Archive for September 7th, 2006
Bali is home to a whole menagerie of expats, who scratch a living in interesting ways. Some flog stuff over the internet, some can standthe heat of the kitchen and run their own warung / restaurant, some are in the trinket trade. One Bali expat who has it going on is Alex Zabotto-Bentley, owner of the Fashion Assassin range of clothing.
A recent fashion show in Melbourne featured his work, including muted tones, straight-leg cargo pants matched with a printed tee or a brown woollen cardigan - and more of those high-waisted dresses, all lined up for the autumn and winter of 2007.
According to Mr. Alex Zabotto-Bentley, the current trends are having a pattern, an inherent pattern on the fabric, either a printed pattern or a textile. His Melbourne show featured colors such as, yellow, royal blue and khaki. Said Mr. Zabotto-Bentley “It’s all a bit dark and dirty, and the khaki thing is very, very big.”
Wasn’t khaki ‘big’ about 5 years ago, or is that just my imagination? If that’s the case, I can tell him whatt the next phase will be….orange (its true, happened in the US about 4 years ago).
Pretty cool gig though I reckon, live in Bali and design clothes. I have taken his comments to heart and am designing my 2007 warddrobe. I think we’ll start with muted tones, straight-leg waterproof pants (its the rainy season you know), long sleeve Nike shirt in shimmering polyester, making sport shoes and socks, draped with an elegant silver poncho, acquired at Marche Bintang.
source : www.baliblog.com
September 7th, 2006
‘Nyepi‘ day, the Icaka New Year, the day of absolute silence, no activity is done, no amusement is held, no fire is lit along the day & night. The day of fasting & self-introspecting, the entire island is just like being deserted during the day.
For people not familiar with the ceremonial schedule in Bali, it is extremely complex.
Balinese priests consult 2 calenders, the saka and the wuku. The saka calendar operates on the Hindu lunar cycle that is somewhat similar to the western calendar with 12 months. The preists highlight phases of the moon as being auspicious times. The wuku calendar has no months but is a year of 210 days divided into weeks, 10 of which have from 1 to 10 days and run simultaneously! Each day has a name, thus in the 1 day week every day is called luang.
On Nyepi Day, the whole island shuts down, no walking on the beach, no going out for a bite, no flights in or out. For those who have never experienced Nyepi it is a purification for the whole island. In Balinese Hinduism local temples and villages are purified from time to time, the island once a year and dates to be arranged. In 2006 Nyepi fell on March 30th.
Before Nyepi Day objects from temples are ritually cleansed in streams and the ocean. Specially made offerings are placed at crossroads to lure evil spirits out into the open. The reason for this, is to flush hem out and chase them away with ‘ogah ogahs’, the large Freddie Kruger-like creations that every village makes.
The night before Nyepi, called Ngrepuk, is like a festival, with locals, expats and tourists out on the streets, watching the ogoh ogoh. Balinese people have always been open to incorporating new ideas into their relgion / culture, and the 21st Century has had an influence on the ogoh ogoh’s. One time I saw a one doing a wheelie on a Vespa. The ogoh ogoh’s are carried on bamboo platforms by young guys, who often are a little tipsy after drinking arak. At streetside a panel of banjar judges, give points to the best ogoh ogoh. The platform bearers will edge towards one side of the street, and tilt the platform. In Kuta it can get roudy so watch out if a platform is heading your way.
Best places to watch ogoh ogoh:
•Bemo corner in Kuta.
•Jl. Seminyak at Dhyana Pura in Semnyak.
•Puputan Square in Denpasar.
When the ogoh ogoh’s have departed, the streets clear quite fast. A good place to stock up on supplies is Bintang supermarket in Seminyak, which stays open late, 10pm or later.
The ogoh ogoh’s scare the evil spirits away from Bali, but they return several hours later looking for human activity. All lights, machines, radios must be turned off and no one is allowed out. The pecalang or religious traffic cops, will reprimand anyone who ventures out. The quiet period lasts from around 5am to 5am the next day, with the airport completely closed to traffic.
What does this mean for visitors? Well if you are in a resort you will have access to the facilities, but will have to quieten down a bit. Guest house travelers will have to stay in their guest house, no food places will be open.
One year I taped towels over my windows and cooked for once. It wasn’t bad but if you’ve done it once you probably wouldn’t get much out of it again. I think it would be more interesting being in a local household observing their interactions. Strictly speaking the Balinese are not supposed to talk or eat. The evil spirits will depart and leave Bali alone for another year when they are satisfied, at dawn the day after Nyepi.
In the past, Hard Rock Hotel offered a ‘Nyepi Package’ with the tagline ‘celebrate the silence.’
What to do on Nyepi for tourists:
•1. Go to Lombok for a couple of days
•2. Stay in a resort, where services continue
•3. Stay with an expat who has enough land that you can party
•4. Get invited to a Balinese household and enjoy a traditional experience
•5. Lock yourself in your room with a bottle of arak and someone you like.
I usually go for a long walk the night before and stock up on food and drinks. In 2007, Nyepi will be on March 20th.
source : www.baliblog.com
September 7th, 2006
Dengue Fever is one of the tropical diseases that exists in Bali and a recent Jakarta Post article discusses its life cycle and symptoms.
Dealing with Dengue Fever: Indonesia
You have heard about dengue fever — demam berdarah (bleeding fever) or “break bone” fever. You probably know people who have had it. You know it is in Jakarta and it is a little dangerous. But you may do not know what you can do about it. You may think your lurah (neighborhood chief) is doing something about it, as are the people who manage the property where you work.
Or maybe the Ministry of Health is doing something — or perhaps not. The fact is, protecting yourself and your family from dengue is squarely in your hands. Dengue fever is a relatively new disease, appearing initially in the 1950s in Southeast Asia and causing just a few thousand cases in that decade. The infection has since spread to most tropical and subtropical areas.
During the 1990s there were nearly 200,000 cases in all of Southeast Asia. In just the first half of this decade, there have been over 300,000 cases in Indonesia alone. The dengue problem grows steadily worse. There is no drug that prevents or cures infection. There is no vaccine. If you get dengue fever, you ride it out.
Last year in Indonesia there were about 80,000 reported cases, and nearly 1,100 deaths caused by dengue. Most experts consider the disease underreported by a factor of two or three — one reported case for two or three actual cases. Most people infected by dengue experience mild-to-severe discomfort, typically a headache (especially behind the eyes), malaise and maybe a rash. But about 1 to 2 percent develop a more severe form of the disease called Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever (DHF).
The case fatality rate for DHF ranges from 1 percent to 40 percent, depending on promptness and quality of supportive clinical care. People with dengue fever need medical attention and, managed properly, it greatly diminishes risk of a bad outcome.
Dengue is a fact of life in Jakarta, with thousands of cases and dozens of deaths each year, and most cases occur during the rainy season. Why that happens is the key to what you can do about it. Dengue is transmitted by a mosquito that is abundant in Jakarta, Aedes aegypti (and a sister species, Aedes albopictus), the Asian Tiger mosquito. It loves the rainy season. Reducing your exposure to this mosquito is the key to diminishing your risk of acquiring dengue fever.
The Asian Tiger bites during the day. The mosquitoes we all see in our homes at night are probably not the Asian Tiger. You are more likely to see the Asian Tiger in your backyard or schoolyard in the middle of the day, but it also goes indoors if it can. This mosquito is most abundant where it finds suitable breeding sites, and these definitely become more abundant with rain. These mosquitoes love to lay eggs in little containers that capture even just a few drops of rainwater each day. The breeding site can be discarded cans, tires, flowerpots, or even an unnoticed dam in your drain spouts.
Maybe a leaky faucet or air conditioner condensate at the side of the house provides just what the mom mosquito is looking for. It is these breeding sites that are the bull’s-eye of reducing the risk of dengue fever. Attacking breeding sites is hard work. Constant vigilance is needed even after making a sweep of your premises — each new rainfall potentially creates breeding sites not seen before.
When you see insecticide fumigation going on, this represents a sure sign of failure to effectively control breeding sites. Fumigation effectively knocks down the adult mosquitoes that happen to be present when it occurs, but many resting mosquitoes survive and can safely take to the air just a few minutes afterward. What’s worse, the many thousands of larvae in breeding sites (soon to become flying adults) escape this band-aid approach at control and take to the air within a few days. Fumigation also kills bees, dragonflies, and other beneficial insects.
Don’t reproach the government too hard on this effort. They simply cannot take responsibility for breeding sites in your home, school or work site. This would take armies of invasive officers that simply do not exist. Apart from surveillance, insecticide fumigation is largely all they can do. The real work is in our hands as stewards of the properties we occupy. Know where Aedes mosquitoes breed and attack these nurseries.
OK, your neighbors are not doing their part. So, why bother? After all, the mosquitoes that infect people have clearly come from someone else’s yard. Wrong on two counts: 1) Outsiders are routinely on our own properties, and 2) Aedes mosquitoes can be born with dengue virus inherited from their mothers. That’s right — a mosquito hatched in your yard and never going anywhere else can transmit dengue fever. A package of tools is available for managing the risk of dengue fever. These tools constitute a solid program of biodiligence against the mosquito vector of this disease: * After surveying your property and ridding it of unnecessary pools you will be left with necessary pools like fishponds, bird baths, waterfalls, etc. Put guppies and minnows in these pools. They eat mosquito larvae. Larger fish do not pay much attention to mosquito larvae, and they may eat your guppies and minnows instead. Keep algae and dead leaves off the surface of the water — this provides larvae effective cover from feeding fish. * There are also biological control tools available to professionals. These are bacteria or fungi that infect and kill mosquito larvae and are harmless to people, fish and most other aquatic animals and plants. Chemical treatments are also available. * Great advances have been made in the technology of mechanically attracting and destroying mosquitoes. Forget the bug zappers and sound-emitting repellants — these are not effective. The best technology uses ultraviolet light, heat, carbon dioxide and other proven chemical attractants (like octanol or mosquito sex pheromones) combined with air flow (a fan) to ensure capture.
The best of these machines tend to be hard to find in Indonesia (almost all are manufactured in the U.S.), expensive (about US$500) and require daily maintenance, but they really work in reducing mosquito numbers. * If at all possible, seal your house against mosquito entry, especially during the rainy season, by running air conditioners and keeping doors and windows closed. If this does not work, insectide-impregnated mesh is available to cover the attic space over your ceiling (where many mosquitoes can gain entry). Blowers over frequently opened exterior doors create a wind curtain that keeps mosquitoes out (costing about $1000). Insecticide-treated paints may also be considered in some cases. * Mosquito nets, typically draped over beds are great protection against night-biting mosquitoes like the ones that carry malaria. Unfortunately, our day-biting dengue mosquitoes could care less about your bed. That being said, if you have an infant in a crib or a toddler in a playpen, mosquito netting over those things during the day provides excellent protection. * The final tool of biodiligence is personal protection. Wearing a DEET-based repellant every day is not such an appealing prospect, and I do not recommend it. More importantly, DEET is known to be toxic to small children and should not be used on them.
But if you use DEET on yourself or older children, a formulation between 30 percent and 40 percent works best. The lower concentrations do not work as well, and the higher concentrations do not work any better. The skin lotion brand Skin-so-Soft (Avon Inc.), which contains no known insect repellants, is by reputation an effective device against mosquitoes, especially for babies and small kids. I found that it worked great on my own kids, and at least one study demonstrated good activity. Clothing frustrates biting mosquitoes. The more skin you cover, the less likely you are to be bitten.
Dengue is a serious disease that infects thousands and kills dozens of people every year in Jakarta. In the absence of a drug that cures infection, or a vaccine that prevents it, managing your risk of dengue involves a program of biodiligence against the Asian Tiger mosquito.
A sound program will deliver other benefits as well, including diminished risk of other mosquito-borne diseases that occur (much less frequently than dengue), like Japanese encephalitis, and of course the sheer pleasure of not being riddled with itchy mosquito bites.
The writer is an expert in tropical infectious diseases and worked formerly with the U.S. Navy as a microbiologist. He is now a section editor for the American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. He can be reached at jkb@vhasia.com.sg.
J. Kevin Baird, Ph.D.
source : www.baliblog.com
source :
September 7th, 2006
Bali sits 8 degrees south of ther equator. That means during the dry season (May-October) we get clear skies and strong sunlight. In the wet season (November-April) we get slightly longer, if somewhat cloudy days, with even more intense sunlight. As a foreigner, how do you dress for the tropical sun in Bali?
Just walking down th street in Bali can gt you a suntan / sunburn, depending on what kind of skin you’ve got. Someone once told me I had a complexion like boiled fish. That soon changes to boiled lobster, if I’m out in the sun too long. Tourists from Europe and parts of Australia, that do not get such strong sunshine, often stroll around shopping, without a care in the world. I see whole families fresh off the plane, sporting tans like mine, (milky white) and wearing no hat. By the second day of their trip, some of them have splashed out and bought a baseball cap.
Expats have to take things a bit easier, as they are subjected to strong sunlight year round. Now it true, I see these ‘Sylvester Stallone’ type Italians, who can walk around all day without a shirt. Great for them, but for us mortals, we look to cover up a bit.
•Starting with the feet: I sometime wear Nike’s or Vans in the dry season, to give my feet a break. My feet sweat, however and my shoes stink, so I usually go back to wearing sandals.
•Shorts, pants or sarong? For me shorts are more comfortable in a tropical climate. The only downside is my thighs get toasted when I ride a motorbike. For long rides I use a pair of thin cotton pants. In the dry season light pants work well. During the wet season, when its rainy, humid and streets flood, long pants are a pain. Some people, particularly older Euro guys (is he gay, or European?), like these 3/4 length pants. I really don’t like them, but can see they do give cover when riding a bike. Newly arrived tourists and ‘older geezer’ expats, can often be seen out wearing a sarong. Sarongs keep the heat in and are awkward to walk in. The only times I wear a sarong are at a temple, or if I need to rush out of the shower.
•Shirt, tank-top or t-shirt? This depends on ho much sun you can take. A long sleeve shirt with a collar will give you the most coverage and many expats pair this with a pair of cotton pants in the dry season. Its looks cool, and spotting someone with a long sleeve white shirt and colored pants, while everyone else has footy shorts and Bintang tank-top, instantly points out the fact they have been around for a while.
Bali expats never wear Bintang tank tops / t-shirts, in the same way Aussies don’t walk around with a kangaroo t-shirt.
For the best sun protection wear a black shirt, although its also the worst for attracting heat and mozzies. I have a selection of long sleeve polyester Nike shirts, which are cool and give okay protection. For my neck area, I use a sarong when riding the bike. One of my Nike shirts is designed for jogging in cold weather. Slightly padded, it had a polo neck and is perfect for the dry season, providing sun protection in the day, and a little bit of warmth for riding at night.
If you are holiday and are not riding around on a bike, a short sleeve cotton shirt with collar is fine, for both wet and dry seasons. I’d steer clear of the thick cotton t-shirts, in the wet season (Christmas / New Years), as they are ‘heat-boxes’. In the wet season, you’ll sweat like a ‘whore in church’, and I see tourists, perspiring through their new surfer t-shirts. By the way, I think 99% of what’s on sale in surfing shops in junk. They’ll take a thick brown cotton t-shirt, spray a logo across it, and charge $25…no thank you.
•Hats: For some reason hats don’t seem to be popular in Bali. Locally made straw hats suck, they are too small and are ugly and uncomfortable. Baseball caps provide some cover, but not much, and the woolen type hats the Kuta beach vendors wear, and that are sold in handicraft shops, are something you’d only want to wear on the beach, not walking around. My hat selection includes and Aussie cowboy hat, a khaki hat with a 360 degree brim, that I can fold up and chuck in my bag and my USC baseball cap, used more for late afternoon glare than for real sun protection.
Japanese ladies almost always bring their own sunhat with them, basically a giant visor with a top. My advice is to shop around before you come to Bali for a hat with a brim, that fits and is something you can wear everyday.
Hopefully these tips will make your trip to Bali more enjoyable.
source : www.baliblog.com
September 7th, 2006