Danish travel agents cancel trips to Bali

Bali just can’t get a break these days. Someone breaks wind in another part of the world and somehow it comes back to Bali. The latest piece of weird-logic was made by Danish travel agents who have canceled trips to Bali, over the ‘cartoon crisis’. Let me tell any Danish person who is reading this, you will be fine in Bali.

This afternoon my Muslim brother-in-law, Awang, came over for some nasi bungkus (take away rice). I had Ika ask him if he had heard about the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. He said he had not and that is likely to be the case with many other people. Unless you walk down the street waving a banner saying ‘I’m Danish’, no one will know. The Balinese are all Hindu anyway.

My thoughts go back to the first piece of weird-logic, the Sari Club bombing in 2002. According to the bombers, they were angry at the US for supporting Isreal’s mistreatment of Muslims. Thinking they could kill Americans, they blew up the Sari Club. Imagine you were a working class Aussie on holiday and happened to be caught in the bombing. Globalisation also now means global-nutcases, able to link a whole string of unrelated things together and come up with a plan.

So anyway, Bali feels safe and this afternoon at Blue Ocean beach I stopped to snap a surf class that was in progress. The atmosphere down there was like the French Riviera, plenty of people from all over the world enjoying the sun, sea and surf.