How Bali is becoming even more "greener"!

Some eco-conscious entrepreneurs on Indonesia's Island of the Gods are working to build a future in tune with nature

By Tannia Vera & Robert Michael Poole from CNNgo

 

The Heart of School at Green School, Bali.

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In Indonesia, the concept of green living is starting to take hold.

This archipelago of more than 17,000 islands stretched along the equator is home to Bali, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and it has seen resorts, tourist facilities, ugly hotels, clubs and all the trimmings that go with those developed over the last several decades.

Now, the island is not only pushing a trend to create structures that preserve the natural environment, it is also establishing new forms of education.

A school, new housing and an affordable luxury holiday retreat show how fast the movement is progressing.

The grass is not greener on the other side when in Bali.

Cleaning up

The modern concept of sustainable, or “green” living, began in 1954 when Helen and Scott Nearing published “Living the Good Life.”

As the world’s population has grown -– to around 7 billion today –- and new technologies have been invented, the environments that we live in have been effected in many adverse ways.

Though some scientists, governments, companies and especially environmental organizations like Greenpeace have sought to confront the wider issues, individuals who simply want to live a more sustainable personal life have sought their own ecologically sound lifestyles.

In Bali entrepreneurial projects are now springing up to meet that demand.

Sixty-four projects recently competed in the Tri Hita Karana Awards, which recognize environmental management. 

According to local environmental consultant Gove DePuy, founder of a green youth culture movement called PT Akarumput, "growth is most obvious in the 'buzz' at this point. Magazine articles, people discussing renewable materials in the cafes and restaurants, green-themed festivals like Ubud's Earth Day Festival.

"But along with that has come actual change. More people refuse plastic bags in the grocery stores, Hypermart now offers cloth bags at the register, Bali's first Green building supply store (Little Tree) has opened its doors and Bali now has a chapter of the World Green Building Council," says DePuy.

Organic food is being bought more often for both personal and commercial use, eco-hotels, resorts and green residential homes have shifted construction materials from concrete to sustainable materials like straw and bamboo, which, as DePuy says "makes a huge dent in the amount of resources consumed by older, less efficient construction." 

Power to the various projects meanwhile is increasingly being generated by highly visible solar panels, water, geothermal, and wind sources.

Students discuss upcoming performances in the theater at Green School.

Green education

Inhabited mainly by Hindus, Bali and its culture is founded on the fundamental Sanskrit phrase "Tri Hita Karana."

Roughly translated, it means “to keep the harmony and balance between human to God, human-to-human and human to environment.”

"Human to environment" has been the guiding light for a number of eco-friendly property developers,  with many implementing environmentally-friendly methods of construction while still serving the growing demand of Bali’s tourism industry to cope with increasing numbers of visitors -- temporary and permanent. 

Green School is one such example. Built almost entirely of bamboo, Green School is redefining what children’s education is about.

Founded in 2008, the school teaches pre-school students through to grade 10, with grades 11 and 12 to be added in the next two years. Located between Denpasar and Ubud, the private school was founded and built by long term residents John and Cynthia Hardy who sold off their own successful local jewelry store before starting the school.

Its curriculum has a central core of English, Math, and Science but it also aims to prepare its pupils to be the green leaders of tomorrow via green studies and creative arts teaching.

Environmental leaders of tomorrow

At entrance lies a playground and cafe.

According to the Green School manifesto, it aims to be “the number one model of sustainability in education in the world."

"This generation of children will be the first to grow up learning about environmental issues from their early years,” says Chris Thompson, father of two young students at the school, aged 4 and 7.

The background of families enrolling suggests the school has a wide appeal, with students from 45 countries attending, and parents with diverse career backgrounds. Chris Thompson is an experienced media consultant who sits on boards in Abu Dhabi and Singapore advising on investment, growth and development strategies.

“We need new leaders to bring change to the world. But these students don't need to become environmentalists to help the world," he says.

"They simply need to have a consciousness about the challenges so that they may apply them in whatever profession they may choose," says Thompson.

Inflatable classrooms

When the humidity gets too much, a blow-up classroom keeps the coolness inside.

During our visit to the school in November 2010, we discovered its vast complex of classrooms.

There are both open-walled classrooms and even inflatable balloon-like classrooms to cope with the occasional extreme heat of the tropical forest, a hydro power vortex energy source to keep the school self-sufficient, organic plantation fields so kids can learn to grow their own produce and a conservation center of endangered avian species for children to observe and study directly rather than just read textbooks.

"Our aim is for environmentally off-grid power sourcing," says head of admissions and enrollment Ben Macrory. 

The school is also home to what is thought to be the largest permanent bamboo building in the world, known as The Heart of School (click "View Gallery" above for pictures).

Celebrity donors

The gymnasium at Green School, like most of the structures, has no walls.

Names of donors to the school as well as the names of the first student of the school are carved in the bamboo poles that hold up the multi-level structure. Among the names, celebrity donors Sir Richard Branson, Donna Karan and Miss Japan 2009: Emiri Miyasaka.

Ben Macrory says the school now has 203 students representing 45 nations. It also has a scholarship program for local Balinese. 

The program is intended to stimulate awareness of green issues among the local community by making the education affordable to Balinese. Regular fees range from US$5,000-10,000 per year.

The Grade 5 classroom at Green School fits into its surroundings.

Balifornian Tours works with charities and organizations like The Green School to help educate, clothe and nurish the great people in many small villages in Bali and Indonesia at large.  Our customized private guided tours encorporate visits to impovershed villages where participants can donate time, gifts, money or whatever they find appropriate.  Our feedback tells us this is one of the most rewarding parts of our tours.

Celebrating A Gift From Bali: Delicious Confusion

Celebrating A Gift From Bali: Delicious Confusion

By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH 

NO longer quite the inaccessible Shangri-La of antique travelogue, Bali remains, for artists of all kinds and seekers of a spiritual bent, an isle of pristine enchantments. To musicians with or without the cosmic baggage, the fascination lies in the intricately layered pulse and shimmer of the gamelan, the indigenous form of orchestral ensemble, dominated by percussion and associated for centuries with Balinese ritual and devotion.

Christine Southworth

A projection of Nyoman Triyana Usadhi above Desak Made Suarti Laskmi, wearing a yellow robe, next to a set for “A House in Bali.”

 

Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

The dancer Kadek Dewi Aryani performs in a scene in “House in Bali,” Evan Ziporyn’s opera, directed by Jay Scheib. The opera will be performed Thursday through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

Since the 1980s the clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn has made the pilgrimage often. His new opera, “A House in Bali,” celebrates his forerunner Colin McPhee, a Canadian-born composer and scholar best remembered by fellow acolytes of Bali’s musical heritage. Happening on a few scratchy phonograph records from Bali in 1929, McPhee found his calling. If not for him, the traditions that flourish today might be extinct.

The opera is based mainly on McPhee’s memoirs of the same title, published in 1946 to a rave review in The New York Times by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had known McPhee in Bali. “This book,” Mead wrote, “is not only for those who would turn for a few hours from the jangle of modern life to a world where the wheeling pigeons wear bells on their feet and bamboo whistles on the tail feathers, but also for all those who need reassurance that man may again create a world made gracious and habitable by the arts.”

For logistical and sentimental reasons Mr. Ziporyn’s opera received its first, unstaged, preview in June 2009 on the steps of a temple in Ubud, a Balinese arts mecca, surrounded by spreading rice terraces and plunging ravines. The stage premiere followed three months later in Berkeley, Calif. This fall the opera reaches the East Coast, with performances in Boston and in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival Thursday through Saturday.

The scoring is for a balanced ensemble of Western (the Bang on a Can All-Stars, of which Mr. Ziporyn is a founding member) and performers from Bali whose contributions are equal but for long stretches separate. On Oct. 30 a program of Mr. Ziporyn’s compositions in the Making Music series at Zankel Hall will include further examples of Western-Eastern fusion.

Born in Montreal in 1900, McPhee was hardly the first Western composer to thrill to the gamelan. The former Wagnerian Claude Debussy was transfixed by Balinese musicians at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889. The cosmopolitan Maurice Ravel was likewise taken. But it was left to McPhee to sail halfway around the globe to experience the music in its home.

For much of the 1930s he made Bali his home, studying, redeeming historic instruments from pawnbrokers, recruiting children to learn and play. He left in 1938, never to return, but worked on his magnum opus, “Music in Bali,” for the rest of his life. He had barely finished correcting the page proofs in the medical center of the University of California, Los Angeles, when he died, in 1964.

In his memoir McPhee’s evocations of gamelan music are bewitchingly specific.

“At first, as I listened from the house,” one passage begins, “the music was simply a delicious confusion, a strangely sensuous and quite unfathomable art, mysteriously aerial, aeolian, filled with joy and radiance. Each night as the music started up, I experienced the same sensation of freedom and indescribable freshness. There was none of the perfume and sultriness of so much music in the East, for there is nothing purer than the bright, clean sound of metal, cool and ringing and dissolving in the air. Nor was it personal and romantic, in the manner of our own effusive music, but rather, sound broken up into beautiful patterns.”

McPhee went on to analyze the music’s layered architecture: the “slow and chantlike” bass, the “fluid, free” melody in the middle register, the “incessant, shimmering arabesques” high in the treble, which ring, in McPhee’s phrase, “as though beaten out on a thousand little anvils.” Add to all this the punctuation of gongs in many registers, the cat’s-paws and throbbings and thunderclaps of the drums, the tiny crash of doll-size cymbals and the “final glitter” of elfin bells, “contributing shrill overtones that were practically inaudible.”

The scales, though pentatonic, fail to duplicate the assortment we know from the black keys of a piano. And pitch variations from gamelan to gamelan (fundamentally irreconcilable with Western tuning) amount to a science in itself.

The narrative of “A House in Bali” makes delightful reading too, despite some extreme air-brushing. McPhee’s wife, Jane Belo, a woman of means and an anthropologist, is never mentioned, though they traveled (and built the house) on her money. Bowing to the taboos of his time, McPhee passes over the awakening of his homosexuality in Bali, though the charged nature of his attachments to numerous men and boys (consummated or otherwise) is hard to miss. Impending war, one factor that drove him from Bali, is hinted at. Crackdowns by the vice squad, another factor, are not.

In shaping the stage action, the librettist Paul Schick picked out several episodes that McPhee’s readers are sure to remember: the long-drawn-out construction of the house, a comic shakedown by his native neighbors, an unsettling call from a suspected Japanese spy, a visitation by spirits of ill omen. Much of the dialogue is straight from the book; most of the rest quotes writings of the opera’s two other Western characters, Mead and the German artist Walter Spies.

As for the staging, audiences who anticipate an ornamental divertissement along the lines of the “Small House of Uncle Thomas” sequence from “The King and I” are in for a surprise. Mr. Ziporyn seems to have been thinking along these lines too, but the director, Jay Scheib, had other ideas.

“McPhee and Mead and Spies were all deeply involved in image making,” Mr. Scheib said recently between rehearsals on an iffy Skype connection from Ubud. Bali. (Signs of the times: Mr. Ziporyn remembers when the closest telephone was an hour away in the capital, Denpasar.)

“Mead was working out the methodology of visual anthropology, based on the scientific premise that you could infer more about a culture through careful photography rather than through written notes,” Mr. Scheib added. “McPhee shot hours of silent film footage of dance training and rehearsals. And Spies was documenting Balinese culture in a very interesting way through painting.”

With all this in mind Mr. Scheib has opted for extensive use of live video, giving audiences virtual eye contact with performers, even when they are confined to enclosed spaces where viewers in the auditorium cannot actually see them. This, at least, was the case in Berkeley; the production was still evolving.

At the heart of the opera, and often front and center, is Sampih, a shy, skittish country urchin who rescues McPhee from a flash flood, becomes a servant in his household and is trained, at McPhee’s urging, as a dancer. In 1952 the real Sampih achieved international stardom touring coast to coast in the United States as well as performing in London. Back home in Bali two years later, at 28, he was strangled under nebulous circumstances by a killer who was never caught.

Though the correspondences are far from exact, McPhee’s infatuation with Sampih has reminded many of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” in which the elderly, repressed aesthete Gustav von Aschenbach conceives a fatal attraction for Tadzio, an exotic youth. The opera by Benjamin Britten (a close friend of McPhee’s who for a time shared a Brooklyn brownstone with him and other arty types like Leonard Bernstein) reinforces the parallels, such as they are. Not only did Britten assign the role of Tadzio to a dancer; he also scored his music for gamelan.

The part of McPhee in Mr. Ziporyn’s opera was originally sung by Marc Molomot, who was unavailable for the current performances. His replacement is Peter Tantsits, an adventurous high tenor, who has studied the voluminous source material and McPhee’s circle in depth.

“As an opera singer it’s rare to get to play a character who existed in the flesh, and not all that long ago,” Mr. Tantsits said recently from Boston. “My first impression when I was offered the part was, ‘I’m too young to play Aschenbach,’ which is a role I’d love to do maybe in 20 years. Right now I’m 31, the same age as Colin when he went to Bali. I don’t think the relationship with Sampih was a case of sexual attraction but something more like an adoption. The way he’s described in the book is quite sensual. This is hard to talk about. I don’t think we’ve completely decided what we will decide.”

No Pandora, Mr. Ziporyn has deliberately kept a tight seal on the ambiguities.

“As McPhee presents himself in the book, he’s very transparent yet completely opaque,” Mr. Ziporyn said on a recent visit to New York. “I wanted to mirror that. I think of McPhee almost as a Nabokovian unreliable narrator, as in ‘Pale Fire,’ or even ‘Lolita,’ if that’s not too charged an analogy.

“Every quest is a quest for yourself. In going to Bali, McPhee was looking for his own artistic or personal essence. ‘I’ll always be the outsider,’ he said after he’d been there for years. He was talking about the music, he was talking about Sampih, and he was speaking in general. I wanted to convey that sense and let viewers draw their own conclusions.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 10, 2010, on page AR21 of the New York edition.



Shopping In Bali- Bali And It's Art Of Shopping

POSTED BY JASA IJAZAH 

Bali And It's Art Of Shopping

In Bali, shopping is not simply going into a shop, choose something off the shelf and paying for it. In every traditional market, art shops or simply clothing shops around Bali, bargaining is a must! In fact, in Bali, we call shopping an art and bargaining a skill that we have to master!

Even if you're not a seasoned negotiator, be prepared to enjoy the bargaining process. It is definitely fun! Just be patient and for sure, you'll find good buys with the best prices! If you're lucky, you may even get away with cheaper prices than what the Balinese normally gets! In some places you can bargain until you get 50% discount. Always start by bargaining at 30% of the price. Yes 30%! It's the norm so don't be shy. Walk away if they don't want to bargain, until you get the price you want or at least 75% of the price they quote at the beginning.

Shopping and bargaining this way makes your shopping in Bali very fun. You can feel the warmth of human value in all your shopping transactions. However, do take note, before you embark on your shopping adventure in Bali, please have cash with you because most places do not accept credit cards unless you're in shopping malls.

I recall seeing a Dutch lady negotiating for an umbrella on Kuta beach. She did extremely well in the bargaining process. Instead of paying Rp 30,000, she paid only Rp 5000! Yes at only 1/6 of the initial price quoted. She was so happy and walked away smilling gleefully. Isn't that the main quintessence of bargaining? To be happy with your purchase and satisfied with the price. So where can you go to spend your Rupiah?
Do read my article on "Bali Shopping Destination" and "Bali Travel Guide" to ensure you enjoy shopping in Bali and you have a blast in Bali!

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Bali Travel Guide With Attractions In Bali For Bali Newbie

POSTED BY ANASTASIA @ BALI
Bali Travel Guide Advice And Attactions In Bali For First Time Visitors To Bali

So When Should You Travel To Bali?

I will always recommend all my friends, colleagues and associates to visit Bali during the dry season in May-July, the best period to visit Bali in terms of weather. However, preferences may differ depending on the type of tourist you are, surfers like it bright and sunny while explorers and newly-weds prefer the weather to be cool. During May-July, the beaches in the western part of Bali is known to have beautiful waves which surfers like! My best recommendation is to check on the weather forecast for the days when you'll be visiting Bali and plan accordingly. I noticed that most Aussies travel to Bali during Christmas and May-August during their school breaks. Europeans normally in June-July. However, no matter who you are and where you're from always remember to book your flight tickets and accomodation early so that you can get better prices. Do visit BALI HOTELS REVIEW to get UNBIASED &HONEST hotel reviews in Bali.

With the mentally spiritual destination in Bali lying in the mountains, the tourist heart of the island lies in the south, where major tourist destinations in Bali are located. They are Kuta, Legian, Sanur and Nusa Dua. This is the main destination or at least the embarking point for the majority of visitors, especially those arriving by air. Those staying in any of the above-mentioned areas will find it quite easy to make day trips to most of the popular tourist destinations, including Gunung Agung and Besakih temple, Kintamani, Lovina Beach, Candidasa, and Ubud, the main art hub in Bali and for the Balinese. However... Please do make sure that you allocate at least 2 days for UBUD, to get a real feel of the Balinese culture, arts and attractions. Ubud is the main cultural heart for Bali.

Bali's timezone is +8 hours, same as Singapore, Bangkok and Malaysia's timezone and 1 hour ahead of Jakarta, Indonesia's capital. Bali's main currency is Ruppiah (IDR) with denomination notes of Ruppiah 100,000, 50,000, 20,000, 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 denominations. USD or United States Dollar $ is also widely acceptable in Bali. Normal changing rate is IDR 10,000 for USD $1.

What Should I Do In Bali?

I say.. you MUST watch the Balinese Dance, a pillar and famous Balinese Culture. Balinese Dances have historically played an important role in Balinese society. Through this art, people learn about the tales of the Ramayana, Mahabarata and other epic stories from Balinese history. Balinese dance never fails to awe the audience including myself, a native Balinese and they never fail to put a smile on my face :) A place i'll recommend is Lotus Pond Restaurant in Ubud. The settings of the garden in Lotus Pond Restaurant (Jalan Raya, Ubud) is a beautiful environment where you can watch TRADITIONAL & ORIGINAL Balinese Dance. The Thursday night performance by Balinese kids from the age of 9-18 is DEFINITELY charming and enchanting. Entrance fee is Rp 50,000 for a 75mins dance show which starts normally at 7.30pm. The only problem is during the rainy season when a sudden downpour may mean they dash up to perform in a hall at the back – but trust me, that’s interesting itself and you still get to experience the beautiful Balinese Dance.

Next on the list, I normally bring my visiting friends and associates for some monkeying around in Bali's Monkey Forest - Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary (Jalan Monkey Forest, Padangtegal, Ubud; 62-361-971304; www.monkeyforestubud.com). The monkeys, being Ubud's most beloved residents, live in a dense forest to the south of Ubud, complete with their own temple. If you go to the Monkey Forest, just be careful, particularly with regards to your children. The monkeys go for 'bright' - glasses, cameras, watches, jewellery and can rip bags of peanuts out of your or your child's hand. Not to forget.. leave your bananas and never buy bananas on your way to the Monkey Forest. While this can be amusing for your kids, it can also be distressing if the monkey escapes with your goods or worst still, an experience that my own brother will never forget whereby he got attacked by the playful but fierce Monkeys which leave his arm torn and bleeding badly. He ended up getting 12 stitches on his arms and vow that he'll never bring banana's again, even if it's for the monkeys.. Hehehe... Admission is 10,000 rupiah, or about $1 at 10,000 rupiah to the dollar.

My favourite activity in Ubud itself is to experience Ayung River.. Wanna know why most of the expensive luxury hotels in Ubud are built along this river? Just one answer and that is, THE VIEWS ARE SIMPLY AWE-INSPIRING AND GORGEOUS!!! See it for yourself and click on that cameras so that you can boast to your friends and family that will definitely make them wanna visit Bali! Don't forget to get yourself wet in these naturally beautiful clean river in Ubud which will definitely gives you good memories of Ubud! Hehe.. Do climb aboard a rubber raft while you're in Ayung River and watch the waterfalls with thick vines along the low-flying swallows go by. Bali Adventure Tours (0361-721480, www.baliadventuretours.com) runs 90-minute trips down the river starting at $60 for a morning trip that includes a basic lunch of rice and egg rolls.

After some monkeying around and getting wet in the rivers of Ubud, you should pamper yourself with a Balinese Massage (Do read What Is Balinese Massage to get an idea of a Balinese Massage) Don't worry, it won't burn a hole in your pockets.. My elders always remind me that four hands beat two hand :) so why not book a four-handed massage at Spa Hati (Jln Raya Andong no. 14, Peliatan, Ubud; 0361-977-578), a massage salon with stone and thatched-roof compound at the edge of Ubud. I recommend you to try the four-handed massage packet with "Lulur", a traditional Javanese body scrub using blends of rice flour and secret herbs — 90minutes massage packet for only Rp 225,000. After the massage, the unhurried staff lets you relax for as long as you want in the hot tub, listening to little frogs make big noises in the rice paddy next door. And about that cheap labor: spa profits help support the Bali Hati Foundation, a non-profit organization that runs community programs and help the needy Balinese, including building a school for the local less-privileged kids.

Now, for the best show in town guys! Head for Seminyak beach, to the north of Kuta by 5.30pm so that you can get the best front-row seats in "Breeze" an elegant and sleek beachside bar & restaurant at the Samaya Hotel in Jalan Laksmana(Seminyak), for the MOST DAZZLING ROMANTIC SUNSET in BALI and Indonesia!!! Don't forget to order yourself a glass, or if you must, a bottle of WINE. The decks are so close to the surfs that you can almost feel the foam from the breakers!

Besides witnessing the Sunset in Bali, you should experience the beaches in Bali. Bali have many beautiful beaches that is good for swimming, surfing, or just reading and chilling on the sand. Some hotels and villages groom the beaches and ensure their cleanliness. Also, the quality of a beach can change drastically between seasons, depending on the location of the beach and the direction it faces. To be sure and get more useful insights into the beaches in Bali, do visit Bali Beaches Guide.

Bali is not complete if you don't have a night out in the club :) Night life in Bali starts late, which means around midnight. Tourists normally wonder why the expats and locals only start partying at around 1am – even in Kuta where most of the top clubs are, clubs only start getting crowded after midnight. Do visit Ku De Ta, a modern and trendy spot that faces the surf where young Balinese adults especially the beautifully-flashing babes hangs out (Jalan Laksmana 9, Seminyak; KuDeTa). It's a shockingly sceney — a DVD is sold showing highlights of the high season. Get yourself seats by the beach with sights of the beautiful waves crashing in, illuminated with the help of floodlights from the club. After Ku De Ta, head on to Double Six Club (Jln Double Six Blue Ocean Boulevard, Seminyak; 0361-733067 - www.doublesixclub.com; Ruppiah 70,000 for admission), with a gigantic dance floor and bungee jumping, YES you heard me right - bungee jumping, on weekend nights. But don't show up before 3 a.m. For more information on Bali Nightlife do read Bali Nightlife - Bali After Dark

After you're done with having fun and getting a feel of Bali and Balinese cultures... it's time to do some shopping for souvenirs and more! You can go shopping for handicrafts and arts such as antique furnitures, balinese paintings, delicately crafted Balinese gold and silver, wood and stone carvings, masks, woven and dyed fabrics and etc. in many shops in the Kuta/Legian area, in Sanur, in various handicraft villages and the Sukawati market on the way to Ubud and in Ubud itself.

Please forget the idea of DUTY FREE SHOPS and do not visit them by all means! Local-made goods are over-priced and sold at ridiculous prices in DFS. Imagine, just one bottle of HATTEN Rose wine which is made in Sanur costs US$11 in DFS outlets. That is way more expensive than in most local restaurants! It's worst if you're looking for a beautiful French made blouse, a designer handbag, some jewellry or a dress watch for your partner to wear at a special occasion in Bali, you'll totally waste your time and MONEY!

PLEASE DO BARGAIN ON THE PRICES NO MATTER WHO YOU ARE AND WHETHER YOU HAVE LOTS OF CASH OR NOT!

Bali is the best place to master the "Bargaining Art". Unless the product is price-tagged, bargaining is a must and you shouldn't be ashamed of it! Trust me, it's gonna be fun and bargaining is an exciting thing to do! If you have never bargained before, the bargaining masters will find it exhilarating, especially when a good deal was struck. Many come to Bali with a 'shop until you drop' attitude, so you would probably end up buying a few things anyhow. There are numerous western-style department stores and shopping centers in Denpasar, Kuta-Legian, Sanur and Nusa Dua that offer a range of clothing, shoes, leather goods, sports gear, and toys. The service is generally good, and the low value of the rupiah ensures excellent prices. Balinese arts and crafts are the most popular purchases but you can also get value-for-money goods such as clothing, music, musical instruments and watches.


Thats all for now and do comment on my post or email me if you have anything to ask or comment on alright? Happy Bali-ing and hope this guide is useful for you :)

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