HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, May 27, 2011

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.

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HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, May 6, 2011

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.

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

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.

   

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

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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HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, Apr. 15, 2011

Great Move

To Put New

Writers

In the

Spotlight

Things are moving on the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival front that promise to significantly broaden its impact and appeal. One of UWRF’s key missions is to promote emerging Indonesian writers, an effort that since 2008 has involved various programmes, including the sponsoring of participation by selected Indonesian writers in the festival, publishing bilingual anthologies of the works of those emerging writers, and organising fringe and satellite events in other parts of the country.
   This year UWRF is organising the First Bali Emerging Writers Festival (in this land of acronyms it is shorthanded as BEWF) as “an initial effort to build a replicable, sustainable and feasible model for similar festivals in the future.” Sounds like a really great idea.

    The two-day festival next month will, to use its organisers' words, bring together Bali’s promising young talents to engage in a lively dialogue with several established Indonesian writers on various aspects of literary writing, from the often elusive creative process to the more mundane but no less important aspect of publishing.
    As well as panel sessions, BEWF will feature performances from the island’s young talents in spoken words, theatre and music. The organizing committee will invite up to 30 emerging writers from across the island to participate in BEWF as well as up to 10 established writers.
    BEWF will be held in Denpasar from May 27-28. The UWRF itself is from October 5-9 this year.
    Facebook users can find more on the BEWF at facebook.com/ubudwritersfest.

Shocking, Really

Apparently 25 members of the national House of Representatives paid an unannounced visit to Kerobokan prison this week to check the state of the inmates. Led by Fahri Hamzah, vice chairman of the national legislature’s commission III, they were taken around the premises by prison governor Siswanto and Taswem Tarib, the local representative of the justice and human rights ministry.

    So, leaving aside the fact that it was a carefully organised “unannounced visit” as most such events are, we can be pleased that the legislators were surprised at the poor conditions of Kerobokan and of the inmates therein. They recorded cramped and stuffy sleeping quarters and a terrible smell of garbage throughout.

   “Many of the prisoners are sleeping on the floor with too many people in one room,” said Fahri. “From our findings, the penitentiary failed to make people come back as better people. The penitentiary conditions are not helping to rehabilitate, inmates want revenge instead. The penitentiary system in Indonesia is over capacity.”

    All of that is true, across Indonesia. It’s not just at Kerobokan, which gets the bad press it does largely because of its oversupply of foreign miscreants.

    Prison governor Siswanto says the jail’s capacity is 323 prisoners but that it is accommodating about 1,000 at present, and adds that in such conditions rehabilitation is a practical impossibility.

    Fahri said: “We will ask the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights again. We’ve allocated trillions of rupiah for prisons. In addition, we have also asked that domestic violence and customary cases be classed separately so the prison does not become even more crowded.”

   Taswem also complained about the inhumane conditions in Kerobokan. “We want the House to know that Kerobokan is improper, and violates human rights. We want parliament to allocate the budget for us to build a new prison, or make Kerobokan into a two-floor building.”

    Urgent action is certainly required. The national legislature could find the money easily. It could take it off the grossly inflated budget for its over-serviced members’ new Taj Mahal in Jakarta.

    More than 40 percent of Kerobokan inmates are serving sentences for drug offences.

So Sad

Byron Bay on Australia’s eastern seaboard is a magic spot, for surfers and seekers of alternative truths. It is totemic too in that it is the most easterly point on the Australian mainland. We used to visit it often – it isn’t too long a drive from where we used to live in Brisbane and a pleasant trip for the subtle changes in landscape and climate that kick in once you’re south of the Queensland/New South Wales border – but nowadays we do so virtually.

     One of the places for virtual drop-ins has been Byron Bay Live, a media agency website run by Tasmanian exile and long-term Byron resident Jonno Howell. His photographs capture the essence of Byron, its beaches, its magic surf and its colourful inhabitants, temporary and permanent.

     It was therefore doubly distressing to hear of Howell’s sudden death in Bali last week, apparently the victim of anaphylactic shock, in layman’s terms an acute allergic reaction. He was only 28. He’d been here on business and had eaten out – in Kuta – the previous evening. RIP Jonno.

     It was a reminder too that life is a fragile thing and that oblivion may claim you at any time.

Beat That

The Beat Magazine, which keeps Bali and Jakarta readers up to speed with what’s going down on the entertainment scene, has for some time been publishing a daily online news brief called, unsurprisingly, The Beat Daily.

    It’s a useful and timely service which breaks new ground in English-language news reporting in Bali. It cites its local, Indonesian language, media sources.

    In some people’s books that’s called honesty.   

We go on

As a rule, you let things go. And so we would have, if not for the strange little note in The Bali Times the week before last. We saw it last Sunday week when, spotting a fortuitous parking opportunity at our local Circle K, the thought occurred that we might after all bother to buy a copy. It said, on page 2, “The Bali Times Diary has ended.” This must be Irish for:  “Hector’s Blog, which has been provided free to The Bali Times as The Diary since October 2008, no longer appears in the newspaper.”

    Of course, it continues where it has always been, on this blog. But it was good to see Rio Helmi’s nice post on the other side of paradise in the page; Helmi’s very good value. And the Dalai Lama’s a good bloke too, if on reflection you find you’re a bit short of local copy.

    What was less pleasant was the grossly prominent page one report on the C151 property at Seminyak having won the government-sponsored International Business & Company Awards 2011 for “service excellence.” It ran with a very big photograph of one of the company’s principals receiving the ornament from someone or other. Oddly, the article failed to mention that C151 founder Hanno Soth, who provided readers with an effusively promotional and entirely misleading quote in the report, is the newspaper’s proprietor.

    Neither did the story seek to balance its astonishing breadth and length, or even augment it, by mentioning that successful local businessman Chris Wilaras, who pays for his regular advertisements, won Best Developer of the Year award at the same little Kuta love-in. He had to advertise it specially, poor chap. His cheerio also appeared on page one, right beside the not necessarily desirable but entirely unsurprising information that Singapore-resident Soth is still trying to acquire profile, influence, position, and your money in these parts.

    Oddly enough, that week’s front page never made it to the newspaper’s website. The previous week’s remained there until replaced last weekend by the next but one.  Perhaps someone was embarrassed. But nonetheless that below-masthead line on the front page of the paper should be revised. “Revealing the Real Bali Times” seems apt.

    BY THE WAY: Hector’s helper reports he has been unfriended on Facebook by William J. Furney, late of Canggu. Furney joins an exclusive group: 0.8 percent of the carefully selected address book. The others are long-time luminary Michael Made White Wijaya (we know him as MW2), who got his knickers (and his udeng) in a twist many moons ago over something or other, and bow-wow-BAWA stalwart Elizabeth Henzell (now Suttie, we see), Janet de Neefe’s executive assistant, who had squawked furiously about dogs and the inadmissibility of views other than her own about how to stop them giving rabies to poor Balinese people who don’t deserve to die in that particularly horrible and unnecessary way.

   That was a pity. Liz is a great bird and MW2, while OTT, is an engaging fellow who, like Hector, enjoys a rant.

Hector is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky) and Tweets @Scratchings.

HECTOR'S BALI times DIARY, Apr. 8, 2011

Hey, Chaps,

There May

Be a Riot

(Or There

May Not)

It’s difficult not to empathise with the Indonesian government’s criticism of the latest revision of the official Australian travel advisory for Indonesia (including Bali). (The bracketed bit is always there because some Aussies, being Aussies, apparently still don’t know Bali is in Indonesia.) It related to the beneficence of the capture of Umar Patek, one of the suspected masterminds of the 2002 Bali bombings, in Pakistan, and advised that similar high-profile apprehensions in the past had led to outbreaks of violence.

    It’s true that you can never safely forecast the actions of nutters or the response to them by mindless mobs or pepped-up packs of protesters, and that to err on the side of caution is sensible policy. At the same time, there’s little evidence that anyone in Indonesia – beyond a benighted few – gives a toss about Patek and even less that they view his arrest as likely to bring a riot to their doorstep. Foreign ministry spokesman Michael Tene was on the mark when he said:  “The warning should reflect the actual situation.”

    Australia’s advisory said Patek’s arrest “may increase the risk of violent responses in the short term.”  This is possibly true: but it is a statement so qualified – by that “may” – as to be of very dubious utility. You’re probably more likely to run into some riotously angry neighbours debagging (and de-bra-ing) a poor sad man masquerading as a woman, as happened recently in Java, than a pugilistic push by the Patek Promotion Party.

    The real purpose of travel advisories, whether from Australia or anywhere else, is twofold. First, they do genuinely offer advice – most of it entirely sensible, such as don’t let a rabid dog bite you, don’t drink the water, avoid street touts and fatal diseases, do not allow a transvestite to spike your drink (or marry you, see above); that sort of thing – and second, they serve to deflect criticism from the issuing government if something inconvenient should in fact occur. The government can then say, “Well don’t blame us, we told you not to go there.”

    The duty of care nowadays, like so much else, turns on the risk of litigation.

Good Moves

We hear some very good news from Janet de Neefe’s Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (Oct 5-9 this year). Jane Fuller and Melissa Delaney came on board last month as executive producer and programme producer respectively, a cheering sign for a great week in October.

    Fuller comes to the UWRF with 15 years of producing performance in a variety of theatre and festival settings in Australia – including three Adelaide Fringe Festivals – and a residency at the Hong Kong Fringe Club.

    Delaney joins Bali’s own LitCrit festival from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where she had been senior arts coordinator since April 2008, responsible for the management, design, implementation and evaluation of RMIT Link Arts & Culture programmes, including Arts Council funding and the performing arts and other programmes.

    Here at The Cage, we’re looking forward to Ubud. We’ll be fresh from enjoying a selection of the eclectic range of delights at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

    Sarah Tooth, who had a two-year turn as Janet’s UWRF helper, is back in Adelaide, by the way.

Getting Crowded

New figures show that Denpasar – uncontrolled-growth cities everywhere are like black holes, really, sucking everything in to destruction – is growing like Topsy and won’t be stopped. Especially here, where planning is at best notional and in fact a sick joke. Bali’s capital had a population of 788,445 at the end of 2010 (it’ll be more now) comprising 403,026 males and 385,419 females. No wonder those red lights wink so brightly at Padang Galak and other places where wanita-wares and HIV are available at a discount.

    Census figures just released by BPS, the central statistics agency, and other data show that Denpasar is growing at 4 percent a year, that remaining agricultural land (aka open space) is fast being swallowed up by development and what our tourism promoters might want to call “informal housing,” and that traffic conditions are daily becoming more chaotic.

    The most crowded area is South Denpasar, with 244,957 inhabitants and a density of 6,846 people per square kilometre. In South Denpasar the settler population (people not native to that location) forms half the total.

    Demographics are changing South Bali in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Shoo-SHOO

We don’t like waste here in Bali, apparently. In fact, according to the latest intelligence from Renon, we have no time for it at all. This startling news follows an embarrassing article in TIME Magazine, which along to way to describing a holiday in Bali as hell, said the amount of rubbish around the place was disgusting.

    First knee-jerk, from the Governor’s spokesman, was to the effect that Bali wasn’t hell (no arguments there) and nothing much was a problem anyway (plenty of arguments there). Then, 24 hours later, Governor Made Pastika himself weighed in and said well, yes, actually there was a problem and it needed to be fixed. No arguments there.

    Then, of course, it descended again into the sort of sorry farce you hear whenever someone that honoured potential foreign guests might listen to says something not necessarily to our advantage. In this instance what got us ROFLing was the Governor’s lovely line about how Kuta Beach was covered with rubbish because the wind blew it there.

    Yes, well, um ... that’s true. But in order to be blown onto Tourist Icon One it needs first to have been created.  So if you were having a sensible conversation about it you might say it’s a cause and effect thing. But Bali isn’t having a sensible conversation about it at all, so far. We don’t do things like that here. We have a series of farcical no, can’t be, no, oh well, all right then, yes, interludes and then someone says they’re looking into it (there are a lot of mirrors in Bali).

    Now that the rubbish has been officially noticed by the world (the story was getting an outing in Australia this week, a place where they fine you $200 for dropping a cigarette butt in the street – and $400 for ignoring the health warnings soon, we expect), though, action will need to be taken. Or a facsimile of same will need to take place.

    So let’s start with a few basics: 1 – If you don’t have proper waste management systems in place (i.e., if you just toss the stuff over the fence or in the nearest drain or watercourse) then sooner or later it’s going to end up ruining some tourist’s happy snap. 2 – There is rather more to waste management than keeping Kuta Beach free of litter. 3 – You have to actually organise waste management.  4 – This requires more effort than declaring Bali Clean and Green and (ineffectually) spraying the Suwung dump to control the vermin and keep the smell down. 5 – Give the grassroots job (the education and initial collection and control) to the banjars, fund and resource them to do it, and make sure they do.

    With education, there might soon enough be fewer plastic bags floating around the place. And with health education, there might be a lot of angry mums banging on the banjar door about  dangerous and smelly rubbish, consequential disease risks, large numbers of enormous rats and an excess of mangy, scavenging dogs.

Choo-CHOO

Apparently the 500-kilometre-long round-island railway promised by Governor Made Pastika is even closer than ever. Word this week from the gubernatorial press podium was that it would be up and running in 2013. So in between having the brainwave and recruiting some “Who? What? Oh...” help, the governor’s slow train has already advanced two years. Guess they’ll be starting on the preliminary concept planning sometime soon, then.

Well, Hello

The lovely little MinYak cantered into our in-box again this week, bearing the good oil. It’s a regular treat from Sophie and Nigel and the girls and guys at Yak Central, aka the Canggu Tennis Club, where the big Yak and the newly resurgent Bud are produced in super-glossy print and which the MinYak augments electronically and helps promote.

    Among the many treats, in house and other, publicised in the latest MinYak is the 2011 Yak Canggu Tennis Classic open tournament, playing from April 30-May 7. They’re looking for good hitters, but we’re guessing they’d like some well-mannered spectators too, so it’s in our diary.

Hector tweets @Scratchings

Find him on Facebook at Hector McSquawky

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

Look Behind the

Hovel Door:

Paradise Is Out

To Lunch

Rio Helmi, who takes great photographs and like most nice people has a well developed social conscience, is lending a hand in fundraising for Bali’s street children. An art exhibition opening on April 15 offers two works for auction, proceeds to go to the charity concerned, Yayasan Kasih Peduli Anak in Denpasar (visit virtually at www.ykpa.org). Bali’s street kids are everyone’s concern.

    YKPA provides a caring home, school, and a new life, currently for 24 children. Seventy more children still on the streets have reading and maths classes at the beach and in the slums where they live. YKPA’s work in AIDS and abuse prevention is aimed at giving these children a future other than becoming sex workers or the new generation of Fagin-style characters who force young children to beg for them.

    The launch of Helmi’s exhibition, Urbanities, is at 7pm on Friday, April 15, at Danes Art Verandah in Jl. Hayam Wuruk, Denpasar. Part of the proceeds of the exhibition will go to the foundation, founded by Ibu Putu in 2005, and two large prints will be auctioned at the opening.
    Then on April 27 Helmi opens an exhibition on Bali, The Seen and the Unseen, at the Four Seasons in Jakarta, with a substantial portion of the proceeds going to the Komunitas Anak Alam project that works with impoverished children in the Batur Caldera.

   He’s a busy fellow. On Thursday he interviewed fellow Ubud identity Diana Darling at the latest event organised by Janet de Neefe’s Bar Luna Lit Club, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival’s year-round primer.

Markisa Time

The markisa vine at The Cage is in overdrive at the moment, producing two, three, four, sometimes up to six drop-down delights a day that are retrieved from the garage driveway to which they plunge, dead parrot-like, at their appointed time and are taken upstairs where they are washed and put in the fruit bowl ready for brunch next day. There’s been a bit of a markisa drought recently, another imbalance brought to us by La Niña, so it’s good they’re back. They’re tastier here than in other places, where they are known as passion fruit.

    We brunch at The Cage, on the basis that if you don’t breakfast until late morning, by then it’s brunch and you can skip lunch. It’s part of the waist management programme. The home-grown markisas – from a vine cutting given to us three years ago by a friendly chap up the hill we stop and chat with on our morning walks – are a great addition to the water melon, pineapple, papaya, mango and bananas upon which we always feast, with yoghurt, before the main brunch course.

    Hector has oatmeal in between the fruit and whatever: as Rabbie Burns might have said, had he thought of it, a man’s a man for a’ that porridge. The Scottish bard, and Hector’s dad, stern culinary traditionalists the pair of them, would abjure the sultanas and honey that accompany the porridge; but, hey, times change and customary practices with them.

    We finish with a strong espresso. Then we feel ready to face the sybaritic trials of the day ...  and dinner long after the sun goes down.

Beat That!

This year’s four-day Bali Spirit Festival, the lovechild of Ubud based native New Yorker Meghan Pappenheim, wound up last Sunday with an eclectic – and big – musical bash featuring the Canadian fusion group Delhi 2 Dublin. They were sponsored by the Canadian embassy in Jakarta, in a cultural expansion that is not only welcome but of which we would wish to see more. Memo embassy: Some Alberta fiddlers would be good sometime. They’re not New Age; but, boy, it’s the best fiddle music in the world.

    The musical finale to four days of yoga-ing and other delights, sponsored by Fiesta condoms and Citibank (there’s an intriguing coupling) among others, was at the ARMA Museum’s World Music Stage. It was described by festival co-founder and music director Ron Webber as a “huge success.” We’re glad to hear it. It doesn’t do to have a “dismal failure.” And it’s good to create an epic dance atmosphere rarely experienced in Bali, as he puts it. That would be the sort of Bali epic dance atmosphere that doesn’t synthesise with the gamelan, of course, and which today, sadly, so frequently features beautiful women in diaphanous tops and thigh-flashing bottoms that sadly reveal  only disappointingly opaque and completely impenetrable Lycra body armour beneath.

    It would have been nice to trot along for a toe-tap, but competing demands kept Hector away. Perhaps Ric Shreves, the Water&Stone man, could give us a rundown. He noted on his Facebook that he was at the festival; he must have been taking a break from Joomla or Drupal or one of the many other incomprehensible things web wizards get up to in their extended working hours.

    Organisers say around 2,000 people attended the musical finale. Delhi 2 Dublin’s music combines instruments such as tabla, dhol, fiddle, electric sitar, Punjabi vox, and electric guitar to create a Celtic-Punjabi fusion with touches of reggae, breakbeat, drum n' bass and hip hop.  It grew from a live collaboration put together in 2006 as a one-off performance piece for a club night in Vancouver, British Columbia.

   Also last Sunday, a panel of cultural experts and spiritual figures endorsed the festival’s call for a stronger culture of service, and encouraged audience members to find inner clarity, strengthen their communities, and use positive gestures of kindness to engage people of all cultures and faiths.

   Good advice.

He’s Back ...

Australian foreign minister and former PM, Kevin Rudd, who is secretly a recidivist member of Peripatetics Anonymous and is known among the politerati as the Occidental Tourist, was back in Bali this week. He didn’t just come for the weather (which now it’s stopped raining quite as much people can do again) but for another performance of his favourite sit-com The VIP Monologues.

    We jest, of course. Foreign ministers are expected to travel, and he was due a Bali break after spending all that time rushing around the Middle East organising the Libyan no-fly zone. (We hear the West Australians were interested in getting one going there, until they discovered it was aircraft and not insects that the FM was buzzing about.)

    No, we jest. Really. He was here to attend the Fourth Bali Regional Ministerial Conference on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crimes (those Initial Capitals are either Important or just Gratuitous Gravitas; we’re Not Sure Which) commonly known as the Bali Process (ditto). The conference, initiated by the Indonesian and Australian governments in 2002, was held on Tuesday and Wednesday at a swish hotel in Nusa Dua. Rudd did a cosy little double act there with Marty Natalegawa, our very own foreign minister. Australia’s immigration minister, Chris Bowen, was along for the ride.

    It’s a serious business, people smuggling, and needs to be stopped. Indonesia could do rather more about that than it has bothered to do in the past.

    Rudd tweets of course, being a thoroughly modern deposed prime minister. He sent a message out into cyberspace on Wednesday that said he’d tried one sentence in Indonesian in his address to the lengthy-named function mentioned above but that no one had understood it and he thought he’d stick to Chinese in future. We twittered back:  Itu tidak masalah. Mereka semua akan memiliki mendapat pesan pula (It doesn’t matter. They’ll all have got the message anyway). Kev was once our local member back in the Special Biosphere, so we feel comfortable offering ex-constituent advice.

    But we do sympathise. So often you speak Indonesian to people here and they look thoroughly confused. It’s partly intonation, pronunciation and cadence of course (broken and heavily accented Indonesian must sound as risible to a native speaker of the language as broken English does to first-language speakers of the world’s lingua franca) but the looks you get are often ones of complete astonishment.

   Everyone knows that foreign devils aren’t supposed to speak the local lingo.
 

Read it Here

Some readers of Hector’s blog, who have been reading it in The Bali Times where it appeared as The Diary from October 2008 until last week, won’t be seeing it there anymore.  It was interesting that the moment we came to a disagreement all evidence of it disappeared from the newspaper’s website.  The site still links to any number and all manner of former columnists, several of them syndicated overseas personages of dubious local value and one currently in questionable circumstances, so it must have been something we said.

    Not to worry. The best place to catch up with Hector’s Bali times is here.  And it includes the archive. It’s shared on Facebook, Google and Twitter. Enjoy.

April Fools

Today is All Fools’ Day, an annual celebration that like so much else these days has been taken over by the genetically challenged and turned into something it’s not.  There are no April Fools in this week’s Diary, unless readers choose to identify any by vicarious implication.

Hector tweets @scratchings