Friday, December 17, 2004
Fuck Terrorists
No, I'm not being rude. Well, actually....
Anyway, that's the title of the T-shirt Dan bought and is most proud of.
We're back from Bali with more than a touch of sunburn, full of American food and loads of cheap clothes, including the aforementioned T-shirt. It was a really good holiday.
The Hard Rock Hotel had a huge pool, a beach within the pool- it's quite an experience swimming in chlorinated water but putting your feet down into sand. It's quite the experience getting sand stuck everywhere but not being sticky from the saltwater.
And to have dinner metres away from the surf, with the sun setting and your chairs sinking into the soft sand? Priceless.
So, everything was beautiful. We're well rested, we had the most wonderful drinks in the world- anyone going to Bali will have to find a way to get into the hotel and try our two favourite teas and our biggest extravagances (at SGD$3 a glass- they're relatively expensive when you compare it to a 1.5 litre bottle of mineral water for SGD$0.50). My personal favourite was
How Sweet It Is which was tea with ground lemon rind and honey- yummy, especially when I was nursing the tail end of the sore throat and cough. Dan's fave was a honey concoction with freshly crushed peppermint leaves, cornily named
Seasons in the Sun. We had about four glasses of those every day. Each!
We arrived in Bali, fully prepared for the chaos and mayhem that everyone warned us Bali was about. But we saw none of them. When I told people we were staying at
Kuta Beach, we got disdainful looks because it was crowded, dirty and dangerous (pickpockets). But we saw none of that. The beach, with ocean as far as the eye could see, with a sprinkling of surfers, looked empty save for touts. We were met with the same sight along the streets where all the stores were. The shops were mostly empty and the famed crowds that were supposed to be able to rival Bangkok, not there at all.
I didn't think much about it until we met this driver who took us around. He talked about the Bali bombing and how, before that, he worked as a receptionist in one of the five star hotels along Kuta beach. And at this point in time, he was driving a van, offering to take people like us to the many tourist attractions in Bali illegally (outside company time) just to make an extra 25 000 rupiah which roughly comes up to 5 bucks. It was then that the full weight of the Bali bombing hit us. It wasn't just a terrorist attack on a tourist destination. It was an attack on a people who were heavily dependent on it being a tourist destination to survive. No doubt 88 Aussies died in the
bom (as they call it), but how much did it
really impact the gormless followers of the great Ameriacn foreign- slash in the name of national security- policy? Not much impact except to deny them an excellent escape from winter spot. But I must commend the Aussie and Kiwi government for a job well done in that aspect. When we were there, we found out that people back home were worried about us because yet another
travel advisory had been issued against Bali. So, they avoid Bali like plague. I don't blame the individual traveller for doing that. After all, Bali did get attacked.
But that's the from the individual standpoint of the tourist. I never thought about it from the point of view of the shopkeeper or our driver who got laid off because some bastards decided the two pubs along a busy road in a caucasian dominated tourist area in Bali was a brilliant place to detonate some explosives all in the name of freedom. And from where the locals are standing, they're the ones who got the raw end of the bargain. The driver told us 202 people died that day when the pubs got blown up. And then he added an incredulous figure after, saying about a million people would die from the after effects. It puzzled me for a second since it wasn't some atomic/nuclear/radioactive device that went off. Then he went on to clarify that 90% of the Balinese population's employment depended on tourism and the fact that there has been almost no high season for tourists in the last 2 years and is most likely to stay this way for another 5, has impacted the population so badly that people
will die from it.
It really sucked to hear all that, but in a way, I'm glad we did. I think both of us came away respecting these people a whole lot more. They're a resilient people, who will by and large survive this crisis. You see it when a little girl comes up to you and sells you post cards, playing up her puppy dog eyes or a boy with a toothless grin runs up to you and tries to sell you some beads. They do all they can to get by. But you sure go away wishing it didn't have to be so hard for them. You wonder whether their "Fuck Terrorists" and "Osama can Surf" T-shirts are their means of expressing an anger that they cannot afford to show.
And you sure as hell feel bad for being so wealthy compared to them and question slightly nervously if they resent you for it. You feel guilty talking about how the next time you go to Bali, you want to stay at the Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons. You suddenly understand why peasant uprisings occur and why Marie Antoinette's head got loped off when she offered the peasants cake.
But the thing is, no matter how pissed and indignant we felt when this revelation sank down heavily on us, there was and is so little we can do to help people like the driver we talked to. We can't help him build a better life for his 7 year old son. We can't help him find a hotel that would take him as a front office person. Much as we want to. All we could do was to wish him luck and leave him a tip that would triple how much he had hoped to earn that day. But at the end of it, we still felt impotent. We hadn't changed anything. Nothing was different just because we suddenly understood and felt an anger we could not describe.
So to express that helplessness, we went out and bought the T shirt- fuck the terrorists.
Ondine tossed this thought in at 22:34
0 thoughts...
0 thoughts...
" Far in the stillness, a cat languishes loudly"