ON BALI

Why does anyone travel when we could sit at home at watch it all on the Discovery Channel?

You can see a Buddhist Monastery outside Wollongong, you can smell the pungent odours of the Markets at Preston, you can experience grand architecture at the Regent Theatre or State Library, if you want to see exotic animals go to Melbourne Zoo. Exotic plants? Botanical Gardens. Every airport looks like every other airport and all Non-smoking.

No…. we are curious to see what is on the other side of the fence, and for me the more I travel the more I enjoy coming home. For it is then that I realise what a fortunate position we are all in, and the moans and groans of outrageous fortune don’t seem to occur as often.

It is a great pity that we can’t turn things around so that instead of increasing income through age, experience and knowledge we can’t receive better salaries whilst we are young and have them pegged, as we get older and the need for dough decreases. When do we need money most? When we are starting out in life. Travel, House, Car and Baby all come when we are young and least able to afford them.

Just after a few mentally unstable individuals blew up hundreds of white people and Balinese western lacky’s I had the fortune to visit Bali.These ‘bombers’ believed that Islam was being threatened by the West with such lame duck excuses as ‘our women are getting ideas about being equal to men’ and ‘western culture is the creation of Infidels to seduce our young people’. One might note that some of these cranks are also wearing Nike and GAP.

Indonesia and hence Bali (despite it having a Hindu majority) is part of the Empire of Islam. Unlike the British Empire of old when one nation is under threat all the others will automatically fall in behind them regardless of race or sect, Islam is so fractured and fractuous that even if Islam was to fall completely the aim would be to ensure their brand, Sunni, Shi’ite, Sufi, Wahabi were the last to fall. Survival of the fittest even unto death.

Whilst in Bali amongst the hordes of aged drunken Australians looking for cheap sex (not even our blind whores would want these blokes mounting them), and cringing whenever I had to show anyone my passport, I imagined myself to be back in Kings Cross. It was oft said by local Balinese that half our tourists come from Indonesia just to experience the decadent West. Having recently arrived from Solo in Central Java I found myself agreeing with them.

So why do I enjoy arriving home so much? It is because I begin to appreciate what Australia has to offer. Despite all the prophesies of doom and gloom uttered either side of this column divider and the political atmosphere I realise that I have never had it so good.

So why can’t we have a society that, with the intensity of hormonal youth seeking sex, we travel outside our own borders and discover what the rest of the world hasn’t got. It would certainly be less embarrassing in Bali if the Aussie tourists were all virile young studs rather than the old retired wrinklies I saw with girls appearing more like grand-daughters hanging incestuously from the old guys wallet.

Poverty is relative. Even though I still cannot work out how some young people could possibly survive on what they receive from Centrelink but they fare much better than a country that has no social security system at all. Many tourists complain of the street vendors plying their wares with unceasing sales pitches, where the word ‘No’ seems to invoke an even greater sense of urgency to make you part with your money. Survival is the name of the game and a dollar profit from the fat old fart in the T-shirt, shorts and thongs will help them and their family make it through another day.

If our young people despite all the ‘Americanski hype’ that surrounds them, could see with their own eyes that there are billions worse off than they, then perhaps what we see as unreasonable demands might be seen by them as well.

The unending patience displayed by the people of Asia goes far beyond what we Western races would tolerate. Buddha taught that ‘Life is suffering, and suffering is life’. On the one hand this is a most enlightening decree but on the other it has also helped create the political ambiance of Asia where single parties, dictatorships and inhumane political freedom fighters proliferate. As a result a vast multitude of people suffer through the most bestial of revolutions in the belief that it has been ordained and they may as well just sit it out for the next life. Fortunately for us 500 years ago the Reformation allowed us to begin thinking for ourselves, we saw through the machinations of the Priests, and put religion in its proper place as part of our culture and not the centrepiece of it.

in a world of Donar Kebabs, Chinese Sweet and Sour and African Tapioca

‘WHAT DO WHITE RACISTS EAT?’