THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 10, 2010

Will Their

Easy Money

Now be Just

A Distant

Dream?

It’s good to see that new Bali police chief Hadiatmoko has given orders that, if followed, which would itself be a novelty, will foreclose on at least one informal police revenue collecting point, the Dreamland turnoff on the Bukit. He has ordered a report on the practice and has promised to make this public. It could make interesting reading, since – even though informal – unofficial revenue collecting is a widespread hobby among what would be the constabulary if Indonesian police were peace officers rather than enforcers and can never have been unnoticed by those higher up the food chain.

    It used to be a firm rule of bureaucracy, as well as politics, that you never start an inquiry whose outcome cannot be known. In recent times, happily for diarists in search of snippets that will cause them and their readers to fall about the floor laughing, this sensible caution has gone out of the window in pursuit of something erroneously called “openness.”  

    But what did surprise The Diary was the insubstantial nature of the levies apparently required of passing surfer-foreigners on motorbikes who, when flagged down by the plods, found their perfectly valid licences to be invalid and their wallets invited to make a donation to ensure their problem went away. On the few occasions when The Diary has fallen into the hands of unofficial police revenue collectors (it’s a lottery: you don’t have to have done anything wrong) the sum required to make the problem go away has been substantially in excess of a mere Rp25-50K.

    Perhaps, on the unofficial donation tariff which the feisty Hadiatmoko is apparently about to outlaw, older Bules who look as if they might bite are charged a special premium.

Boys from Brazil

Some tourists deserve to be targeted. The ones who drive like madmen either because they actually are gila or because, from the examples they see around them, they think that’s how you should drive here.

    The police could do more about regulating local driving and motorbike-riding practices (a good starting point would be “something”) but at least local people – and long-term foreign residents – know roughly what to expect.

    Most short-termers don’t, naturally enough. The sensible ones know this and react and behave accordingly. With excess caution is a good rule. But when you’re a testosterone-charged bullyboy, you are by definition not sensible. You are an idiot.

    There was a tragic accident the weekend before last near Uluwatu. Such things are a commonplace of course, so much so that it didn’t make the local Bahasa media. The Diary heard about it much later from some Australian surfer friends of the victims.

    They were a young woman named Made – she was not yet 30, The Diary is told – and her daughter, known as Cindy, 11. Made was killed instantly; Cindy is in intensive care.

    Their nemesis was a carful of Brazilian boyos flying home, heedless of caution, insensitive to the sanctity of the lives of others, oblivious to the bends in the road, from Kuta after an all-night session in party town. It was around 7am and Made, by repute a very careful and cautious motorbike rider, and Cindy were on their way somewhere or other, a little mum-and-daughter duo inoffensively going about their business.

    The word from the tragic and unnecessary wreckage was that the boyos were uncooperative with the police. They’d apparently come here to party, bitch about the high price of warung food, and ignore surf etiquette by stealing other people’s waves around the breaks at Uluwatu. It was not part of their programme to waste time talking to inconvenient police who back home their rich daddies would just pay off.

    One of them finally had the guts to own up to being the driver.

    Here’s a photograph of Made as her many friends will remember her. It’s from a friend’s Facebook:

 Hector did not know Made; and sheds a tear because now he never will.

Mind the Dogs

They say that organising festivals is like a walk in the park. That's if you don't mind the resulting disorganisation and can accept it as all part of the local colour; the ambience of the event. And it is this factor - the delicious alchemy produced by the confluence of Murphy's Law, Sod's, and those of Unintended Consequences and sundry others - that came to The Diary's mind when in an idle moment last weekend the foraging cursor lit upon the Schedule of Special Events posted on their website by the good folk at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, whose 2010 short working week in the global spotlight is October 6-10.

    For Rp250K, also delineated on the website as A$32 and being roughly approximate (in the currency against which the rupiah is generally quoted) to US$27, you can Jalan Jalan With the Poets on Friday, October 8, on a tiny trek through Janet de Neefe's local Garden of Eden from her Casa Luna restaurant (that’s not the other, unconnected and apparently frowned upon, one in Sanur) to Sari Organik.

    We're sure it will be fun, particularly since the little ramble is being led by local Irish expatriate John O'Sullivan, who when he's not being a perambulatory poet is in charge of the Four Seasons hotels at Jimbaran and Ubud. Lionel Fogarty, a robust Australian, and other gabblers are on the manifest.

    They say wear walking shoes and a hat and carry water. We'd suggest carrying a stout stick too, since Ubud's dogs, rabid or otherwise, also like to make a breakfast of everything.

    The special events schedule is devoid of any mention of Israeli writer Etgar Keret, by the way, which is a shame since he's said to be coming such a long way under difficult circumstances.

Saying Hi

An old mate – he really is: he’s five days older than your Diarist – plans to drop by on Sunday for a late brunch at The Cage. He’s staying in Ubud for a break and, traffic and driver willing, will find us with the kettle on in the wilds of Ungasan. It could be a long brunch. We have more than five years of gossip and scandal and reminiscence to catch up on.

    Ross Fitzgerald, Australian historian, author and commentator and long-standing chum (we share a deep affection for coffee and Australian Rules football; customarily we order the same brew but barrack for different teams) is a lively companion, an assiduous scholar, a keen observer of the peripherals of life as well as the things that matter, and a first-class bloke.

    He’s also an alcoholic. Last Christmas Day, when he turned 65, it was 40 years since he touched a drink. He’s written a book about it, called My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey (published by New South in Australia). It is a tour de force in every sense.

No Reading

Make a note in your diary: No reading (or writing) on September 25. That’s because it will be Saraswati Day. The name comes from saras – meaning flow – and wati, which means a woman. The goddess Saraswati is the symbol of knowledge, which flows like a river and is alluring, like a beautiful woman. (The Diary goes for a sense of humour in a wati above all else, incidentally. Physical beauty is but a visual stimulus.)

    There are many mysteries in the Hindu religion and its rites, whether here in Bali or in India, where the forms, substance and a number of the rites themselves are differently expressed. Elizabeth Gilbert is an expert on neither, by the way. A wandering wati of a certain age and distressed status in search of a way to justify a substantial publisher’s advance rarely has answers to anything. So give that movie a miss.

    Anyway, back to mysteries: quite why one should celebrate knowledge by not reading or writing is a puzzle, at least to the Western mind. It does give the kids a day off school, though. The Diary was a youngster once and can see the allure of that.

    But seriously, Saraswati Day is among the most colourful of Bali’s panoply of ceremonial events. On the day, offerings are made to the lontar (palm-leaf scripts), books and shrines. Schools and other educational establishments hold ceremonies to worship and thank Saraswati for her blessing; they offer a prayer that knowledge and the arts will continue to develop and grow.

    Teachers and students forgo their uniforms and wear bright and colourful ceremonial clothes. Children bring fruit and traditional cakes to school for offerings at the temple. Ceremonies and prayers are also held at the temples in family compounds, villages and businesses from morning to noon.

    Worth seeing; just don’t write about it (on the day).

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog appears as The Diary in The Bali Times, out Fridays, and on the newspaper's website at www.thebalitimes.com. The Bali Times is Bali's only English-language newspaper. The print edition is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY September 3, 2010

The Neighbours

Are Doing

Quite Nicely,

Thanks

Very Much

Some parts of this week’s diary were penned (though perhaps these days it should be “cursored”) at De Quake, one of the fine waterside eating places in Senggigi in Lombok. They do a nice lunch and they have wifi. It couldn’t be better, really. There’s a roof, so the fact that it rained on Sunday afternoon was not a problem. And The Diary sat upstairs to avoid the field of view becoming crowded with insistent little fellows anxious to sell you bootleg DVDs and all sort of other impedimenta. It became temporarily overcrowded with tourists of French provenance. They always assume that any neighbouring Anglo is incapable of understanding their lingo and Sunday’s multiplicity of heureux fêtards was, as is the nature of the French, noisily indiscreet. But The Diary, itself the soul of discretion, silently outlasted the lot of them.

    Our neighbouring island is an interesting place. It’s even interesting that the local government – of West Nusa Tenggara, of which Lombok is a part and Mataram the capital – seemingly takes the view that it can entice large numbers of recreational revellers from the Arab lands away from the fleshpots of Europe to enjoy themselves on holidays that will further the cause of Islamicising Lombok and beyond. That’s if the Wahhabi money from Saudi Arabia keeps coming in and the authorities can stop people stealing the runway lights at the new airport for long enough to land a plane. And if they can manage not to crack the runway on landing, they might even get to take off again.

    On Lombok’s west coast – where it really is one of the best places to see Bali (it’s just across the Strait) – things are marginally different. That’s where the island’s substantial Hindu community is concentrated. It’s where the bulk of the tourists go – pre-eminently to the Gilis, of which more in a moment – and it’s where party-time is available on call.

    Senggigi was not exactly buzzing, but there were enough tourists around to pique the interest of the street sellers. The Diary bought some lovely ikat while dining street-side one night; or rather the Distaff did – The Diary kept munching on the sensibly small smoked marlin plate that had been ordered as a main course.

    The beach resorts in and out of town seem to be doing well. There are some new players around, apparently financed by Singaporean money (Silk Air flies the city-state’s flag to Lombok, a long-standing commitment that delivers welcome dollars to Lombok’s embryonic economy), and established resorts also seem to be having a high old season.

    The Diary chose to stay at Puri Bunga, which is operated by Lombok Hotels Association chairman Marcel Navest. The tariff there is on the reasonable side of good. And waitress Novi, who despite her Ramadhan fasting always managed to serve infidels breakfast with a smile, would be our pick for employee of the month.

‘High’ Seas

There are some mutterings on the mainland of Lombok about the focus international visitors put on the Gilis, the three islands off the north-west coast that offer a different experience. One might wonder at the vacuity of visitors who travel from Bali to the Gilis, spend whatever time they have there within cooee of Lombok itself, and never set foot on the island proper.

    The fast boats are the attraction, apparently. The ones that don’t deposit you unexpectedly on some bleak East Bali beach when the waves get a little nasty and they start taking on water, that is. The dark theory among some of the Lombok crowd is that these are particularly popular because luggage isn’t scanned and all sorts of goodies that would otherwise be dangerously detectable travel free from interference.

    Needless to say, the Gilis are at high-season overflow level at the moment.

On a Winner

Garuda seems to have picked its moment – and its scheduling spot – in Lombok. It flies Denpasar-Mataram-Denpasar once daily, at the locally unfriendly times of 7.15pm out of Ngurah Rai and 8.15pm out of Selaparang.

    Its flights are full, because they are neatly timed to take international arrivals to Lombok the same day and extract returning holidaymakers from there in time to connect with mainly night-time flights out of Bali.

    The “full service” is a bit of a joke. The cabin crew have time to hand out a fruit tea (in economy) and to momentarily flick shut the “them-and-us curtain” between cattle class to the rear and executive splendour forward.

    It’s a pity though that they don’t seem to have time to clean the cabin between trips. The Diary and party, travelling in the same seats both ways, three days apart, found a plastic wrapper in the seat pocket on the return trip that the party had left there on the outward journey. And by the time we got back on board to return to Bali the bulkhead video screens – on which one is enjoined to closely attend to the safety demonstration – had given up the ghost too.

    Another problem – it’s a perennial one – is tour parties. Our flight back had what seemed like at least a thousand Chinese, none of whom apparently could manage to sit in the right seat, or indeed, sit down.    

  

She Loves Us

While in Lombok, The Diary received a cheery email from a happy reader named Heidi who lives on that side of the Wallace Line. It’s always nice to get a compliment, though (see below) it doesn’t do to let them go to your head.

    Here’s her little billet-doux:

    “Hi Hector. I was just in Starbucks at the airport in Bali on my way back home to Lombok. I had the great fortune to find a copy of The Bali Times in their reading bin.
    “Let me say I am an Aussie girl living in Lombok and one of my greatest joys when in Bali is to get a copy. The very best of compliments to you for a most professional newspaper; it is a rare find indeed.
    “Long live The Bali Times ... it is truly a shining beacon to us, possibly gila, expats who have chosen to take a path less travelled.”

    Thank you, Heidi. Keep up the good reading.

Here Jack, Catch!

The Jakarta Globe had an article recently in which the newspaper discovered that there are a few things wrong with Bali. They’re not wrong, of course, in making that assessment or in publishing their recent illumination on such matters. And it is only right that a national reading audience should get the real picture.

    What was rather more surprising was the fact that Jack Daniels of Bali Discovery Tours – a travel agent, one of the endemic oversupply of same on this island – chose to cut-and-paste the piece, co-opting it as a promotion for his weekly email update. From this we learned that Daniels had single-handedly already revealed the dark side of Bali. The Globe was just playing catch-up.

    Good promotion, Jack; it’s just not exactly accurate. But it’s great to see you’re catching up too. Just ease up a little on the blow-hard bit, there’s a good chap.

Right Priorities

The most telling comment to come from news that Governor I Made Mangku Pastika and his deputy A.A. Ngurah Puspayoga have refused to accept the new cars set to be provided for them in the current provincial budget – on the sensible argument that there are better things on which to spend scarce money – was made by the vice chairman of the special legislative committee for the budget, Ketut Adnyana. We report the story in the news pages in this edition.

    Apparently, Adnyana was astounded by the novelty of such a gubernatorial caveat. He said in response that the Governor’s and vice-governor’s vehicles often have trouble keeping up with the motorcades of the political glitterati when they come to town for high-speed car chases escorted by phalanxes of police armed with offensively loud whoopee sirens and very bad manners. Well, if that’s the case, perhaps in the cause of political harmony they could just try going a little more slowly; or even stay within the speed limits. Further, said Adnyana, the Governor’s modest official limousine was often outranked by the plush carriages preferred by district heads.

    There’s a grand old Australian slang term, now quite properly in use throughout the English-speaking world, which amply covers this pathetic excuse for a policy position. It is “bullshit.” The Governor and his deputy have done all Balinese a favour – especially the poorer, pedestrian, ones most at risk of being run over by politicians, plutocrats and lawyers in their disgustingly expensive motor vehicles – as well as everyone who pays tax on the island, and the budget, by foreclosing on such nonsense. There are indeed worthier things on which to spend money.

    And as for the regents with their ramshackle budgets and shambolic administrations, any testicular-vehicular boy-toys in their possession are an unconscionable disgrace.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is at www.thebalitimes.com. Print editions are available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.  

THE BALI TIMES DIARY August 27, 2010

Shooting Them

Is Not a Good

Idea, if

the Aim is

Humanity

We hold no brief for drug runners or the low-life scum who organise them; or for terrorists who avoid being blown away and are thus forced into a system of jurisprudence that really should have nothing to do with them. And we concede that the death penalty argument is a particularly fractious one in a society such as Indonesia’s, where religious figures apparently find it perfectly acceptable to assert that some classes of God’s human creation should be denied prayers for their souls after they die.

    But Indonesia is a signatory to a United Nations treaty that specifically outlaws judicial murder. National policy is thus at variance with the nation’s international undertaking. This does not make Indonesia unique. It simply makes it as impervious to obligation as many other states. The government may be happy with this position; but that doesn’t make it right.

    The issue is pertinent because three of the so-called Bali Nine drug criminals are appealing their death sentences in hearings now before the courts in Denpasar. Andrew Chan, Myuran Sukumaran and – separately, since he was but a stupid dupe of a mule and not a ringleader – Scott Rush, have future but as yet undetermined dates with Indonesian firing squads. They wish to avoid this (and quite reasonably) for their own purposes. But the argument goes beyond that. It goes to the crucial question of whether – having accepted international law as the benchmark via accession to the UN treaty – it is lawful for Indonesia to execute people.

    The rejoinder (which we may expect) that it is in fact lawful, because death is prescribed in national law for criminals who commit specified offences, begs the question. There is – morally, legally, ethically – an unfathomable gulf between taking life in a military or police operation, or in self-defence, and cold-bloodedly ordering the extinction of it by judicial fiat months or even years later.

Lombok Beckons

This weekend The Diary is in Lombok. A trip eastwards across the Wallace Line has been long delayed – by all sort of things, including the fact that if you’re in Bali, you’ve already arrived at the best possible destination – but was made necessary by business, as well as a touch of nostalgia. It is a beautiful island and – on the west coast – one of the best places from which to see Bali. Gunung Agung, 70 kilometres away across the Lombok Strait, is a constant presence.

    It is an opportunity too to see old friends, though not all of them. One set has decamped for Ramadhan on a circular tour to the Philippines, Singapore-Malaysia and then Western Australia that will bring them back to Lombok long after the fast is finally over for another year.

    And it will be nice to say hello to the eucalypts that are a natural part of the ecology on our neighbouring island, though The Diary will while doing so also be missing the chirpy little squirrels that daily put on a floor show and trapeze act in the teak trees across the road from The Cage. We left them a note saying we’d be back soon.

    The Diary and Distaff chose to fly Garuda. We had to keep our infrequent flyer points alive. And anyway, it’s a much quicker flight. Garuda flies Boeing 737s on the route. They make the crossing in 15 minutes. The turboprops used by other airlines take 17.    

Nice Train Wreck

It’s not very often Australian politics gets interesting; even to Australians, far less to the rest of the world. But the election outcome (what outcome?) in Australia last weekend delivered drama by the spade-full.

    It produced the first “hung parliament” (where no single party has enough seats to guarantee a majority vote) since 1940. It proved that the Labor Party – now in power nationally only in caretaker mode pending negotiations between all parties on who can actually form a government – cannot take the electors for granted. It brought forth a surge in support for the Greens. This must surely silence the Greens’ continual bleating that the electoral system denies them lower house seats (they won the seat of Melbourne: all they have to do now is what the other parties do - persuade more voters, in other seats, to vote for them).

    Saturday’s election may have forever altered the face of Australian politics. It definitely produced a spectacular train wreck.

Harry’s a Crock

Well so much for saurian prescience. Harry the Croc, resident of a Darwin attraction that seeks to capitalise on the fascinated horror with which both Australians and international tourists view the salt-water crocodiles native to the country’s tropical north, picked Julia Gillard to win last Saturday’s national elections.

    She didn’t. The result (see above) was exactly what most observers who are not hungry crocodiles had been predicting for weeks. Gillard’s Liberal opponent Tony Abbott can take some comfort in the fact that his own chicken-on-a-string was passed over by Harry on Thursday last week in favour of the feast attached to a photo of Gillard.

    It was certainly made clear last Saturday that Australians do not like the concept of the midnight knock on the door, such as that in late June when Gillard deposed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at the behest of faceless Labor Party factional leaders who thought Rudd was going to cost them unfettered access to the gravy train.

    But we have a theory. It is that, being an adventurous type of a certain age (he’s an Over-40) Harry simply prefers redheads. Did anyone actually ask him why he picked the Ranga (Aussie slang for redhead) in his snap poll?

Go Away World

A curious little advisory note is nowadays popping up on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website, for people outside Australia who might want to watch one of its programmes on line. Say something like The 7.30 Report, hosted by Kerry O’Brien, which is essential material for anyone interested in keeping fully abreast of Australian affairs, especially at times of high political drama.

    The note reads: “Due to copyright reasons this video programme is available for download by people located in Australia only. If you are not located in Australia, you are not authorised to view this video.”

    Ah well, Aunty (like other once genuinely, now notionally, public broadcasters around the world) is a very commercial old girl these days.

    But perhaps in the interests of the accuracy and objectivity it asserts is its constant aim, it should cease promoting itself quite so assiduously as a vehicle for carrying the voice of Australia around the globe; at least for the rapidly increasing audience out here beyond the migration exclusion zone who want – or need – their viewing on demand rather than on the not necessarily convenient schedule offered by Australia Network, Aunty’s cash-strapped overseas arm.

Write On

The Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – from October 6-10 this year – has a great deal for aspiring writers. The Kilat! Flash Fiction Challenge offers such scribblers an opportunity to post stories. People vote for them. It’s an engaging idea and thoroughly commendable. A delve into the site this week showed that entries thus far are eclectic – as they should be – and coming in a fast trot. That’s also good news. Visit http://flashfiction.ubudwritersfestival.com/ if you’d like to read them, vote for them, or try your hand at writing one.

    Most of the material is in Indonesian. The festival has added Google Translate to the site so that “everyone can enjoy entries in English or Bahasa.” Good luck with that. Google Translate produces something called Googlish. Or Bahasa Buruk.      

Flying High

The Merah Putih has just returned to storage at The Cage, after its annual weeklong-plus flutter in honour of Independence Day. This year it remained aloft for the full period without the need for adjustment because the bamboo pole to which it is affixed as required is now housed in a length of PVC piping attached to the outside wall of the Bale by the handyman who looks after the pool and other things.

    It nearly didn’t. The gent, who has a day job elsewhere and is a very cheery and helpful fellow, was asked last year, straight after Independence Day, to add this essential piece of infrastructure to the domestic inventory, and hadn’t done so for 12 months. A gentle reminder three days before flag-raising – the last in a lengthy and regular series of such prompts – got the pole-holder in place in the nick of time.

    The Cage is also celebrating because this year its flag went up first in the neighbourhood, beating the patriotic local family compound across the gully by a clear two days and everyone else in the area by a country mile.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of The Bali Times, out Fridays. www.thebalitimes.com. The newspaper is available worldwide via NewspaperDirect.

THE BALI TIMES DIARY August 20, 2010

Pitiful
Tifatul
Unplugs
Us All
Again

The Diary spent last Friday night and much of last Saturday unplugged. The internet was inaccessible, as well as inexplicable when your high-priced provider only provides online support in business hours. It was all eventually sorted out – or it sorted itself out – but this process took place without benefit of explanation.
    But we blame Tifatul Sembiring, the minister for miscommunications and leading member of a political party that wants to jilbab the lot of us, whether we like it or not. The minister has been fulminating about the un-Islamic nature of porn on the web – and we agree that it is morally unsound and all sorts of things; plus it gums up Indonesia’s woefully undersized web for the rest of us, given the wall-to-wall virtual titillation that we are warned is going on – and has vowed to pull the plug on it.
    Unfortunately, as columnist Vyt Karazija points out on the Perspective page today, if you want to target specific websites to unplug you have to know what you’re doing. Tifatul clearly doesn’t, though this is not a surprise. However, the skill of being a minister and of implementing policy (even policy made on the run, which is the general way of affairs here) lies in finding the means to achieve the objective.
    Sending out a lot of dunderheads to unplug everything, willy-nilly, lest somewhere out there someone may be obtaining an un-Islamic jolly on the web, is not the way to do it.
    Web-based pornography may be distasteful and offensive to many people. It is not the sort of thing with which those among us who are religiously inclined should even contemplate dallying; or anyone with a mind, for that matter. But these are personal choices; and that goes to the very heart of a free and democratic society. The government of which Tifatul Sembiring is a part is committed – it says – to advancing freedom and democracy.
    Cutting off a lot of crass whackos from their fun time should not be done at the expense of internet access for people who have other reasons for being on line, or for trying to be.

So Excited

The funsters at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival keep giving us all a laugh. Last Friday they posted on their Facebook this engaging little come-on: “We have an excited announcement coming up very soon! Stay tuned!!”
    It must have been the three-year Citibank naming rights sponsor agreement that was announced shortly thereafter. There’s a report on it in this edition of The Bali Times. It was certainly good news for the festival, which has been trying to find a major commercial (as in, lotsa dosh) sponsor for a while.
    Perhaps the announcement was excited. But it’s more likely the post was worded as it was as the result of illiteracy on Wudbee Hill. The multiple exclamation marks were a dead giveaway.

Get Along

Australia votes this Saturday (August 21) and all good Aussies, everywhere, are waking from their customary slumber to trot along their local voting place to do the right thing: That’s as in vote, or be fined for not doing so.
    The Diary, having been one of the flock since 1972 (when separate citizenship of the Great South Land was acquired) and still registered to vote, has already done its duty. But lest there are any Australians about, resident here, who are eligible to tick the boxes but have not yet done so, we remind readers that the Australian Consulate General is a postal voting place. They’ll even be open on Saturday to permit this exercise in democracy to have its fullest expression.
    The election is about all sorts of serious things but, for those who might have difficulty choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, some useful guidance emerged in the final stages of campaigning. A Sydney radio station quizzed both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on their musical tastes.
    Gillard opted for Bruce Springsteen and Cold Chisel. Abbott, plainly an old-style conservative to his bootstraps (or possibly his Speedos) said he was a man of his generation and liked The Beach Boys, The Big O, Elvis and The Beatles. Gosh, he’s older than his years (he’ll be 53 in November). But he’d love Bali’s wandering minstrels.
    The radio station told him: “Even Obama is listening to Jay-Z.” Abbott replied: “Yeah, well, I probably wouldn't even know who that guy is.” We hope he meant Jay-Z.
    Disclosure: The Diary would vote for Bruce Springsteen and Cold Chisel if they were on the ballot paper.

Bon Chance

It’s not every day you run into a Canadian consul in these parts, since a treaty exists under which the Australians look after straying lumberjacks in this neck of the woods while the Canadians, ever the drawers of the short straw, get to pick up the debris of the Bintang singlet brigade in other remote parts of the globe. 
    So it was nice to meet Dana Lajoie, second secretary and vice consul at Canada’s Jakarta legation, who was in town on the sort of business visiting consuls do from time to time and popped up at the little soiree Australia’s departing consul-general, Lex Bartlem, put on last Tuesday week.
    She was able to give The Diary cheery news about the Canadian woman badly injured here in a motorbike accident a little while ago, an event that among other things brought The Bali Times Virtual Blood Bank into play. She’s back home and on the mend, we’re told.
    The Bali Times Virtual Blood Bank is a register of members’ blood types for matching with emergency requirements. It coordinates with the Red Cross Blood Bank at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar. If you’d like to sign up, there’s a form on Pg 4.

Faux Pas

Lajoie was here with her husband Gilles. The Diary, being an inattentive oaf, immediately thought: Ah, Quebecois. Alas, the ultimate Canadian joke had been self-played. Gilles is from New Brunswick. It is Canada’s only officially bilingual province and it’s where they actually do speak French.
    Dana is from Saskatchewan, a different place altogether, famous in The Diary’s mind for two things: First, for being the destination of choice of Sitting Bull who, having assisted in the most significant US Army snafu of the Indian wars (the annihilation of the terminally incautious George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn in 1876) crossed the border and told the Mounties that since his Latoka Sioux cousins at Woods Mountain were subjects of HM Queen Victoria, he was too. And second, for being right next to Alberta, home of the world’s best fiddle music and the fabulous singer kd lang.
    In Quebec they still speak the sort of colonial pidgin thrown by the citoyens at poor General Wolfe who, being a bewigged and powdered English gentleman, was mortally offended by them on the Heights of Abraham outside Quebec City in 1759 as he wrested – posthumously as it turned out - what would become the Dominion of Canada from the failing grip of the Versailles mob to add to King George II’s imperial domains.

Hype Alert

It was nice the other day to pick up Sophie Digby’s fun little August-datelined MinYak – that’s the Yak magazine’s monthly get-it-on they pop into people’s inboxes to keep readers’ interest up between quarterly editions of the actual mag – and see Craig Seaward, boss of the oh-so-W property said to be soon coming your way if you’re at Seminyak and Susi Johnston hasn’t yet had cause to complain about another out-of-season biblical flood.
   The little Yak had a Q&A with him: the usual fluffy stuff you see in the glitter-box media these days. Goodness, the guy’s so hip he must be prosthetic. Still, it’s great that the Zip Generation, who can only manage 20 words at a pop, including adjectival overload, can get a brief on the real meaning of life, even if they’re really only channelling Julia Roberts.
   Those interested in reading longer sentences, written with some objective purpose, would have got a fuller (and much earlier) picture of the big W from reading our LIFE section feature on July 21. It was written by our Seminyak correspondent, Novar Caine, and included this memorable bit of what’s-that-you-say from Seaward:    
   “We flirt with guests’ senses – sexy with a touch of whimsy, seduce through individual attention through emotional connection in unleashing the spirit of fun. We welcome all that is ‘now’ by bringing guests behind invisible velvet ropes into the world of W, from discovery of Balinese customary ceremonies to VIP access to celebrated fashion showcases and music happenings.” Thanks, we’re quite clear now.
   No, seriously, we like the thought of outré hotels; and the Yak and its little offspring. And Sophie, as we have noted before, is a dear. Oh dear, it sounds as if we’re starting a zoo.

So There

In the letters page last week, feedback contributor S. McLean wrote that she or he – we’re guessing she: we did ask at the strange Yahoo email address from which the missive had issued, but we heard nothing, as you do – was upset that The Diary had seemingly (and apparently unbelievably) set out to discomfit some poor souls hereabouts who were only trying to keep their names in lights.
    Stripped of its hyperbole, it asked if we enjoy writing this sort of stuff. Well yes. That’s what diarists do.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is at www.thebalitimes.com. Print editions are available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.  

THE BALI TIMES DIARY August 13, 2010

Sorry, But

We Really

Do Need to

Rage About

Rabies

Rabies is a frightful disease best dealt with, should it appear, with draconian measures. Before the present outbreak caught everyone by surprise – including the local authorities and the first victims of it, who went to their graves never knowing what had killed them so horribly – Bali was officially a rabies-free area.

    Whether it was or not is moot. Like many of nature’s ways of committing indiscriminate mass murder, rabies can lie dormant, or at least quiescent and unnoticed, for lengthy periods before breaking out to cause misery and untimely death. There are very few places on the planet where it can be safely said that rabies is not present, or potentially so, or where continuous vigilance is an optional extra. Bali is not one of them.

    The fact that there have been no identified human cases for a statutory number of years neither confers protection nor indicates absence. Rabies manifests itself with readily identifiable symptoms – not for nothing is it known in French as La Rage and in the now disused English term as hydrophobia – and even if health post personnel are not educated to recognise them, any veterinarian or doctor worthy of a certificate to practice certainly should.

    Thus responses such as those of the authorities (run in circles, scream and shout), the animal welfare lobby (don’t be nasty to all those poor dogs), and now the Bali Hotels Association (apply World Health Organisation procedures and don’t scare the horses, aka international tourists) are foolish and intensely annoying.

    We can still stop rabies. If anyone had thought (in time) to establish an effective quarantine zone on the Bukit in 2008, enforced it, and destroyed all potential animal carriers of the virus in that area, we wouldn’t now have an island-wide problem. In that context, all we have to deal with is a far bigger problem than should have been the case.

Let’s Rock

It hardly seems possible that it’s a year since the Rock Bar at the Ayana started serving drinks on the cliff just above the waves at Jimbaran, and entertaining the crowd (and the crews of the Java boats at anchor just offshore) with loud live music.

    But it is. Proof of this passage of time was to hand last Thursday, when Rock Baristas were invited to a party. Ayana general manager Charles de Foucault made a short speech – they’re the best – in his delightfully accented English and pointed out that the success of the Rock Bar could be seen by the fact that they had already needed to extend it (it’s a sort of Rock Bar II a little further along).

    As on all such occasions, The Crowd was there. It included Cindy Wockner, who works out of Jakarta as the Sydney Daily Telegraph/News Limited’s Indonesia correspondent (Cindy is another former colleague so it was good to catch up), other journalists of importance, and a few hangers-on, such as The Diary.

    We still didn’t see the alphabet soup girl, Susi Johnston, however, even though she’d left us a note on Hector’s Blog, where The Bali Times Diary is posted. She said the reason we hadn’t managed to spot her at the Yakkers three weeks ago was that she had been wearing black eye makeup for the first time in 20 years, new specs, a multi-hued dress apparently of such effusion that even Jacob would have been jealous, and heels high enough to escape a Seminyak flood.

    We’d have looked for her at the Rock Bar, of course, armed with this intelligence, if we hadn’t been having too much fun. But of course we were having too much fun. The Rock Bar’s that sort of place. And the music’s good too – Third Eye Blind played at the party – even if those flashing strobe lights are a bit too much for people who would rather concentrate on the colour of the wine.      

A Fond Farewell

In the grand old days of the British Raj, for which it seems some Indonesians rather pine on a what-if basis - what if the British rather than the Dutch had been their late and unlamented colonial masters: might they now have a country that works? - it used to be said of Indian troops that they didn’t really care whether their (British) officers were good or bad. They just liked them to stay with them for a very long time.

    Expatriate communities feel something of the same imperative where the official local flag-carrier of their own country is concerned. That’s why the honorary consul is such a good idea, if the place is entirely peripheral to the core interests of the country concerned. The home government appoints one of its national flock resident there – or even a citizen of the country itself – to perform these duties and appear on the handshake circuit.

    Where Australia is concerned, as with other regional countries, Bali’s unique position within Indonesia and the international travel market makes fulltime official consular representation a must and a suitable appointment essential. This means a career foreign service officer and that means they come and go. Thus we are losing Lex Bartlem, Australia’s consul-general here since January 2009 and now, far ahead of the usual schedule, heading out to a new appointment.
    Bartlem made the announcement of his hitherto unscheduled departure - though he could not say where to because the appointment has yet to be announced by Canberra - at a soiree in honour of departing consul Sean Turner (he's been with us for three years and was in Jakarta for three before that) and to welcome new consul Annette Morris at the Consulate General on Tuesday night.

    An old friend of Bartlem's at the gathering, a long-term Bali resident who worked with him years ago when (surprise!) both were somewhat younger, said a few words of thanks to a modest chap who would never think to blow his own trumpet.     

   

Dry Run for Chaos

The unbelievable shemozzle that enveloped Sunset Road, the Ngurah Rai Bypass, and the circus that is Dewa Ruci in Kuta last Friday afternoon may have had some educational value. Those recovering from the ordeal might find that thought therapeutic.

    Police had closed off the through access from Sunset to the Bypass heading towards the airport and Nusa Dua, forcing all such traffic heading in that direction to go up the road towards Sanur before making a u-turn a kilometre along the way to head back in their necessary direction.

    It was brought about by an emergency – though people stuck in their vehicles for 45 minutes inching along towards Sanur and then forcing their way into the traffic trying to get from Sanur didn’t know this at the time – and may thus have been unavoidable. A fire at a spa in the mangrove swamp further south along the Bypass had resulted in the fire brigade being called from far and wide and their appliances required priority. It also brought flocks of gawkers who got in the way of everything and should have been moved on.

    But what was truly unbelievable was the response of the police, who showed devotion to stupidity far beyond their usual call. Dewa Ruci was overrun with them, though most seemed to be standing around. Up the road towards Sanur, where traffic - doubtless including tourists in transport that was never going to get them to the airport on time - was trying to make the u-turn, was one lonely motorcycle policeman, blowing his little whistle like mad and waving through the traffic that actually wanted to go that way.

    Well, that traffic was going that way whether he liked it or not, of course. That’s what road verges (and for motorbikes, shop forecourts) are for in Bali. The little chap needed help: a couple of his colleagues from back at Dewa Ruci would have done, provided they had their whistles with them, without which an Indonesian traffic cop is incapable of any activity.

    They could have formed a u-turn squad and organised a regulated reverse-direction point that would have worked. But evidently that would have been too hard. Or too much trouble. Or no one thought of it.

    The Diary - caught up in this fun show (a two-and-a-half-hour stop-start drive from Denpasar to Ungasan is a delight) – found it a useful dry run for the chaos Governor Pastika has promised us when they take away that big statue and start building that flyover.

Big Book Date

There's soon to be a really interesting panel discussion on the future of books. This is a seminal question for bibliophiles everywhere and eminently suitable fare for a literary festival. The panel will discuss the developments in electronic publishing that are revolutionising the way books are sold and read. After all, it is not since Gutenberg - half a millennium ago - that such a profound change in the dissemination of knowledge has occurred.

    Panellists will discuss what effect this is having on authors and how electronic publishing will alter the nature of fictional and non-fictional texts if (when) the physical book passes into history. It will try to answer how classics will be identified and reputations made in a radically fractured reading constituency. 

    The participants are two authors, a book publisher and the publisher and editor of a leading literary review (the London Review of Books).

    Not to be missed? You're right. Unfortunately the event is at the Edinburgh Book Festival (which is on this month) and is light years away from the land of fragrant rice.

diary@thebalitimes.com

Hector's Blog is published as The Bali Times Diary in the print edition of the newspaper, out Fridays. The Bali Times, Bali's only English language newspaper, is at www.thebalitimes.com. Print editions are available worldwide through NewspaperDirect.