Wednesday 30 September 2015

A follow up to the Jimbaran Bali controversy

It's been an exciting 48 hours of blogging - basically, I did something a lot of bloggers do: I jumped on the bandwagon of a hot story and sure enough, I got plenty of hits on my blog. Here's a startling statistic for you: despite the fact that my previous piece on the haze was featured on Singapore Daily (which usually generates a lot of traffic to my blog, thanks guys), I've had twice as many hits on my 'bandwagon' piece on the Jimbaran Sea View Villa case. Most of the hits came via Facebook where I had posted links to the piece on the profiles of one of the influencers involved, Tricia Ong. Thus in this follow up post, I would like to deal with some of the misconceptions to deal with my travel writing.
I love sharing my travel adventures through my writing.


Sponsored pieces vs independent pieces

Now there are times when a travel writer is either paid or sponsored to write a piece - here's how it works. Say a new attraction like a resort is trying to raise its profile and it invites a travel writer to stay there for free - so they will give the writer (usually plus a guest - after all, it's not fun going on holiday on your own) to go there for a few days and they'll throw in (often very) generous travel expenses for the writer + his/her companion to get to the resort. When you get such an amazingly good deal (or 'lobang', as we would say in Singlish), the unwritten rule is that you try your best to give the place an excellent review, to raise their profile and get more business. If you have the audacity to give the place a bad review after having been treated like a VIP, then it is unlikely that you will get any further 'lobangs' like that. That's just an unwritten rule in such cases. Certainly those of us working with an editor would never be able to get a bad review of a sponsored piece pass the editor - editors work very hard to cultivate good relationships with such establishments and they are not going to let the whims of their writers destroy those relationships.

In contrast, there are the travel writers who are not sponsored - they go on holiday like everyone else: they search online for a good deal, they book their flights and hotel and off they go. Now this kind of holiday experience is far more like the rest of what the general public would have and often, the average reader will prefer to read a piece which reflects their experience, rather than one of the sponsored piece which is going to be overwhelmingly positive. Things can go wrong during holidays and reading about the mistakes that others have made can be quite useful at least in terms of learning about the pitfalls to avoid and the challenges one may face when in a foreign country, where you don't know the culture or speak the local language. Now as an established travel writer, I do both sponsored pieces and independent pieces and it tends to be my independent pieces that gets far more hits than my sponsored pieces - why? I guess it is just a matter of what readers out there prefer, a far more realistic piece about what they could expect when on holiday, since they're not travel writers being sponsored to stay at some gorgeous 5-star resort or hotel.
Would the Jimbaran Sea View Villa be now inviting travel writers to review it?

Being biased against people from poor countries

Oh this was the repeated criticism that I faced: that I was a very nasty person for discriminating against people from poor countries. Now the whole Jimbaran case was based on the fact that these three Singaporean bloggers went to Bali on holiday and had their money stolen from their rooms, despite the fact that the room was locked. The assumption thus was that the cleaners had gone through their belongings, found the money and stole it. Now some people have argued that this is the kind of theft that can happen anywhere, but I am saying that it is far more prevalent in poorer countries: please allow me to justify my point of view.

In a place like Indonesia, many poor rural folks flock to the popular tourist destinations in search of work and even if they end up working in a 5-star hotel, they are still paid peanuts. Yes these people are being exploited by these luxury hotels - the mindset of the owners is simple: you are still being paid more as a cleaner in my luxury hotel than if you were stuck in your village working on a farm, so you should be grateful for your job and I don't need to pay you a Rupiah more. Given the disparity of income between the urban elite working in the tourism industry and the rural poor, there is an endless source of cheap labour. Let me tell you a story that illustrates this point: I once passed through a hotel in Bali where I saw a team of gardeners cutting the grass in the garden with no more than a pair of kitchen scissors each - I was shocked as a decent lawn mower could have probably done the same job far more quickly and efficiently by just one person. I asked a local why this job was being done by hand: he shrugged his shoulders and explained that it still much cheaper to hire a bunch of migrant workers to do this by hand than to invest in a proper lawnmower for the hotel garden: the beautiful, serene Balinese style garden was built on extremely cheap labour.
Are you expectations when you visit Indonesia?

Different countries, different kinds of labour markets, different laws

So if a cleaner or gardener gets sacked because s/he is caught doing something wrong (such as stealing from a tourist), then s/he simply rocks up at another hotel or resort somewhere else and gets work. These hotels/resorts invest very little in their staff: they are treated as a cheap, disposable commodity. If you were to compare them to say staff working in a hotel in a rich country like Singapore or the UK, the system is totally different. In the UK for example, when you apply to work in a hotel, the employer will look into your work history and contact your previous employers for references. If necessary, employers can conduct a background check (called the Disclosure & Barring Service) conducted by the Criminal Records Bureau for any individual who applies for a job: this is fairly standard procedure and will review any kind of previous run-ins with the law. A similar system doesn't exist in poorer countries where anyone can wipe the slate clean simply by disappearing and that popping up in another town.

Different countries, different police systems, different amount of resources to deal with crime

There is a question of law-enforcement. When a tourist has something stolen in Indonesia, the police are simply not interested in investigating the crime as it happens so often. All they will do is give you a police report to enable you to make an insurance claim for the theft, but they will not do anything to apprehend the thief who stole your belongings. It is a question of resources: the Indonesian police force simply do not have the manpower or resources to investigate every single crime reported to them. It is a very big country with 255 million people and the police prioritize their time: so if it an influential local who has his car stolen, then they will definitely look into the case (as the influential local would have probably paid them a bribe to investigate the case), but if a tourist has her wallet and camera stolen whilst on a crowded beach, they're going to just shrug their shoulders and say it is virtually impossible to find the thief (which is probably true) and not bother. Whereas in the UK (or Singapore or any other richer country), the police actually are better funded and do have the time and resources to look into the crimes that tourists report. Hence a theft in the UK or Singapore is far more likely to be properly investigated than a theft in Indonesia - whether or not the criminal would be caught depends entirely on the individual circumstances of course, but at least the probability of being investigated (and possibly caught) is enough to make any potential thief in the UK or Singapore think twice before stealing.
It is a combination of being treated like disposable cheap labour in an almost consequence free environment that leads to a far higher incidence of crime amongst tourists in poorer countries like Indonesia. A lot of the Singaporean (and Indonesian) commentators on Facebook have just defaulted to being politically correct when they criticized me for discriminating against cleaners from poor countries because they are trying to be politically correct, but let me present you a simple risk-reward analysis. Let's compare two cleaners, one in a hotel in Indonesia and one in a hotel in Switzerland. Both cleaners find US$1000 in a room they are cleaning, which cleaner is more likely to take the money and which cleaner is going to say "no I am not going to touch the money, it is just not worth the risk"?

The risk-reward analysis: Switzerland vs Indonesia

Let's apply the risk-reward analysis. The Swiss cleaner is probably treated reasonably well by her employers and US$1000 is probably not an amount of money worth losing her job over, if the theft could be traced back to her. Furthermore, if caught, she could get convicted and end up in jail over a crime like that - that is simply not worth it. The Swiss cleaner may not be rich, but at least she has a decent home to go to, a roof over her head and she is able to support her family with her job. There is just too much at stake, too much to risk for a gain of US$1000, which is probably less than a month's salary for her; so even if she is somewhat tempted, she decides it is just not worth the risk. For the Indonesian cleaner, she is probably treated far less well by her employers and US$1000 would be several months' salary. She knows that if she gets caught, she could probably bribe her way out of any situation and the US$1000 may end up in the pockets of some corrupt police officer, but she would still not be any worse off than if she had not stolen the money. She is probably living in abject poverty and struggling to feed her family, thus she has very little to lose and a lot more to gain by stealing the US$1000. Thus the risk-reward situation for the Swiss vs the Indonesian cleaner is very different, so you can't say that oh I am discriminating against people from poorer countries. If the Indonesian cleaner was as well paid and as well treated as your average Swiss cleaner, then it would be fair to make a direct comparison - but the world is made of some very rich countries and some very poor ones, that's why you can't pretend that everyone is the exactly same as people face very different conditions in poorer countries.
The good old risk vs reward analysis

Ironically, the kind of people who are trying so hard to be painfully PC about not judging those from poorer countries have probably not seen much of these really poor countries where people live in abject poverty. It is perhaps easier for them to believe that these poor people are somehow poor but happy, starving but noble because it means that if these poor people are perfectly content living in poverty, then you have no obligation to help them. You only have to scratch beneath the surface and see the harsh conditions that people in these countries face: in Mexico, you could either go work as a waiter or a cleaner in a hotel and paid peanuts, or you could go work for the drug cartel and earn a lot more being involved in the drugs trade. Any consideration of which is more ethical, morally sound or legal is often pushed aside by the pressing needs that one has to feed one's family. Imagine if you have a young child or elderly parents to feed, maybe you have a sick sister who desperately needs money to pay for her cancer treatment - your first priority is to get the money your family needs so desperately, not to think about the relative morality or consequences of your actions. People in rich countries have the luxury to be honest because they already have comfortable lives, so they are not tempted by petty theft. It's a simple risk-reward analysis that so many people fail to apply in such situations and that is why they don't understand why crime rates are higher in poorer countries. Take a look at this list of the world's top ten most dangerous cities - do you ever wonder why these are all cities in poor countries and not rich ones?

But wait, some people have met honest folks in Indonesia...

Well good for them. I'm not saying that every single person in Indonesia is a thief and will rip you off or steal from you the moment they have a chance, but some will, some won't. I have met honest Indonesian folks on my travels over the years. It is too simplistic to imply that just because you have had one good experience of someone returning your wallet in Indonesia that somehow all Indonesians are honest or vice versa, that if you had encountered one rude person in Italy, that somehow all Italians are rude. Let me give you an idea about the range of honest folks one can encounter in Indonesia. Now I was in Tanjung Pinang (on Bintan) earlier this month and I speak conversational Malay reasonably well, so I have always been quite happy to converse with the local folks in a mish-mash of Malay and Indonesian. I was at the pasar malam (night market) in an East Tanjung Pinang suburb near my hotel and I decided I wanted to have some authentic Indonesian satay. Satay is an extremely popular street food in Indonesia and you usually would get one 'porsi' (portion) of ten sticks which could come with the ketupat compressed rice cakes (they called it the 'lontong' in Bintan). Unlike your very clean and well organized hawker centers in Singapore, the pasar malams in Indonesia are chaotic: hawkers set up their stalls on the roadside, on the kerb, by the drain - just about in any available space by the roadside as traffic whizzes by at breakneck speed. It can be quite dirty and noisy, you sit on little wooden or plastic stools as the food is prepared right in front of you - it couldn't be more different from the Singaporean hawker center experience and if you take it in the right spirit of adventure, it can prove to be quite fun!
My roadside Indonesian satay experience

I asked at least ten stalls for the price of one porsi of satay and I got ten different prices ranging from five sticks for 30,000 Rp (about S$2.92 or one stick for about 58.4 Singapore cents) to ten sticks for 10,000 Rp (about S$0.97 or one stick for about 9.7 Singapore cents). Oh and the satays in each stall were pretty much identical, it is not like some of them were jumbo kebabs whilst others had very little meat on them. Needless to say, I was glad I had shopped around and got me the best possible price for the satay from an old couple. Now you may say that I am bickering over an amount of money that is no more than a few Singapore dollars but it does go to show the predicament that tourists find themselves in when they visit a place like Indonesia: you will stand out as a foreigner even if you do speak the language, the local vendors will gladly rip you off as you're going to disappear the next day. They will however, treat locals with more honesty and respect as the satay seller doesn't want to offer the woman living on the same street as him, for she will tell everyone in the neighbourhood never to buy anything from him. Maybe that old couple were genuinely honest people who charged me exactly what they would charge the locals (I did observe other customers paying the same price I did) or maybe they were just smart enough to have observed me walking around that street and clocked onto the fact that I had been comparing prices. Either way, it does seem like pretty common practice for the locals to try to rip foreigners off even over very low-priced items, like street food - it couldn't be more different from Singapore but such is the nature of traveling: it exposes you to different things you won't normally observe at home.

But wait, you can get ripped off anywhere, even in rich countries. 

That's right, I did blog about a case in 2014 where a Chinese colleague was ripped off whilst buying a souvenir in London. The shopkeeper probably thought he was an easy target as he spoke very little English - he was charged £20 for it, but when I went shopping for an identical item, I was offered the same item for just £4.50 (and when I walked away, the shopkeeper offered to drop the price further). Many people get ripped off when traveling but they would rather not think about it as it is probably not a huge amount of money and the knowledge that they have been ripped off would sour the happy memories of an otherwise nice holiday. But we're talking about theft or extortion vs getting ripped off - when you go shopping on holiday, you can start bargaining over an item and then walk away if you failed to get the price you want. There's no obligation for you to buy, the same way I walked away from the satay hawker who wanted to charge me 30,000 Rp for 5 sticks of satay (that makes it more expensive that what I would pay for satay at a Singaporean hawker center). There are times when you get confronted by people who just want to extort money from you or just steal the money off you and that is far more likely to happen to you in a poor country than a rich one.
We all love shopping but we hate being ripped off.

You're just way too negative, you are biased and that brings out the worst in people you meet.

Well I have a logical explanation for this. My regular readers will know that I am a polyglot who speaks over ten languages and I have a brain that soaks up new languages like a sponge. What this means is that I am always able to converse with the locals in their language and this has proven to be incredibly useful in places like Russia, north Africa and Vietnam where the locals speak very little English. Many tourists still go along to these places in spite of the language barrier and when they get ripped off, they are none the wiser. Here's an example from my time in Russia:

I ate at this restaurant in central St Petersburg, just off Nevsky Prospect, the main shopping street downtown. It has a bilingual menu in English and Russian, so all you have to do is point to the item on the menu to the waitress and she would know what you want even if you don't speak a word of English. The Russian food there was actually surprisingly good. When I got my bill at the end of the meal, I realized that I had been overcharged - in fact I had been given someone else's bill, someone else who had far more expensive items than I had. Of course, the bill was written entirely in Russian and for those of you who are not familiar with the beautiful Russian language, well a sentence in Russian looks like this. Here's a sentence from the Russian Wikipedia page for Borscht: Борщ (укр. борщ) — разновидность супа на основе свёклы, которая придаёт борщу характерный красный цвет. The Cyrillic alphabet makes it very hard to read if you are not familiar with it, most foreigners who don't speak Russian do not even try.
That's me on Nevsky Prospect, in St Petersburg.

But aha, I speak Russian! Not fluently but I speak it well enough to communicate with the locals and can read Russian since I have spent hours memorizing the Cyrillic alphabet. So I asked the waitress in Russian to double check my bill as I had been given the wrong bill, she acted all innocent, apologized, said that she had accidentally given me the wrong bill and then promptly returned with the right bill. I was prepared to dismiss it as an honest mistake (the restaurant was rather busy at that time), then a group of American tourists approached me. "We don't speak Russian and, I think they made a mistake with our bill as well but I don't know how to explain it to the waitress who doesn't understand a word of English, could you help us explain to her please since you speak Russian?" Sure enough, I was able to sort out the American tourists' bill, which led me to believe that the restaurant were hoping that the foreigners would not be able to spot the "mistake" on a bill written in a language they couldn't understand and just pay up.

Ignorance is bliss when it comes to holidays

I do wonder how many foreigners have dined at that restaurant and got ripped off like that, but were totally unaware of what happened because of the language barrier? Sure you could go to a place like Russia, Indonesia or China, give everyone the benefit of the doubt and be totally oblivious each time someone rips you off. Sure that means you walk away from the holiday thinking, "ooh I've had such a lovely time, the locals were so friendly and everything was great." Of course, the locals haven't really been that friendly - you just didn't have the language skills to figure out what the hell was going on. Ignorance is bliss, especially when one is on holiday and isn't really counting just how much money one is spending. Oh the number of times I have had taxi drivers, shop keepers and waiters talk about me in front of me in their language, assuming that I don't understand - I actually think it is very fun when I respond in their language and to see the shock on their faces when they realize that I understood every word they said. So whilst I get to see (and hear) the uglier side of the locals because of my language skills, those who are not as linguistically gifted walk away with happier memories of their interactions with the locals, blissfully oblivious to what the locals are saying.
Do you bother learning the language when on holidays?

The hatred on Facebook from Indonesians is quite juvenile. 

Oh and Tricia has been receiving a lot of hate from Indonesians on Facebook because her story has put Indonesia in a negative light. Instead of addressing the specifics of the case, they just issue threats and warn her never to set foot in Indonesia again or she will be attacked - note that these are not just threats issued by people in Bali, but from Jakarta and all over Indonesia. Are these people actually going to attack her? No, because they have absolutely no idea if and when Tricia (and the other two Singaporean bloggers) will set foot in Indonesia again and it is a huge country. What if Tricia pops up in Medan, Lombok or Bandung, would there be a mob of haters trying to beat her up? No but it doesn't stop these haters on Facebook from issuing threats of violence (in either Bahasa Indonesia or bad English). It is not like, "with all due respect, you have misunderstood and misjudged our culture, kindly allow me to explain." Hell no, they're not articulate or reasonable. It is all like, "if you dare to come to Indonesia again bitch and we will kill you." Oh dear. What does this tell you about Indonesian culture and conflict resolution in Indonesia?

Does traveling make you mature and humble? Erm, no?

Finally I have been accused of being immature and arrogant - that somehow going to these poor countries should somehow make us more 'mature' and 'humble'. I laughed when I read that - I can just imagine some Singaporean father taking his children to somewhere like Indonesia and nagging at his kids, "see the Indonesians are so poor, see how lucky you are to live in a nice flat in Singapore? See how fortunate you are to have so many nice things in Singapore that you don't appreciate?" I don't think that witnessing poverty somehow makes you more mature or humble - we are part of a generation who are so desensitized by the media these days.: we see everything from graphic violence to hardcore sex to all kinds of human misery on the internet these days. Seeing some poor people live in wooden huts in a village isn't going to have a major impact on us I'm afraid as we've seen so much worse on TV or the internet - we'll probably just whip out our mobile phones and take a selfie to post on instagram, #kampungstyle.
I've traveled loads - but did it make me humble?! Why should it?

You want to become mature? I say it takes a lot more than just a holiday or three - emotional maturity is all about functioning like an responsible adult, breaking the shackles of childhood. Traveling will not do that - especially if you are on a guided tour when you are told exactly what time to get up, where you are going, what you will be eating and where you will be sleeping. Traveling independently may give you unique experiences that may help you achieve emotional maturity, but if you truly want to be an independent adult, I say - the first step is to move out of your parents' home and start living an independent life. As for being humble - I seriously fail to see the correlation between humility and traveling: your humility is dependent on your relationship with your own self-esteem, it is a very personal issue that affects you every waking hour, not just when you are traveling. Yes I am extremely well traveled but how is that supposed to make me more 'humble'? You strange Singaporeans do make a lot of very, very strange assumptions!

On that rather bizarre note, I shall end it here. Yes I am guilty of shamelessly muscling in on the bandwagon of a hot story I am not personally involved in, but hey, such is the nature of the blogging game and as a travel writer, I found this Jimbaran story too hard to resist. Keep traveling and may your travels be safe. Thank you very much for reading.
Safe travels everybody - that's me in Austria

4 comments:

  1. If I may link the above content to the recent Indonesia forest fire.

    Would you agree that part of the reason for the failure to curb the Indonesian forest fire is because their people are poor? It is more profitable to use methods that save cost but pollute the environment, and it is unlikely they are being prosecuted. As you mentioned above, it is about risk vs reward.

    Also, enforcement officers are poorly paid, they are easily bribed to look the other way.

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    1. Totally, there are far greener and cleaner way to clear forests for agriculture that do not involved burning - burning is the cheapest way to do so. Yes, enforcement officers are bribed to look the other way. Even firefighters are too. It is a sad situation and the grim reality is that Singapore has to content with the haze for another 20 or so years because there will be no more forests left to burn at the rate they are clearing it.

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  2. I don't know why you bother to engage the trolls on FB. I've had money stolen from me once while i was in a budget inn in Segamat Johore. Those don't come with room cleaning service and we got the only pair of keys to the lock so we suspected someone (possibly insider) had gotten duplicate to the keys in all the rooms. We ended up not making a fuss of it, since we knew nothing was going to be done (live and learn right?).

    On the other hand i left thousands of baht on the table and went out for a quick bite while in Bangkok. When i came back i notice the room had been cleaned and my money was still all present. So i would say YMMV.

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    1. I know, I know, you're right - ref: trolls on FB....

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