US President
GW Bush may visit Indonesia next month, according to the
International Herald Tribune.
Indonesian President
SBY is a friend of America and needs foreign investment. Bush is keen to court the friendship of the world’s largest Muslim country. I was here in 2003 when Bush last visited. He stayed at the Patra Jasa (now a different name) next to the airport for his 4 hour visit.
The next visit hasn’t been confirmed, but would make sense. Maybe this time GW could hang out for a while, take a surfing lesson, pick up a few Bintang t-shirts, and practice his bargaining skills on Poppies Lane II.
source : www.baliblog.com
October 4th, 2006
Swimming in Bali can be dangerous, there’s no doubt about it. When I walk along the Kuta in Seminyak, I can tell where rip currents are likely to be. Sometimes there will be a single red flag, postioned on a sandbar to indicate the area in not safe for swimming.
Quite often I also watch Euro’s in their Speedo’s gingerly wade into the waves, hoping for a dip in tropical paradise. If you see waves breaking aways offshore, directly behind another set of waves that are breaking, you don’t want to end up in that area.
Today the bodies of 3 young Balinese were found after swimming on Kuta Beach. They were caught by a big wave and swept away. If this happens to you, remember not to fight the current. Stay afloat, go with it, and try to swim along the beach in the direction of the swell (NW on Kuta Beach) and you’ll be able to get in.
Southern Bali gets strong swell and currents, hitting unprotected beaches. This is one of the reasons Sanur and Nusa Dua are much safer places to take young kids.
source : www.baliblog.com
October 4th, 2006
Indonesia is a like friend who smokes 40 Marlboro a day. He’s your mate, but you wish he’d stop affecting your health.
The annual burning of forest and crop waste in Indonesia, has once again affected other countries in SE Asia. Yesterday a plane skidded off a runway here in Indonesia, due to poor visibility. The worst year so far has been 1997, with plane and boat crashes. The governement is trying to stop the deforestation and burning, but its hard to inforce. Yani, from Balikpapan in Kalimantan, told me in her town, its banned to cut the forest and start fires. Some estimates say that by 2020 all the low land forest in Kalimantan will be gone.
Thick haze from Indonesia spreads across Malaysia, Singapore.
National News - October 03, 2006 The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Thick haze from land-clearing fires in Indonesia blanketed a large swath of the country’s west Monday, sending air quality levels plummeting there and in neighboring Singapore and Malaysia, officials said.
The smoke shrouded an estimated 556,000 square kilometers of land on Indonesia’s islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan, forcing many residents to wear protective masks, and delaying flights.
“The haze has persisted for a whole week,” said Frans Tandipau, a senior official tasked with extinguishing forest fires on Sumatra, as quoted by The Associated Press.
Fires from land-clearing activities in Sumatra and Kalimantan, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, have occurred almost every dry season since the late 1990s. They are typically set by people looking for a cheap way to clear brush for plantations.
Indonesia’s annual burn-off causes a haze that typically smothers parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand as well as Indonesia itself.
The Indonesian government has outlawed land-clearing by fire, but weak enforcement means the ban is largely ignored.
In Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, many people were wearing face masks, residents there said. Flights in and out of airports were delayed early Monday when the haze was at its worse.
Air quality levels had reached “dangerous” levels, from “unhealthy” last week, according to a monitoring station in Palangkaraya, state news agency Antara reported.
In West Kalimantan, hundreds of “hot spots”, or satellite readings indicating possible forest fires, appeared in a number of regencies.
At least 640 hot spots were detected through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric satellite Sunday in eight of the 12 regencies in the province.
Haze has blanketed Palembang, South Sumatra, and its surrounding areas over the last few days, especially during the day.
Local residents hoped the haze would ease so that they could resume their daily activities.
In Singapore, the air quality dropped to “moderate” Monday from “good” Sunday due to the fires in Indonesia, the National Environment Agency said. Residents complained the air was “hazy.”
“The smoke haze has also obscured the sunlight and lowered the temperature and visibility,” the agency said as reported by Agence France-Presse.
“The latest satellite picture showed that there are 97 hot spots and dense smoke haze in Sumatra, mainly in Jambi and South Sumatra. The current dry weather conditions in southern parts of Sumatra are expected to persist until mid-October,” the agency reported.
Haze began to affect Singapore on Sunday afternoon.
The air quality also deteriorated Sunday along coastal areas of Malaysia’s side of Borneo island, mainly because of open burning in Indonesia, officials in Malaysia said.
Malaysia’s Department of Environment said that seven of its 51 monitoring stations nationwide recorded “unhealthy” air quality levels, while 11 were “moderate” and the remaining 33 had “good” air quality.
The good news in that the SE Asian smog, which originates in Sumatra and Kalimantan, does not affect Bali. Our air is clean and skies are blue. I feel sorry for anyone living in Jakarta. Their air is bad enough at the best of times. A guy told me recently that he was staying at a 5 star hotel there, and coming down from his room to the lobby, saw a haze of cigarette smoke (inside the hotel!). Basically most people smoke there and his room stank. He said he asked for his bedsheets to be replaced, but the new ones were worse. Probably the staff in the laundry smoke, while working. I know how this can be, and have stayed in some ‘ashtrays’ myself.
No on Jakarta: YES!!!! on Bali
source : www.baliblog.com
October 4th, 2006