Life is a Beach in Bali

Because I am traveling light, my camera was too big and bulky to bring along to Bali.  My mobile phone was also a disgrace, I couldn’t read the text anymore and it could only store 30 messages at a time and really needed to go.  I decided I wanted a phone that could also double as a camera and still be a good, easy-to-use, simple phone.  Probably expecting too much as usual and it took me ages to settle on one that did not cost an arm and a leg (the choices are mindlessly large) but finally I settled on one yesterday and, so far, I am rapt with my Nokia X1.  It is doing everything I wanted it to do and more, but, of course, it is early days yet.

While the photos are not great quality they are good enough to add some colour to my blogging.  The phone is terrific and so is the MP3 player which is great because, sadly, my I Pod thingo sang its last song in the washing machine in China several months ago.

Anyway, the point of all that is gets me back blogging and now I have a discrete camera so I don’t have to go around feeling like a gawky tourist.

I love nothing more than the Kuta beach in the very early morning particularly at low tide.  You can walk for miles on a near deserted beach and swim in the ocean to your heart’s content.  And my heart is really content doing these simple things.  I have had more long swims in the ocean here, in my not yet three week holiday, than I had in two summers in my old home town of Apollo Bay in Victoria; it was always too cold, too windy, too wet for more than half a dozen dips in the ocean each year.  Whilst the scenery was undoubtedly grand, it was always disappointing not to be able to use the beach for more than a few days each year.  This is probably why I have made the decision not to go back to such a temperate climate unless, for some reason, I have to.

When you wake up each morning in Bali, you know with a certainty, the weather will be good for walking and swimming and, let me tell you, it’s a great feeling and you can sort of frame your day around your morning four hours on the beach.  Also you can get a healthy breakfast of Asian porridge and a freshly pressed tropical juice right on the beach; something you could never do in Oz.

The Balinese school kids gather on the beach in the morning in their always, pristine and attractive, uniforms.  According to a Balinese parent I know, apparently they have three uniforms to cover the 6 day, school week.  Schooling is taken very seriously and they appear to be doing the Indonesian national curriculum.  What is quite strange to me, is the small emphasis on learning English as a second language, particularly given that about 90% of the Balinese economy depends on tourism.  It’s like they are all being trained to be office managers and professionals which seems to be more that slightly out of step with the reality that the majority of them will end of working in rather menial jobs in the hotel and hospitality sector.

And the Balinese that have been working in the industry for years still have incredibly low levels of English too.  Staff I first met in the hotel I stay at here three years ago, still have the same standard of pigeon English which is kind of interesting.  I almost get a sense that they don’t put much store by learning English apart form a half dozen key words (transport, buy here, one more, very cheap) and it is one more way in which they protect their unique culture from the barbarian tourist onslaught.  I need to look into this phenomenon some more and try to understand it.

Anyway, leave you with some snaps of the early morning Kuta beach and the school kids getting ready to line up and be lectured for an hour (that’s all that seems to happen, they don’t do much else!).

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