8degreesoflatitude

HECTOR’S DIARY

in the Bali Advertiser

Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017

WE had an interesting chat the other day (no names, no pack-drill) about Bali’s new tourism demographics and their effect on the five-star-plus hotel sector. Basically, it’s not good news.

The emphasis on the low-cost domestic and Chinese markets is bringing in lots more people and is, from time to time, filling up the Rp35-Rp500K a night hotels, as well as clogging up the road system. And that’s fine as a policy setting (well except for the strain on the road infrastructure) if pursuit of raw numbers is the name of the game.

But that’s a double-edged sword.

The downside is that these pressures are forcing higher quality hotels and resorts to lower their prices. You’d have to be a Trump supporter to accept that argument without pausing to think. If it continues unabated or is enhanced further, as some propose, it will ultimately make quality resorts wholly uneconomic instead of only marginally so.

This in turn will speed up Bali’s descent into the mass market, low-cost, culturally unaware, sector. So much for Bali’s special magic then: it will disappear into a morass of cheap-eats-and-trinkets-style offerings.

Suckling Imlek, Anyone?

YOU have to dig deep for a laugh these days. So it was fun to read that the Pork Festival in Semarang, Central Java, had been renamed the Imlek festival so as to avoid mentioning babi, a food that is haram. We do hope no followers of the Prophet were taken in by this exquisite renaming and because of this tried to order Imlek guling.

The festival took place from Jan. 23-29, right over the Lunar New Year, on Jan. 28. It’s now the year of the Fire Rooster, which might explain why everyone was running around like chooks with their tail feathers ablaze.

The incident caused us to recall that lovely little pop song from 1963, sung by the Ronettes. We’ve amended it for the good halal burghers of Semarang.

The sing-along bit goes like this:

So won’t you, please, be my be my babi
Be my little babi, my one and only babi
Say you’ll be my darlin’, be my be my babi
Be my babi now, my one and only babi
Wha-oh-oh-oh. 

It could catch on.

Snowball’s Chance

REGULAR readers will remember that The Diary is a Monkey. We’re very glad our once in a dozen years turn around the dance floor is over. But all is still not well at The Cage.

The Distaff is a Rooster. Moreover, she’s a Fire Rooster. We’ve had our share of challenging moments over the past twelve months and must now look forward to back-to-back mazurkas.

Of course, it could all go swimmingly well. They do say hope springs eternal. But as someone who lives in the optimist-pessimist convergence zone, we think we’ll see some bumps in the road. And we’re not just talking about the worsening state of the goat-track access to our little rumah pribadi.

Another Round

It will not have escaped anyone’s notice that rabies has been endemic in Bali since 2008, when the killer disease broke out on the Bukit and wasn’t noticed soon enough to stop it spreading island-wide. Rabid dogs have recently bitten people at Sukawati in Gianyar regency and at Kediri in Tabanan.

The Bali authorities have now accepted a proposal from Japan to help with rabies eradication. Wiping out the disease is the public duty they’ve managed to evade for nine years, despite help from the national government, local animal welfare charities, foreign governments and the United Nations.

Two months ago Governor Made Mangku Pastika visited Kumamoto, a prefecture (district) of around 1.8 million people that neighbours the slightly larger Fukuoka in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s home islands. Last month a team from Kumamoto visited Bali. Kumamotu has successfully controlled rabies in cats – the disease vector there – through humane population control and properly managed vaccination programs.

The Bali plan involves Kumamotu University, which has an alumni program in Indonesia, and the Kumamotu Indonesia Friendship Association (KIFA). That connection is facilitated through PT Karang Mas Sejathara, one of the operating arms of the Jakarta based corporation MidPlaza, owned by Rudy Suliawan whose wife Yoko is from Kumamoto. Its Bali enterprises include the Ayana and Rimba resort hotels on the Bukit.

A leading veterinarian who owns the Ryunosuke Animal Hospital in Kumamoto (Dr. Tokuda) was at the Jan. 19 meeting in Bali and said of the successful program in Kumamotu: “Everyone worked hard so we could vaccinate and sterilize 1800 cats each week, allowing us to finish our work in two years. I am convinced that Bali could do the same.”

Well, so it could. It just needs to work at it.

Happy Endings

No, it’s not what you think, at all. Shame on you! Though it’s possibly true that Mellors might have had a mind to advise Her Ladyship that “there’s nowt beats a bit of nooky” if that coarse word of later Australian popular origin had been in common usage in the Old Dart in Lady Chatterley’s more plainly Anglo-Saxon days.

Those to which we refer in this instance are offered in the desserts section of the menu at a new Canggu eatery recently made the subject of comment in the Yak magazine’s e-brief MinYak. Our favourite Dorset Girl, Sophie Digby, suggested we should try it; and we said, yes, we would, incognito as always.

MyWarung Canggu – which has a sister operation at Echo Beach – is the brainchild of Juan-Pierre Anthony, a native Indonesian from Tanjung Benoa who has spent most of his adult life globetrotting, and French-Canadian chef Hugo Coudurier.

We’ve looked at the menu, courtesy of Sophie the Yakker, and it’s certainly both tasty and affordable. We told her we’d look at the Happy Endings. No tarts are on the menu, but there’s an apple crumble that could quite easily turn our head.

You can look it up on line at mywarung.com.

The Bali Advertiser publishes fortnightly. Hector’s Diary in the Bali Advertiser appears monthly.