Archive on 'July, 2006'
by Putra - 28 Jul 2006 @ 6:28 am · Category Flora and Fauna
A cousin to the wild boar, Bali’s famous pigs are weighted to collapse with their loads of pork, their backbones sagging as if broken and their enormously heavy pink bellies dragging through the dust. Pigs are the property of the woman of the house and any money she earns from them belongs to her. A great Balinese delicacy not to be missed is suckling pig (’be guling’ in Balinese, ‘babi guling’ in Indonesian) roasted on a spit.
The ducks of Bali, kept as family pets, rank among the island’s most prominent citizens. Squads of them are taken from the family ‘kampung’ by the herders each day to feed in the rice fields, marching in formation under flags on long poles from which they never stray. In the irrigation channels between the rows of plants these comics act like up-tailed, web-footed vacuum cleaners, loosening old roots, nosing through the mud grubbing for worms, snails, frogs, insect pests, and leftover grains of rice.
At day’s end, the chattering flock gathers around the duck herder’s pole to be taken home again. Ducks are much better behaved and more complacent than bothersome chickens, well-suited for the communal living of the Balinese domestic compounds. Duck meat, as in the strongly spiced dish ‘bebek betutu’, makes for some of the finest eating on the island.
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by Putra - 27 Jul 2006 @ 6:27 am · Category Flora and Fauna
Monkeys, considered descendents of General Hanuman in Hindu mythology, occupy a semi-divine status on Bali and are allowed to proliferate around some of Bali’s most sacred temples. The best places to watch monkeys (and people) are the monkey forests of Ubud and Sangeh. Feeding time brings the monkeys down out of the trees around 1000 and 1600 when they are fed potatoes. Talk to one of the feeders-some have been caring for monkeys for the past 15 years. They have given the monkeys names and know the quirks of most individuals in the troop.
Even though signs often say, “Don’t Feed The Monkeys”, vendors sell peanuts and bananas at the gates. Gate price for peanuts is Rpl000, ‘warung’ price is Rpl00. It’s the same story for bananas. The secret for enjoying the monkeys without getting hurt or robbed is to sit very quietly and let them come to you. Before you arrive, put away all extra food, zip purses shut, and lock down cameras.
The monkeys will search you. Take off any jewelry and paraphernalia that you don’t need-they’ll gladly take possession of earrings, necklaces, watches, and even hearing aids. Then either hand the food to them or simply lay it in the palm of your hand. Always look out for the dominant male; he should be given food first to avoid fighting. Don’t feed the sub-adults or you may get bitten by their mother. Never show your teeth when smiling at the animals as it’s regarded as an aggressive gesture.
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by Putra - 26 Jul 2006 @ 5:44 am · Category Flora and Fauna
Bali is home to 32 species of mammals, including a wildcat, two species each of civet (the ‘musang’ or palm civet, which resembles a mongoose), two species of monkey, ’sambar’, barking deer, mouse deer, wild ox (banteng), and a miniature squirrel.
In the early 1900s, a writer reported that his camp in west Bali was trampled by a herd of feral elephants, but by the 1920s it was difficult to meet anyone who’d ever seen an elephant on the island. By that time the Balinese tiger, the smallest of eight subspecies of tiger, was very rarely sighted, and the last known animal was shot in 1937. Today only five sad stuffed specimens are left behind.
A visit to the 76,000-hectare Bali Barat National Park (BBNP), covering most of the heavily forested interior of western Bali, is obligatory for animal and bird lovers. The park is effectively protected against exploitation and development and is well-patrolled by rangers based at the park headquarters of Cekik and Labuhan Lalang. Here you can see ‘rusa’ deer, wild boar, and fairly tame long-tailed macaques and leaf monkeys sitting high in the trees chewing on leaves. The 165-hectare offshore island of Menjangan has a population of around 50 barking deer.
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by Putra - 25 Jul 2006 @ 5:43 am · Category Tourism
The impact of tourism on Bali’s environment has been horrendous. The island’s affluence has given way to ugly urban sprawl in the capital of Denpasar. Even more serious is the environmental damaged caused by the plundering of offshore reefs for coral used in the construction boom of the 1980s. Live reefs are threatened by sewage, runoff and silt. Over 1,000 hectares of agricultural land are lost every year to art shops, hotels, and housing estates. Megaresorts displace traditional landowners and tenants.
The southern region is woefully lacking in the infrastructure necessary to sustain a burgeoning population. The water table is sinking, and water is already in short supply. Electricity is barely adequate. The problem of waste disposal has reached crisis proportions. No one seems to know what to do with all the ’sampah’ (garbage) as the volume of non-organic, non-biodegradable waste grows. Profits made from tourists may soon be canceled out by the cost of maintaining the environment.
Inflation is inexorably driving up the price of land. In 1993, a restaurant owner on the Bypass paid Rp55 million for 10 are just to increase the bus parking space for her restaurant. Land in Kuta now runs Rp100,000 million per are. The Balinese themselves cannot raise the necessary capital to open big enterprises. Jakarta-based businessmen and women in partnership with transnational corporations now dominate Bali’s real estate market. In 1995 The West Australian published a list of the major investors in five-star hotels and golf courses in Bali, revealing that numerous high-end properties are owned by President Suharto’s children.
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by Putra - 24 Jul 2006 @ 5:40 am · Category Tourism
Tourism is Bali’s biggest source of hard currency. The foreign currency brought in by tourists improves Indonesia’s balance of payments, helping to correct the structural imbalance of trade between the developing and developed nations.
The government recognizes that tourism is Bali’s best hope for raising living standards and bringing jobs and prosperity. Tourism has meant that many people are now able to send their children to school. A senior high school diploma (SMA) is required to enter a tourism school, and all the big hotels only want students from these schools. Work in a hotel in almost any capacity is considered an excellent job. Tour guides and drivers can do even better. They can make between US$400 and $500 per month, compared with a monthly salary of US$100-150 for Balinese high school teachers.
Many Balinese view tourism as a cure for overcrowding and poverty. Tourism provides extra income for the landless as well as for those put out of work by the “green revolution,” the introduction of machines, and shrinking land holdings. Even backpackers leave money. Their priority is to travel cheaply, but the very length of their stay-often up to the two-month limit-means they usually drop more cash than the wealthy tourists who spend but four days on the island.
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by Putra - 22 Jul 2006 @ 5:39 am · Category Place of Interest, Tourism
In 1974 the government concocted the Nusa Dua Experiment, calling for the construction of luxury hotels along the East Coast of the arid, thinly populated Bukit Peninsula. By offering foreign investors 50-year leases with maximum incentives and tax holidays, it was hoped the Nusa Dua resort would accommodate and contain the surge in visitors. Nusa Dua constituted a major shift to elite tourism, planned as an isolated, self-contained ghetto that would allow visitors the experience of Bali but keep their interactions with the natives to a minimum.
Because relatively few of the island’s 2.7 million people live near the sea and few tourists want to stay anywhere else, the plan looked really good on paper. But the resort was very slow to develop. It was only in the 1980s that Nusa Dua finally came into its own; it wasn’t until late in the decade those tourist projections were met.
In this Mediterranean-style, self-contained hotel resorts tourists can sun their near-naked bodies on white sandy beaches without scandalizing anyone and watch abbreviated pseudo-events performed in expensive hotel foyers. Those with a spirit of adventure may day-trip around the island in air-conditioned buses to pre-selected villages and tourist sites, leaving untainted the rest of Eden.
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by Putra - 20 Jul 2006 @ 5:30 am · Category Tourism
Ever since two members of van de Houtman’s crew jumped ship in 1597, Bali’s utterly unique, highly developed culture has been endlessly fascinating to Westerners, the paradigm of tropical beauty and exotic adventure.
The Dutch steamship line KPM began calling at the northern Bali port of Buleleng in the late 19th century, though its cargoes consisted mostly of pigs, copra, and coffee rather than tourists. Following quickly upon the ‘puputan’ of 1906, Bali’s first tourist was Dutch parliamentarian H. Van Kol, who reached Bali at his own expense and toured the island with a senior Dutch official. Upon his return to Holland, he wrote of his travels on Bali in a book called Out of Our Colonies. By 1914 KPM was producing brochures rhapsodizing about Bali as an enchanted Garden of Eden.
Next came a classic book of photos of wild dances, corrupt kings, and bare bodies, published in Germany in 1921 by Gregor Krause. As early as the 1920s, the island drew a steady stream of affluent, intrepid, genteel world vagabonds; these visitors perplexed the Dutch, who looked upon their tour of duty on quiet Bali as a boresome necessity.
In the 1930s the documentaries Isle of the Demons and Goona-Goona depicted Bali as a paradise on earth.
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by Putra - 18 Jul 2006 @ 5:25 am · Category History of Bali
In the waning days of Sukarno’s reign, conflict increased between the high-caste capitalist class and communists pursuing a more militant role in land reform and harvest-sharing policies. Bali’s governor, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, increased the participation of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and other leftists in the island’s administration and legislative bodies.
The PKI’s aggressive policy toward land reform understandably had tremendous appeal to landless peasants and poor tenant farmers. Land was seized unilaterally from rich landowners; landlord-employed thugs destroyed sharecroppers’ crops and razed their huts. Government offices were burned, scuffles and armed attacks broke out, religious ceremonies were disrupted. A full-scale civil war, drawn along class lines, was underway.
A series of ominous natural catastrophes also weighed in: rat and mouse plagues, insect infestations, crop failures, and, finally, the violent eruption of Gunung Agung. The mountain exploded during the holiest of Balinese ceremonies, Eka Dasa Rudra, a purification rite in which harmony and balance in people and nature are restored in all 11 directions.
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by Putra - 15 Jul 2006 @ 5:23 am · Category History of Bali
Revolution
On 17 August 1945, 11 days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesia’s independence in Jakarta. Before the Dutch could return to restore order, Balinese militants moved to seize weapons from the Japanese. The subsequent war of independence against the Dutch lasted for more than four years. On 20 November 1946, the Battle of Marga was fought in Tabanan in central Bali. Colonel I Gusti Ngurah Rai, 29 years old, led his 95 guerrillas in a last-ditch battle in which all were killed by aerial bombardment-a reenactment of the ‘puputans’ of 40 years earlier. T
oday you see Ngurah Rai’s name commemorated on street signs all over the island; Bali’s international airport is named in his honor. Although Balinese resistance was broken, the Indonesians eventually won the war. In 1946 the Dutch made Bali the headquarters of their federal “Republic of East Indonesia” (NIT), which they backed as a rival to the revolutionary republic based on Java. Their plan was to one day merge the island into a pro-Dutch federation. The Dutch tried to build support among the people by promising to revitalize Bali’s devastated economy.
But the Dutch lost their chance at dividing the islands when they broke their treaty with the new government and launched a direct attack on republic headquarters in Yogyakarta in central Java. After this “police action” proved ineffectual, Holland formally transferred the former Netherlands East Indies-including Bali-to Indonesian authorities in 1949. The Dutch left behind their most precious legacy-a wildly diverse Indonesian nation welded into a unitary state.
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by Putra - 14 Jul 2006 @ 5:20 am · Category History of Bali
Dutch Administration
The Balinese became the darlings of the Dutch authorities. Indeed, the Dutch administration took a patronizing attitude toward the people and their culture, allowing the Balinese to continue using their own language and practice their own ‘adat’. Although the remaining pro-Dutch princes were deprived of political powers, they maintained much of their influence and importance as patrons of the arts.
We must also be forever thankful to the Dutch for keeping the missionaries out of Bali; it was more convenient for them to control the people through their liaisons with local leaders and let religion take its own course. So little did Dutch colonialism affect Bali that even up until the 1970s, before the building of the international airport, a rural Balinese village was probably very similar to a Javanese village of the 17th century.
Foreign visitors and tourists were vigorously discouraged from visiting Bali. A small group of dedicated Dutch officials safeguarded Bali’s culture, which enjoyed a rebirth during the first three decades of Dutch rule. One can still see in the highlands above Singaraja and in Denpasar steeple homes with double doors, wrought-iron grillwork gates and hanging porcelain lamps, remnants of Dutch efforts to Hollandize Bali.
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