Alfred Russell Wallace Vs. the time-share salesmen.
Driving down Jalan Raya 'anything' one cannot help but be struck by the preponderance of literally hundreds of half completed and monstrous edifices. The love affair with cement and the vertiginous spiral into what is fast becoming the second fastest growing city in Asia has stopped dead in its tracks. What was once a marginal backwater that ambivalently harbored a bohemian society of diasporas and borderless flotsam has in the past five years metamorphosized with a virulence into a get rich quick yuppie utopia. No longer is old Pak Ketut drawing up a dubious contract on a student note pad to lease his ancestral 'sawal' to some misty eyed dreamer, a dreamer with visions of building a "Swiss family Robinson" fantasy in which to live out his days in rustic splendor. No longer is there the quaint system of communicating through note pads hanging on every gate tucked far down flowered 'gangs'.
The land lines and computers are in place, oiled and revving, overloading their struggling systems. The hand phones are glued to almost every ear, four at a table, three on hand phones. The Bali Advertiser has in five short years exploded from a ramshackle single page optimism into a malevolency of slickly advertised professional land grabbing and divvying.
Every road that cuts its swath through the beauty of Southern Bali has been lined end to end with fly-by-night Shoplettes that obliterate that verdant landscape just ten meters beyond. In fact it is a shock to realize that seen from the air even built up Kuta looks green. It is akin to a painted woman of a certain age and some celebrity long adrift in money grubbing cynicism, far astray from the youthful dedications that gave rise (no pun) to that celebrity in the first place, (a sexist analogy I know, but political correctness drove me out of America).
Every new compendium of cinder-block and corrugated tin has a hole dug in its backside. Up till recently, a new one each time you blinked. Each of these holes are built on top of ancient 'sawal'. And what is a paddy field if not a highly evolved water transportation system, a water transportation system now catering to literally thousands of haunches squatting over thousands of holes, day in, day out, a system that now carries a frightening bacteriological lode of effluent down to the very sea that is a primary lure for the unsuspecting visitor. In the late rainy season after a big storm we have seen such sights and colors they strain credulity. Black waves with brownish-yellow bubbling froth in place of 'white-water'. Sand obscured by mounds of discarded condoms, syringes and bubbling fecal foam.
The venal shortsightedness that is the map for this debauchery was hopefully immolated along with those almost two hundred tragic souls on that awful night.
This is not yet another plaintiff screed bemoaning the predictable despoiling of paradise, but rather a question posed. Will the sordid debacle of 10.12 in anyway engender a more thoughtful management of an irreplaceable resource? ...oh much more than a resource, no less than a earthly treasure for all of humanity and all of time.
I am very clear that Russell-Wallace himself was, for all his unselfconscious principle, an original regional shock trooper of a tide that is in effect in every corner of our globe. The dusty international road weasels that have for a century or so washed upon these shores are themselves merely forerunners of the package tourist. The issue at stake here is only thoughtful long term management.
I only paint this blackest of paintings because, although true, too many, as is evident on another forum, see contemporary Bali only through a hazy and touchy-feely veneer of saccharine that is itself patronizing and paternalistic if not inherently racist.
Forever the optimist, sincerely, Py.
Driving down Jalan Raya 'anything' one cannot help but be struck by the preponderance of literally hundreds of half completed and monstrous edifices. The love affair with cement and the vertiginous spiral into what is fast becoming the second fastest growing city in Asia has stopped dead in its tracks. What was once a marginal backwater that ambivalently harbored a bohemian society of diasporas and borderless flotsam has in the past five years metamorphosized with a virulence into a get rich quick yuppie utopia. No longer is old Pak Ketut drawing up a dubious contract on a student note pad to lease his ancestral 'sawal' to some misty eyed dreamer, a dreamer with visions of building a "Swiss family Robinson" fantasy in which to live out his days in rustic splendor. No longer is there the quaint system of communicating through note pads hanging on every gate tucked far down flowered 'gangs'.
The land lines and computers are in place, oiled and revving, overloading their struggling systems. The hand phones are glued to almost every ear, four at a table, three on hand phones. The Bali Advertiser has in five short years exploded from a ramshackle single page optimism into a malevolency of slickly advertised professional land grabbing and divvying.
Every road that cuts its swath through the beauty of Southern Bali has been lined end to end with fly-by-night Shoplettes that obliterate that verdant landscape just ten meters beyond. In fact it is a shock to realize that seen from the air even built up Kuta looks green. It is akin to a painted woman of a certain age and some celebrity long adrift in money grubbing cynicism, far astray from the youthful dedications that gave rise (no pun) to that celebrity in the first place, (a sexist analogy I know, but political correctness drove me out of America).
Every new compendium of cinder-block and corrugated tin has a hole dug in its backside. Up till recently, a new one each time you blinked. Each of these holes are built on top of ancient 'sawal'. And what is a paddy field if not a highly evolved water transportation system, a water transportation system now catering to literally thousands of haunches squatting over thousands of holes, day in, day out, a system that now carries a frightening bacteriological lode of effluent down to the very sea that is a primary lure for the unsuspecting visitor. In the late rainy season after a big storm we have seen such sights and colors they strain credulity. Black waves with brownish-yellow bubbling froth in place of 'white-water'. Sand obscured by mounds of discarded condoms, syringes and bubbling fecal foam.
The venal shortsightedness that is the map for this debauchery was hopefully immolated along with those almost two hundred tragic souls on that awful night.
This is not yet another plaintiff screed bemoaning the predictable despoiling of paradise, but rather a question posed. Will the sordid debacle of 10.12 in anyway engender a more thoughtful management of an irreplaceable resource? ...oh much more than a resource, no less than a earthly treasure for all of humanity and all of time.
I am very clear that Russell-Wallace himself was, for all his unselfconscious principle, an original regional shock trooper of a tide that is in effect in every corner of our globe. The dusty international road weasels that have for a century or so washed upon these shores are themselves merely forerunners of the package tourist. The issue at stake here is only thoughtful long term management.
I only paint this blackest of paintings because, although true, too many, as is evident on another forum, see contemporary Bali only through a hazy and touchy-feely veneer of saccharine that is itself patronizing and paternalistic if not inherently racist.
Forever the optimist, sincerely, Py.
