HECTOR'S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Feb. 22, 2012

A Fine Weekend

Brad and Siska Little’s Bali Life Foundation is getting a giant helping hand from Karma Kandara Resort at Ungasan on the Bukit.  On the weekend of February 24-26 the resort is hosting its first Bali Life Foundation Weekend in support of a children’s home – founded by Australian surfer Brad and his Indonesian wife Siska – that provides a nurturing environment for 20 children guided by the founders’ pledge to give hope, dignity and purpose to those under their care.

     Karma has designed what it calls a unique weekend stay experience February 24-26, 2012, including cuisine prepared by celebrity chef Luke Mangan, from which 100 percent of the weekend-stay package revenue will go to the Bali Life Foundation. Mangan will be in Bali for the occasion. Details are available from Karma Kandara resort at http://www.karmakandara.com/ or phone 0361 84 82200.
     You can find out more about the Bali Life Foundation and its work at http://www.balilife.org.

Capital Capers

A visit to Canberra is an unusual treat for your diarist. The Australian capital is an interesting city that is wholly artificial – the only imperatives that created it being the petty rivalries of Sydney and Melbourne over which was the country’s leading city and the fractious competition between the sovereign states that make up the Commonwealth of Australia – but is also a wonderful parable of Australia’s development. Its original design was American; its central purpose is bureaucracy; and its people are almost all individuals whose original homes were elsewhere.

    This visit, the first in six years, had a very special purpose. Three-day residence of the capital was also taken up by your diarist’s four-year-old granddaughter, a thoroughly delightful little Canadian who was visiting down under with her dad to meet her Australian family.
    Canberra’s a lovely place (no really – some people love it) but it’s very small. On a brief visit to the Qantas Club lounge there your diarist saw four people he knew.
     The visit also allowed time to renew acquaintance with several favourite Renaissance painters whose works are on show at the Australian National Gallery. Much of the work, a product of its time half a millennium ago, is of a devotional nature. But none of it is to be missed. It is all magnificent. There’s a Titian on show. But lovers of limericks will be disappointed to hear it is not the one with the ladder in it.

Business as Usual

Local travel agents have a good point when they complain, as they have recently done, that Bali airport operator PT Angkasa Pura I is apparently in the business of gouging its customers. The surprise is that they have bothered to lodge a complaint, since the official Indonesian practice is to charge people an extortionate fee for products and services of very little value and limited utility.

     Two things in particular are exercising their minds. First, that there is no means of driving into and out of the airport to pick up or drop off visitors without paying for the dubious privilege of joining the chaotic traffic within. And second, that PT Angkasa Pura I – again in the fine tradition of feather-bedded public corporations everywhere – has done another monopoly deal, this time with a florist, PT Penata Sarana, and now charges a substantial fee for VIP welcome leis along with another hefty impost for welcome banners.
     Al Purwa, head of the Indonesian Association of Travel Agents (ASITA) in Bali, complains that the airport operator is unprofessional and arbitrary in its business practices. Few would argue with that assessment. He is a man whose optimism is boundless, however. He says he hopes that once the airport makeover is completed PT Angkasa Pura I will truly operate the air gateway to Bali to an international standard.
     Unfortunately, a contrary view seems less likely to disappoint: that nothing will change beyond an opportunistic grab for higher and higher charges for traffic access and parking among much else. Continuing porter problems and the taxi monopoly are among many issues the airport operator needs to address.

Island Hopping

New Zealanders who can spare the money for all the get-out-of-the-airport extras on arrival will soon be able to hop right over the Big Island – the one with all those kangaroos and koalas on it – and fly direct to Bali, for the first time since the 1990s. Air New Zealand is finalising arrangements for twice-weekly flights between Auckland and Bali between June and October with 228-seat Boeing 767s. Flight time is eight and a half hours compared with the 14 to 24 hours available on other carriers that fly services via Australia.

      The service is awaiting government and regulatory approval.

Sing Us a Song

Ambassadors generally present a world view that, publicly anyway, is informed by the political directions received from their governments. This doesn’t mean they are dull bods. Quite the reverse: people lucky enough to have working lives that bring them into contact with the servants of other national interests are richly rewarded by their fellowship and by countless opportunities to observe their dextrous diplomatic pirouettes when caught between a rock and a hard place.
     These days, your thoroughly modern major envoy is often to be found in the Blogosphere, and such is the case with the engagingly personable Mark Channing, HM’s ambassador to Indonesia and Timor-Leste. He recently blogged that suspicions that the British economy has been behaving for years in ways one might expect of a dead parrot are unfounded.
     He’s quite right. Bits of it perform like a cuckoo on steroids. No, seriously – Channing cites one of Britain’s more engaging invisible exports. It’s an audible one. The Brits might no longer be ruling anything much (not even Scotland for long, perhaps) far less making widgets or grummets or whatever, but they do make music.
     He blogs:    
     Wherever in the world you go, and no more so than here, one hears British music – some of it new, some old. At the same time, one often also hears people comment that Britain ‘no longer makes things’. Yet, one of the reasons that the UK economy is one of the largest in the world is its success in ‘invisible’ areas like music ... British music remains a staggering money-spinner ... worth around US$6 billion each year, with UK artists accounting for almost 12 percent of global sales in 2010.
     It’s good news week, it seems; though we should note that the singer-songwriter-producer Jonathan King – he is yet another fatally flawed genius on the music scene – who wrote the song of that title in 1965, was being satirical rather than promotional: it then says “someone dropped a bomb somewhere.” At least he was accurate. His other 1965 song, Everyone's Gone to the Moon, sadly proved to be over-optimistic.
     Channing was in Bali last October – it was bomb memorial time – in part as part of Britain’s new push to re-engage fulsomely with Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia.  We had a cuppa and a chat about that. Sometime, somewhere, soon, your diarist must find a forum in which to publish his unauthorised view of this clement – and long overdue – development.

A Lively Little Drop

Sometimes, just when you think all is lost and that ennui has won the final battle, the heavens send you a little pearl to remind you – it’s always at the eleventh hour, dammit – that the forces of risible liberation are not yet quite beaten.

     One such occasion enlivened opportunistic affogatos for two recently taken at Grocer and Grind’s Jimbaran Corner premises (it’s where you turn off Jl Uluwatu to go to the fish cafés and – if you’re lucky enough to scrape through the defile – on to Karma, the Four Seasons, the Ayana and other plush places).
     Idling while awaiting our espresso and vanilla ice cream – that being what the totally decadent and irredeemably orgasmic affogato actually is – we perused the wine list. The prices always stun you, but that’s Bali. On this occasion, however, something else piqued the senses.
    The little pearl in question hid coyly among the red wines. It was a Naked Range product (that name itself prompts illicit thought) from Victoria, Australia. It was a pinot noir – something else the Diary regards as orgasmic – and the chaps at Grocer and Grind evidently agree.  A lovely word transposition had listed it as Naked Duet Range pinot noir.
     They say a picture paints a thousand words. In this case, if we are to believe the Kama Sutra, five words paint 64 pictures. Only a handful of these depict activity that is not athletically difficult or downright dangerous.

Trying Hard

We’re not sure whether this is actually real, since Australian bureaucrats like any others are not widely known for their public humour. But we’re not going to check, either, because this is too good to miss.

     A list of questions and answers on the Australian Tourism Commission website recently made it our way and included this little beauty from someone in the USA. Q: I have developed a new product that is the fountain of youth. Can you tell me where I can sell it in Australia?  A: Anywhere significant numbers of Americans gather.
    And we can’t resist this one either (unfortunately also from an American): Q: Will I be able to see kangaroos in the street? A: Depends how much you've been drinking.

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

HECTOR'S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Feb. 8, 2012

Give Me Some Lava

Big Apple expat, Nagacia jewellery designer and FOH (Friend of Hector) Tricia Kim has added an enterprising string to her bow. She has designed some specially branded logo charms for a new snip, clip and stick salon in Johannesburg, South Africa.  We’ve seen photographs of them and they’re beautiful.

     The new establishment is SoHo Salon – SoHo as in “South of Houston [street]” in Manhattan, New York, not central London’s Soho, which generations of British mothers warned their sons was dangerous (they never said it was also fun) – and according to its American operators it brings the first New York-style full-service salon to South Africa. It opened in January. We hear there are plans for a dozen more such places, which one assumes would translate into many more charms for the delightful Kim.
      She tells us the charm she designed for SoHo is of white wood beads dyed red and lava stones. Lava has shamanistic power. It was used by First American nations, known as Indians or Red Indians in the days before the Sioux discovered they were homonyms for profitable litigation, to give warriors strength and clarity when entering battle. It has similarly shamanistic qualities in many other cultures. 
      Kim has also designed lava stone totems for upmarket Bali spa retreat Desa Seni. Lava’s fiery origin is said to be good for people who might suffer from indecision. That could be useful in yoga class.

The Good Oil

When the latest lovely little MinYak trotted into our inbox in mid-January, our inner spelling policeman woke up – he should have done so earlier, but we won’t develop that line of criticism – to the fact that its content is rendered in the American fashion. You know, with the twenty-first letter of the alphabet prominent by its absence.

     We asked the friendly chaps at The Yak and The Bud, which are run with thoroughly British aplomb, whether this apparent addiction to Eng (US) was by design or by default. In other words, had the mellifluous benefits of Eng (UK) ceded the field to the shorter-form forces of the Non-U push? One of them got back to us – like the MinYak and the print magazines it supports they are timely and generally pertinent, which in Bali is truly a blessing – and said this: “The man who does the MinYak is American. And so is my spellchecker.”
     So that would be a “yes,” then.
     There is a serious side to this. At last report, Indonesia officially uses Eng (UK) and it is this form that is supposed to be taught in schools, yet increasingly the English-language media – particularly and spectacularly the electronic media, which can’t spell anyway and wouldn’t know a past participle if it bit them on the bum – opts for American English.
     It’s not something for which one would choose to die in a ditch and indeed the American preference might be the better way for Indonesia. But it does pose questions. There’s an interesting – and very valuable – English language teaching programme getting under way here that’s being jointly run by the Australians and the Americans. The Aussies (those who can spell; a dwindling number) use British-derived English. Like the Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indians, Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders and sundry others, they are “U” people. The Americans, of course, as we know, are defiantly Non-U. The programme’s internal correspondence might make interesting comparative reading.  
     Moreover, American English is terse and truncated – some may define it as crisper, and that’s by no means an unwinnable argument – and does away with much of the colourful flourish that makes British English such a delight.

But Not From Canggu

We found a little internet gem the other day, an online newspaper that calls itself The Hibernia Times – it does so in a delightfully unreadable ancient script, by the way, which oddly seems both apt and ironic – and claims it is Ireland’s web-connected newspaper. This singularity will surprise long-established journals such as The Irish Times (and others) that cover local, national and global news and events on the web as well as in print.

     Its web-blurb says the HT (do not confuse this with the Hindustan Times, which is an eminently readable journal) has an editorial policy that is to always be fair, impartial and balanced in news coverage. It says it would “love to hear your thoughts and views on this newspaper” and to email these, should such inspiration occur, to editor@thehiberniatimes.com.
     Its editor, like that of the near-comatose C151 Bali Times hereabouts, is unnamed; but we believe we know him well.  We dropped him a line. It wasn’t just for old time’s sake. We’d still like to know (even if this is the age of instant communication, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc: see the HT website for the full dissertation) how William Furney – who Houdini-like departed Canggu for unknown locations in the Emerald Isle 15 months ago – finds it possible to seriously edit a Bali newspaper from half a world and eight time zones away; especially if you’re apparently also rattling out an allegedly round-the-clock e-sheet there. Still, a man’s got to earn a quiet crust, we suppose.

Meghan’s Moment

It’s nearly Bali Spirit Festival time again – it’s from March 28-April 1, safely after Nyepi on March 23, if you’d like to diarise the opportunity for yet another spirited Ubud opportunity – so it was no surprise to see the ubiquitous Meghan Pappenheim popping up in the previously mentioned MinYak. She’s a good sort, so it’s always a pleasure to see her.

     Pappenheim appeared as January’s colourful character, gave her standard responses to who-what-why-when and a nice little promo for the event she founded as a cathartic comeback – like that other Ubud love-in, Janet DeNeefe’s annual writers’ and readers’ festival – after the first Bali bombings in 2002, and then told us what we all wanted to know: What’s she’s listening to on her iPod.
      It turned out to be Lady Gaga. That would be a point of difference between us. The Diary long ago formed the view that only the Gaga bit accurately describes that particular unchained melody. But one should not be churlish. Perhaps Pappenheim doesn’t like to listen to Warren Zevon being prescient about his future at high volume, as he often is on the iPod at The Cage. I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is rollicking rock, but it’s not for everyone.
      The Bali Spirit Festival does great work in the environmental and health fields, and particularly in countering the threat of HIV/AIDS. It also entertains mightily well, so good luck with this year’s, Meghan.
     There’s a free Spirit Festival-backed outdoor concert in Ubud on February 18, by the way. Details are at http://balispiritfestival.com/ayobicarahivaids.html. For more information about the Bali Spirit Festival itself, visit www.balispiritfestival.com.

Up For It

We’ll be looking in on Jade Richardson’s writing course on erotica being held in Ubud in March. It should be fun as well as instructional. Too many people in these dumb days of post-literacy mistakenly conflate eroticism and pornography and assume you need continuous – goodness, we almost wrote “rolling” – pictorial assistance, when in fact all you need is a brain.

     It’s the fourth element of a quartet of courses the Ubud-resident Richardson has on the go. The first is Unlocking Creativity (Feb. 22, 23 and 25); next up is Travel Writing (Feb. 28, 29); then comes Advanced Creative Writing (Mar. 1, 2, 4; we’ll look in on that one as well); and then Erotica (Mar. 8, 9, 11). Email her at passionfruitcowgirl@rocketmail.com or call 0958 5727 0858 if you’d like to Write Like an Angel too.      
           
Still Trying

Here at The Cage we’ve been customers of Telkomsel’s Kartu Halo mobile phone system since 2006. Until last October, it worked well enough. There were one or two of the little stumbles that one becomes accustomed to in Indonesian public bureaucracy, but it more or less functioned.

     Since October, however, it has been impossible to pay. Telkomsel’s successive monthly bills have not been accessible, because they are not ready. The wonderful term here is “in process,” which of course means nothing of the sort.
     In November we were in Australia, where using an Indonesian mobile phone can be quite expensive. So we’d dearly like to pay the outstanding accounts, especially as another Australia trip is looming. But the “all calls” function on our phones continues to be unhelpful. On January 26, for example, unhelpfulness came with a new message:  “Mohon maaf, system sedang sibuk. Silahkan ulangi berberapa saat lagi.” ( “We're sorry, the system is busy. Please try a couple of times again.”)
     Gosh! It must be all those irritated customers trying to find out how much they have to pay before they get cut off that’s gummed up the works.  There’s a simple solution. Telkomsel could employ some people who can keep accounts.

Carp a Diem

Among the thickets of inspirational sites that now litter the internet is one that calls itself Brainy Quotes. It recently featured this thought from Christopher Fry – he died in 2005 – whose thoughts are considered worthy since he was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th century: “I want to look at life – at the commonplaces of existence – as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.”

     Goldfish have it made then. They habitually do that.

Hector's Diary appears in the print edition of the Bali Advertiser, out every Wednesday, and on the newspaper's website www.baliadvertiser.biz. He tweets @ Scratchings on Twitter and is on Facebook (Hector McSquawky).

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

Something in the Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     If you’re interested, contact Jade at passionfruitcowgirl@rocketmail.com or by phone on 0958 5727 0858. 

Surf’s Up

A friendly wave is certainly a long-standing part of Bali’s culture – along with the odd unfriendly one – and no more so than on the surfing scene, an invention (like so much else) of the faraway 1960s when the first waves of young riders appeared, appropriately from overseas.

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, Sucker!

A friend got a really interesting email the other day, from something called the Thailand Internet Lottery Organization of 88C Phetchamnork Avenue, Bangkok, Thailand. Director General Shompoo Prachapor sent his fonds regards – no, that’s not a misprint – and advised that the email address in question had drawn a prize of US$1,068,000.00 as one of two winners of the jackpot in the fifth category.

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

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

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

There You Go

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

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

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

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

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

Keep Jogging

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

Holey Cake

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

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

Pun Run

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

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

     Here it is:

     An anthropologist was recording folk remedies with the assistance of an Amazonian tribal elder who indicated that the leaves of a particular fern were a sure cure for any case of constipation. When the anthropologist expressed doubts about this – apparently in South America it is important to be quizzical rather than gullible – the elder looked him in the eye and said:

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

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

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser January 11, 2012

Super Idea

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

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

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

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

Dig it, Dig it

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

     The website says that Mt Rinjani is so high it creates its own weather. They mean it rains a lot up there, in other words. This benefit is then multiplied because the well-timbered and therefore un-eroded slopes “act as water-collectors for the hole of Lombok.”

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

Mopping Up

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

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

     We’ve been a bit worried at The Cage, because some of the firing has seemed pretty close. We’ve been sending out our own patrols during lulls in the combat just to make sure the immediate surroundings are clear of elves. They have been so far; and no reindeer have been seen trying unlawfully to befriend the local cattle either.

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

Top That

Being fair-minded, the Diary dropped back into Pepito Express at Bukit Jimbaran after writing an item (Hector’s Diary, Dec. 14) that rather castigated the place for having recently acquired the ambience of a trade store.  We wanted to check whether we’d been unkind.

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

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

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

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

Do Drop In

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

      These thoughts are currently at the forefront of the collective mind at The Cage, since some of the larger geckos seem to have adopted the habit of defecating from a great height upon the stairs linking the living level and the bedroom suites.  We don’t really mind if that’s their real opinion of us, and indeed might even be persuaded by reasoned argument that this is to be understood.

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

Chilling

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

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

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

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

Uncorked

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

     We learn from a recent item in Daniels’ Bali Update – which Jack likes to remind people was once dubbed the Pravda of Bali; apparently he has forgotten (or perhaps he’s never known) that while pravda is the Russian word for truth, the infamous Soviet-era newspaper of the same name retailed nothing of the sort – that this year the lads (and lassies we hope) toured some of Western Australia’s finest wine country, having last year plonked themselves down in France.

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

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

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

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

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, Dec 28, 2011

A Beautiful Mind

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

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

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

      Hitchens said this in 1999, a year before Bush became US President. In 2003 Hitchens was a staunch supporter of the US-led invasion of Iraq.  He later railed against waterboarding, a torture technique favoured – until rightly banned – by the US military.

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

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

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

Sun Don’t Shine

We tweet on Twitter (@Scratchings if you’re interested) to a select few who have chosen to follow Hector’s ephemeral flight paths and were thus pleased to see the other day that something called the Bali Sun – though its website and Twitter page call it Bali The Sun – had elected to follow us. It’s nice to have followers. No former leader writer should be without them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She’s Our Hero

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

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

     Hear! Hear!

Kindling Thought

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

     Amid the evening ambience – The Cage sports a sort of deep crimson light-pool at night, courtesy of some table lamps that inevitably propel one’s thoughts towards the more classy among Parisian and Chinese brothels (Hector is not at all unhappy about this) – talk turned among other things to the developing world of ebooks and specifically to the Kindles now on the inventory at our house.

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

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

     It is particularly memorable for Joyce’s use of some lines from William Butler Yeats’ 1892 poem Who Goes with Fergus? They include these two lines, sage advice in any vicissitude:

      And no more turn aside and brood

     Upon love’s bitter mystery

Santa in Seminyak

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

     That was on Saturday, December 17. Informant Sean Cosgrove told us the red-suited gent would be there from 9am to noon. We do hope the sleigh didn’t get held up in the traditional traffic jam that gridlocks Kuta-Legian-Seminyak on a permanent basis.

Animal Capers

Someone kindly alerted us to a list of the most popular dog names this year – OK, it was in New York, which is one very self-absorbed apple – which lists Bella as No. 1. Presumably that’s for lady dogs. The Diary’s personal favourite was way down the list, at No. 49. We don’t have a dog, but we’re always calling “Oreo.”

     Guess there’ll be a new list next year.

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

     Happy New Year!

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

On Twitter: @Scratchings. On Facebook: Hector McSquawky

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

Pep Talk Required

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

     Sadly, and no doubt in search of immediate feet through the door rather than a steady build-up of high-spending local consumers, things have changed. The place has become a calling point for huge buses which disgorge crowds of confused and apparently impecunious Taiwanese and Korean tourists (they never seem to understand the marked price or have the right money). The aisles have been stuffed with convenience foods (seaweed snacks seem to loom large) and there is no longer room to wheel your trolley down them with even the vague hope that you might find a regular Oreo as well as your normal range of western consumer products.

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

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

Leap Before You Look

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

     In many ways it is not dissimilar to the happy habit in Hanoi, Vietnam, where pedestrians wishing to cross the most frenetic of roads (and worse, intersections) simply plunge into the mayhem and walk steadily and on a fixed course in their chosen direction. They are confident the ubiquitous motorcycles will miss them. The buses sometimes don’t, though that’s another matter.

     But (that essential codicil!) you have to know what you’re doing. It helps, too, to know where you’re going.  If you are unsure of either of these things, and especially if unsure of both, do not attempt to tempt the traffic.

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

     In true Bali fashion, the incident was locally viewed as entirely the fault of the Bule.  After all, if he hadn’t been on the island, he wouldn’t have been involved.

Jingle Belles

The Diary got a lovely invitation from jewellery designer Tricia Kim – we go back such a long way, she and we, all the way back to the 2009 Yak awards where we ran into each other upon the steps at the then new Cocoon and didn’t know each other from a bar of soap, something now pleasantly rectified – to attend the launch of her 2012 collection on December 7.

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

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

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

No Need to Duck

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

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

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

Cook Up

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

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

Hill Town Daze

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas

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

    So Merry Christmas to all. 

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

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

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

Holiday Break

The Diary has just spent two weeks enjoying the pleasant ambience of the Nerang River in Queensland. It was, though not in the way Hyacinth Bucket (“It’s ‘Bouquet’”) achieved it, a riparian delight. We were well away from the faux glam glitter of the Gold Coast’s beachside tourist strip and – courtesy of some lovely friends of very long standing who courageously opened their home to Diary and Distaff – enjoyed all manner of domestic comforts.

     It gave us a chance to catch up with people we haven’t seen for many years (at least six, since we left Queensland for the sybaritic delights of Bali) and to reconnect with what for the Diary is truly home. We also spent a couple of days well inland, on a formerly frequently visited farm, the domicile of other dear friends. It is a place with plentiful cups of tea and long views of beautiful mountains:  the sort of landscape that the weather and Bali’s love affair with dysfunctional internal combustion engines so often conspire to deprive you of at home.

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

Idiots’ Week

The peculiar Australian custom of “Schoolies Week” – an annual event during which young people who have just finished senior school go off and have a holiday with their mates – is a pernicious occurrence not only in Bali, where little idiots arrive and do foolish things, but also at the Gold Coast in Queensland. This year’s risk of choice there, among the mindless, was balcony jumping. That’s one way of bringing yourself down quickly from a party high, we suppose.

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

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

Blog for Health

High profile conferences and diplomacy are of course vital to the business of managing international relations and bringing assistance to countries and communities that need help (in whatever form) but it is at the lower, less visible, end of the equation that most of the practical work gets done.

     So it is with the Australian aid agency AusAID’s great Indonesian gig to get bloggers to help increase awareness of HIV/AIDS and of World AIDS Day (December 1). Active bloggers were invited to enter a dynamic online competition themed “HIV and Youth.” The competition called for young Indonesian bloggers to write about their own experiences or opinions on HIV/AIDS.
     Australia’s ambassador, Greg Moriarty, says of the competition: “Indonesia has one of the fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in South East Asia. We need to do all we can to raise awareness of this disease.”
     The competition was aimed at tapping into Indonesia’s thriving social media scene – which has 38 million Facebook users and more than 3.2 million bloggers – to expose the country’s browsing community to inspiring and easy to read information about the disease. It was held by AusAID in partnership with Viva News, one of Indonesia’s leading news sites. Submissions closed on November 30.
     The winning blog entries will be announced on December 20. The top three bloggers will win computers, cameras and high-tech phones.
     In 2010, Australia’s $100 million Partnership for HIV provided services to 50,000 prisoners, helped 26,000 injecting drug users to gain access to clean needles, methadone maintenance programmes and harm reduction services, and improved access to medicines for people living with HIV.

Dream Road

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was among the squadrons of international political leaders who attended the East Asia Summit in Bali two weeks ago. These jamborees are important – genuinely, they’re not just photo opportunities or occasions for grandstanding as some of the more jaded among us might sometimes think – even if, for most of the population under the flatfooted footprint of the attendant VIP protection effort, they are chiefly occasions for mass inconvenience.

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

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

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

  

Great Idea

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

    One of them was a think-in about Women’s Empowerment, hosted by Indonesia’s Ministry of Same and chaired by First Lady Ani Yudhoyono. Now that’s an area where a lot of work is needed.

What’s Cooking?

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

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

     And it says the book is not only a cookbook but also an incredible photographic journey. It sounds like a dream.  Perhaps it will feature in 2012’s writers’ and readers’ festival.   

Artist in Residence

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

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

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

Back Home

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

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

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

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

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