[Geary]

Thanks for asking, Dottore. To be fair, I know a few Hawaii folks who now call Bali home, and they love it down there .. and an old room mate lived in Jakarta for over a decade, overseeing production of his successful clothing company, likewise never having any significant problems.

The Bali I first visited in '75 struck me as a surfer's paradise. This was the Bali described in Star Black's excellent book, "Guide to Bali". I spent about 10 months of my 3+ years traveling SE Asia in Bali. The changes I saw in Kuta during just that short period were pretty astounding. It began with a few pimps/girls cruising Kuta on motorcycles each evening, and by '78 it had gotten pretty bad. (BTW, as a young traveler, I never felt danger at any time during my travels. It's in retrospect that I realize there were times I should have .. especially when I was literally the only westerner for 50 miles in any direction.)

I didn't know it at the time, but 100,000 Chinese had been slaughtered just a couple years prior to my initial Indo visit. Apparently, this level of brutality is not uncommon in parts of the country. My very favorite Kuta shop was owned by the nicest Chinese guy. We kinda hit it off, and I spent hours talking with him. I still have his family's Chinese embroidered altar hanging, which he had replaced with a Batik altar hanging because the original was in a state of disrepair. He and his family disappeared from the scene, and I never did find out where they went.

During one of my stays, I hooked up with a lovely Japanese American girl, who had been traveling Indo alone for a couple months. According to her, every day she would get a few " **ck Yous" from passers by. WWII Japanese occupation forces had been very cruel in Indonesia .. but only approaching a level of cruelty exhibited by the Indonesian military in Timor during the late '70s.

In '78, I was involved in a traffic accident on Bali, which landed me in the hospital for a day. It hadn't been my fault, but I did pay .. I had no choice. At least they waited until the following day to hit me up. I was easy to find. Kuta was relatively uncrowded in those days, and i was the only surfer sitting on the beach with a full arm cast.

It was another 15 years until I visited Bali again with a bunch of Hawaii guys. It took me two days to realize that the huge hotel we were staying in sat on the very spot I used to sleep in a $5/night tent. Our one night out we went to a new two-story nightclub that was THE place to be for Westerners. It didn't even start rocking until 11:00 or so. OMG, what a change from the earlier days. Not my cup of tea, but it kept a lot of the young Aussie surfers from surfing the early sessions. (We headed on to G-Land surf camp the next day, anyhow.) A couple years later, that nightclub was bombed, killing a couple hundred young party-goers. Our son lost a couple good friends that night.

Again, to be fair, my impressions are not shared by most .. but it's smart not to be complacent anywhere in SE Asia.