF fundraiser on August 13 at the Westin at Nusa Dua, of which the Bali Advertiser is a sponsor, and the ROLE dinner at the Ayana on August 11.

    Bali’s plush international hotels are seen by some at the “radical” end of the observer market as somehow being blots on the landscape. This is of course rubbish. They all run very good social and community development programmes (and employ many Balinese who mightn’t otherwise have jobs) and deserve public acknowledgement for this.
    The Westin event, Spirit of a Champion, features a performance of Wushu, Barongsai (the Chinese Lion Dance), Pencak Silat as well as Capoeira. It’s at the Nusa Indah Hall at the Bali International Convention Centre. An introduction class to Wushu will be available on the afternoon before the show.
     This event is in conjunction with the UNICEF Check Out for Children fundraising programme that the Westin and other Starwood hotels and resorts are supporting. Starwood has been working for 16 years to raise funds for the world’s most vulnerable children – Titin Rohayati at the Westin Nusa Dua tells us more than $7 million Australian (approaching US$8 million at today’s exchange rates) has been raised since the programme began.
    The money is garnered through a staff fundraising competition between Starwood Hotels in the Asia Pacific region which began in 2003. Last year Starwood staff in the Asia Pacific region raised more than US$132,000 in the UNICEF Check out for Children Challenge. Under the programme the money to date has been used to immunise thousands of children against the major childhood diseases: diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, polio, measles, childhood tuberculosis and hepatitis B.
    Now the programme is focusing on helping UNICEF education projects throughout the Asia Pacific. The impact of a child’s education is long-lasting because children of educated mothers are 50 percent more likely to survive beyond their fifth birthdays than those whose mothers didn’t get a chance to go to school. Money raised will help UNICEF build and improve school facilities; provide quality teacher training in impoverished areas and essential school supplies; help children return to schools after emergencies with “School-in-a-box” kits; provide teaching programmes for ethnic minority areas; and communicate awareness of gender and health issues in schools.
     Tickets for the show cost Rp50.000 and the introduction to Wushu class plus the show costs Rp75,000. They are available through the Westin (call 08113802975 or 0361 77 1906 ext 6420 or email destination.westinbali@westin.com.
     The Ayana event on August 11 is a charity dinner – it’s dubbed ROLE Models – that follows a 10-week hospitality training course in partnership with the ROLE Foundation undertaken by seven disadvantaged students who have no formal schooling and most of whom were illiterate before they joined ROLE's vocational training programme.
    They are now learning basic serving skills from AYANA's senior managers and trainers, with the aim of eventually securing long-term employment in the hotel industry. Their training includes setting tables, pouring drinks, serving meals, taking orders and clearing plates.
    At the August 11 event they will serve “real” guests for the first time, supported by AYANA's trainers. The menu at the Rp500,000 a head dinner sounds inviting: Muara fish salad with pickled roots sour sauce; Keluwak beef soup with ginger and chilli; grilled chicken with red curry sauce, vegetables and pandan rice; and crispy banana fritter with mungbean Javanese ice cream.
    All proceeds from the dinner go to the ROLE Foundation. Check out their website at www.rolefoundation.org.

Ah So

News that All Nippon Airlines (ANA) and AirAsia have signed up to a cooperative deal that next year will bring AirAsia Japan into regional skies is good to hear. The new airline proposes to fly both internally in Japan and to regional destinations and might, in the fullness of time, produce a lift in the number of Japanese travellers to our shores.

They’ve been scarcer of late than they should be, for all sorts of reasons, not all of them connected with the withdrawal of Japan Air Lines from the Bali route. But they’re fun, as well as well mannered, and they add a lot of value to the dining experience at Japanese restaurants here.

National Flag Day

We’ll miss Independence Day this year, which is a pity, because we like to be here for Indonesia’s official birthday and also to win the informal competition in our street to see who gets the flag up first. We’ve won two years running, with a bright and clean Merah Putih (it only comes out once a year) firmly tied to a nice straight bit of bamboo pole that resides for the period in a custom-made cradle, a length of grey PVC piping that was probably souvenired from somewhere by our handyman, known to us from his sterling performance on our behalf as Mr Maybe.

On August 17 we’ll be in Scotland where, in these devolved pre-Disunited Kingdom days, the fine white saltire of the St Andrew’s Cross is everywhere seen fluttering proudly on its field of dark blue.

Hector's Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser, out fortnightly, and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz

HECTOR'S DIARY The Bali Advertiser (July 27, 2011)

2011-08-04T16:05:00.000+08:00

Doing Without the Wicked Witch Bank

We hear from the organisers of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – it’s on October 5-9 this year – that everything’s going ahead even though Citibank is no longer the major cash sponsor. (It seems Citibank may have overspent on their own credit card; let’s hope they have a convincing repayment plan to put to their outsourced delinquent accounts collectors.) That’s good, as we’ve noted before. The litfest should be supported by everyone; it’s a really great idea.

    So, according to a statement UWRF put out recently, the 2011 bash will be better than ever, with even more Indonesian writer participation. Last year founder and chief eminence Janet DeNeefe announced with a flourish that Citibank was the festival’s three-year naming sponsor (apparently on the basis of an unsigned email from someone at the bank). This year she’s been banging on some fairly deaf doors as a result of Citibank’s little accident on the way to a collection.
    More than 110 writers from more than 20 countries are on the books for a starting place this year, on the theme Cultivate the Land Within. Confirmed authors include Alexander McCall Smith, Alice Sebold, Alberto Manquel, DBC Pierre, Junot Diaz, Paul Kelly, Tim Flannery, Alex Miller, Izzeldin Abuelaish, Andrea Hirata, Tariq Ali, Glen David Gold, Benjamin Law, Putu Wijaya, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Corinne Grant, Peta Mathias, the Cambodian Space Project – and the Diary’s personal favourite, Trinity the naked traveller.
     Programme director Melissa Delaney says the full list of writers will be announced in August. These and other details are available, or will be, on the festival website at www.ubudwritersfestival.com, and via Facebook and Twitter.
     DeNeefe says that despite Citibank’s withdrawal UWRF will present yet another world‐class dynamic event and that “overwhelming support from readers and writers alike” has given a huge surge of optimism to the festival team. That’s good. But it’s no substitute for a business plan you can actually bank on.

Spirited Effort

While on the subject of Ubud and festivals, make a note in your diaries: Next year’s BaliSpirit Festival — billed by the spirited Meghan Pappenheim and others as South East Asia’s premier

yoga, dance, and live music event – will be held from March 28-April 1.
    The five-day-and-night event, now entering its fifth year, offers more than 100 workshops, convenes dozens of top international yoga and dance instructors and world class musicians, and attracts several hundred guests from all over the world.
     Among those presenters scheduled to appear at the 2012 BaliSpirit Festival are renowned figures
in their fields such as Danny Paradise (Ashtanga Yoga and Shamanism); Vinn Marti (Soul Motion Dance); Mark Whitwell (Heart of Yoga); and Carlos Pomeda (Meditation/Tantra Yoga).
     “We offer something for everybody, and every year the festival atmosphere only gets better,” says Pappenheim, the festival’s co-founder and producer. “I believe it’s the magic and beauty of Bali that enhances the festival experience.”
     When we spoke to Pappenheim last week she was in Singapore – the Diary loves the New Serenissima: all the traffic stays in its clearly marked lanes and stops at red lights – where no doubt there are opportunities to promote the festival. She says the 2012 festival will feature Indonesian and Balinese culture and art; world music concerts and collaborations; workshops for many interests – and a new bamboo reforestation project among other programmes for the socially aware.

Happy Appointment

In yet another sign of the indelibly beneficial links between Indonesia and Australia, Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, has just appointed Indonesia’s ambassador in Canberra, Primo Alui Joelianto, as an honorary professor. The appointment recognises the ambassador’s personal commitment to Indonesia-Australia relations and support’s Murdoch’s mission in Indonesian studies, Bahasa Indonesia, and a strong research capacity.

Joelianto gave a lecture at the university on July 21 to mark his appointment. His topic was Indonesia’s Foreign Policy and Australia-Indonesia Bilateral Relations. He certainly brought some formidable intellect and knowledge to that task – before his Canberra appointment, in 2009, he was director general Asia Pacific and Africa in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was previously director of East Asia and Pacific Affairs.
Murdoch University’s professor of South East Asian studies, Professor David T Hill, heads the university’s Centre for Asian Studies and is on the board of the Australia-Indonesia Institute. Earlier this year the university hosted a workshop on the future of Indonesian studies in Australian universities.

It’s B(ad)

The Diary has a lovely young friend who lives in Jakarta and keeps us up to speed with events in the Big Durian that actually affect real people rather than just the elite. You know, the sort of stuff that generally fails to rate a mention from the politically rich and religiously powerful whose views are sought on a whole lot of things and which are reported ad nauseam. We met on Facebook and now commune regularly via instant message but – other than on webcam – have yet to meet face to face.

All of which is by the way, except that she recently travelled home to Lampung in Sumatra for her brother’s wedding and tried – as we had agreed – to make contact from there. Her first go was hardly a success. Her text said: “Service here is b”.
The full but regrettably truncated word was “bad” and the veracity of her report completely self-explanatory.

Alila Delight

Alila Villas Soori on the Tabanan coast, the plush boutique resort which benefits from the public relations skills of the delightful Devina Hindom, had a wine dinner on July 23 which it would have been lovely to attend. The Diary, however, is determinedly self-drive (we prefer to have our own accidents) and while a round trip might have been feasible with just OJ in the middle, it would be suicidal to attempt it accompanied by the inevitable results of exposure to real wine. So we didn’t go.

Should we come into a more than modest inheritance and have the sort of cash required, we might try it sometime, though. Chef Ashton Hall’s ingredient-driven cuisine, a prime al fresco dining ambience at Cotta restaurant, and a decorous real wine or three would really be rather nice.
Alila has another treat available. Its current artist in residence, Gregory Burns, has an exhibition of paintings at the resort until August 3 and is also offering classes for anyone who fancies adding gifted amateur to their CV.

Just a Thought

We’re in the middle of some enervating annual bureaucracy here at The Cage, a chore that sometimes detracts from enjoyment of the Bukit views and ocean seascape that are among the many delightful features of our des res. It so happened that this coincided with the unsought arrival in the in-box of some promotional puffery from a property developer in Malaysia.

    It was spruiking expatriate housing – apparently in Kuching, Sarawak, which would not be our primary choice as a place in which to while away a genteel retirement – but was interesting for its enumeration of the benefits of the MM2H programme run by the government of Malaysia. It stands for Malaysia My Second Home.
    Hey, those guys actually want expatriates to go to live there! You can buy freehold property in your own name. You automatically get multiple exit re-entry permits with your annual visa (and automatic permanent residence after five years). You don’t need a nominee. You can take your household goods and chattels with you free of import duty. And a quality global standard internet connection costs you about a third of what you pay here for a service that drops out at will and otherwise runs like a dead donkey.
    Still, it’s not Bali.

Europe Calls

By the time you’re reading the next Hector’s Diary we’ll be in Europe. We’re going to Scotland on family business (the clan’s got to get it together sometime) and then on to Budapest to check on the summer flow level in the Danube. (That is, as it relates to the by-product of the fermented grape juice available in the city’s many wine bars.)

But don’t be alarmed. We’re not doing a runner and we do know, unlike others lately scratched from our address book, that you have to be here to write about Bali. It’s not a permanent relocation. And we’ll be looking forward to getting home.

Holy Month

The Diary is blessed to have many Muslim friends. With Ramadan starting on August 1, we say to them all: Kul ’am wa enta bi-khair (May every year find you in good health).

The Diary appears in the Bali Advertiser in print and in the e-paper. Visit www.baliadvertiser.biz.id. Hector blogs here and is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Twitter (@Scratchings).

HECTOR’S SCRATCHINGS

2011-07-23T14:50:00.004+08:00

From the Scribe’s desk, for the week ending Saturday, July 23, 2011

A Shocking Event

If the indolent avian who is supposed to scratch together this weekly blog had been doing his job, and had done it yesterday when he was supposed to instead of idling away the hours on all sorts of other eruditions, we would not be leading the column with an item on the Norwegian outrage. But he didn’t, and so we are.

The events in Oslo and nearby on Friday prove yet again – tragically – that lone madmen, or small groups of the same homicidally dysfunctional people, are a great and potent danger to us all. This one, apparently a Norwegian, seemingly has links to the mad anti-immigration, anti-Muslim fringe of the Norwegian (and pan-European) far right. A so-called jihadist group elsewhere claimed responsibility for the bombing of central Oslo, but madmen of that provenance customarily claim to have done things they haven’t, in order to boost their visibility and to fool themselves that they are relevant rather than pointless.

It defies belief that anyone could perpetrate an outrage of the sort just visited on Oslo and the poor young people attending a political party youth camp on an island near the Norwegian capital, many of whom are now dead. The shame of it is that the perpetrator is not in the morgue or lying bloodied under a blanket in a paddock in the cruel pornography of violent death with which, via modern communications, we are these days constantly assailed. Instead, the man has been arrested and we shall now have to endure months – possibly years – of legal process and argument presented for and against him.

He has no argument he can reasonably advance in his own defence. There is nothing that can excuse, explain or justify homicidal mayhem. There is no social or political cause that justifies meting out vile, shocking, terrifying death to anyone, whether by terrorist bomb or by multiple gunshots. That is the only lesson we can try to draw from these events. It is a message those who advocate or perpetrate terrorist violence – everywhere, of every stripe and including in Indonesia – must learn if they wish to be regarded as members of the human race.

It is said that to meet their actions with a reaction in kind is to be descend to their level. Rubbish. It is they who have put themselves beyond the Pale. We are not a deadly threat to our communities; they are.

Be a Dhal, Dear

On to happier things: there’s an active and very useful Facebook-based group here in Bali that promotes “Bali Clean and Green,” which is the mantra adopted by Governor Made Mangku Pastika in his quest to clean up the island.

A lot of it concerns the plastic and other waste that overburdens Bali and, unlike banana leaves, won’t quietly and harmlessly biodegrade in the watercourses and the undergrowth, as in the old days. There is of course a raft of national laws that proscribes polluters, corporate and private citizen alike, and the practice of selfishly and illegally discarding pollutant products. These are not enforced because Indonesia – and Bali as part of it – is adept at passing laws and equally so at ignoring them afterwards. Acquiring the energy and interest to actually implement and enforce laws, and to stamp out the venal low-level corruption that prevents this, is the real imperative.

But life is always better when attended regularly by risibility. And so it is that we can advise – courtesy of our good friend Tricia Kim, jeweller of renown, party girl of fine repute and, like Hector, a member of the Facebook group – that we can all help save the planet by eating lentils instead of cows.

Apparently lentils selflessly die to feed us at far less an impact on global warming than beef cattle. So there you go – be a dhal and save the planet.

Wuffled Feathers

The Empire must be dead! This week the British Prime Minister, a chap who was educated at Eton and Oxford and who, despite the politically driven desire to be viewed as untoffy by the common man, could never manage the swallowed vowels or glottal stops now favoured by the Pommy herd, stood up in the House of Commons and pronounced furore (fuh-rorh) as few-roar-ray.

Still, poor David Cameron was under a bit of pressure, in the fallout from the Murdoch shambles and his astonishing decision when opposition leader to appoint former News of the World tabloid fixer Andy Coulson as his spokesman and to take him with him when he moved into No 10. The News of the World is now defunct, as it should be. Rupert Murdoch has been revealed to be an 80-year-old man (surprise!). A grubby newspaper and its grubby practices have created a political crisis.

Cameron is certainly at the centre of a furore. Political cupidity always – eventually – catches up with people. So it is no surprise that he has been discomfited. But few-roar-ray? Never!

Des Res Designs

Here at The Cage we are in the early stages of working up our next Des Res Acquisition Programme (DRAP). Well, we’ve been where we are for four years and we’re out of paperclips or something. Plus the present digs have a lot of steps. These are no problem at present but, with the passing of an unknown though implacably finite number of years to come, may be in the future. As well, apparently, we need one more room. The Distaff has explained why this particular specification is essential and Hector’s happy with this – anything for a quiet life. He’d settle for twin basins in the bathrooms, but he has always been accused of lacking domestic ambition.

As part of the extensive “pre-decision to proceed” process – everything’s so codified nowadays – we have commenced examination of stock on the market. We have all but ruled out building a new place, since neither of us is sure our blood vessels could stand the strain. Thus we are seeking something with a view, in a quiet area, with proper plumbing and reasonable construction, at an affordable price.

Early research indicates that the property we really need does not exist. Unless we're living in it. Just a thought. However, as with shoes in your size and preferred colour and design (“I really like these shoes. They’d be great in a different colour with smaller heels, an open toe and a thinner strap”) the search will go on.

Phase II of DRAP involves selling the existing des res – which really is desirable and, after much work on our part, also a residence – to someone who wants something with a view, in a quiet area, with proper plumbing and reasonable construction, at a price we will feel disposed to accept.

For Phase II we are staying out of the hands of realtors, some of whom seem only to be interested in stinging you for Rp2 million a month – OK, that’s only $227 Australian, but it’s still dosh down the gurgler – for “marketing” that may, or more likely may not, be visible.

Layer, Layer

Winter is upon us on the Bukit. Yes, we know this will surprise those of you who live in places where actual winter exists, or if in Australia, a pale facsimile of same, but our bit of Bali juts out into the Indian Ocean at the southern extremity of the island proper – we’re only joined by a mangrove sandbar for goodness sake – and in July and August the breezes can strike you as a tad on the cool side.

We were out for dinner last night – just locally, at our favourite little spot, Gorgonzola on Jalan Raya Uluwatu, a mere 10-minute fright away, where the pizzas are so good that they attract taste sensationalists from Seminyak – and we had to put on something under the something we were wearing to keep out the night chills.

It has nothing whatever to do with advancing years. Anyone who suggests it has will be sentenced to an indefinite term of helping us up our steps (see above).

Hector is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Twitter (@Scratchings). He writes a diary in the fortnightly Bali Advertiser www.baliadvertiser.biz and the lovely people at The Yak magazine link this blog to their online site http://theyakmag.com/

HECTOR’S SCRATCHINGS

2011-07-17T15:48:00.001+08:00

From the Scribe’s desk, for the week ending Saturday, July 16, 2011

A Rabid Enragement

It is widely known that we have rabies here in Bali. Even idiots who supply feedback to websites and who apparently think its rabbis we have here, and must in consequence be constantly on the look-out for seven-branched candelabras, would probably know that, if they thought about it. They just can’t spell, which would be a giggle were it not merely tedious.
   We’ve had the disease here – officially – since 2008 when officialdom officially woke from its customary torpor to discover several unexplained deaths of people in the southern Bukit area from symptoms that any properly instructed medical student – not to mention a vet – would instantly recognise. Unfortunately, as well as inevitably, the disease had by then become established in the island’s stray dog population. Upwards of 130 people are therefore dead when no one should be.
    It is a critical epidemiological emergency as well as a preventive health imperative. There are far too many malnourished and diseased stray dogs on the island and they are a pest. Their numbers must be controlled, wherever possible by humane means such as vaccination and sterilisation but if necessary by culling.
   This process is under way (or so they keep telling us) but in various places local authorities have been taking it upon themselves to cull the dog population, without official sanction. You can’t blame them, especially in the face of arguments from the Don’t be Nasty to the Nice Little Doggies Lobby that culling is bad and longer term veterinary management is better. No one wants a rabid dog in their street.
   But – and it is a very big but indeed, and uttered in incandescent rage – mass indiscriminate poisoning of beach dogs at Seminyak is beyond the Pale. It’s more moronic than anything else, given that promiscuous scattering of strychnine baits kills domestic pets – even some on leads we hear – and risks killing small children who might pick one up and put it in their mouth.
    Who is organising it – if we accept that “organising” and “Bali” are not mutually exclusive terms – is unclear, but it’s most likely the banjars, the community precincts that are the very heart and soul of Balinese society. Who is paying for this indiscriminate extermination campaign is similarly unclear – it certainly won’t be the banjars – but its location on the Lurex Coast, the emerging Wannabe strip north of the existing Plushopolis, points in a certain direction.
   Naturally enough, high tariff hotels and high price-low behaviour places of entertainment and other pastimes don’t want dirty, diseased and potentially rabid dogs on their doorsteps scaring away their beglittered trade. But there are better ways to achieve a desirable outcome than mandating murder.

An Interlude

We’ve had a busy week, doing this and that. We even ventured into Kuta one afternoon (a long way from the Bukit now you measure road distances here in time spent travelling) to see some lovely friends – and some lovely friends of friends – who were sensibly sojourning in Bali during Western Australia’s school holidays. We dined later at Un’s, off Poppies Lane I at the Jl Legian end, always a favourite spot and not just for its gnocchi gorgonzola.
It was a lively evening, spent in Hector’s case in engaging discussion about literature and politics. Such fare is not generally available, at least readily, in English, in Bali. And afterwards, having collected the clothes donation that came along with the visitors for distribution to various people desirous of same, the Bukit was much nearer Kuta than on the inward trip, which had taken place at pique hour.

Pay Up, Stay Up

The handy beach warungs (little cafés) at Balangan Beach on the Bukit, one of the few remaining places in the playground not yet cordoned off for the over-moneyed crowd, have been ordered to be torn down by Regent AA Gede Agung, who has put his Public Order squad (Satpol) on the job. The ramshackle little hostelries are unlicensed, you see ... and that means Regent Agung isn’t getting any money out of them.
    That’s fair enough. If there are rules and regulations and licensing arrangements (and notionally there are) then obviously they should pay their whack. But there’s a little matter of mutual benefit that is forever overlooked here. Regulations are applied in Bali to acquire money for the authorities. Precious little of it comes back, either in cash or in kind. And little beach warungs make scant profit anyway from the cool drinks and Bintang and sarong sales and massages that they offer to the budget crowd.
    It would be nice to get from Regent Agung (and all the other local government leaders) an actuarially sound accounting of where the revenue they scrounge actually goes, and what benefits flow back to the people.
   He might like to consider, too, how tearing down helpful and pleasant little budget tourist facilities, licensed or otherwise, benefits anyone other than Satpol heavies who fancy a themselves a chance for a morning of public ordering.

Bugger That

Here’s a little tale that demonstrates the delights of life in Bali. Residents of a village in Gianyar on the Sanur-Kusamba bypass (which is being given a dual carriageway with hefty Australian aid money) tore up the median strip and destroyed traffic signs the other day because the new arrangement meant they had to detour 200 metres up the road on their motorbikes to turn off to their local beach.
Apparently, despite being “socialised” about the issue – as the term puts it here: it means they had the matter explained to them and agreed to it – they had a little paddy and ran amok. Such is life. Perhaps they’ll actually be penalised for disturbing the peace and destroying public property. But don’t hold your breath.

Monkey Business

Monkeys are an integral part of Bali’s traditional life and culture. They feature in dance, drama and folklore as well as in real life, and as long as they don’t pinch your lunch, your camera, your wallet or your sunglasses, they’re fun to see in the wild and semi-wild too.
    But not at one village near Amlapura in Karangasem recently. They’ve taken a leaf from the liberation liturgy of the Gianyar bypass villagers (or maybe it’s the other way round) and gone on the rampage. Village chief Wayan Yasa told the local press simian raiding parties have destroyed agricultural land and private gardens in the area.
    “Everything’s been eaten: pineapples, bananas ... basically anything that can be eaten,” he said, adding that because of this the village would be seeking tax relief from the local authorities.
    Teams sent into the bush to locate and exterminate the monkeys – in a fine example of the live and let live culture of Bali – came back disappointed. Their clever quarry made monkeys of the lot of them.

Chill Dinner

We saw some other friends one night this week at Gorgonzola, the Bukit Jimbaran bistro and wine bar where host Gibson Saraji lays on live music, tempts plenty of palates, and the beer is always cold. Our dinner friends that night are in Bali regularly, from Perth, and have a little house here that is their regular tropical holiday escape, especially from Perth’s rather chill and damp winters.
It was nice to see them and we had a good chat. The evening was dry-season cool on the Bukit and the atmosphere was chill (it was not quite glacial) for a while. They arrived later than usual because the distaff part of the friendly couple is a West Coast Eagles fan and she had been watching the match on Australia Network TV.
The Eagles had just been soundly beaten by St Kilda. Hector is a St Kilda fan.

Hector is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Twitter (@Scratchings). He writes a diary in the fortnightly Bali Advertiser www.baliadvertiser.biz and the lovely people at The Yak magazine link this blog to their online site http://theyakmag.com/

HECTOR’S DIARY For the Bali Advertiser, July 13, 2011

2011-07-14T08:35:00.000+08:00

The Gripes of Roth and Better Fiction

We had a good laugh recently when that loud and verbose bore Philip Roth, the self-proclaimed king of American social critique, announced he had given up fiction as irrelevant. Many people we know gave up Roth years ago, citing much the same reason. But not your diarist, who believes the three best rules of life are read, read, read. Besides, it’s difficult to argue that someone’s writing is mind-blowing rubbish if you haven’t bored yourself rigid reading the stuff first – and we do like an argument.

    But never mind. The mewling of people uncertain about their place in the world is better left for history – in this case the history of literature – to adjudicate. For most of us, more practical and immediate matters are of greater concern.
    So, absence of Citybank cash notwithstanding – you’ll remember they had that little local difficulty over a defaulting credit card customer and one of the collateral damages of that little exercise in total idiocy was their three-year sponsorship of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – the festival crowd up at Ubud are putting together a great programme.
    The Diary is particularly keen to meet the naked traveller, Trinity, who will be presenting a travel blogging workshop at the festival. We assume her tips will include advice to make sure you pack some clothes if you’re going off travel-blogging.
    Trinity is Indonesia's leading travel writer. In 2005, she started a travel blog at naked-traveler.com and in less than two years the blog was nominated as finalist in Indonesia's Best Blog Award. This led her to switch her corporate career to become full-time traveller and freelance travel writer.
    Her debut book The Naked Traveler (these American spellings are a nuisance but that's how she spells it) was a compilation of stories from her adventures around the world. The book inspired many Indonesians, especially young people, to travel. And that can only be good.
    The Naked Traveler has now been published in its third sequel and the book is Indonesia's best-selling travel book to date.
    UWRF’s Facebook is a good one to keep an eye on, by the way.

Strategic Glitch

A little while ago some friends we haven’t seen for years dropped us an e-line to say they were coming to Bali. They didn’t make it (they’ll try again later) because they were flying (well, meant to be flying) Brisbane-Bali with Strategic Airlines and its only available bus was stuck on the ground in Malaysia with a broken bit awaiting a replacement from somewhere or other.

    These things happen, and when you’re a small player like Strategic having one aircraft off line has a dramatic impact on your core business. You know what we mean: the bit in the business plan that says your business is all about flying fare-paying passengers on schedule and with minimal disruption.
    So we asked Strategic’s new corporate communicator, Heather Jeffrey, a refugee from Virgin Australia (and previously Air New Zealand), for an explanation of the service failure and specifically what the airline was doing for passengers stranded in Bali at the end of their holidays. Apart from anything else, it presented an opportunity for the airline to score a brownie point or two with a friendly reference to their great concern for the travelling public.
    Sadly, nothing was heard back from Ms Jeffrey, who must have decided that indiscretion is the better part of valour. It’s a strange way to run a PR operation – and an airline, if you’re trying to drum up business, which Strategic is desperate to do.

Cliff-Top Sensation

We dropped in at Ayana Resort & Spa on Sunday, June 26, for the post-Bali Triathlon party, as the guests of Ayana spruiker and triathlon participant Marian Hinchliffe. She was looking remarkably spry for someone who had spent the day doing all sorts of things we’d never dream of – running, you know, and riding bikes and taking long swims – and we had a good chat. Which was very nice.

Jack Daniels, whose Bali Discovery Tours had a hand in the event, this year sponsored in chief by local internet provider Biznet, was his usual ebullient self, and by all accounts – his included – the whole thing was a great success. That’s good to hear because Bali needs as wide a range of attractions as possible.

It’s a Breeze

Some other long-time friends from Australia were here recently, staying – as they generally do – at The Samaya at Seminyak. We dined with them one night, catered from Breezes, the plush resort’s signature beachside restaurant. But we dined in their villa, a pleasant ambience though on the other side of the road because the rest of Samaya has been demolished for extensive resurrection.

    The night started well. Our hostess – who may have been suffering shock, we heard a little later, since she had thought an earlier ring on the villa gate was her dear family returning from an outing but on opening the gate in a state of considerable dishabille found to her horror it was a work crew coming to fix something – offered us a beer and promptly (and spectacularly) dropped the bottle. A sprayful of large Bintang goes a long way.
    Things got rapidly better after that, though. So much better that the Distaff managed to leave her glasses, an apparently vital hair comb and certain other sundries concealed behind the cushion on the long couch upon which she had spent the evening wining, dining and gabbling.
    It was a difficult two days before we were able to retrieve the items. Life took on an altogether different and fierce aspect. They were her rose-coloured glasses, you see.

Smile, Please

One of Bali’s most deserving charity causes is epitomised in the Smile Foundation (Yayasan Senyum) whose leading light, Mary Northmore-Aziz, has just deservedly been in London to receive an MBE from the Queen.

    Smiles are worth paying for, the more so when they are smiles on the faces of children born with deformities that can be corrected by intricate and expensive cranio-facial surgery. So Adelaide (and Bali) identity Sally Black – with her son – are in the process of organising the Arafura Miles for Smiles. Sally and Arie – who is 14 – will bike it from Bali to West Timor to raise money for the charity.
    They are in Darwin at present – shame they had to be there in the tropical city’s coldest June on record, a function of global warming no doubt, but there you go – arranging necessary logistics. They have to get their motorbike from Kupang to Darwin at the end of their ride, for one thing, and are looking for a sponsor to fund this operation.
    Air North, which used to fly Darwin-Bali and may do so again, was on their list of possible sponsors to approach. It would be great if that came off.
    The Diary will follow the Ride for Smiles (well, figuratively speaking). So watch this space. And if you’re on Facebook (isn’t everyone?) check out theirs (Arafura Miles for Smiles). These two websites are worth a visit too: http://www.senyumbali.org and http://www.craniofacial.com.au.

Silly Chump

Those who observe the Australian scene may have noticed that the miners there are up in arms over the government’s plans to introduce a carbon tax (in the odd belief that this will avert or at least ameliorate global warming). It’s probably a silly idea: it would far better to use the tax system to properly subsidise developments in and usage of renewable energy. But it’s not a killer blow to magnates domestic or foreign who earn their overly-thick crusts from ripping out the country’s minerals, including the coal now being demonised by the Greens for political purposes.

    So it was strange that Twiggy Forrest, a West Australian magnate, should foolishly raise recently the spectre of secession. The West Australians voted to secede in 1933, in a referendum, but it did not proceed then – and wouldn’t now – because, well, it was (and is) a ridiculous idea.
    WA makes a living out of complaining that Canberra takes all its money and doesn’t give enough back. It’s a familiar refrain in any federation and has its own small echoes here in Bali over much tinier revenue flows from visas on arrival.
    Most West Australians, properly informed, would understand that if WA was suddenly independent it might keep all its resource revenue but it would have to pay the full whack for education, health, infrastructure and social welfare – not to mention defence and security and all the other impedimenta that come along with independent nationhood.

The Bali Advertiser is online at www.baliadvertiser.biz. Hector is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Twitter (@ Scratchings)

HECTOR’S SCRATCHINGS

2011-07-10T19:41:00.000+08:00

From the Scribe’s desk, for the week ended Saturday, July 9, 2011

It’s All Go Around Here

It’s been a strange sort of week at The Cage; and in the novelty of our first dry season in two years a little chilly overnight at that. Still, the frangipanis are out again and the twice-daily walk programme is well entrenched. So everything’s more or less as the forest nymphs would like it, excusing a walk cancelled by a rude shower of rain or an access of incohol the night before. On that last point, we are currently engaged in an innovative programme aimed at assessing whether the makers of Aga Red can keep up their supply to match demand. We think we have them worried.

    Meanwhile the two chaps with the little hammer seem to have returned for further tapping experience at the monster villa next door that has now been “under renovation” for about three years and was, we hear, recently sold by its Jakarta owners to some poor mug from Singapore who is in consequence the new employer of the little chaps with the hammer. We suspect leaks, which may be connected with improper sealing (or ceilings) or possibly with the inability of water – even, amazingly, in Indonesia – to run uphill.
    Two canine occasions enlivened recent late afternoon walks, in the short gloaming that you get in the tropics. First Mr Grumpy – we don’t know his name but he’s an old dog no longer at his best (we know how he feels) – barked at us when we appeared from the top of the little gang (alley) from which we always emerge after the hill climb we’ve built into our fitness regime. He long ago gave up barking at us, since we embarrassed him into silence by ignoring his threats to rip us apart and then being nice to him. He only barked twice (and ran towards us) before he recognised that he’d been an absolute mutt. An elderly proto-wolf looking foolish is a sight worth seeing.
    Then, another evening, Cleo, who is a very large brown dog of some variety who has similarly (unless she forgets) given up barking at us, was outside her villa eating grass along the roadside. She is a very big dog and the local cows are very small. It was momentarily confusing. Then it became amusing, because – like Mr Grumpy up the hill – Cleo looks hilarious when she’s severely embarrassed.

Birthday Week

Two of Hector’s favourite local luminaries from the distaff side had birthdays this week – serial campaigner Susi Johnston and Ubud scribble-fiesta doyenne Janet DeNeefe. Facebook’s birthday facility was called into play on each occasion.

Susi’s Facebook said she was living in Brussels – she wasn’t and doesn’t, she was just visiting – so we said cheerio and have a waffle, she was allowed. She told us by return that she was definitely allowed but by that time was in Milano so she’d have a giant gelato instead. Good call!
Janet’s big day was on Saturday. We expect it was a decorative affray.

Here be Dragons

Well, not exactly, except for a few in breeding programmes in local zoos. Bali is not the natural habitat of the famed Komodo dragon, the world’s largest monitor lizard. They hail from Komodo Island, neighbouring Rinca and – in slightly diminished stature – the western end of Flores, which is several hundred lizard-swims east of Bali.

    We do have our own large monitor lizards on Bali, some of them of impressive size and astonishing speed – one we met once raced us up a long driveway and won, and we were in a car – and to these we apply our Standard Reptilian Rule: you stay out of our way and we’ll stay out of yours.
    Nonetheless, the Komodo deserves protection as a small and unique part of Earth’s natural heritage and for this reason we can afford to give a cheer to a concert in their honour to be held on Kuta Beach on July 30
    The concert is an important part of the “Komodo: The Real Wonder of the World” campaign that was launched in Jakarta on July 1. The campaign is aimed to raise global public awareness and participation in the conservation and preservation of the Komodo dragon and its natural habitat.
    The Concert for Komodo will be highlighted by East Nusa Tenggara ethnic music and will feature some of Indonesia’s most well-known musicians, including Dwiki Dharmawan, Dira Sugandi, Mercy Dumais, Sandhy Sondoro, and others, who are part of the Friends of Komodo community.
    So let’s hear it for the Komodo.

What a Shemozzle

The strange (and strangely disturbing) case of Prita Mulyasari, a 34-year-old mother of three from Tangerang, part of the sprawl of Greater Jakarta, who in 2008 wrote some unfavourable emails about the Omni International Hospital there and has been vindictively pursued by that self-evidently less than august facility ever since, had another outing this week.

    In a decision that defies even the tortured logic of Indonesian justice, the Supreme Court upheld a prosecution appeal against her acquittal in a separate but related trial for criminal libel brought after Omni’s initial civil suit was quashed by the same court.
    Initially she was thrown into jail in 2008 after Omni sued for defamation over 20 emails she had sent to friends criticising the hospital’s service. That’s the way here: in a crisis, brain is chiefly used to round up and direct brawn to batter your opponent (sometimes literally). But she won the case.
    After first being ordered to pay Omni Rp 312 million (around US$39,000 at present exchange rates) she won a cut on appeal to Rp 204 million ($25,500) and then the verdict was finally quashed.
    At the same time, however, Prita was tried in a criminal libel case brought by Omni. This time, the Tangerang court threw out prosecutors’ preliminary arguments and later acquitted her at trial. But prosecutors appealed this ruling and it was this appeal that the Supreme Court upheld on Friday.
    Throughout this ridiculous travesty Omni has failed to learn the lessons it needed to learn: make sure your services actually are user friendly, which means not necessarily believing your own bullshit; and if a problem nonetheless arises, manage that through a sensible corporate public relations and mediation process.
    If you don’t do that, the whole world learns that you’ve been a bit of dill, or worse. And anyway, whatever the merits or demerits involved in a corporate shemozzle, some mud always sticks.

Yak On!

We’re chuffed. Hector has been invited to join the list of Bali Blogs promoted on the great Yak Online site, where readers of Bali’s best magazine can now get an instant update on matters Yak. Do yourself a favour and bookmark www.theyakmag.com.

That way, you won’t miss any of the bubbles Bali produces for the party crowd – or the great reading the print magazine and its feisty stable mate The Bud present for readers.

Hector is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Twitter (@ Scratchings). He also writes Hector’s Diary for the fortnightly Bali Advertiser.

HECTOR'S DIARY Bali Advertiser, June 29, 2011

2011-07-01T08:54:00.000+08:00

New Refuge is Just the Cat’s Whiskers

Bali’s dogs have a bad name, for all sorts of reasons, not least the woefully mismanaged rabies outbreak which since 2008 has killed upwards of 120 people. But that’s unfair. The dogs are not to blame. It is the studied indifference that the Balinese affect in matters of animal welfare, and their still widespread refusal to accept responsibility for animals in their care, that lies at the root of the dog dilemma.

    It’s much the same with cats. They are less obviously a problem, being essentially solitary animals, but Bali’s stray felines lead sad and sorry lives. So it is cheering to hear that a new refuge is providing professional veterinary care for strays or otherwise unwanted cats lucky enough to get a berth at Villa Kitty Bali, at Lodtundah near Ubud.
    It was the idea of Elizabeth Grant Suttie (some may know her as Henzell) who in her other life is executive assistant to Janet DeNeefe, the fragrant rice activist who feeds and houses paying guests in Ubud and is the luminous presence behind the annual writers and readers festival.
    Villa Kitty Bali has four veterinarians and four veterinary nurses on staff, plus support personnel. It began life as the cat section at BAWA – the Bali Animal Welfare Association – but moved to its own purpose-built accommodation this year, with the help of substantial private donations.
    Many of the cats at the refuge are adopted by caring Balinese families.
    Villa Kitty Bali is in the process of registering as a charity. When this is complete, Yayasan Kucing Bali - Bali Cat Foundation will be able to receive donations officially. In the meantime, Villa Kitty Bali, which opened on March 17, is on Facebook and welcomes visitors. We gather proprietary cat food for kittens is in great demand so if anyone has friends coming from overseas who could bring in a tin or two that would be very welcome.
    Hector is planning a visit. Possibly with kitty food.

Days of the Triffids

The walking programme – jalan jalan olah raga, “sport walking”, around here – is well on track, so to speak, and aimed at achieving a level of fitness in Diary and Distaff that might make survival of cliff tracks in Scotland and treks to wine bars in Budapest – both these excursions are scheduled for August – less of an unlikely outcome than might otherwise have been the case.

    We go twice daily, most days: an early morning trot around the ridges of beautiful Banjar Bakung Sari at Ungasan to see which of the local dogs are awake and a late afternoon reprise to check whether they still are. Most have revived from their afternoon siestas by then, it seems. Mercifully, though, most now also seem inured to the fact that two of the local Bules choose to walk rather than drive, and no longer set up a furious round of serial barking on our approach. Our method of movement is certainly a novelty to most of the locals, the beneficiaries of price controlled petrol at Rp 4,500 a litre, who invariably fire up their scooters to travel anything over 50 metres rather than saddling up Shanks’s pony.
    Lately, however, some of the scenery has been moving as well. It’s cut-and-cart time at the moment and we’re fortunate perhaps that, now equipped with electronic readers – Kindles – we haven’t yet acquired electronic copies of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids with which to alarm ourselves.
    Cutting and carting hereabouts, where the leafy product of particular trees and shrubs is concerned, is done by the simple process of pruning the selected plant and placing the collected result upon one’s back, and then trotting home with it.
    This means that on your daily perambulations you’re apt to see, disquietingly, what appear to be small trees or big bushes crashing noisily out of the scrub along the track, or heading menacingly up the road towards you.

Top Gere

Tourists visiting Borobudur in Java towards the end of June may have been fortunate enough to see the sights without running into Hollywood actor Richard Gere and having the stunning vista blocked or interrupted by the obsequious mayhem that surrounds celebrity these days. Gere and Family – wife Carey Lowell and son Home James Jigme – were special guests at a performance of the Borobudur Masterpiece Ballet at the 8th century temple on June 27 and while in the environs on that and the two previous days took part in a sunrise peace walk and tree planting and enjoyed an elephant ride through Medut temple and Borobudur village. Elements of the affray were televised nationally.

     Gere, who is chiefly memorable for playing goofball opposite pretty women, also met national culture and tourism minister Jero Wacik and dined with Sultan Hamengku Buwono X at the Yogyakarta Royal Palace
     We’re pleased to note that despite all these excuses for taking executive action, the authorities did their best for ordinary mortals. Borobudur remained opened to the public.
     Gere, who as well as being a Celebrity is also a Buddhist Celebrity, apparently, whatever that functional oxymoron is, then brought the family on to Bali for a holiday. We don’t know where; or care. But we hope it was a pleasant stay for them.

Top Nosh

Top nosher: Ewald Jeske

We imagine it wasn’t the Westin Resort and Spa at Nusa Dua that the Geres got into after disturbing the peace in Borobudur, which might have been a mistake on their part since the property has just acquired the services of an excellent new executive chef. For this intelligence we are indebted to general manager Bipan Kapur, who via Titin Rohayati, who spruiks for the establishment, sent us a lovely email about the arrival of Ewald Jeske, pictured here, in that important office.

Jeske comes to Bali from the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia, a Starwood property in which your diarist has actually stayed, though long before Jeske’s time we imagine. Jeske is a master chef graduate of the Hotel School Heidelberg in Germany and promises guests creative cuisine that simultaneously tempts the palate and promotes healthy living.
We might have to check that out soon. The sea breeze at Nusa Dua at this time of the year can help work up a healthy appetite.

Lock it In

This year’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival is getting down to brass tacks. Everything’s coming together nicely, we hear from programme director Melissa Delaney, and there will be plenty of international talent on show for the October 5-9 event, the eighth.

    One great attraction for old rockers like Hector is Paul Kelly, the Australian singer-songwriter and out-of-the-closet anarchist. Not to be missed.
    Authors already in the line-up include American novelist Alice Sebold and Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre. This year’s theme – it’s the eighth UWRF – is Nandurin Karang Awak, Cultivate the Land Within, the heart of the epic poem Gaguritan Salampah Laku by Ida Pedanda Made Sideman.
    Says festival founder and director Janet DeNeefe, just back from a gig at the Makassar writers’ festival: “Developing the self is in many ways similar to cultivating rice fields: sowing the seeds of truths, cropping the stems of desires, and carefully reaping a bountiful harvest for the finest grain. This is a fundamental philosophical concept in the spiritual landscape of Bali.”
    The full author list is scheduled for announcement in early July. It will include writers from Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Russia, Denmark, Italy, France, Palestine, Hong Kong, Columbia, Japan, Samoa, Germany, Malta, Cuba, the United Kingdom, Egypt, India, Africa, Tunisia, New Zealand and Pakistan.

You can read the Bali Advertiser online at www.baliadvertiser.biz

HECTOR’S SCRATCHINGS

2011-06-25T13:33:00.000+08:00

From the Scribe's desk, for the week ending Saturday, June 25, 2011

Just So Sarky

When you’re not having a sybaritic six-hand massage within sight and sound of the waves at Bingin beach – which is what one of our favourite Jimbaran resort flacks reported on her Facebook one weekend recently that she had been doing – or slaving over a hot computer, and if there’s nothing on television (there never is) then reading is the way to go.

    The Diary has just reacquired several of Saki’s little tales and placed them in the Kindle . It’s great to have him back in the library. We grew up on Saki, whose outré and often macabre satires demolishing the idiocies and faux grandeur of the Edwardian age were (and are) deliciously consumable. Some unkind souls have remarked in the past that this is probably why we’re so sarky ourselves.
    The other day, in an idyll moment, we delved into his little tale entitled Reginald in Russia. It has always been a favourite for its first paragraph:
    “Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess’s salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.”
    Another favourite is The Open Window, for its delectable last line: “Romance at short notice was her speciality.” The full horror of another Saki tale, Esmé, makes it perhaps the best of them all.
    In the very late 1950s and early 1960s, when the adolescent Hector found his eponymous muse Hector Hugh Munro, one read him with a delicious sense of rebellion. It was never a misguided quest for the past – a different (and unreachable) country in those days, just as it is these, and will always be – but for the elegance of simple English developing complex themes with an arch wit and eclectic knowledge of many things: of antique furniture; of Greek mythology; of social mores; and so much more.
    Munro, journalist, author and playwright, was born in Burma on December 18, 1870, the son of a British officer in the Indian imperial police, and died in the impromptu (and as it turned out inadequate) shelter of a shell hole at Beaumont-Hamel on the Western Front on November 16, 1916, the victim of a German sniper. It is said, according to several sources, that his last words – directed at an incautious defaulter among the squad of men he was leading – had been “Put that damned cigarette out.”
    Munro enlisted as an infantry soldier in the Royal Fusiliers in 1914 on the outbreak of World War I, over age at 43, refusing a commission because, he said, he shouldn’t lead soldiers if he had not experienced their privations. By 1916 he was a lance-serjeant (corporal). He several times returned to his unit on the battlefield when sick or otherwise medically unfit for duty. He was homosexual.

Busy Schedule

This has been quite a week. We’ve been back into Denpasar – an unremitting joy on every occasion – and had a round of significant visitors. Tonight we dine en famille at The Cage with our good friends Nyoman and Made and their children Jordan and Cynthia. Nyoman is the Banjar (local community) chief in his precinct in Nusa Dua and a businessman of local repute. We’ve known them for years and they’re great fun. He also very kindly pays our mobile phone bills whenever we are absent from Bali at paying time, something that must be done at an ATM (see below).

Tomorrow we go to the Rock Bar at the Ayana Resort and Spa for the after-triathlon party. We can run that course, but not the one that precedes it.
Never let it be said that life in Bali is in any way dull.

It’s a Buzz

Speaking of life never being dull, and mobile phones, a further trip into Denpasar appears to be in the offing. The ATM of our deficient bank (it’s BCA) that we customarily use to make online payments – you cannot pay your mobile phone bills over the internet, at least not with BCA, which may soon be sacked in favour of a branch of the global banking industry that actually offers functional banking services – has been unable to issue receipts for several days. It must have run out of paper and no one’s thought to put a new roll in the silly thing. And of course without paper it (reasonably) won’t process transactions that require proof of payment receipts. Sod and his Law are alive and well.

    So today, on the day before final payment date and while on a mission elsewhere, we dropped into another ATM point. The much feared message “your transaction could not be processed” flashed up on the screen. This is Telkomsel code for “you didn’t pay in time and now we’re going to make your life a misery.”
    Unless a new and largish office brightly emblazoned with the Telkomsel corporate logo that we’ve seen somewhere on the by-pass – we can’t remember if it’s towards Nusa Dua or towards Kuta – takes money, and it may or may not, Francesca will be taking us for another three-hour round trip into the very middle of the Pusat Kota (CBD) on Monday. This time for an enervating round of How to Pay Your Phone Account and insisting that they verify that your global roaming facility has not been cancelled because of delinquency.
    This involves taking a number and sitting and waiting – a long time – to see which of the otherwise comely customer service operatives makes a face when she sees her next customer is one of those dreadful Bules who are such a nuisance because you either have to try to speak English to them, or speak v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y in Indonesian.
    Such fun.

Winter Bites

Yes, yes. We know these things are relative. But today’s minimum (outside) at The Cage, here on the uplands of the Bukit, was probably just below 20C (68F). And when you live most of your year in the complaisant comfort of a temperature range of 24-30C (75-86F) you’re entitled to feel a little chilly, especially if you suspect an unconscionable 1 might have briefly prefixed your double-digit minimum.

Still, mustn’t complain. We’ve been bleating for 18 months about how it never stops raining, and now it has and – no surprise – the “cool” dry season has arrived. It is the time of year when the doona (or duvet) really earns its keep.
Our hearts were gladdened, however, later in the morning, when the mercury had climbed to a far more acceptable 25C (77F) and we got a plaintive little Skype message from an old friend marooned by caravan brake failure in Clermont (it’s in wintry inland Queensland). He told us it had been 1C (34F) there that early morning. Choice!

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HECTOR'S SCRATCHINGS

2011-06-17T10:21:00.000+08:00

From the Scribe's Desk, for the week of June 17, 2011

Walk Quickly and Ignore the Triffids

The walking programme – jalan jalan olah raga, “sport walking”, around here – is well on track, so to speak, and aimed at achieving a level of fitness in Diary and Distaff that might make survival of cliff tracks in Scotland and wine bar tours in Budapest – both these excursions are scheduled for August – less of an unlikely outcome than might otherwise have been the case.

    We go twice daily, most days: an early morning trot around the ridges of beautiful Banjar Bakung Sari at Ungasan to see which of the local dogs are awake and a late afternoon reprise to check whether they still are. Most of them are. Mercifully, though, most of them now seem inured to the astonishing fact that two of the local Bules actually walk rather than drive, and no longer set up a furious round of serial barking on our approach. Our method of movement is certainly novel since the locals, the beneficiaries of price controlled petrol at Rp 4,500 (about 50 Australian cents) a litre, invariably fire up their scooters to travel anything over 50 metres rather than saddling up Shanks’s pony.
    Lately, however, some of the scenery has been moving as well. It’s cut-and-cart time at the moment and we’re fortunate perhaps that, now equipped with Kindles, we haven’t yet acquired electronic copies of John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids with which to alarm ourselves.
    Cutting and carting hereabouts, where the leafy product of particular trees and shrubs is concerned, is done by the simple process of pruning the selected plant and placing the collected result upon one’s back, and then trotting home with it.
    This means you frequently see what are apparently small trees or big bushes crashing noisily out of the scrub along the track, or heading menacingly up the road towards you.

A Kindler, Gentler World

We mentioned Kindles, those handy little gizmos from Amazon that mean your library can now travel with you rather than being ignored at home and thereby providing a capacious des res for bookworms of another sort.

    The Diary’s new library is building quite rapidly, with the acquisition of a number of volumes previously held in physical form that went out with the rubbish when we shifted from Australia to Bali six years ago and which have been grievously missed ever since (Distaff to note).
    It’s very early days yet of course, but Hector's Kindle already contains Plato’s Republic, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Thoreau’s Walden, a stout compendium of American short humorous stories, and several other musts in any decent library, electronic or not.
    The Kindles have an additional benefit hereabouts. Ours have leather covers with built-in pop-up reading lamps. So now, if the local monopoly powerless utility unplugs the district, which it does with depressingly frequent irregularity, we can just carry on reading. It’s better for the soul (and the blood pressure) than foul fulminating; although the latter is certainly cathartic, as well as fun.

Oh Not Again...

Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid driving into Denpasar, Bali’s Ibu Kota (Mother, or capital, City). Or if you must, to do so only rarely. This week, however, we’ve had to do it twice, and on consecutive days. The reason doesn’t matter: suffice to say it was essential.
    The streets of Denpasar are not very good at coping with traffic, especially when it’s at extra high volume and police are “controlling” several key intersections because there’s a big arts and cultural festival on and the fringe programme apparently includes continuous performances of Let’s Create Total Chaos.
    We mention this only as an aide memoire to any who might have to venture therein, with or without a driver whose despicably low stipend is apparently supposed to fund his chronic ulcer problems as well as feed the family. Hector prefers to self-drive for this and other reasons.
    There are no road rules in Indonesia. You’re bigger than anything around you? Push through. Your plutocratic derriere is smugly sunk in the comfy velour of your black-windowed and über-smooth limousine? Apply divine right. You’re in a hurry? Gum up the works by burning the rubber off your tyres in a nifty series of jump starts and screeching halts. You’re on a motorbike (most people are)? That 20cm space between the truck in front and the car behind whose driver is still inching forward is just made for you. You want to get ahead of the crowd? Get in the trickle left lane and then at the last moment barge into the traffic that’s trying to go straight ahead but can’t because of selfish idiots like you. You’re a traffic cop? Blow your whistle and gesticulate like an Italian TV newsreader. It doesn’t help, but it’s fun.

Non-Absent Friends

This weekend, if all goes to plan, we shall enjoy a pleasant reunion in Sanur with a former colleague not sighted for far too many years. She’s in Bali on holiday (so is most of the world it seems) and we have several beers worth of catch-up yakking to do, on many matters of mutual interest, including the state of the Australian media.

One of the great benefits of living in Bali is that, eventually, everyone you want to see comes here. At The Cage we’re heading into prime VFR (visiting friends and relatives) season with a full book, basically, right up until August when we trip off to return the favour in very distant parts indeed.

HECTOR'S DIARY (Bali Advertiser, June 15, 2011)

2011-06-16T17:47:00.000+08:00

A New Bloom

in Ubud’s

Art Garden

Australian QC and long-term Bali resident Colin McDonald had a big day at the end of May when his Made Budhiana and Donald Friend galleries opened in the grounds of Villa Pandan Harum, his hideaway pad at Abiansel just south of Ubud.

    McDonald, who is a member of both the Victorian and Northern Territory bars, maintains a house in Darwin – guess if you can’t be permanently in Bali Darwin’s a reasonable climatic substitute and it is only just over two hours away by air – as well as his Ubud residence,
    His opening, on May 28, brought together an eclectic gathering for a grand opening of his novel galleries that torrential rain the previous night did nothing to spoil. Veteran Australian diplomat and friend of Indonesia Dick Woolcott did the honours as opener-in-chief. McDonald said a few words, welcoming those “whose generosity of spirit and love of art and Indonesia has brought them to this opening” and noting – with justified pride – that the event realised a long-held dream.
    As well as the two galleries, housed in a building on the villa block but separate from the main residence, McDonald has provided an apartment for artists in residence. Bali inspires much art and the Ubud area, where the ancient traditions of the island and the imported collective consciousness of the world’s artistic community combine to greatest effect, is certainly an environment that is conducive to reflection and the exercise of great skill.
    The Donald Friend gallery includes Friend’s last painting: truly a collector’s item. The work of Made Budhiana that is on display reflects the power the artist brings to depiction of Bali in the artistic form that has long captured the attention of art lovers around the globe.
    McDonald’s connection with Bali goes back many years and mirrors the increasingly close interest of the Northern Territory and its capital city Darwin in events and issues here, pointed up most recently by the proposal – now being worked through and also involving McDonald’s strong advocacy – to twin Sanglah General Hospital in Denpasar with Royal Darwin.
    McDonald was also involved in the defence case for Bali Nine member Scott Rush, now finally (and thankfully) spared the death penalty.
   The Diary on its visit to Villa Pandan Harum on gallery opening weekend also had the pleasure of chatting with Australian artist Geoff Todd, some of whose works are in McDonald’s private collection. These are striking and occasionally confronting paintings that one would wish were in one’s own collection.

Youth Speaks

It’s really cheering to hear from 2011 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival program director Melissa Delaney that the inaugural Bali Emerging Writers Festival (BEWF) in Denpasar was a great success. This is sort of extension service for which friends of UWRF have been waiting anxiously to see eventuate.

    BEWF was held from 27-29 May and was designed to promote and support the essential literary voices of tomorrow. Over the three days the festival presented a range of workshops for young people, panel discussions, performances, slam poetry and a celebration night on Saturday, 28 May featuring performances by local bands including Morelia, Nymphea, Day After the Rain and Ripper Clown. We hear there was much dancing.
    It featured more than 30 writers from around Indonesia and also West Australian performance poet David Vincent Smith (sponsored by the government of Western Australia) in the poetry slam. Guest writers included poet Iyut Fitra from Payakumbah; writer, journalist and documentary maker Ayu Diah Dempaka; Ni Made Purnamasri; and the award winning poet Rosa Herliany.
    Young writers had access to the words and experience of the guest writers through the panels, workshops and performances which covered topics from blogging and social media, teen lit, short story writing, the ins and outs of publishing through to poetry writing.
    Delaney tells us the success of the inaugural emerging writers’ event means there will be another next year.
    UWRF this year, themed Cultivate the Land Within, is from October 5-9.

Rock On

When you have a facility such as the Rock Bar at Ayana Resort & Spa, all sorts of people want to go there. The Diary drops in occasionally for a spectacular sunset. But no one takes our photo when we do.

    If you are the reigning Miss World, however, and are accompanied by the new Miss Indonesia, snappers appear from everywhere (not counting the ones on your dinner plate later) and take pictures that add considerable human decoration to the natural beauty of the cliff-side and beach environment.
    So it was on June 5. Our photo, courtesy of Ayana’s Facebook page, shows Miss World Alexandria Mills, a fine Kentucky filly, with Miss Indonesia Astrid Ellena, on Kisik Beach below the Rock Bar. The tide was out, which was a good thing for the girls and for members of the Leg Appreciation Society.
   Miss World was in Indonesia to crown Miss Indonesia following the 2011 Indonesia final, held in Jakarta on June 3. Astrid Ellena, 19, beat 32 other finalists to win the event and will represent Indonesia at the 2011 Miss World Final in London on November 6.

A Bit Crass

Profiling gets a bad press. It negatively impacts on the human rights of people, or so it is said, and in any case is not effective in deterring criminal activity or catching people at it. Well, that’s one story. The other story is that profiling works. For example, 100 percent of fanatic Muslim suicide bombers are fanatical Muslims. More prosaically, but actually more importantly, profiling helps in detecting drug smugglers.

    Hence the recent unfortunate interlude at Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport where two Filipinas were detained (for far too long) and subjected to intense questioning and intrusive body searches. From reports of the affair, it was badly handled and crassly dealt with by at least some of the officials involved. That’s bad.
    But the policy is not necessarily bad. Filipinas are not the leading mode of entry of illegal drugs into Bali, but they appear in the profile of cases. If these things are handled correctly – and they always should be – no one sensible would cavil at being checked. It’s in everyone’s interest to curb the inflow of illegal drugs carried by people who are quite prepared to flout the law and who should pay the price for doing so.
    Perhaps the Philippines authorities, who have indicated some level of irritation over the incident, would like to fully inform themselves about the pervasive presence of the global drug-smuggling market.

Good Sports

The Diary has a lovely young friend – her name is Ayu, though for us it’s Berliana, and she’s nearly five and is the daughter of a young woman who once worked for us – who is a cheery little soul. She was at our house one Sunday recently and left with a present, a little bag of personal care items, the gift of the Distaff who keeps a stock of such items against the statistical likelihood of random visits.

But what she really wants, it seems, is a dog and a brother; possibly in that order, maybe not. Her mum tells us Ayu has been pressing her parents to produce both and, in relation to the brother, has apparently learned from an older friend that to make babies parents much engage in sport at bedtime.
We gather that, thus informed, Ayu has banned mum Komang and dad Agus from retiring for the night before they have completed a vigorous session of sit-ups and push-ups, of the sort you see on television when a sporting match is about to begin.

Good to Be Here

Hector is pleased as punch to be in the Bali Advertiser and hopes readers enjoy his musings as much as he enjoys jotting them down. Drop him a line if you’ve got something you think will interest him.

Hector's Diary is (c) Bali Advertiser.

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HECTOR'S SCRATCHINGS, June 10, 2011

2011-06-10T11:34:00.001+08:00

A Sick Joke

That’s Being

Played

on Us All

The shameful and shambolic state of Bali’s – and Indonesia’s – political administration is nowhere more pointedly and distressingly demonstrated than in the continuing and extremely tedious row over planning approvals, where the grandiloquently titled regents of various regencies (think of them rather as chairman of local councils for true perspective, relativity and appropriate power) are thumbing their collective nose at provincial and national environmental laws.

   One focus of this disgraceful situation that is much in the news at present is at Nusa Dua, where the local community vehemently opposes a “Beach World” project that will effectively close off the last remaining area of public beach in the area, a spot where thousands of locals who are neither bloated Javanese plutocrats or their acquisitive local political pals have historically gone on Sundays for a bit of family R&R.
    It’s shocking too that the regent of Badung has been able to call in the assistance of the minister for the interior who scribbled a little note that says Badung can do what it likes within the 1995 regulations because those are ones in force. Even if they are – and presumably this would be because Indonesia’s political apparatus brooks no argument over whether anything is actually ever finalised or inscribed into unarguable law, since apparently nothing ever is – the appropriate advice would be to work with the rules applied by the province of which Badung is but one part. In short, that Badung’s argument (if it has one) is with the Bali provincial government.
    We know, from bitter experience, that regents and developers (domestic and foreign) have absolutely no interest in preserving the environment and will despoil it for profit wherever they can. It is this phenomenon – it’s not confined to Indonesia: it’s a global thing – which environmental and planning laws are supposed to limit.
    At Nusa Dua there has been no consultation of any meaningful extent with the local community, which is having yet another “tourist” excrescence foisted on it because another lot of money-grubbing profiteers have been given a rails run in gouging even more pay dirt out of someone else’s backyard.
    Sadly, this sort of thing is a commonplace in Bali. It is perpetrated as much by opportunistic foreign developers as the native variety, and with as little conscience or care. What needs to be fixed is the regulatory and administrative environment, so that rules are both clear (and sensible, another must) and enforceable.

Blow-Hards

We heard this week that PLN, Indonesia’s notional power utility, will start work in 2013 on the much vaunted “Bali Crossing” – a plan to string high-tension power lines across the 11 kilometres of the Bali Strait from Java at its narrowest point, so that 300MW of electricity can be fed into Bali’s deficient and defective grid.

    According to local news reports of this impending beneficence, PLN’s planning calls for the wires – and the 70m high towers that will support them – to withstand wind speeds of up to 70 metres a second. That would be a truly magnificent; a world first and an absolute triumph of engineering.
   It’s probably a bit over the top, though. We can safely assume – pun intended – that if we ever get a breeze of 2,520 km/h it will be a tad academic whether the high wires survive.
   Hey chaps, try 7m/s (252km/h or 126 knots). Or have a little chat with the reporters you spoke to if it’s their maths that are wonky.
   Whatever, if the project ever actually gets off the ground, so the speak, and 300MW of electricity are swung into action in Bali, PLN will have to find a whole range of new excuses for blackouts, shocking service delivery and maintenance, and woefully deficient infrastructure.
    In the interim, enjoy the continuing random darkness of the power cuts PLN promised in 2010 were a thing of the past for Indonesia’s premier international holiday resort island.

Bubbles and Squeaks

A loud, though we’re sure thoroughly decorous, affray will shortly be held to commence what organiser Christina Iskandar says is the Diva and Dude dinner series. It’s on June 24 at Vivai with a menu prepared by chef Dean Fisher. Apparently there are free-flow bubbles for the birds included in the Rp250K per head tariff. Sadly the birds in question are from the distaff side and are not superannuated cockatoos.

It is also the irrepressible Diana Shearin’s birthday (she’s 21 or 18 again or something). According to the event’s Facebook page bubbly Diana would like a dude for her big day. It's such a shame that here at The Cage dude is spelled dud.
Never mind, it’s sure to be a great night for those attending the affray.

Discordant Echo

The reprehensible Don Storen, whose career as a provider of allegedly adult entertainment in a series of Australian low-lit (and low-life) premises then mutated to a sojourn in our neighbouring island of Lombok, where he was engaged in a number of little enterprises, has lately had another bout with unfortunate publicity.

    We do not refer to his release and immediate deportation some little time ago after serving a four-year sentence in Mataram for playing with little boys. It’s his latest venture into publishing that has caused a flurry. He and some realtors apparently got into business with a free newspaper in Fremantle – the port city of Perth in Western Australia – in circumstances that are (or possibly were: the journal’s fate is unknown at this time) rather less than salubrious.
    By what means we don’t know, but he and his cohorts – including a fictional principal who turned out on investigation to be none than Storen himself wearing another hat, or a tickler perhaps – were outed by the deliciously watchable Australian TV programme Media Watch. It’s an ABC product, naturally. Commercial tabloid TV doesn’t do cerebral at all well.
    It is a sad fact that people like Storen will never understand that membership of the sentient grade of the human race imposes some requirement on them to behave, if not in a completely honourable and open way, at least within the broadest interpretations of decency.
   While he was interfering with Lombok’s way of life and the moral safety of its people, by the way, Storen was an originator of the now defunct monthly English language paper Lombok Times. He had long gone from there when your diarist took up a spell of editing and managing the paper some years ago. But the smell remained, unfortunately.

Change of Tune

Hector is appearing fortnightly in the Bali Advertiser from next Wednesday, with a Diary to suit that widely read and popular publication – which among other things benefits from being both relevant and managed in Bali itself – that the old bird hopes will interest and amuse readers.

The move prompts a change to this blog. He’ll post the Bali Advertiser diary here but from this week there’ll be a weekly Bali Scratchings column – this is the first – for those who want to read between the lines.

Tweet with Hector @Scratchings or join him on his Facebook: Hector McSquawky.

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, June 3, 2011

2011-06-03T17:17:00.000+08:00

It’s Tough
When You’re
In Training
For a
Marathon

Here at The Cage, Diary and Distaff are in full training mode for an expedition in August to Scotland – where the terrain in the ancestral locality includes goat track cliff trails it will be necessary to negotiate on foot – and a week subsequently in Budapest, said to be a “walking city.” So are several others of our acquaintance, including Paris – better now they’ve outlawed poodle-droppings – and Buenos Aires, where there are empanada stands on every corner that are impossible to ignore. There will be a similar problem in Budapest relating to the oversupply of wine and cheese tasting establishments therein.

    Our training around the ridges of Banjar Bakung Sari at Ungasan on the Bukit involves two daily walks of three kilometres each. These start with a gentle stroll up a steep little lane (which does not seem to get any easier by the way) to a local rise now known to your Diarist as Anthem Hill. It got this name because from it you can see from sea to shining sea, albeit only across the narrow isthmus of Jimbaran that divides the Bukit from the main portion of the island. The other day it occurred to the tramping party that it could also represent Australia’s anthem, which refers to a land that abounds in nature’s gifts. Since the local cows use the spot as a gathering place, plenteous gifts of nature lie underfoot.
    The training track then encompasses a wide area of our locality, and we seem now to be sufficiently well known to the local canines as to be mostly unremarked as we pass by. A few remain a problem. Smallish stones, for throwing as warnings only if required, are carried on our morning and late afternoon ambles.
    They are rarely needed, but if they are, the message for any outraged owners is that the missiles are “hadiah untuk anjin galak,” “prizes for fierce dogs.”

Silly Old Fool

Few things nowadays enrage your Diarist. Even absent editors. Such derelictions are easily dealt with. You just tell them to piss off. That said, some things irritate, or perhaps annoy. But too much useless angst has flowed along with all that water beneath too many bridges to elevate much to enragement. There is the occasional exception, though, such as Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian male novelists of Sub-Continental ethnicity who parlay literary success into vain excuses for misogyny. These people can still threaten to burst a blood vessel.

It passes belief that we should hear this week from VS Naipul, who has lived an educated, mannered and privileged life with all the physical and intellectual comforts of western liberalism to hand, that no female writer is or could ever be his equal.
What a planker. At least female writers cannot, by very definition, be insufferable pricks.

Rekindled

Having acquired a Kindle each, Diary and Distaff are now working through the technicalities of acquiring a superabundance of reading material handily contained in one little slim paperback-size gizmo that can go everywhere with you and be topped up with new material at will.

Naturally, as with all technological marvels, there is much to be learned. But the Diary has managed to obtain Plato’s Republic, with which he has been without since 2005, when an earlier print copy of this handy reference to Utopia and beyond was placed in the remainders at the local second-hand bookshop as excess baggage.
More gems are to be loaded.

Go Get ’em, Susi

Prominent position-taker Susi Johnston, ever one to seize an issue by the throat and worry it to death, is on a winner with her campaign to get Bali going really clean and green. This is the policy of the Governor, of course, but we all know that policy and outcome are mutual exclusives in Bali, for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that none of the little panjandrums in lower administrative jurisdictions will consider the thought that superior jurisdictions have precedence and must prevail, subject to the democratic process. Hence Governor Made Mangku Pastika’s significant problem with the regents over planning and zoning laws.

    The matter of rubbish – the real stuff, not the regents’ arguments that on planning matters the Guv can go and take a jump because they want the dosh – has lately been in the news. It’s part and parcel of the serious problems that Bali faces with the inevitable trash of consumerism, the island’s woefully inadequate infrastructure, and the fact that the Balinese themselves are still culturally attuned – we’re being polite – to producing only biodegradable natural rubbish and thus throw it away wherever they please.
    Susi has started a Facebook group to natter weightily about such matters. It’s a febrile little collective – which is good – that clearly isn’t going to go away. It includes not only foreign residents (whether anaesthetised or otherwise by their “guest status” here) but also Balinese and other Indonesians.
    More power to them. We need to make a noise.

Pedal Power

We hear that Marian Hinchliffe, chief flack at the Ayana Resort and Spa at Jimbaran and well-known fitness freak, has acquired wheels with which to take part in the Bali triathlon later this month. The dehydrating process of running (and swimming and biking) around in circles has always struck us as a strange way to behave, but so many people seem to like it so it must be good.

Fortunately we are able to get such pleasures vicariously, by reading about them. There are the drinks afterwards, of course. Now that might work.

How Bazaar

Sunday, June 12 is worth a diary date. It’s the annual Bali International Women’s Association charity bazaar, this year being held at the Lotte Mart wholesale premises on Jl Bypass Ngurah Rai. There are 200 stalls, according to the organisers, and it promises to be a fun day out. Proceeds go the deserving charities that BIWA supports.

We wish Marianne Vertegaal and her troops all the best for the day. Visit www.biwa-bali.org for details.

Lit Glit, Etc

Some interesting things are happening on the art and literary fronts this year, about which we’ll have more later. They centre on Ubud as Bali’s crucible of imported culture (as well as its role as a lodestone of Balinese culture itself) and are certainly worthy of note.

Hector tweets @Scratchings and is on Facebook: Hector McSquawky

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, May 27, 2011

2011-05-27T09:42:00.000+08:00

Back in Bali

With a Bag
Of Fresh
Supplies

It has, as the old saying puts it, been a little while between drinks. The interregnum was brought about through the intervention of a SEB, a Short Essential Break. Bali regulars will understand the need for such escapes. This one took your diarist away from The Cage (and Bali’s several clemencies) and deposited him in Western Australia, where Odd Zone ennui, a fearful and unavoidable condition, immediately set in. Well, that and the absence of handy internet connections.

We returned to The Cage, with a fresh supply of Oz newsprint to line it, last Sunday night, with new supplies of liquor that here would break the bank, and cheese and sultanas ... the latter an essential but sadly deficient in supply on the Island of the Dogs, possibly because certain ill-tutored individuals assume raisins are a substitute, though more likely a result of Indonesian stock-control practice (What? We’re out of [fill in your product of choice]? Well, I didn’t know! Sigh. Better see if we can get some more, I suppose.)
It’s good to be back, though. We needed to return to ensure The Cage is prepared for the next landing parties of visitors, who are completely convinced that we live in Paradise.

Bugger Off

We picked up a vehicle in Perth on arrival – a kind niece lent her car to us for the duration – and buzzed off southwards, towards the ancestral lands of the Distaff. These lie 300 kilometres away. That distance would be a three-day ordeal around here, but there it’s a doddle. Just over three hours including a coffee stop to make the trip, and not even one vehicle tried to “merge” into the traffic in front of us while maintaining an unsteady 20 km/h or bothering to notice that this would cause people already on the highway to slow down to a crawl to accommodate them.

We did run into the smoking police. It was at the coffee stop, a little roadhouse-cum-petrol station at about midpoint on our pre-dawn-to-blinding-sunrise trip. We had lit up a smoke (we don’t do that in OP cars) after getting a cuppa and taking it back outside when something hugely censorious (and also huge, plainly unfriendly and wearing an I Eat Nails for Breakfast mine-site working uniform) leaned out of its hefty utility vehicle and growled “Carnt ya see the signs?”
We hadn’t. But since our informant was as described (very big, of uncertain temper, and most likely impervious to the arguments of others) your Diarist forwent the pleasure of responding “Bugger off” and instead said “Thank you.”

Peppermint Idyll

The south of Western Australia features lovely trees (among them the luxuriant karri on which the area’s former timber industry was based) and like trees everywhere, these are a delight to the senses. Some of them are exotics – northern hemisphere deciduous trees which in autumn blaze with colour ranging from the palest yellows through to the deepest reds and tug heavily on the heartstrings of people whose genes hale from the bit of the globe that points out of the galaxy – but most are native eucalypts, banksias, wattles and others with names impossible to spell.

The Diary’s favourite is the peppermint, a finely-leafed eucalypt that flies don’t like (a definite bonus in Western Australia). We sat on several afternoons at a beachside pub with the chill breeze blowing in from Geographe Bay and the sunlight dappling through the canopy of tall trees. The Hahn Super-Dry may have helped (it’s nearly as good as Bintang) but the effect, particularly as the afternoons wore on and the skies assumed the orange-purple hues of an approaching Australian dusk, was like a Chinese painting. And just as good for the soul.

Big Day In

The WA trip was caused by a big event, an annual celebration known as Birthday of the Distaff’s Mum. We shan’t be indecorous and mention the age attained in this year of grace, but it was a Significant Marker on life’s path. And anyway, we love a good party.

Our arrival was a big secret, and praise is due to all the blabbermouths who this time managed to keep quiet about it. The surprise was complete, and a delight to see. There was a big cake too, which went surprisingly far given the attendance of the Birthday Girl and partner, all of the Three Sisters (and their spouses), an eclectic collection of grandchildren and attachments, an Hon Daughter, and some very old friends including a fine lady who was matron of honour at the Diary and Distaff’s wedding in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 29 years ago.
Several drinks were taken.

Meow Moments

Some people say it’s strange that a cockatoo should be a cat person. But this assumption springs from a fundamental misunderstanding about what drives cat-bird relations. Finely plumed cockatoos (or if older, formerly finely plumed) and decorous felines in fact have a lot in common. We both rule the roost, for one thing.

     Hector has many feline friends. Locally he’s a Facebook friend of El Tigron, who allows Ric Shreves and Nalisa Sitabut to live in his house and do all the grunt work down at Water&Stone. And on his recent Perth weekend – a reward for spending nearly a week in country WA – Hector made friends with three very fine felines.
     Reggie is a venerable Siamese who lives in a nice pad at Claremont with Balinese touches. He is a chocolate point and 18 years old and reminded Hector of his long-gone companion, Jasper, who enlivened the post-war UK experience by bailing up the gas meter man (“Madam, please call your cat off,” the poor chap said to Hec’s mum when we found him cornered in the scullery) and bringing home a hefty two-pound prime steak from the nearby (rationed) butcher. He also took us all for walks on his pale blue lead, which matched his eyes. Like Reggie, he favoured sunny spots on sofas.
     Sundae is a tortoiseshell, also of elegant vintage. Her favourite pursuits are climbing onto the roof of her house in leafy Wembley and pinching stools and other seating appliances from humans silly enough to vacate them.
    And Mya (for Myanmar) is a young Burmese whose energetic focus on catching and terrorising a mock mouse on a string was quite exhausting to watch.
    While in country WA, we paid our respects to another long-time feline friend, Thomas, who has been sleeping beneath a shady conifer in the garden for some time now. We probably won’t be there again, so a last goodbye needed to be said.

Good Gear

The Diary will be back in full Bali mode next week. But just for the record there’s an interesting an enterprising event on this weekend – it started today – called the Bali Emerging Writers Festival. It’s a spin-off from the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, an innovation that is very welcome. We’ll be checking with Janet De Neefe and Melissa Delaney afterwards, to see how it went.

Hector tweets @Scratchings and join him on Facebook: Hector McSquawky

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, May 6, 2011

2011-05-05T22:22:00.000+08:00

Beware the
Blowpipe
Brigade’s
Best Efforts

Rabies is a significant risk to people in Bali, arguably even while they’re sitting quietly on the porch at home minding their own business. That’s a cogent reason for strict measures to control stray dog numbers while at the same time vaccinating the required percentage (70%) of the island’s canine population to control the spread of the virus.

    You should not, however, have to consider that there is any associated risk of being hit by a strychnine dart aimed (well, misaimed in true Keystone Kops style) by your local animal control officer. Such was the unpleasant fate, though, of a young Klungkung woman who, sitting upon her porch at her house in the village of Semaagung during the hot noonday hours and apparently watching the dog cull taking place, was struck in the shoulder by the said dart.
     Not unreasonably, she collapsed. The dart, from a blowpipe wielded (apparently without due care and attention) by an animal control officer, was carrying enough strychnine to kill a dog within 15 minutes. The woman was taken to hospital where she made a full recovery and was allowed home after a day or so.
     We expect that the next time the blowpipe brigade comes around she’ll decide that discretion is the better part of valour and take cover.
     The tally from the April 25 operation: three dead dogs.

Shoot First, Dissemble Later

Osama bin Laden was an evil man and, by any reasonable definition of justice, a mass murderer. The search for him, and the operation that finally found him, was justified, as was the technical invasion of a sovereign state (Pakistan) to achieve that.
    It was a firefight. It was reasonable to assume Bin Laden would be armed if resistance was encountered. In the circumstances as described, requiring split-second decision, an assumption that he could be armed was also reasonable: in any circumstances short of a hands-up-I-surrender situation, it would be a tough call to gainsay a "shoot" decision.
    Yet apparently he wasn't armed when shot dead. He was hiding in a room with his youngest wife, we now gather; she apparently showed more spirit than he and rushed at the invading BlackOps operative. She was shot in the leg for her trouble, we also gather, from the confusion of information the Americans have released. Yet Bin Laden continued to "resist," according to information prised out of the White House on Tuesday this week. Was he about to throw a chair? Did he ask to leave the room? Did he burst into tears, like most self-deceivers and bullies do when their behaviour catches up with them?
    No one should weep for him, given the death and destruction his wantonly poisoned mind visited upon the world, but the Americans now have questions to answer about the manner and the circumstances of Bin Laden's death that will again provide embarrassment, risk turning into yet another own goal, and undermine the political and strategic benefits of removing him from the scene.

Yak On

It hardly seems possible that a month has passed since the last little MinYak cantered into the in-box. But it must be, because another one arrived this week, carrying fresh tales from the land of glitter and somewhere called Baliwood. Not sure that works: Bollywood is already taken, of course, by all those chaps who run the western world’s call centres, but Bolly’s not a bad set of bubbles if you like that sort of thing.

    Neither champagne nor the sparkling wine that’s not champagne because of ridiculous European Community naming rules appears on Hector’s favoured drinks list. Those little zesty bubbles don’t go very well with a beak. That’s a shame, because the latest MinYak has a Q&A with Carol Duval-Leroy, president of Champagne Duval-Leroy.
    She has some views on how to manage enterprises and people that would be required reading for several of our local bizbods, both indigenous and expatriate. If they could read, of course.
    The finals of this year’s Yak open tennis are on this weekend. The organisers promise fun and frivolity. We might manage a look-in. It’s no trouble breaking out of the Bukit Bubble, or breaking into the Canggu one for that matter. It’s the 90-minute, 20-kilometre crawl between the two that puts you off.

Strait Swap

It’s interesting to see the Jakarta Globe is now printing Singapore’s Straits Times in Indonesia under a masthead partnership. The ST is not quite the mouthpiece for the modern incarnation of the Serene Republic (Singapore is the Venice of our era in so many ways) that some of its critics assert, but it is very cosily consanguineous in the peculiar political circumstances of the city state. Officially controlled democracy has much appeal to big business, as it does to politicians, since it deflects the embarrassments that spring from promiscuous public argument.

Commercially, Singapore is the linchpin of ASEAN. Its financial strength, infrastructure and social capital give it clout far beyond its weight. Already it is effectively the power in situ in Indonesia’s nearby islands and pre-eminently in Batam, from where on a clear day (ha!) you can see Singapore’s skyline. So an opportunity to read the print edition of the Straits Times on the day of publication – even here in relatively distant Bali – is almost a local business essential.

Common Sense

It was cheering to hear that errant New Zealander turned Aussie Angus McCaskill, who copped a seven-year jail term for being caught with a sizeably small quantity of illegal drugs in a sting at a Tuban supermarket, may get a sentence cut to one year and thus soon be away on the compulsory deportation flight home.

    The courts here hand out very heavy sentences for drug offences – and rightly so when the circumstances demand – in accordance with national law but often not in accordance with common sense.
    McCaskill, who began life in Aotearoa as Willie Ra’re, foolishly sniffed his way around Bali’s wannabe party scene, apparently in the belief that this was where it’s at. It isn’t, of course. But seven years for being a personal-user idiot was never fair; neither was it justified except on a fulsome misreading, by the judges, of their duty to make judicious decisions.
    It was the same with that silly girl Schapelle Corby, whose boogie-board cover was found to contain more than four kilos of marijuana when she popped in for a holiday break in 2004 and, lordy, she didn’t know how on earth it could have got there, and with her family and others created a noisy conspiracy theory that pissed everyone off, especially the judges. Twenty years for being a screaming idiot’s a little tough, unless of course the extra time was for having a topless sister and a loud mother. There appear to be sensible moves under way to apply a retrospective common sense rule to her case.
    The Australian contingent in Kerobokan keeps growing. Michael Sacatides, kick-boxing instructor, has just joined up for 18 years for forgetting to wonder why some guy in Bangkok he hardly knew wanted to lend him a suitcase for his Bali trip.

New Virgin

Pacific Blue, the overseas operating livery of Australia’s Virgin Blue airline, will soon be a thing of the past. Virgin Blue already is, having become Virgin Australia in a massive rebranding exercise this week. By year’s end, Virgin Australia aircraft will be flying the Bali routes from the Great South Land.

The airline’s rebranding completes its growing up process. Launched – in Brisbane, with a great party – in 2000 as a fun show (with serious commercial intent) and utilising the penchant for bent language in the Australia patois – its aircraft were red and a redhead is called “Blue” or “Bluey” – it has now emerged as an adult operation, with a strong pitch for the business market, the bit up the pointy end that requires bigger seats, silver service, serious trolleydollying and excessive ego-stroking.

Tweet with Hector @scratchings and join him on Facebook: Hector McSquawky

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, May 1, 2011.

2011-05-01T20:06:00.003+08:00

Lombok’s Still

There; We

Checked it Out

On a Three-Day

Flying Visit

Better late than never, they say. And so it is with this week’s Diary, delayed by Hector’s schedule, no longer driven by determinants other than his own. It was disrupted by the need to go to Lombok. It’s always a pleasure to visit Bali’s sister island just to the east. The contrast is interesting. The barely perceptible bump as you transit the Wallace Line is fun – especially in a Wings Air ATR72-500 in cloud at 5,000ft on the 60 nautical mile flight between Ngurah Rai (Denpasar) and Selaparang (Mataram). And especially when to make the flight last the advertised 30 minutes your plane flies out into the middle of the Lombok Strait and describes a couple of s-l-o-w figures of eight to while away the time.

Never mind. You get there in the end, even if Wings Air pilots seem to like to land at near cruising speed and then hang out every anchor possible to stop before the end of the short Selaparang runway. That’s what life in Indonesia is all about: adrenalin. (Coming back three days later our ATR72-500 pilot demonstrated similar thrill capacity by landing a long up the strip, missing the otherwise easily attainable taxiway turnout and having to turn around and trundle back to it, all the while under the baleful glare of a big jet waiting to take off .)

Ngurah Rai’s domestic terminal is still testing the limits of chaos theory, by the way. On our return from Lombok on Sunday passengers were playing guess-which-carousel in the luggage collection area because the information screens were blank.

Senggigi Swings

It would be inaccurate to describe Senggigi, focal point of Lombok’s mainland tourism (the Gillis run their own race) as a centre of anything much. It’s pretty small beer if compared with other tourist centres elsewhere. Kuta (Bali) would swallow it whole and not even blink. Of course, Senggigi would swallow Kuta (Lombok) whole, ditto. That gives an idea of the relativities involved.

Nonetheless, the little joint was jumping the three nights we were in and around the strip looking for dinner. Some of the light bulbs have been changed and there are one or two new shingles hanging up outside diners-deluxe and otherwise. At Square, a long-time favourite, the Distaff swore that before she arrived at our table (she had diverted to check out the facilities) your Diarist was being assessed by the management for girl receptivity. That seems highly unlikely (they wouldn’t want a cardiac arrest on their hands, surely?) but then again, three decades of direct experience have amply demonstrated that the Distaff is rarely wrong. Fortunately, then, she arrived in the nick of time and saved your Diarist acute embarrassment and a nasty bout of irritation.

We shan’t be going back to another old favourite, De Quake, in a hurry. The lamb was anything but and, for the Diary’s money, the goat from which chunks had been sawn before being improperly dealt with was an older one than even your Diarist. The Distaff’s fish was off and they threw us out early because the staff wanted to play cards. It’s sad, because we were at De Quake’s opening in 2007, its waterside premises are first-class, and its corporate connection with the American owned upmarket Qunci mini-resorts chain had been promising.

Our third eatery was of course Asmara Restaurant, where, we happily report, the delightful Sakinah Nauderer is still serving up the finest Teutonic cuisine. The meatballs were delicious.

Royal Occasion

It seems Diarist and Distaff must be among the mere handful of global citizens who did not watch the British royal wedding last Friday (it started at 5pm Indonesian central time). We were staying at Holiday Resort, where old chum Stefan Leu is general manager, and when we met him for a brief say-hi at 4.40pm – we were on our way out – he pleaded pressure of business and disappeared (we met him again next day for a much longer chat).

It turns out that the business that was pressing was getting into the lounge chair in front of the TV in time for the nuptials. Ah well, the whole world loves a spectacle. Or so it seems. Someone we met on Saturday who had been in Jakarta airport at the bewitching hour reported wall-to-wall Indonesians glued to the TVs in the terminal.

Not a Klui

As reported, we stayed at Holiday Resort on Lombok this time. It’s a well-run establishment and the refurbished bathrooms are pretty good. The hotel’s employees are super-friendly, the beach traders in the area are pleasant (and pleasantly manageable) and the facilities – if you overlook the usurious rates for connecting to Wi-Fi – are all you’d ask for at below super-stellar level. We’re glad we stayed there.

We mightn’t have. When the need to visit Lombok – it was business related – emerged we had attempted to connect with the plush new Jeeva Klui at Malimbu, a little further up West Lombok’s spectacular coast. Unfortunately, it seems, they just can’t be bothered to reply to emails.

The establishment bills itself as just upon the Wallace Line. Just below the Plimsoll line would seem a more appropriate pitch.

That’s the Spirit

This year’s BaliSpirit Festival drew 6,000 attendees, according to figures just released by organiser-in-chief Meghan Pappenheim. It also raised US$15,000 for a local HIV/AIDS prevention programme that many see as being most directly relevant to those most at risk, which in Bali nowadays is senior school students and young adults, and sex workers. It long ago ceased to be an affliction of homosexuals and intravenous drug injectors and thus worthy of being ignored by people whose consciences are unaffected by fatalities among the undeserving.

In another sign of the times, BaliSpirit’s Facebook was viewed by 250,000 people in March and its website recorded 115,000 visits.

International attendees at the event, held the Purnati Centre for the Arts and ARMA Resort at Ubud, included record numbers of Australians, Americans, Canadians and Germans – and Indonesian visitors were also a record.

On Your Big Bike

The arrogance of posses of big bikers is legendary, in Bali no less than anywhere. Here their threatening road-hogging convoy tactics are outweighed only by the official arrogance of police escorts (often found “escorting” bands of big-bikers on their little outings, for a fee of course) and the mindlessness of truck and bus drivers who sweep all before them (literally if you’re not super-cautious). It’s part of the Rafferty’s rules that substitute for common sense here.

So it was interesting to see that a group of motorcyclists had a run-in with Governor Made Mangku Pastika, who was returning from a weekend visit to Buleleng in a private vehicle. It wasn’t an official visit because if it had been he’d have had a police escort and the bikers would probably have been monstered themselves instead. We read about the incident in Indonesian press early last week, and it was amply covered in The Beat Daily, the email news briefing put out by The Beat Magazine. Naturally when the bikers discovered to their horror that they had beaten up on the Guv, major grovelling took place.

If it results in these highway bother-boys mending their ways – and in the police regulating their rides rather than abetting their bad behaviour – then that’s all to the good. Bike clubs raise a lot of money for charity. They provide an outlet for testosterone-challenged boys of all ages. But they are a pest when they’re on the open road apparently doing auditions for a remake of The Wild One. That the Governor has now told them this may be a promising start on their road to rehabilitation.

Not sure it was a newspaper lead story a week after the non-event, as the Bali Times seems to believe, but these are sorts of decisions that apparently get made when you’re revealing the real Bali from somewhere in Ireland.

Classic Occasion

This year’s Yak Tennis Classic open tournament kicked off at the weekend at Canggu and runs to May 7. Entry is free to all spectators and there are some eatable and drinkable treats as well. The action takes place at the Canggu Tennis Centre, part of the Canggu Club and just across the road from the plush central premises of that establishment. Weekday matches commence at 3pm and weekends at 10am.

Tweet with Hector @Scratchings and join him on Facebook at Hector McSquawky.

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, Apr. 22, 2011

2011-04-22T00:36:00.000+08:00

How to Stop

Being Bugged

by a Catastrophe

of Caterpillars

We can all relax, apparently. Researchers in Bali believe they have found a nice, non-chemical way to combat the caterpillar outbreak. Doubtless this will interest those who run the island’s weekly English-language newspaper from Ireland and Singapore; last week’s edition led with a story on the catastrophe, but perhaps that’s what happens when you bugged out long ago.
According to Putu Sudirta of Udayana University’s faculty of agriculture, the idea is to use the caterpillars themselves to kill other caterpillars. He told Viva News this week they can be made to host parasitoids, a parasite that either sterilises or kills the host. The parasites are injected into captured caterpillars which are then released to spread the breeding-stopper to other caterpillars.

The science of this is well known and widely practised in pest and disease vector control and in that regard is unremarkable. But we got a giggle out of the view, expressed by Sudirta, that Udayana expects Bali’s department of agriculture, crops and food to “instruct” residents to go out and capture as many of the little beasties as possible and taken them along to the university. Given that Bali’s population won’t be instructed about anything much at all – for example about looking after their dogs so that they’re well fed and healthy, not to mention neutered and fully protected against rabies and other animal diseases about which there is astonishing continued ignorance – all we can say is good luck.

Another Udayana academic, Wayan Supartha, head of the university’s integrated pest management laboratory, makes a good point though: These efforts are in line with maintaining the ecological balance in Bali by avoiding the use of chemical pesticides.

Another Tragedy

Bali’s latest rabies death – that of a 12-year-old schoolboy from Buleleng in the north of the island who was bitten five months ago as he walked home after classes and told no one about it – prompted recall of a sad (and sadly unremarkable) story we heard the other week from a doctor. He told us his hospital – and apparently others – do not offer pre-exposure prophylactic rabies vaccinations because the Indonesian product they use is not safe. He related the case of one man who had had the pre-exposure course who went on to develop rabies symptoms, though not apparently fatally. It was more than just the statistical probability of a very bad reaction, we gathered.

It’s not clear what Bali’s rabies toll is, other than that it’s around 130 or possibly more, since an isolated outbreak at Ungasan on the southern Bukit in mid-2008 was allowed to spread island-wide by Bali’s shambolic and shamefully inept bureaucracy. Perhaps someone knows; maybe some clerk is keeping a tally. But our guess would be that the true number is known only unto God.

The conversation arose because here at The Cage we’ve had the pre-exposure vaccine, the imported French one from an international clinic, as a necessary precaution since we daily walk among the sick and the lame in these parts, aka the local dog population.

Rabies is untreatable once symptoms appear. If you die of the disease in an Indonesian hospital you do so disgustingly, roped to a bed (if you’re lucky) to restrain the maddened paroxysms that precede a short coma and merciful death.

Wink, Wink

We saw an item in The Beat Daily this week – the electronic news update put out by the friendly crew at The Beat magazine, a journal dedicated to publicising good times – spruiking the delights of the Blue Eyes disco on the bypass at Sanur.

That’s the place, co-located with one of the many nonconforming and improperly licensed hotels here, where if you hire a VVIP room for your private karaoke party you can also pay for private dancers who’ll show you a lot more than they’re allowed to in the public areas of the establishment.

Some months back there was a lovely story in the local press that related how police charged with putting a stop to unseemliness within the raucous environment of Blue Eyes felt it their duty to keep gathering evidence until the comely little gaggle of “dancers” had rather fully revealed the totality of their attributes before blowing the whistle.

Bet the team drew lots for the inside jobs on that operation.

Stuffed Goose

Indonesia earned $US7.6 billion in foreign exchange from tourism alone last year according to the Department of Tourism and Culture. And this year, according to a report in the Indonesian language newspaper Bisnis Bali, tourism minister Jero Wacik is targeting even more, $US8.5 billion.

He bases this arithmetic on an average daily arrival figure of 4,500 foreign tourists and up to 7,000 a day at peak holiday times. Around 40 percent of all foreign tourists to Indonesia come to Bali, which is acknowledged as the country’s biggest tourism draw. The government wants to persuade visitors to see more than Bali, however, especially Lombok and Java which are easily reached from our island.

That’s fair enough. It’s even a good plan, if there is actually a plan. Lombok is making a big pitch for tourists as part of West Nusa Tenggara province’s target of a million visitors in 2012. But it and other places need to get their tourists direct, not via Bali, if they want to build a sustainable tourism presence whose growth does not depend ultimately on Bali’s capacity to cope.

AirAsia is adding a fourth daily Perth-Bali service to meet demand. There are reports the airline is planning to fly Kuala Lumpur-Mataram direct and hopes that a Perth service might join the list soon. It can’t be soon enough, paradoxically, for Bali. If current growth rates keep up we’ll have a population of more than five million in 2015. Badung, the most populous regency – it stretches from Mengwi between Denpasar and Tabanan in the north to the Bukit in the south and includes the KLS conurbation (Kuta-Legian-Seminyak) – grew by 4.63 percent in 2010, versus the national population growth rate of 1.49 percent.

We see the result in overloaded – and woefully inadequate – infrastructure. The outlook, for anyone other than a realtor or a foolish optimist, is less than happy.

Drug House

Bali may soon have its own drug rehabilitation facility, only the second such institution in Indonesia, under plans announced this week by the national narcotics agency (BNN). Ketut Budiarta, head of BNN in Bali, said it would be built next door to the island’s only psychiatric hospital, at Bangli, where limited numbers of drug users are already treated.

Plans call for a start on building the 144-room rehab centre in 2012. If it eventuates it will be a significant enhancement in the battle against addictive drugs. At present most drug offence prisoners are sent to Kerobokan, the island’s main jail, where they make up more than 40 percent of inmates. The prison holds three times more than its design capacity of prisoners.

The project has the support of Governor Made Mangku Pastika, who once headed the BNN, who said this week: “We don’t have adequate facilities to rehabilitate or treat drug users. It is inhumane to send them to Kerobokan Penitentiary. When they enter the prison they are drug addicts, but when they leave they will be drug users and traffickers.”

He’s on the button there.

Oh, That Island

Someone seems to have woken up to the fact that Nusa Lembongan, the laidback surfing and relaxation island off Nusa Penida, is cracking under the strain of tourist numbers. The island has a population of 4,000 but tourists – both domestic and foreign – number 10,000 a month.

Klungkung Regency, which administers Lembongan and Penida, has been alerted to the problem by legislators in the regency assembly who have pointed out the blindingly obvious: that the island’s infrastructure cannot cope.

They want the regency to spend more of its budget on the tourism icon and to clamp down on unlicensed – and therefore unregulated – accommodation places.

Novel Idea

The busy beavers at the Bali Peace Park Association in Perth, who only like to tell you good news (and therefore tell you basically nothing) and resolutely refuse to be accountable, announced this month that international terrorism and security expert Anne Aly has joined them as “Western Australian ambassador.”

Aly, who was born in Egypt but migrated to Australia with her family at the age of two, is an author – she focuses on countering radicalism – and is a member of the Council for Australian-Arab Relations. She has an arts degree from the American University in Cairo.

We’re sure she’ll be an asset to the team. But the main focus of efforts should surely be to raise the money required to settle the association’s land dispute with the man who holds the lease on the former Sari Club site in Legian, where it says its peace park will be built by October this year.

This chap, who drives a Jaguar as well as a hard bargain, apparently has other ideas. That’s Kadek Wiranatha, whose empire encompasses several eateries, some “under renovation,” places of entertainment, and the fortnightly Bali Advertiser publication. It was he who launched (and then presided over the collapse of) the former island airline, Air Paradise.

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