The Jimbaran Sea View Villa case and some bad Coconuts

As a travel writer, I would like to comment on a story that has been making its rounds on social media in Singapore. This is about the three Singaporean bloggers/influencers who have had money stolen from them whilst at Jimbaran Sea View Villa and there has been an unkind article about them on Coconuts Singapore. In short, these three Singaporean women (Jayne Tham, Tricia Ong and Lian Meiting) had about S$1,000 stolen from them whilst at the villa - conflicting versions of the stories have emerged about what happened next (depending on whether you want to listen to the Singaporeans or the villa owner) but the Coconuts article was needlessly unkind to the three Singaporeans because they had acted in an arrogant manner towards the villa manager, claiming to "no one will ever come back to your villa" - which is a pretty tall claim given that it takes more than just a few bad reviews to totally sink a business like that. Please allow me to analyse this story as a globetrotter and travel writer and find out what is really going on here. 

The scene of the crime: Jimbaran Sea View Villa

I had a quick look online for this Jimbaran Sea View Villa - I found two reviews for it on Tripadvisor, this listing on Booking.com, this one on AirBNB and this one on Agoda.. None of them have many reviews, so it seems like this place is rather new. Whilst the photos looks very nice and is indeed pitching itself at the higher end luxury market, so far, nobody has let a particularly nasty review yet and the owner (Ms Arie Wiartini) seems keen to respond to all reviews (good or bad alike). Am I surprised that a theft like that has taken place? No, not at all - the sad truth is that thefts like that happen all the time in hotels in poor countries around the world. This kind of theft can happen in any poor country: China, Tunisia, Thailand, Morocco, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Cambodia etc.The cleaning staff are probably very poor and are paid peanuts compared to the owners of these high end establishments, so if they can lay their hands on some hard cash whilst cleaning the room, they are just going to treat the opportunities to steal as one of the perks of the job. If you are caught say with a guest's camera or laptop, it is hard to claim that you accidentally took it by mistake whilst cleaning the room - but if it is cold hard cash, it is very hard for anyone to prove anything.

I've traveled to quite a few poor countries from Mexico to Morocco to Sri Lanka to and I'm afraid that one must be so extremely careful with one's belongings in these countries. The locals will know that you are probably carrying a lot of cash on you (along with other valuables like phones and cameras) and tourists make easy targets for conmen, pickpockets, robberies - shopkeepers will try to rip you off, waiters will "accidentally" overcharge you in the restaurants, taxi drivers will rig their meters to make you pay more, even the local police and customs officers often want bribes from you.  The sheer poverty makes these people think that it is their god-given right to rob, manipulate, harass and extract money one way or another from foreign tourists - it is a hazard that comes with the territory. If you are not prepared to deal with it, then try visiting a very rich country like Japan or Sweden, where the locals are a lot more honest with tourists, but be prepared to pay a lot more for your holiday and you are unlikely to find any bargains.

Indonesia - idyllic but very, very poor and corrupt

What I find disturbing about this story is the fact that on Jimbaran Sea View Villa's ad, they claim to provide safety deposit boxes for the guests - so the question is, did the Singaporean tourists use the safety deposit box (or did they just leave the money in the room)? You can read Tricia Ong's version of events in detail by following this link. So if the Singaporean tourists naively just left the money say in their luggage without actually securing the money in the safety deposit box, then I feel that they have to accept this as a painful lesson to learn. S$1000 is probably several months wages for these cleaners in Indonesia, they are not paid enough to be honest and probably don't care if the villa's reputation is totally ruined as a result of this incident (they'll just go work for another hotel or villa). Like I said, when traveling in a very poor country like Indonesia, you have to be extremely careful and not trust anyone, never let your guard down, not even when staying at a 5-star resort/hotel. It may sound politically incorrect to call Indonesians downright dishonest, but I've encountered enough crap in Indonesia to know just how bad the situation is there.

However, what I found downright distasteful is the way the writer on Coconuts Singapore thought it was appropriate to use sexist language against these three Singaporean women. Good grief, it was completely uncalled for. Urgh. This was the utterly tasteless statement written on Coconuts Singapore, "Little ladies, here's some knowledge — you don't have that kind of power. There really is not that much weight for so-called influencers' inane self-centred musings. Whatever case the trio built against the villa, it looks like they're not as faultless as they painted themselves to be."

How much influence do these three influencers have?

Allow me to respond in kind: dear writer at Coconut Singapore with an incredibly small dick, it doesn't make you any smarter or wittier by insulting the three women involved in this case by calling them "little ladies". The only thing that is little here is your dick you pathetic loser. How are the activities of these social influencers all that different from the articles on Coconut Singapore? In any case, these influencers may have made a name for themselves talking about handbags, cosmetics, shoes and earrings but so what? If they have managed to get a captive audience, who are you to call what they do "inane self-centred musings" Is it any more shallow than some of the crap that is featured on their website like "Bikini-clad singer causes outrage at concert for welfare officials". Yeah right, like that is serious news and not inane at all. The fact is Coconuts Media is hardly a serious news organization, they rely on light entertainment and inane stories to try to capture the attention of young people on social media - so for them to try to attack these Singaporean influencers for their "inane self-centred musings" is really pot calling the kettle black.

Here's the irony: Coconut Media has a presence in seven Asian countries including a very strong presence in Indonesia, they even have a Bahasa Indonesia version of their website. Yet in this article, the writer doesn't seem understand how things work in Indonesia at all. Even if the writer was a Singaporean based in Singapore, surely he (or at least his editor) could have double checked with an Indonesian colleague given that the incident happened on Indonesian soil, involving Indonesian people and police.  Here's a does of the bitter truth for you: you can't trust the corrupt Indonesian police for shit, especially in a place like Bali - they are extremely corrupt. They go around stopping tourists all the time for the most minor crimes like jaywalking or parking too far from the kerb, trying to extract on the spot fines which go directly into their pockets. The Indonesian police (and custom officers) are very poorly paid compared to some of those working in the tourism industry who have more access to some of hard cash that foreign tourists bring with them, so they feel entitled to 'top up' their incomes by extracting 'fines' out of rich foreign tourists. 

On a beach in north Bali in 2013

In this case, it is highly unlikely that the police will be able to do anything about the situation even if they did genuinely want to help (which they won't) - this is simply because there isn't any concrete evidence that the cleaner stole the money. Unless the thief was caught red handed stealing the money from the Singaporean tourists, how are you going to prove that the money was taken from the Singaporean tourists' room? You can't convict anyone without any evidence and in this case, it is just the word of the Singaporean tourists vs the word of the villa's staff. This is why the thief knows that s/he can get away with a theft like that, s/he would not keep the stolen money in the villa and sadly, the Singaporean women are not going to get their money back. I do wonder why they were carrying so much cash on them in the first plae and why they were not a lot more careful with it. Perhaps it was just a bit of naivety on their part, or they just plain made a mistake. We're all human, after all, but some mistakes are more expensive than others.

What the three Singaporean women tried to do was to get the owner Ms Wiartini to confront her staff in the hope that the thief may confess and cough up the money - it is a high risk strategy that is unlikely to work (hindsight is 2020), but one that is far more likely to yield better results than going to the corrupt Indonesian police. Perhaps Ms Wiartini has a perfectly good idea whom the thief is and maybe the thief has even struck before, the Singaporean women believed that threatening Ms Wiartini with a bad review may be enough to get her to interrogate her staff and retrieve the stolen money (or just pay them to avoid any trouble). But let's get real here: this is Indonesia, not some primary school in Singapore. Even if Ms Wiartini knows exactly whom the thief is, the conversation is probably going to go down like this:

Imagine Ms Wiartini confronting her cleaner

Ms Wiartini: I know it is you. I know you took the money, you were the only one around that day and you cleaned the Singaporeans' room. Please just return it now and nothing will happen.

Thief: Prove it. Can you prove that I took the money? You have photos, CCTV of me stealing? Any evidence?

Ms Wiartini: You were the only one with access to the room then, I know it was you, no one else could have done it.

Thief: So what? Maybe the Singaporeans dropped the money whilst shopping in town or going to the beach. Unless you can prove that I was the one who actually took the money, you don't have any proof at all. Go ahead and call the police. You haven't got proof. You've got nothing on me bitch. Whatcha gonna do eh, what can you do to me?

Ms Wiartini: Stop lying. I know you took it.

Thief: Yeah, yeah, whatever, without proof, you can accuse me all you want but you can't prove anything!

Ms Wiartini: I warn you, I will call the police.

Thief: Okay! Go ahead, you know how corrupt they are - they will probably just ask you for a bribe and do nothing.

Even if Ms Wiartini knew whom was guilty, what could she do?

So as you can imagine, this puts Ms Wiartini in a very difficult situation - so her only recourse is to turn to the police and ask them for help. But if the Singaporean women are clever enough (and I hope they've learnt their lesson by now), they can't trust the Indonesian police and so their best hope is to put pressure on Ms Wiartini to resolve the issue. But that's unrealistic of course, given that Ms Wiartini is really only guilty of having employed a dishonest thief - Ms Wiartini wasn't the one who stole the money, she is a rich business owner, not one of those cleaners who are living in abject poverty. So the three Singaporean women tried to use their 'influence' to threaten Ms Wiartini's business interests, they were all counting on the fact that Ms Wiartini would actually not just roll her eyes and say, "yeah right, go on, leave me a bad review on Tripadvisor, as if I am that bothered." It was a strategy that was unlikely to work - but in light of the fact that they had just lost S$1000 of their hard earned money, they are at least trying the least bad option in a desperate situation; and no, I don't blame them for trying. Sure they were rude to Ms Wiartini and made some tall claims about the power of their influence as 'media influencers' (and the chances of Ms Wiartini believing them were pretty slim anyway), but for crying out aloud, we're dealing with Indonesians after a theft of S$1000.

There's only so much a bad review or three can do to a business like the Jimbaran Sea View Villa - if they get too many bad reviews that affect their ratings on important websites like Tripadvisor and Booking.com, they simply change the name of the business. The villa itself may be completely the same, even the bed sheets may be the same, but the moment they change their name, say to "the Bali Tropical Paradise Beach villa", then ironically, they get to wipe the slate clean and start all over again as a 'new business'. Yes it does seem rather unfair but that is how many hotels in places like Bali reinvent themselves when they get too many bad reviews. I remember having a hard time in Bali trying to locate my beach villa - only to find out that it had recently changed its name and most of the locals knew it by its old name! Fortunately, my stay that particular villa was pretty okay. The woman who ran the place claimed that the management had changed recently, hence they wanted a name change to just make a clean break with the past.

Limpeh in Ubud in 2013

Wake up and smell the coffee people: when you go traveling in a very poor country like Indonesia, you can't go there and be all polite and nice and expect the locals to behave just as honourably and honesty. Hell no. When things go wrong, you have to stand your ground: you have to argue, you have to threaten, you have to show the locals that you're not easily bullied and sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. These three Singaporeans women stood up for themselves when things went badly wrong and it is ridiculous that they are being ridiculed and attacked for having done so? That's fucked up man, that's seriously fucked up. I have more respect for these women for having tried to do something rather than just walk away after having been a victim of crime. It didn't work and maybe in hindsight, it wasn't the best strategy but at least they tried to do something to get their money back. Their version of the story contradicts the version offered by Ms Wiartini - but then again, she has a business to run and given how many villas there are in Bali, a nasty story like that could seriously hurt her business reputation and so if I were her, I would go out of my way to lie and make the Singaporean women sound like totally unreasonable, nasty bitches and bullies. What has she got to do by resorting to slander at this stage, if it means salvaging her business reputation?

Regardless of what actually happened at Jimbaran Sea View Villa, I ask you: if you know that a theft has taken place there, regardless of whose fault it may have been, would you feel totally safe there? The answer is simple: hell no. There are so many villas in Bali, they're probably just as bad as each other when it comes to dishonest staff - but as I do have a choice, I would definitely not want to stay at Jimbaran Sea View Villa. Use Tripadvisor to see which villas have had the best reviews - you can't go wrong that way. And need I state the obvious? If you are visiting a very poor country, for crying out aloud, please be extremely careful with your valuables and don't leave large sums of money lying around for the cleaners to steal. And finally, I know that writers can write inappropriate crap from time to time, but editors are there to edit this crap before the public gets to read it - so one wonders what the hell the editors at Coconut Media are doing? They couldn't even spell the name of the owner at Jimbaran Sea View Villa correctly: it is Arie Wiartini according to her AirBNB profile; stupid, careless mistakes like that just shows you how little credibility websites like Coconuts Media have. I look forward to seeing what kind of response the three Singaporeans will come up with.

Limpeh in Prambanan, Indonesia

So that's it from me on this issue. What have your experiences been with the Indonesians when on holiday there? Have you had things stolen from you before whilst on holiday? How can we protect our valuables whilst abroad? What do you make of the strategy used by these three Singaporean women to put pressure on Ms Wiartini to cough up the money? Do you think the article on Coconuts Media was unfair? Let me know your thoughts, many thanks for reading.

Here's part 2: http://limpehft.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/a-follow-up-to-jimbaran-bali-controversy.html