More photos

I finally got around to posting my pictures from Singapore and Bali.

Indonesia

I’m on my way home from a bit more than a week in Indonesia. I had meant to post a running travelogue here during the trip, but, as often happens, there was enough going on that I generally didn’t feel like spending the time to write about it.

I spent the first week in Nusa Dua, Bali, at the annual APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies) meeting, where I taught a half-day tutorial the day after I arrived, talked to lots of people, and did a bit of sight seeing. Then I went on to a day of meetings in Jakarta.

Nusa Dua is described by the local guidebook in the hotel room as a resort put on a beach far from Bali’s population centers to protect the local culture from the influence of the tourists. The Lonely Planet “Southeast Asia on a Shoestring” guide describes it as Bali’s most expensive resort, and as a place for tourists who want to experience Indonesia in small, controlled, doses, if at all. It is a compound of several resort hotels, a conference center, and a shopping mall. Getting in to the hotels requires going through three security checkpoints – one at the entrance to the compound where cars are inspected before a big metal gate is opened, a repeat of that procedure at the entrance to the grounds of each hotel, and metal detectors and bag searches at the front doors of each hotel. Behind the hotels are beautiful gardens with spectacular swimming pools, and beyond that a gorgeous beach. A path along the beach connects the backs of all the hotel gardens, allowing movement between them within the security cordons. But for the large police presence on the beach, it would be easy to forget about being in a fortress. The only Indonesians I encountered within the compound were resort staff and conference attendees, and the main non-conference attending population appeared to be Russian tourists. Still, while providing no sense of where in the world it is, Nusa Dua is a beautiful place. It’s the sort of travel I tend to scoff at until I’m doing it, at which point it’s so thoroughly relaxing that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else.

Outside the gates things were very different. The opulent resort buildings gave way to mix of stores along the main road alternating fancy modern store buildings with cinder block shacks with corrugated metal roofs. Traffic was the typical Asian chaos, with scooters zooming between the packed in cars, somehow avoiding getting hit. A bit north, on the way to anywhere else, were Kuta and Legian, site of the 2005 Bali nightclub bombings, where the tourist bubble resumed. Fancy beachfront restaurants had their own security checkpoints outside, just like those at Nusa Dua. The street of nightclubs looked like the club district in any European city, other than the presence of a vacant lot with a banner quoting Nelson Mandela mounted to the fence and a big memorial across the street.

North of Kuta is Denpasar, and beyond that the rest of Bali, where I spent a couple of days of beautiful touring. The main roads are covered with workshops and galleries selling local crafts to tourists at grossly inflated prices. Off the main roads are lots of rice paddies, little villages, and on one of the days, hordes of people going to the temples with big baskets of offerings (mostly fruits and leaves, I think) on their heads. We saw a volcano complete with multiple cones, fresh looking black rock covering one of its sides, and a big lake in what was probably one of its older craters. We saw a couple of beautiful temple complexes, one on the edge of a lake, and one sticking out into the ocean on a big rock above a beach. In Ubud, fancy looking outskirts that reminded me of Santa Fe give way to a bazaar in the middle full of tiny shops also selling beautiful crafts with prices many times lower than the tourist shops on the main roads.

I took lots of photographs, which I’ll post once I have time to sort through them.



From Bali I went on to Jakarta. Little shacks in swampland near the airport give way to big skyscrapers surrounded by even more security than there was in Bali. The road in front of the hotel had ten lanes, and didn’t seen any bigger than the other major roads I saw. It was jammed. Little lanes with cinder block and corrugated metal shacks connected the main roads of skyscrapers, an interesting contrast to see. I didn’t manage to do any walking around, being driven in locked cars from security bubble to security bubble, but like so many places it seems like one I’d like to see more of sometime.


Random related thought: Immediately post-9/11, a lot of American office buildings put in cosmetic security. In the name of combating terrorism, it’s no longer possible to go up to somebody’s floor and talk to their receptionist, you’re first supposed to sign in with a security guard, who will check ID. As a theft protection measure it may be a good idea, but for its intended purpose it looks pretty worthless. The Indonesians take security seriously – given their history over the last few years, they have to. I didn’t get asked for ID the whole time I was there, but there were very few times I was driven into a parking lot without the car being searched for explosives. It felt very safe, but isolating and time consuming. I’m very glad to live in a place that, for all its rhetoric, doesn’t take security that seriously.