Five Safety Tips for Anyone Thinking About Reading Bali Raw

1.       Do not read Bali Raw in public. I would advise that before you pick up a copy you ask yourself one question. Do I really want people to know that I am reading a book that contains stories that involve drinking, violence and prostitution?

2.       Do not try and bring a copy of Bali Raw through Bali customs. Indonesia has some very strict laws pertaining to foreigners criticising or saying unpleasant things about Indonesia. And I do not want to be held responsible if you are arrested for bringing contraband into the country.

3.       Do not read Bali Raw if you are any of the following. A Catholic nun, a pacifist, a hippy, an Indonesian Government Censorship officer, a person with their own aspirations of writing a travel book about Bali or Jakarta, and a person that never wants to read anything bad written about Bali. As a further warning this book should also not be read by a person who is under the age of eighteen.

4.       Do not read if you have a weak stomach, believe me some of the things that I find funny are just plain awful. Case in point these safety tips.

5.       Do not read Bali Raw if you have a dislike trailer trash attributes, for example: Swearing, drinking, fighting, sex, working girls, happy ending massages, and all that other stuff that you are not supposed to like. Unless of course you live in a caravan, you smoke two or more packets of cigarettes a day and you drink your wine out of a box.

Finally please feel free to apply these safety tips to Bali Raw 2, the follow up installment should be available in 2014

©Malcolm Scott

Bali’s Café’s and Karaoke Bars

Cheaply built cafes are scattered around Bali, they dot the island like beach umbrella’s dot Seminyak beach. They exist on the fringes of most towns and villages and they are often utilized by local men seeking to socialise, sing, and obtain sex. These bars tend to be dark, dingy and sometimes dangerous and they generally serve up warm beer along with their less than enthusiastic hostesses.

Most cafes and karaoke bars that are operating in Bali run on the same system. When a customer enters he is approached and asked if he would like a drink and company. If the answer is yes, the waitress then organises a few women to be paraded and the punter is expected to choose his acquaintance for the evening. He is then required to buy her drinks while she is in his company. Because the women that work in this setting receive a commission on any drink the customer buys, they often pour and drink as fast as veteran alcoholics.  Working at cafe is a very hard lifestyle for these ladies and a number of them end their evenings by throwing up.

The majority of the women that work in smaller cafés are poor and they speak limited English. They are often recruited from rural areas and they are offered work contracts that include travel and accommodation expenses. They are then required to pay back this money back over a set period of time. And because they are given a wage that barley covers their living expenses they discover that this unmanageable. Unfortunately a number of these women then find themselves trapped and they spend far more time working in these café’s than they originally planned or they were promised.

There are also a percentage of women that are labouring in smaller remote cafes because they have put themselves out to pasture. These women have realised that they can no longer work the tourist strip because they are too old or they are visibly sick with H.I.V.  Because of this some of the smaller outlying Karaoke bars could be considered to be hotbeds of the virus. And it has been documented that the sickness rate in a few of these smaller rural establishments runs as high as 50 percent.

There is currently a push by the government to shut these places down and they are randomly raided with Bali’s Governor claiming that they promote prostitution and drug use. It is generally the working girls that get caught up in these raids and not the proprietors of the café or Karaoke bar. The girls then end up with little more than a fine of about one hundred thousand RP (AUD $ 10 .00), before they are released to continue working. 


©Malcolm Scott

Hold onto Your Husbands (excerpt from Bali Raw 2)

Beautiful Indonesia

Hold Onto Your Husbands

Married couples are retiring in Bali at an ever increasing rate. This would seem to make perfect sense. A couple, who has worked hard all their lives and built up a small nest egg, can retire to Bali and live out their golden years luxuriously and relatively cheaply. The people are friendly, the island is beautiful and the weather is perfect. But more importantly a reasonable lifestyle on the island can be achieved for as little as US $ 3000 a month. Bali could seem like a dream place to spend one's declining years. But unfortunately this may not be as simple as it may sound.

Retiring to a place like Bali can place a heavy burden on a marriage. There will be the expected pressures. The couple will have to adjust to different foods, different ways of paying bills, different driving habits and different laws for example. But then there may also be unexpected emotional strains applied to the relationship. And one of these pressures may be jealousy.

Western women considering retirement in Bali should think about the level of temptation that will be placed before their husbands on a regular basis. Bali is full of beautiful women, foreign and local alike. Any man living in on the island will be confronted regularly by beautiful young girls. He will see them wearing next to nothing and sitting astride motorbikes. He will notice them parading along the beach topless, or in bikinis that barely cover their lithe and lascivious bodies. And he will encounter them drinking in bars or dancing seductively in nightclubs. And these women are just the tourists. For a man, residing in Bali can be like living at the Playboy Mansion.

The beautiful and seductive young tourists are not the only problem. Then there are the stunning Indonesian girls who are ready with a smile and always willing to sit and chat. These women are not shy to approach an unaccompanied man. And although not all of them are planning some sort of sinister seduction, a number of these women have nothing but seduction on their minds. They are more than willing to steal a husband from unsuspecting Western women. To this type of woman, a rich Western man is the prize they have been seeking most of their lives. They couldn’t care less about his marriage status. They will weigh up what he has to offer and if he is deemed suitable, they will start making their take-over plans.

The female population of Indonesia, over the age of fifteen, is close to eighty million. If a woman retires to Bali with her husband and she is foolish enough to allow him to roam its streets alone, then she could be seen to be committing a form of marriage suicide. A woman contemplating this would be very wise to learn from Indonesian ladies. An Indonesian women involved in a relationship knows about her competition. She has to. She was once a competitor in this most ruthless of games. Regardless of his excuses she will never let he partner out of her sight. The risk of losing him is too high. She will keep constant tabs on her man and she will shadow him at any given opportunity.

An Indonesian woman will do anything in her power to keep other women away. A perfect example of this is the innocuous love bite or hickey. An Indonesian woman will randomly mark the neck of any man she is intimate with. She will not do this because she is overpoweringly caught up in the act of making love. She will do this as a warning sign for other women to keep away. For her the love bite is a dog pissing on a tree symbol of ownership. It is a message to her competitors that they had better stay away.

©Malcolm Scott

For more on Bali Retirement visit:  www.fb.com/baliraw