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Just Cruising

HECTOR’S DIARY

HectorR

In the Bali Advertiser

Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2017

 

THE cruise market is big and likely to grow further, so it makes sense for Bali to have the capacity to effectively service this element of the tourism trade. The port of Benoa is the logical place to site the infrastructure required, and it seems that moves to do this are under way.

But people who choose to cruise the archipelago are not necessarily looking for the sort of artificial and determinedly kitsch resorts that dot other parts of the globe. Some may see the proposed Benoa Bay Port Excrescence, a real estate project by tycoon Tomy Winata, as a complementary exercise, but this is not necessarily so. There’s room for some remedial thinking on that score, particularly as the communities around the bay don’t like the idea at all and won’t shut up about it. Neither should they.

At the same time, Bali needs to move in tune with the changing global tourism market. A properly functioning cruise ship terminal fits that matrix and, if it’s built as an extension to the existing commercial port, it should not overly intrude on the rest of the environment. It might make the road traffic even worse, but nobody really seems to care about that.

A meeting on Aug. 1 set a September start date for development of the cruise ship terminal and projected completion by the end of next year. That timeframe’s tight, like most here. Never mind. No one seems to care about things like that either. It will be managed and operated by the state-owned port management company PT. Pelindo III.

There are also plans to develop Celukan Bawang in North Bali for the cruise trade, with work scheduled to commence in December and be complete by March next year. We must hope that the cement dries in time.

Essential Paper

PRESIDENT Joko Widodo, who was in Bali recently, said during his visit that one of the chief issues on his to-do-list, was the distribution of land certificates to the people of Bali. He handed out 5903 land certificates relating to title holdings in all Bali’s eight regencies and in Denpasar. He said 200,000 land certificates would be supplied in Bali this year and that all land on the island would have certificates by 2019.

This should go some way towards stopping the perennial problem of competing claims to ownership and might even – well, we can hope – help self-regulate asking prices. What it will certainly do is help Balinese families create real assets with property market benefits.

Attention Please

Robert Epstone, the barefoot British charity entrepreneur who puts both his soles and his soul into his pet project, Sole Men, provided us all with a lesson of another sort the other day. He posted on Facebook that he was attending the birthday party of another charitable Brit in the Sole Men ranks, nurse Sarah Chapman, after being injured in a machete attack he tried to prevent on an elderly woman. There was a photo of Epstone with a nasty pair of machete slices on his upper left arm. It was clearly a spoof, and the “wounds” were prosthetics, but you only saw that if you read on before making a comment.

That’s the danger in the social media these days. Almost everyone seems to be called Peter and they’re forever shouting “wolf” before checking whether what they think they’ve seen is in fact the neighbour’s poodle. Facebook and other platforms are peppered with people who like to fulminate about all the falsehoods they see, and then themselves fail to check the facts before putting finger to cursor, today’s instant and much less sentient equivalent of pen to paper. Ignorance is catching. We should all remember that too.

Sole Men does some great work and Epstone is a great promoter. Their work with the disadvantaged in Bali is a credit to them. Their Facebook is always worth a look-in.

New Look

SPEAKING of websites, the Intercontinental Bali Resort at Jimbaran has a new one. It offers virtual tours of the resort and its facilities – without which these days the competitive tourist dollar may well migrate elsewhere, after all – and the other interactive and phone-friendly bells and whistles that potential guests expect. Its director of public relations and marketing, Dewi Karmawan, must be feeling pretty pleased with the launch of the website, which went live on Jul. 21.

The Intercontinental has always been on The Diary’s favourites list, for its location and range of facilities, especially its dining options and the sunset bar.

Changing Tune

THE east is still determinedly red, for Bali’s tourism sector, with continuing high growth in the number of Mainland Chinese who holiday here. It is a change in the tourism demographic that seems firmly fixed. There are still a lot of Australians about, but they’re no longer the only sausage in the bun.

As more and more Chinese change the face of Bali tourism, so too are their travel itinerary preferences changing. They still travel in groups – though independent and “couple travel” is gaining ground with them, in tune with global travel norms – but anecdotal evidence indicates the groups are getting smaller. They’ll need smaller buses, then, which should help Ubud and other places whose streets are not designed for large vehicles.

The focus still seems to be on shopping. Why Chinese should want to visit Bali to buy things that have probably been made in China is an interesting question. But they are widening their areas of interest. Someone told us the other day they’d seen a (manageably small) party of Chinese emporium prospectors in Jl. Imam Bonjol in Denpasar, some distance from the Kuta shopping horror.

There are some curiosities there, perhaps. Maybe they were looking for bathroom tiles or were going to ooh and ah in Mandarin or Cantonese at those curious sit-upon western toilets.

Don’t Dance

THE Ubud Jazz Festival, held on Aug. 11-12 at the Arma Museum, presented some fine music and associated other entertainment, but it had one downside effect on an element of traditional Balinese culture that people flock to Ubud to see, or should.

The regular (and spectacular) Kecak Rina performance at Arma that would have been held otherwise, on its normal scheduled, was cancelled. It will return, but it seems a shame that it had to be sidelined at all.

Radio Daze

INES Wynn is always worth reading in the Bali Advertiser, and her piece on radio stations in the last edition was especially informative. There’s a lot out there on the wavelengths – chiefly FM of course, since that’s all that young people can listen to on their smart phones.

Wynn related a classic instance of cause and effect. There’s almost no English-language broadcasting here to service the tourist market. The radio stations say they don’t broadcast in English because no English speakers listen to them. But perhaps if they did offer something in the global lingua franca, English speakers would listen, and advertisers would have another money pit to mine.

Shaken (But Not Yet)

FORGIVE us being a tad churlish. You don’t really have to be a professor at Brigham Young University in the U.S. to safely predict that a truly massive earthquake will shatter Bali and other parts of the archipelago at some undetermined point in the future. The Indo-Australasian plate is slipping under the Eurasian plate and has been for eons, with calamitous effect; it will continue to do so whether observed by humans or not.

The risk is not confined to earthquakes, either. Who could forget the 1815 Mt. Tambora eruption on Sumbawa, which killed thousands locally and many others by its effects, including famine and the 1816 “year of no summer” in the northern hemisphere brought about by its volcanic debris in the atmosphere.

Disaster planning, 21st century style, is somewhat more advanced. It pays to be prepared, though it’s difficult to prepare fully for cataclysm. American research geologist Ron Harris told a seminar on disaster mitigation held in Jakarta recently studies indicated events such as the massive Aceh quake in 2004, which generated the worst tsunamis in the historical record, were possible in Java, Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa, and other parts of the eastern archipelago.

A Richter 9 quake immediately offshore could create tsunamis of up to 20 metres, which could reach the shore in as little as 20 minutes. Nusa Dua and Denpasar were at risk in such a scenario, he said. It’s not a happy thought, especially as high ground is not readily accessible within that timeframe for mass evacuations.

Still, we might get hit by an asteroid first, which would render the question academic.

Happy Birthday!

IT’S Independence Day tomorrow (Aug. 17). Indonesia celebrates 72 years of nationhood this year.

HectorR

Hector appears in the Bali Advertiser every second edition and scribbles between diaries, here at 8degreesoflatitude

 

 

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Dystopian Delights

HECTOR’S DIARY

HectorR

His fortnightly diet of worms and other non-religious experiences

Bali

Nov. 9, 2016

 

THERE were no visibly ruffled kebayas at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival session featuring American author Lionel Shriver on Oct. 29. No one loudly rattled their worry beads or furiously flounced out. This was in stark contrast to the thought chasm at the Brisbane Writers Festival in September, where an angry ethnic headdress made a public point of walking out of Shriver’s presentation. Someone else then thumped out an anguished memoir that appeared somewhere or other and, in it, claimed that Shriver was stealing other people’s heritage.

Shriver’s crime is to give voice in her novels to imaginary characters whose culture and ethnicity is not her own. In doing do, so the good thinking collective asserts, she and others perpetuate an invidious imperial-colonial imbalance. These days, this warrants condign punishment, such as being shouted at before being sent to Coventry.

The modern white man’s burden is to be continually assailed by charges that might have applied to his great-grandfather (the point is moot). It’s true that much of the world’s body of literature, fictional or otherwise, is in English. But much of it isn’t. There are other global languages, Spanish, French and Portuguese in particular. And if a culture whose native language isn’t one of these or any of their increasingly incomprehensible derivatives wishes to fully develop literature in its own lingua franca, it is perfectly free to do so.

This of course is not the thing to say at a literary festival, unless you want to have your tea poisoned.

But it is hard to see how Shriver and her ilk are the agents of continued bastardry just because they write into their narratives imaginary representatives of other cultures. Fiction, whether grittily realistic, or enervating, or readable, or otherwise, is neither fact nor claims to be. That alone should eliminate angst among the sentient and offset the risk of injury to readers from that modern plague, acquired cultural offence.

It’s true of course that many authors and their cheer squads claim gritty realism as the leitmotiv of their works and the arbiter of their own social relevance. But these days if you’re not socially relevant, you’re nowhere, baby.

Shriver’s presentation concerned her latest book, The Mandibles, a dystopian romp of sorts through the imagined near-future economic and social collapse of America. Mad Max on Mandrax, in a way. She read from the text. It’s unlikely to set the world on fire, though America might. The session was moderated by Gill Westaway, once of the British Council and now of Lombok.

Better than Chocolate

We spent some time at the festival chatting with Ines Wynn, who writes for the Bali Advertiser and lives in a riparian setting with a small menagerie (of dogs and cats) far from the madding crowd, just an easy three-hour round trip away from the nearest supermarket that’s stocked with anything bules might actually want to buy.

In such a setting, one has to plan. It doesn’t do to run out of something essential. We thought of foie gras, not because we suppose Ines likes to keep it in stock, as indeed neither do we, but just par exemple, to break briefly into one of her eight languages. Ines is originally from Belgium, that confection of four languages, several instances of casus belli, multiple competing legislatures and former Heart of Darkness empire that was invented in 1830 as a sort of final post-mortem act in the overlong and competing narratives of the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Crown.

Lunch with her, which we took at Kori, just across the road from the gabblers’ headquarters, was much less complex. It was also very tasty and in a quiet environment where the only noise seemed to be coming from our table. We didn’t have any chocolates. It seemed invidious to suggest that we might, since chocolates are perhaps Belgium’s finest exports. No substitutes permitted.

Solemen Indonesia’s Robert Epstone, by the way, had a sort of TED Talk opportunity at the festival, on Oct. 30 rescheduled from earlier in the program, to introduce the lit crowd to the sterling work his charity organisation does.

We couldn’t be there, unfortunately, but Ines tells us Epstone worked his usual magic and passed the virtual hat round to good effect.

Shoot to Thrill

The executioners have been out and about. We’re not referring to the national drug agency, which says it would like to shoot drug dealers without benefit of judicial process, as in Rodrigo Duterte’s new killing fields in the Philippines perhaps, and which hopefully will never get permission to engage in state-sanctioned murder.

It’s Gianyar regency we’re talking about, again, and its cruel and counterproductive dog-culling program. The latest victims were 21 dogs in Batubulan, after a dog bit someone and was later found to have rabies. Just to be clear, we’re not opposed to killing dogs when circumstances dictate that there is no other option, even though it would leave a heavy shadow on our non-Hindu heart.

Instead, as is much of the world that exists outside the blank-stare fiefdoms of the regents of Gianyar and others, we are opposed to the idea of killing dogs because this is easier than implementing an effective vaccination (and re-vaccination) program and humane population control through sterilisation, and because, being cheaper, it won’t interfere with the Essential Additional SUV Acquisition schedule.

There’s plenty of literature available on how to actually suppress rabies rather than just look as you’re doing so. We’ve had rabies in Bali since 2008, at a cost now approaching 200 human lives. That’s ample time to have assimilated the information and to have translated even the difficult bits into Bahasa Indonesia.

A Fine Award

Puri Mas resorts and spa in Lombok has a new and very fine feather in its cap. It’s just been voted Best Luxury Boutique Hotel in Indonesia at an awards presentation in Doha, Qatar. GM Sara Sanders, who was in the Puri Mas contingent at the St Regis Doha to collect the gong, says this: “Congratulations to Marcel De Rijk and all the amazing staff in Puri Mas. Well deserved.”

Puri Mas has always been a great place – in two places: right on the beach at Manggis north of Senggigi and inland at Kerangandan, where owner and long-term Lombok resident and ballroom dancer De Rijk maintains his residence. The resort truly is a jewel in the crown of Lombok tourism.

Get. A. Life.

It is not a criminal offence to be gay in Indonesia. (That’s a good thing in the other, older, sense of the word, because there’s plenty here that gives you a laugh, even if it’s a horse one.) But, seriously, it’s not a crime.

So the disgraceful hue and cry that was reported last month, involving the police and other guardians of self-assessed moral requirements in Manado, North Sulawesi, was a very sorry spectacle. Two gay men were hunted down and arrested because they had displayed their affection for each other in a Facebook post.

Social media is not a public space. It’s certainly true that public demonstration of affection is not what one does here. It is culturally inappropriate. Tourists of all stripes please note, especially the half-clothed young bucks and does of western provenance whose displays of plainly sexual intent are blots on the landscape in Kuta and other goodtime places.

In the Manado incident, there was no cause for public disquiet. It’s no business of the police what private individuals choose – unwisely or otherwise – to post on their social platforms. “Our team tracked down the locations of the two men thanks to information from netizens, and on Oct. 11 we found the two in Bahu, Manado,” North Sulawesi Police Spokesman Marzuki wrote in a statement.

What a circus. The police should have told “concerned netizens” to go away instead of responding with a farcical witch-hunt. That way, police spokesman Marzuki wouldn’t have had to look as if he’s with the Keystone Kops.

The silly business even reached Jakarta, where IT ministry spokesman Noor Iza was quoted as saying: “Facebook is very concerned about inappropriate content, including LGBT.”

Um, no, Facebook is rather more rainbow minded than Indonesian regulator-enforcers like to think.

End Game

The US election will be all over bar the continued shouting by the time this appears in print, but American scribbler Richard Boughton, who very sensibly lives in Bali, posted a plaintive note on his Facebook on Nov. 2 to which we can relate, both in his specific and our own more general circumstances.

He wrote: “I can’t believe how much time I wasted last night arguing with Trump supporters on Facebook. Not that I don’t have time to waste. But I could have wasted it in so many more pleasant ways. Sleeping, for instance. Or pigging out on junk food. Or picking a scab off my leg.”

HectorR

Hector’s Diary appears, edited for newspaper publication, in the print and on line editions of the fortnightly Bali Advertiser