Wow i am glad I don't go to the same Bali as this guy. He seems to have lumped every bad sight and experience that he has had into one, ang gives the impression that this is a representation of what it is like in bali all the time. Further why single out Australians, we have our cringe tourists, but we are not alone
Gary
Australia loves Bali to death
By Brendan Shanahan
Daily Telegraph
November 16, 2006 12:00
AS people did in the '70s, my parents went to Bali for their honeymoon.
In those days it was an island paradise with one luxury hotel.
Now many of the tourist centres are polluted dumps that serve only to give uncomfortable weight to the argument that tourism ruins the world.
Recently, however, Bali has been faced with ruin of a different kind.
Since the bombings the number of Australian visitors has halved and some local hoteliers have begun a mildly amusing internet campaign, parodying our own "Where the bloody hell are you?'' ads, in an attempt to lure us back.
I can only surmise that the Balinese must be in very dire straits indeed because, frankly, if I was Balinese I wouldn't care if Australians never came back.
I have been to Bali a number of times and on each occasion have been left speechless with shame at the behaviour of Australians there.
Some of the scenes I witnessed were sordidly comic - a mother-daughter with matching hair-braiding having a screaming match over who got the "Bali boy'' that night, for instance.
But many, if not most, were just plain sordid: a toothless alcoholic trying to force himself on a waitress in a cafe; a gang of footy team meatheads in dresses exposing themselves to a humiliated group of local girls; another stealing an umbrella under which a homeless woman was trying to sleep in the pouring rain.
As he ran away she burst into tears and tried, futilely, to shelter the baby in her arms with a sarong.
I'm not the sort of guy who thinks that a week by the pool is a counter-revolutionary gesture but being away from home doesn't excuse you acting like a Viking on shore leave.
Some fundamentalists in Indonesia have suggested the Bali bombings were a kind of divine payback for our immoral behaviour on an island of the pious.
This is vile hypocrisy of breathtaking proportions, but it doesn't change the fact that the days of treating our poorer neighbours as an exploitable resource are over.
We must now accept that the way we behave in other countries affects us at home.
The "Third World'' is no longer a separate entity, a mass of brown people whose lives are cheap and expendable, good only for serving drinks, turning down our sheets and $5 "happy endings''.