The Frugal Balinist

style of their own and in need of being told “where to get it”, the rest of the newspaper provides some first rate long form and investigative journalism covering life in general , beyond the financial. Since the FT content is behind a pay wall and I have no interest in the weekday newspaper itself, it’s not worth my stumping up for a subscription. Fortunately for me the weekend print edition is usually on sale at Periplus bookshops around Bali. On one occasion, seated at a table on the deck of the Starbucks in Renon Plaza, engrossed in a good read trying to control the flyaway pages of my newspaper I was enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I was partly aware that a dapper Indonesian man in his early thirties had arrived and sat down at an adjoining table, put down his coffee, opened his lap top, and positioned his handphone together with some other device alongside. Preparing to be irked and ready to rustle the pages of my broadsheet ostentatiously enough to attract attention for a warm-up death glare, I realised that the smoke didn’t actually reek of tobacco, as I had automatically assumed it would. As I was registering this, the man raised a small expensive-looking rectangular black and silver object to his mouth and took a toke. Upon exhale an astonishingly copious cloud of vapour billowed forth, was taken by the wind toward and past myself, on to envelop other tables nearby, only dissipating on the far side of the deck. Impressive in its way. What kind of a storm cloud, I wondered, would a party of half-a-dozen such tokers emit? What about the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms be like? Would they be able to see other? It wasn’t that I was completely unaware. I knew smoking had evolved and that the tobacco barons had developed new ways to attract and addict a younger clientele in the delivery of nicotine, while extending their questionable business ethics into other less lethal areas of business. In fact, I had even read about just that very thing in a previous issue of the FT, to the effect that the big tobacco majors were now concentrating on e-cigarettes and vaping, sales of which now stood at some US$16 billion and expected to treble to over $40 billion in four years. The only clouds on that horizon being a growing international movement to regulate the sale of these products. our lives. The habit has been around a long time. King James 1st of England (1603-25) not only fulminated against the noxious weed but cut off the head of the man who brought it back from the Americas. It was the introduction of cigarettes, which really kicked tobacco industry into the big league, on a par with oil, coal and transportation. By the 1930s smoking cigarettes was the social norm. It was permitted and catered to almost everywhere. The whole world stank of it. We did, so did our clothes and our homes. We just didn’t realise it. In hindsight one has has to wonder how a non-smoker managed to get through life in such a tobacco-ridden environment. Think of the allure of a beautiful and elegant woman smoking a cigarette, a not uncommon and powerful image back then. As a redblooded non-smoking man how in reality, if your dreams came true, would you be able to make love to that woman? And don’t let’s be gender specific here – it works everywhich way. By 1950 the British Medical Association( BMA)sounded the death knell for tobacco’s glory days, announcing conclusive evidence to show that cigarettes caused lung cancer. To prove the point King George VI of England died of lung cancer in 1952 at the age of 56. Not long after his daughter made a point of revoking the Royal Seal of Approval carried by Benson & Hedges and other British brands. She had good cause to believe the BMA. Nonetheless there followed a vicious 50-year campaign of huge mendacity waged by Big Tobacco to deny the reality, that cigrette smoking was the second greatest killer in the world after road accidents. in hell for the affected swine who light a cigar when other people are eating. The more expensive the cigar, the more it stank. Since my late 40s I’ve smoked very little and not at all in the past decade. Whatever the case, the whole paraphenalia in and around smoking affected us. When I first started smoking I went up-market, Benson & Hedges in their red and gold tin, Balkan Sobranie Black Russian or enticingly foreign like Gauloises and Gitanes. Then settling down to Senior Service or Players and a spell rolling my own in 60s. By the mid 70’s I had pretty much settled down to Benson & Hedges gold or Marlboro Light, which was when I finally graduated to tipped cigarettes. Like publishing, the British and American tobacco barons exercised dual dominion over the world when it came to international brands, so I never really got into American cigarettes, but somewhat familiar with the ‘jetplane’ brands of the 50s and 60s (Rothmans, Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, etc.), until the advent of Marlboro Man that is. One phase I observed with interest and faint contempt was the early 70s fashion branding of cigarettes in huge packs by Cartier, Dunhill, Davidoff and the like, inevitably accompanied by a gold or silver bric lighter from Dupont or other purveyor of cadet luxe. For most of us I suspect, looking back at the golden age of tobacco, now that the stench is gone, is a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. We grew up and matured alongside it all - the packaging, the accoutrements, the advertisements, the sponsorships – all designed to entice. By the time I looked up the man with the laptop and his vape had gone. You know what? E-cigarettes etc. kill only a handfull of people a year, so on the scale of lethality I reckon folks can be left in peace to take a small toke of nicotine in the great outdoors, without the heavy hand of the law being invoked. That said, I do wonder a bit about the involuntary sharing airborne particles lung to lung. Copyright © 2019 ParacelsusAsia You can read all past articles of Alternative Voice at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz ParacelsusAsia Comments or queries ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com One of the more solitary small pleasures I enjoy throughout the week is settling down to a good read with the Weekend FT in a café serving half decent coffee. Apart from the cringingly ghastly “How to Spend it”, the magazine supplement written by FT hacks with leaden wit and obvious contempt for their readers - by definition themselves possessing no style of their own and in need of being told “where to get it”, the rest of the newspaper provides some first rate long form and investigative journalism covering life in general , beyond the financial. Since the FT content is behind a pay wall and I have no interest in the weekday newspaper itself, it’s not worth my stumping up for a subscription. Fortunately for me the weekend print edition is usually on sale at Periplus bookshops around Bali. On one occasion, seated at a table on the deck of the Starbucks in Renon Plaza, engrossed in a good read trying to control the flyaway pages of my newspaper I was enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I was partly aware that a dapper Indonesian man in his early thirties had arrived and sat down at an adjoining table, put down his coffee, opened his lap top, and positioned his handphone together with some other device alongside. Preparing to be irked and ready to rustle the pages of my broadsheet ostentatiously enough to attract attention for a warm-up death glare, I realised that the smoke didn’t actually reek of tobacco, as I had automatically assumed it would. As I was registering this, the man raised a small expensive-looking rectangular black and silver object to his mouth and took a toke. Upon exhale an astonishingly copious cloud of vapour billowed forth, was taken by the wind toward and past myself, on to envelop other tables nearby, only dissipating on the far side of the deck. Impressive in its way. What kind of a storm cloud, I wondered, would a party of half-a-dozen such tokers emit? What about the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms be like? Would they be able to see other? It wasn’t that I was completely unaware. I knew smoking had evolved and that the tobacco barons had developed new ways to attract and addict a younger clientele in the delivery of nicotine, while extending their questionable business ethics into other less lethal areas of business. In fact, I had even read about just that very thing in a previous issue of the FT, to the effect that the big tobacco majors were now concentrating on e-cigarettes and vaping, sales of which now stood at some US$16 billion and expected to treble to over $40 billion in four years. The only clouds on that horizon being a growing international movement to regulate the sale of these products. In this instance, I just adjusted my chair so I had my back to the man and instead of resuming my reading, forgot about the vapours and fell into a reverie upon life and tobacco over past decades. One way or another, smoker or not, tobacco affected us all. Its aroma and its advertisement, an ever-present factor in our lives. The habit has been around a long time. King James 1st of England (1603-25) not only fulminated against the noxious weed but cut off the head of the man who brought it back from the Americas. It was the introduction of cigarettes, which really kicked tobacco industry into the big league, on a par with oil, coal and transportation. By the 1930s smoking cigarettes was the social norm. It was permitted and catered to almost everywhere. The whole world stank of it. We did, so did our clothes and our homes. We just didn’t realise it. In hindsight one has has to wonder how a non-smoker managed to get through life in such a tobacco-ridden environment. Think of the allure of a beautiful and elegant woman smoking a cigarette, a not uncommon and powerful image back then. As a redblooded non-smoking man how in reality, if your dreams came true, would you be able to make love to that woman? And don’t let’s be gender specific here – it works everywhich way. By 1950 the British Medical Association( BMA)sounded the death knell for tobacco’s glory days, announcing conclusive evidence to show that cigarettes caused lung cancer. To prove the point King George VI of England died of lung cancer in 1952 at the age of 56. Not long after his daughter made a point of revoking the Royal Seal of Approval carried by Benson & Hedges and other British brands. She had good cause to believe the BMA. Nonetheless there followed a vicious 50-year campaign of huge mendacity waged by Big Tobacco to deny the reality, that cigrette smoking was the second greatest killer in the world after road accidents. In the days when I smoked it was only two or three cigarettes day, unless I was drinking. Then I chain-smoked. When they banned smoking inflight by the early 1980s I was happy. I could stop smoking for years at a time. Trouble was - easy to quit, easy to start. I never liked smoking in and around food so lighting-up after a meal was no big loss in restaurants. In fact I reserve a special place in hell for the affected swine who light a cigar when other people are eating. The more expensive the cigar, the more it stank. Since my late 40s I’ve smoked very little and not at all in the past decade. Whatever the case, the whole paraphenalia in and around smoking affected us. When I first started smoking I went up-market, Benson & Hedges in their red and gold tin, Balkan Sobranie Black Russian or enticingly foreign like Gauloises and Gitanes. Then settling down to Senior Service or Players and a spell rolling my own in 60s. By the mid 70’s I had pretty much settled down to Benson & Hedges gold or Marlboro Light, which was when I finally graduated to tipped cigarettes. Like publishing, the British and American tobacco barons exercised dual dominion over the world when it came to international brands, so I never really got into American cigarettes, but somewhat familiar with the ‘jetplane’ brands of the 50s and 60s (Rothmans, Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, etc.), until the advent of Marlboro Man that is. One phase I observed with interest and faint contempt was the early 70s fashion branding of cigarettes in huge packs by Cartier, Dunhill, Davidoff and the like, inevitably accompanied by a gold or silver bric lighter from Dupont or other purveyor of cadet luxe. For most of us I suspect, looking back at the golden age of tobacco, now that the stench is gone, is a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. We grew up and matured alongside it all - the packaging, the accoutrements, the advertisements, the sponsorships – all designed to entice. By the time I looked up the man with the laptop and his vape had gone. You know what? E-cigarettes etc. kill only a handfull of people a year, so on the scale of lethality I reckon folks can be left in peace to take a small toke of nicotine in the great outdoors, without the heavy hand of the law being invoked. That said, I do wonder a bit about the involuntary sharing airborne particles lung to lung. Copyright © 2019 ParacelsusAsia You can read all past articles of Alternative Voice at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz ParacelsusAsia Comments or queries ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com Goodbye Holly Golightly, Goodbye Marlboro Man... When Islam first arrived in Indonesia in the 15th C., it came ready-packaged in a mystical doctrine that was widely welcomed across Java. Though widespread conversion from the Hindu-Buddhist faith to Islam was complete by the 1600s, the old belief systems did not disappear. Buddhism and Hinduism had a presence on Java for 1000 years and their influence still survived in many rites, symbols, customs and traditions such as the wayang theater forms and architectural features like the split gate that reflect Java’s ancient past. Researchers who today struggle to trace the dynamics of religious change in modern Java are unanimous in one thing: syncretic Javanized Islam has been on the run, pushed hard by conservative, orthodox forces since the 1980s. Javanese have now largely abandoned their pre Muslim beliefs that were intermixed with animist, Hindu and Buddhist leanings and avalanched over to observant conservatism. This imported hard-edged guise of pious Islam is hostile to the veneration of any image or object that might tempt believers away from the single-minded worship of the one God, Allah. Bandit Saints of Java is a challenge to that perception which can only hold water if one assumes that Java’s unique religious heritage and Indonesia‘s pre-national history have died out or are irrelevant in the present. This unusual work of nonfiction dives deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities, legends and lore in the wacky, teeming world of local pilgrimages that is largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists. The book convincingly illuminates how a brash, new, energetic religion changed but not wholly supplanted the old Buddhist/Hindu belief systems. The religion of Java lives on in the venerable mausoleums of legendary saints and spirit guardians who represent local, traditionalist native faith with all its mysticism and magic and obsession with holy places and the dead. For modern Indonesians, saint veneration and local pilgrimages are central to their Islamic identity and the practice of their religion that adopts a tolerant, understanding and humanistic approach. The author argues that many Javanese are able to stay strong in Islam while honoring their semi-divine ancestors who are known as the Nine Saints (Wali Songo). The pilgrimage sites, which Quinn calls the new heathen landscape of Indonesia, are not your usual shrines but fusions of holy ground, the focus of memorable stories and objects of religious devotion. Hundreds of these places of worship, big and small, sprawl across Java as well as Indonesia’s outer Islands. Visiting them has become normal in modern Java and serve to assuage those who face an interminable wait - now averaging 17 years - to go on the haj to Mecca. The saint’s graves are havens of refuge and respite embedded solidly in the practices of everyday life for scores of millions of people. The Indonesian Ministry of Tourism reported that 12.2 million people visited the tombs of the Nine Saints in 2014. A few of the sites, like that of Sunan Bonang in Tuban, host up to a million visitors a year. In the final months of the Ramadan fasting month, 20,000 pilgrims a day visit the tomb of Sunan Ampel in Surabaya. The popularity of local pilgrimages has given rise to a highly profitable services sector called wisata ziarah (pilgrimage tourism) in which pilgrims are whisked around by chartered bus to as many as 9 tombs in 6 days. Run on a shoestring, the tours are composed mostly of women who wear like-colored t-shirts, sleep in the bus, mosque or rest pavilions, eat takeaway food and shop for religious souvenirs. So relentlessly popular are the tours that most participants don’t even get close to the small, inner burial chamber but have to sit in dense ranks on tiled patio floors all around the vicinity. Most are off the beaten track and don’t appear on modern maps or make it into the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook. These landmarks inherited from the distance past are buried under the new geography of cities, highways, ports, railroads, factories, plantations, administrative boundaries and tourist attractions. They roost at the top of staircases on steep hillsides, lie in the darkness of caves, shelter in the tiny scraps of forests still left on Java, crouch under the arbors of trees in quiet villages, hidden in the cluttered old quarters of the island’s major cities or in district level towns like Blora, Tuban, Kediri, Demak, Tegal, Karawang, Sumedang, Banten, Kudus, Magelang, Jombang, Mojoagung and Gresik. Often the temples lie besides or opposite the high-rise domes, shiny halls and Middle Eastern-style minarets of flamboyant modern mosques whose straight-laced parishioners view the local pilgrimage sites as nests of idolatry and backwardness. George Quinn is a one-of-a-kind scholar of Indonesian studies. Possessing a native speaker level command of Indonesian and Javanese, this Australian specialist holds a BA from Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University and for many years headed the Southeast Center at the Australian National University. As an Indonesianist - or more precisely, a Javanist - of the first rank, he is adept at writing in a number of genres - fiction, literary criticism, lexiography, history. He Review by Bill Dalton For any publishers interested in having one of their books considered for review in Toko Buku, please contact: pakbill2003@yahoo.com. Copyright © 2019 You can read all past articles of Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn has published countless papers and articles reflecting his decades-long travel and research in Java. Quinn didn’t write this brilliant discussion of Java’s pilgrimage culture from the sterile confines of a university office under towering bookcases but actually lived the experiences reported in his book. Only a man on the spot would be able to describe in such rich detail the packed, fetid atmosphere of tombs and the details of architecture. Though not a Muslim himself, he is as informed about the nuances of Javanese Islam as any practicing Indonesian ulama. Often Quinn was the only tall, fair-skinned outsider granted as a matter of courtesy a priority place in the inner sanctum. Key-keepers without exception made him feel welcome and were lavish in their responses to his innumerable and sometimes provocative questions. His respect (dare I say reverence?) for the old Sufi saints are equal in ardor to any devout Javanese worshipper. The writer’s marvelous, tactile description of the venerable 15th C. Demak mosque 25 km east of Semarang, is a case in point. There are myriad, priceless scenes of devoted pilgrims - a milling hubbub of murmuring prayer and singing in crowded incense-filled chambers. The text is populated by strange supernatural characters like Gatholoco, the “walking human penis;” a guardian of a holy mountain who became an icon of male vigor at 79; a Muslim saint who was gay and an atheist Sufi saint who took his dogs into the mosque. Others were outright tricksters like the wise pre-Islamic jester Semar. All the esteemed personages are echoes of Java’s ancient tantric heritage that fused Hindu-Buddhist tantra and yoga with Sufism. The majority of the saints were opponents of followers of austere Arab-style Islamic orthodoxy with their pretentions of Middle Eastern dress, their faux-pious mannerisms and claim to religious piety and learning. Bandit Saints of Java paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it’s actually practiced today by many of Java’s 130 million people. The author is a superb, witty and entertaining writer who vividly records what he saw and felt close-up on the ground. Though some of the material is almost impossibly esoteric, the book’s most vital contribution in my mind is that it gives one faith that Indonesia’s lovely, animist native kajawen beliefs will endure in the end under the onslaught of the harsh tenets of hardline Islamist Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia. This erudite and well-researched study gives us the hope that Java will continue to hold dear its own soft, Sufi-inspired interpretation of Islam. Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn, Monsoon Books 2018, ISBN 978-191-204-9448, paperback, 448 pages, dimensions 20 cm x 13 cm. Have you noticed? The Balinese don’t like rain, they don’t drink rainwater and they certainly don’t like it on their heads. It is something to do with picking up evil spirits on it’s way from the sky. Which reminds me, I picked up an evil spirit the other day, it was supposed to be gin and tonic but I suspect it was a particularly evil batch of Arak. “Arak attack” is of course the name of a condition not a drink. Arak does have it’s uses though - it is very good for cleaning carburettors. Have you also noticed, the Balinese don’t have gutters. The logic is, in fact, sound. Get the water off the roof straight onto the ground and organise for it to run away somewhere out of the way. This is also good because much of it ends up back in the water table. It is a bit of a pain though isn’t it. It starts peeing down, cats and dogs turn into elephants and whales and as Mr Murphy would predict you are just about to leave for work with papers clutched under your arm. You wait with a sheet of water running off the roof in front of you, it doesn’t slow so you make a dash for the car. Damn, where is the key on the key ring? Then the key just won’t go into the lock. You flop, wet through, on the car seat and you stare out through the windscreen as the rain eases off. The soggy papers clutched under you arm are starting to run ink onto your shirt. The worst bit was that initial drenching as you plunged through the sheet of water coming off the roof. A gutter can be a good idea. You can get plastic gutters and downpipes here in Bali with all the fittings (apart from good brackets but we’ll come to that). Prices are very reasonable and installation is not difficult but does need to be planned. Be careful because most Indonesian people know very little about gutters. Unfortunately the fact that water does not flow uphill has never been pointed out to Indonesians. Have you noticed how much time and effort goes into building those drainage channels along the sides of the roads, and have you also noticed how the bottoms of the channels don’t always flow downhill, they go up and down with the surface of the road? I can’t count the number of times I have climbed on a roof to find out why water is coming in to find a valley gutter between two roofs which is lower in the middle than at the end where the water is supposed to run out. Gutters come in a round semi circular section and square box gutters. Two sizes are available in both the round and square section and the size you chose is dependent on the roof area that will flow into it. Don’t underestimate how many cats and dogs will fall out of the sky in a particularly fertile wet season. You should also make sure the downpipe can take a full sized cat. A technical point. Round gutters and round pipes such as sewers are known as “self cleaning”. It works like this - as the amount of water flowing decreases it falls to a lower level and is concentrated in a smaller width in the pipe, the cross section of flow reduces so the speed of flow down the pipe or gutter is maintained thereby helping to wash things away. In a flat bottomed gutter this is not the case. As the amount of water flowing falls it still has to fill the same width of gutter so the speed of flow drops and anything being washed down falls to the bottom and is left. The Victorians understood this principle well when building sewerage systems in Britain. Having said this I would always recommend the square box section gutter for use in Bali. Why? Because you can get good brackets for them. The brackets for box section gutters are good solid plastic that hold the gutter firmly in place and can take a reasonable load. The brackets for round gutters, on the other hand, are flimsy sheet steel. They rust immediately so they quickly look a mess. Worse they bend very easily so one dose of cats and dogs and your gutters sag in the middle and the water doesn’t drain away properly. You may be interested to know that round gutters are being heavily promoted by the “Denpasar Save The Mosquito Society”. You also need enough brackets. The Indonesian habit of “saving a bit of money for my poor old mum” means that local contractors will agree to put up a gutter but leave out most of the brackets only putting enough brackets up to hold the thing in dry weather. Cats and dogs, and water for that matter, are very heavy. You must insist that brackets are placed as close as 60 cms apart (ok, ok, two feet to you imperialists, why don’t you get a life, a metric one that is, join the real world....... I do like the inch though. It is such well proportioned thing isn’t it. Even it’s name has a rather nice ring to it. I don’t really like centimetres very much, in fact I hate the horrible little things but we must move on. I stopped using a bone to bang in a nail a long time ago.) You must plan the slope of a gutter along with the placement of downpipes. A slope of 1% to 2% is fine (as long as you have enough brackets to keep it firmly in place) and again enough downpipes to suit the area of roof being drained. You might consider doing the island a favour by not putting your rainwater into the drains but instead returning it to the water table either through a soak pit or an old well. It is clean, fresh, sterile water after all. Believe it or not if development continues at it’s present pace Bali will have a water shortage in the not too distant future. A final word of advice, paint your plastic gutters, brackets and downpipes. Ultra violet light from the sun damages the plastic. You may see that old pipes can become faded and the plastic brittle when exposed continually to sunlight. The grey plastic has a pigment in it to protect it from UV but the sun is intense here and you will extend the life of the plastic if you paint it. Now where did I put that evil spirit? Phil Wilson The Acne Guide To Removing Cats and Dogs From Your Roof Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. It’s been a bit wet. In fact it has been so wet that the ducks have all had new seals fitted to their nether regions. A leaky duck is a very unhappy duck you know. My next door neighbour has started behaving quite odd. He has suddenly started collecting animals. Two horses, two cows, two dogs, two cats - strange really they are all in pairs. It has been a bit of a bother though, their amorous behaviour is keeping me awake all night. He got two rabbits a couple of weeks ago and now he has 3,726 of them hopping around all over the place. An enterprising bloke down our street has a new sign up outside his shop: “Arks made to order, new models always in stock” It is, of course, LRT (leaky roof time) again in South East Asia and the time when you remember that last year you promised you would repair that leak in the roof “when the dry weather comes”. The dry weather has come…and gone and the roof is still leaking. There are a lot of leaky roofs at the moment. I was talking to an insurance salesman last wet season. He had his head in his hands. “Merry Christmas” I said. “Get stuffed” he said. A week later I saw him again. “Happy New Year” I said. “Where can I buy razor blades?” he said “my gas oven has run out of gas.” “You can’t bake a cake with a razor blade” I responded. “Get stuffed” he said. For some who have lived in Bali for a while a leaky roof is just part of the wonderful texture that makes life in Bali what it is. For others, however, leaking roofs drive them mad and drips anonymous is picking up new members again. You may hear them from time to time mumbling the drips anonymous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the drips I cannot fix, the strength to fix the drips I can and the wisdom to know where to put the bucket.” Why do so many roofs leak? Well there are a number of reasons: 1. Most houses have roof tiles that are handmade and so vary slightly and don’t lock together quite as well as they should. 2. When installing roof tiles the spacing of the lathes that support the tiles is often not as accurate is it should be and as a result some designs of roof tiles won’t seat properly. 3. Standard practice on houses in Bali does not include the use of sarking or underfelt as a waterproof membrane under the tiles. 4. Standard practice is for ridges to be heavily concreted into place, only small amounts of movement in the house will crack the concrete. 5. Poor waterproofing of end walls where the roof meets the wall. 6. Insufficient slope on roofs which results in wind driving rain up the tiles and into the roof. 7. A bizarre lack of understanding of the mysterious ways of water. 8. Unfortunately many tukangs don’t understand about roofs. Last week I went to see a man with water pouring into a bedroom. When we came to inspect the roof it was surprisingly well made and one of the few roofs in a “standard” house I have seen with a full membrane installed under the roof tiles. Unfortunately small leaks where the end walls meet the roof had been “repaired” by people who, instead of repairing the roof properly from the outside, tore out parts of the membrane from inside and in fact made the problem much, much worse. For information about flat concrete roofs go to https://www. mrfixitbali.com/roofs-and-gutters/flat-concrete-roofs-235. html Be careful who you let onto your roof. Waterproofing is a bit of an artform really. It is surprising how only a very small crack in concrete combined with that insidious capillary action can produce a significant drip underneath and a substantial loss of demeanour for a house dweller. The results of a leaking roof can be devastating and Bangli has a special wing to care for leaking roof victims. Leaking roofs can also damage your house and contents. How to avoid your roof leaking The most important factor is to find contractors who know what they are doing to install or repair your roof. If you are building a new house put a waterproof membrane under the roof tiles and make sure the roof is properly installed. If you have a leaking roof make a note of where the drips are. If they are next to a wall or in the ridge then you may have to wait for dry weather before they can be properly sealed. If leaks are in the centre of the roof moving tiles around may be sufficient BUT be very careful who gets onto your roof. Many roof tiles in Bali are very fragile because the has clay been fired at low temperatures using wood (often less than 800 degrees). To get effective fusion of silica ideally you need to get up over 1,000 degrees. As a result tiles break easily and someone climbing around on your roof can do a lot more damage than you can imagine. I recently met a very poor Indonesian family who had saved hard and recently had their roof upgraded replacing bamboo beams with timber. The upgrade was a nightmare with badly placed and broken tiles everywhere. As a result the house was flooded and one room remains unusable. They cannot afford to have the roof repaired. A tragic story but unfortunately all too common in a country lacking in standards, training and understanding. If your roof is badly leaking it might be a good idea to simply start again. The tiles can be removed, a waterproof membrane installed and the existing tiles replaced. This is a comprehensive waterproofing job, the tiles will not be damaged because they have not been walked on and the cost is not too high because the existing tiles can reused. Any broken tiles can be replaced and the tiles can be painted to seal them. There are other options such as replacing your tiles with “Colourbond” but we’ll talk about that another day. Of course if it carries on raining at this rate the roof leaks will become somewhat irrelevant and an ark might become a sound investment. Leaking Roofs “Ark The ‘Erald Angels Sing” Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. I have come across many sad cases over the years of honest people who are building their dream home only to find that the builder has scarpered, the money has run out and there is a distinct dearth of windows and doors, electrical wiring is nowhere to be seen and there is some really effective ventilation where the roof should be. Enquiries follow only to reveal that the 8 teams of workers that came and went over the 14 months the project dragged on for left because they hadn’t been paid. Sadly pleonexia is alive and well in the construction industry and contractors know that the average owner builder, Mr and Mrs Nicefriendlypeople, are easy prey for their games. Lambs to the slaughter comes to mind. Such cases are common in Bali and inevitably the “builder” has been paid more than the work he has completed. He will have worked out that by running off now he will end up with more profit than if he finishes the project and he will avoid the most difficult period when he is doing the finishing work and trying to get final payment. Sometimes he may add insult to injury by demanding even more money, his argument being that the money paid is less than the amount of work completed. When a contractor walks away from a half finished job it leaves all sorts of problems. The project is likely to be considerably delayed and it may be difficult to find a new contractor willing to take on the mess that someone else has left. Unfortunately the sort of contractor who perhaps had planned all along to walk away from a half finished job may well be the sort of person that will have also cut corners in the work. So how do we protect ourselves? We use standardised systems that; if well set up, properly thought out and a rigidly applied; minimise the risks involved and keeps contractors in check. These systems use a Bill Of Quantities and a Schedule of Payments. A good Project Manager can set up and manage these systems for you. Bill Of Quantities A Bill of Quantities (or BoQ) is a detailed list of all the tasks that have to be completed to construct the project. Each part of the work is fully described and costed so everyone knows exactly what is to be done and how much it will cost. Let us look at a typical Bill Of Quantities and see what information and the level of detail you should expect. On the website at www.mrfixitbali.com/images/ sampleprogressreport.pdf you will see a sample report from a database designed for managing project progress and payments. The Bill Of Quantities is broken down into headings for each section of the work such as: • Site clearing and project setup • Foundations • Structure • Floor slabs • Walls • Roof and ceilings • Windows and doors • Electrical Installation • Plumbing Installation • Ceramic wall and floor tiling • Painting • Drainage • Water Supply We also need to add on: • Architect’s Fees (10%?) • Structural Engineers Fees • Construction Tax (10%) • Legal costs (IMB, contract fee, etc) Under each of these headings will be a breakdown of the tasks within that heading with the estimated costs. The tasks should describe the work to be done, the type or level of quality of the materials to be used and a quantity such as cubic meters (excavation, fill or concrete), square meters (tiling, roofing and painting) or per item (washbasins, toilets, doorhandles, stress pills, etc.). The price for a single unit and the total price for the totals needed for the project is also given. The description also should, where relevant cross refer back to the drawings in order to tie the specifications stated on the drawings as part of this document. This provides legal protection. The costs are totalled up to give us the TOTAL cost of the project. Alright so we now have our Bill of Quantities and this should become a part of the legal documentation that becomes part of the building contract. The builder must sign up to agree to construct according to this document. You might want to add a penalty clause should he not complete the contract, if he refuses such a clause this might ring warning bells. The Schedule of Payments Now we come to the important part, we have to determine a schedule of payments. We start by saying we’ll give you so much to get started. This gives the contractor some cash to pay for some materials and start up costs. Next we have to work out how we will carry on paying as the project proceeds. We have to make sure the contractor has enough money to carry on working but also make sure that if he heads for the hills we are not out of pocket. This might sound difficult but remember there is a profit margin for the contractor in each part of the project and we can use the profit margin on the work he has already completed as the advance for the cost he will incur on the next part. This means that after each payment is made you and the contractor are square, you have the work completed and he has his profit so far. It is advisable to avoid paying large amounts. If you have only 3 or 4 payments for the whole project the amount paid and the amount of project completion will vary to a far greater degree than if you use smaller, more frequent payments. Construction companies tend to use a more rigid approach. They will set milestones and pay only when the milestone is achieved. For example they may only pay for the roof when every part of the roof is completed and has been inspected and passed. Ok now the final stage is to manage the Payment Process. Before any payment is made the project is inspected and payment made according to the actual work done. You will need an engineer to go through the bill of quantities and check each line item to assess the percentage of completion. This is totalled up to give you the total financial value of the construction that has been completed. If you look at the sample file you will see that there is a column second from the right with the percentage complete entered which is then calculated into a monetary value for the amount of work completed in the right hand column. Armed with this information, some common sense and a healthy dose of assertiveness, you can now make sure you are not paying more than you should. A good contractor will understand all this. He/she will give you a detailed Bill of Quantities and will respect your desire to get progress inspections carried out before you release money. If you know you are not a very assertive person beware that the contractor may sense this and feel that he can exploit you. It might be best to find someone to represent you in dealing with making payments but make sure it is someone you trust. Look out for tell tale signs of dodgy dealings. Don’t let emotions take over, be methodical and never assume the contractor is your best friend and is going to be benevolent to you. Keep an eye out for vagueness or lack of detail in the Bill of Quantities. Excuses should ring alarm bells. If he cannot keep his workers this suggests there is a problem. If the staff walk off find out why and if they have not been paid you can bet your life the contractor will be dishonest with you. It is also well to remember that happy workers will do better work than unhappy workers. Protection comes from having aclear definition of what is to be done, what has been done and accurate costings for the two. Are You Planning To Build? - Take Great Care Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. A building permit has to be obtained before construction of any building in Indonesia begins. The building permit is also known as an IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan, it specifies the approved initial design of the building but it also continues through the buildings life stating what the building can be used for. Here we look at what the IMB is, how you apply for one, the documents you will need and some notes about compliance with building regulations. The IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan IMB stands for Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan which literally means “permit to establish a building” commonly known as a “Building Permit”.It is an approval from the government to build a building. IMBs are important, very important. Make no mistake, after the land certificate the IMB is probably the most important document regarding properties in Indonesia. The building permit is not only a permit to carry out the initial building but it also continues through the building’s life as a registration document. The permit defines (through a pile of associated documents that are lodged with the application) the specification of the building that is or has been built and the purpose the building can be used for. All buildings in Bali should have an IMB Unfortunately many don’t. The IMB is the responsibility of the owner of the building. If you are the owner then it will be your responsibility, if you rent or lease a building it is your landlord’s responsibility. Do not buy or lease a building that does not have an IMB or you may have problems. If you lease a building that has an IMB and wish to use it for a different purpose than is stated on the IMB (say you want to use your building for keeping elephants or perhaps for night time activities involving “social networking” when it is currently registered as a private house) then the IMB must be changed. If a villa is to be rented out rather than used as a private residence you also probably need to be careful. Balinese people often do not bother getting an IMB but take note - they can get away with it. Don’t assume that you will be able to. Once a government official smells a walking ATM with a foreign passport you will (or will not) be surprised just how quickly compliance with the law can be officially urged. This may happen even more quickly should your neighbour not like elephants or does not appreciate the more subtle aspects of “social networking”. How to get an IMB or Building Permit Obtaining an IMB is really a part of the town planning process. Permits are issued by the Dinas Tata Ruang Kota dan Pemukiman which means the Department of Town Planning and Settlements. With the IMB certificate comes a metal plate rather like a car number plate to be mounted at the front of the building. Documents you will need To get an IMB it is necessary to submit a pile of documents that will include the following: • A land certificate including the relevant survey plan. • An ijing Kavling (permit to subdivide) if one is needed. • Correct land zoning for the building that is planned. • Drawings of the buildings that comply with local building regulations. • Structural and services drawings to make sure that the buildings have been properly designed and specified. • Signed permission from all owners of directly neigbouring properties. A common pitfall for unwary property buyers in Bali is the fact that, while there are many professional developers that do the right thing, there are quite a number that start building before they have obtained an IMB. This is illegal. I recently came upon what is, sadly, an all too common occurrence, a very expensive villa nearing completion which we were able to determine had no IMB. I suggest that if someone is going to spend perhaps a million dollars building a villa it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that a building permit is obtained beforehand. In fact it is hard to understand why developers or builders so often proceed without an IMB. If they comply with the regulations and obtain the permit at the start they will avoid problems and increased expense later on. Keep everything legal Many assume that financial lubrication will achieve anything but bear in mind three things: 1. The further the building process progresses, the larger the dose of lubricant that will be required. 2. The fact that someone (perhaps your developer) does not wish to seek an IMB before starting the building process is a sign to you, it immediately suggests a lack of integrity and further that something is probably not right – perhaps the design is not acceptable or there is not a full set of drawings.. 3. Times are changing, government is being cleaned up and lubricant is becoming a dirty concept, it may be that an IMB is obtained now but, beware, if the building doesn’t comply you could well have a problem later on. It appears that many IMB applications in Bali are “arranged” and “eased” through the system. This is not a good idea because the staff in government departments have a tendency to move on and a holder of an arranged IMB may suddenly find new staff have arrived and start to check the records. Remember that the drawings and specifications of your building submitted for the IMB remain on file and at any time in the future they may be pulled out and compared to the building. This is what has been happening in and around Singaraja in recent months where local authorities have been carrying out checks to make sure that houses have IMBs, that the building usage matches the IMB and also that the building taxes have been paid. Do not doubt the government’s resolve, a bad outcome can lead to demolition and several expatriates in that area have been warned, if they cannot resolve their issues they may well find themselves in trouble. Compliance with building regulations Compliance with building regulations is checked in the IMB process. For example it is policy that buildings should be no higher than the palm trees. How high is a palm tree, well, for implementation purposes, it is defined as five floors or 15 metres. There is, of course, one famous exception to this rule – the Grand Bali Beach Hotel which was built by the government in the 1960s before the “palm tree” rule was established. Building design must have elements of Balinese design The design of buildings is also checked in the IMB process. It is stated government policy enshrined in legislation that buildings are to have elements of traditional Balinese design in them. Building Permits The deserted streets, empty hotels and closed businesses have become a familiar sight in Bali and other places around the world that rely heavily on tourism for survival. Initially there was disbelief, then for a short time, hope that the pandemic would be short-lived. But soon reality set in and many despaired that this situation could go on forever. But now there is real hope that the nightmare is coming to end. For sure it is; it is just a matter of how soon. What has changed is the rapid production of highly successful vaccines in sufficient numbers in countries like the US and the UK to meet their entire populations. This means that more supplies can now be directed to countries like Indonesia which have lagged the more advanced nations. Indonesia has been slow to start a vaccination programme but it is now well underway and accelerating. Given the challenge of geography and the spread of the population it will still take a while before sufficient people have been vaccinated to eradicate the disease but the journey has begun. This means that everyone should be making their plans on how best to emerge from the pandemic and readjust to a world that is getting back to normal. We can all learn from the experience The pandemic has impacted people in many different ways. Some big companies have actually profited from the pandemic, in particular those that have provided essential services to populations in lockdowns and working from home. Examples would be home delivery services like Amazon, Internet providers like Google, entertainment services like Netflix, communication services like Apple, Samsung etc. Those who had the foresight to invest in the shares of any of these companies or funds that invest in them would have seen their values increase exponentially. Although millions of people have lost their jobs throughout the world many more have been able to hold on to theirs, even if it has meant forced working from home. Without the ability to shop freely, go out to restaurants or take holidays they have been able to save a considerable amount of money. In fact, personal savings during the pandemic have amounted globally to the tune of billions of dollars. This may be actually good news to an extent for those who lost their jobs and whose businesses have suffered since there is a huge amount of pent-up demand for goods, services and holiday travel to be satisfied. It may be hard to envisage right now, but this could translate into a renewed boom for Bali and other popular destinations in the next couple of years. It’s not too soon to plan for the recovery! As a prelude to the planning it would be well worth reviewing any mistakes of the past relating to either one’s work, profession or business. We would never learn if we didn’t make mistakes so it would be helpful to identify these before facing a pandemic-free world. Typical mistakes that might have made include: • Keeping inadequate cash reserves • Not having longer term financial investments that can be liquidated in an emergency if cash runs out • Investing in assets that are difficult to liquidate in a hurry or during an economic crisis (eg property other than one’s personal residence) • Borrowing too heavily • Choosing the wrong location for a business • Putting all or most eggs into one basket • Not developing alternative skills • Being personally under-insured (a pandemic is not a good time to have a personal emergency) Identifying previous mistakes will help in developing future plans. Points for consideration moving forward Everyone will be faced with personal challenges in finding new work, restarting a closed business or starting a new one. A glance at the list in the previous paragraph should give a few hints on what to avoid. But no matter how hard you try it is impossible to avoid all risks and this must be accepted as part of the deal if you wish to remain independent. Be wary of high return investments If you have been unemployed but find a new job when the pandemic ends then your priority may be to rebuild your savings. If these were heavily depleted you may be tempted to look for ways to replace them quickly. But great care must be taken not to be tempted by investments offering high returns. This includes legitimate ones such as daily traded shares, even the likes of Amazon or Apple that have made Planning a Financial Recovery From Covid-19 small fortunes for those who invested in them at the right time. They may well continue to prosper and I would recommend them to a long term investor, but for someone starting from scratch the risks of short term losses are too high. Best to build up cash reserves in boring bank accounts before taking on risk. Once adequate reserves are in place you can turn to investing again. Another danger is that of investments offering ‘guaranteed’ returns of 10% per annum or more. These are often in the form of bonds or structured notes backed by building projects. The danger of them failing and your losing your capital are too high. Worse still are the many scams you will find on the Internet. Beware of cold calls. They are now illegal in many countries but they are impossible to control due to the ease today of making international calls. Literally thousands of people in the UK have lost their savings or pensions before and during this pandemic through succumbing to such calls. Many were fortunate in that they could claim compensation from an industry-sponsored lifeboat scheme but no such protection exists for expatriates overseas. So where can you invest in complete safety? The answer is that no investment is 100% safe. And that includes keeping money under the mattress! Banks are obviously very safe but even they can fail, although you will normally have government protection schemes up to a limit. But a bank deposit can hardly be called an investment as the effective interest rate is zero in USD or other major currencies. One of the accepted ‘safest’ havens is the US Treasury bond. That’s why even sovereign countries invest trillions of dollars in them. How much interest would you get? Right now you would get close to 1.5% per annum on a 10-year bond. You would get your money back at the end, guaranteed by the US government but there is no guarantee as to its purchasing power in ten years! This is why we need to invest in the capital markets. There is short term risk to be sure, but history has shown they will maintain and often enhance the real value of your investment over the long term. But right now many people are focused on the short term and how best to recover from a once-in-a-hundred-years’ pandemic event. It may take time but we will have all learned something from it. You can read all past articles of Money Matters at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Copyright © 2021 Colin Bloodworth Colin Bloodworth, Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (UK), has spent over 20 years in Indonesia. He is based in Jakarta but visits Bali regularly in normal times! If you have any questions on this article or related topics or would like to receive a free monthly newsletter on financial matters you can contact him at colin.bloodworth@ppi-advisory.com 20 One of the more solitary small pleasures I enjoy throughout the week is settling down to a good read with the Weekend FT in a café serving half decent coffee. Apart from the cringingly ghastly “How to Spend it”, the magazine supplement written by FT hacks with leaden wit and obvious contempt for their readers - by definition themselves possessing no style of their own and in need of being told “where to get it”, the rest of the newspaper provides some first rate long form and investigative journalism covering life in general , beyond the financial. Since the FT content is behind a pay wall and I have no interest in the weekday newspaper itself, it’s not worth my stumping up for a subscription. Fortunately for me the weekend print edition is usually on sale at Periplus bookshops around Bali. On one occasion, seated at a table on the deck of the Starbucks in Renon Plaza, engrossed in a good read trying to control the flyaway pages of my newspaper I was enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I was partly aware that a dapper Indonesian man in his early thirties had arrived and sat down at an adjoining table, put down his coffee, opened his lap top, and positioned his handphone together with some other device alongside. Preparing to be irked and ready to rustle the pages of my broadsheet ostentatiously enough to attract attention for a warm-up death glare, I realised that the smoke didn’t actually reek of tobacco, as I had automatically assumed it would. As I was registering this, the man raised a small expensive-looking rectangular black and silver object to his mouth and took a toke. Upon exhale an astonishingly copious cloud of vapour billowed forth, was taken by the wind toward and past myself, on to envelop other tables nearby, only dissipating on the far side of the deck. Impressive in its way. What kind of a storm cloud, I wondered, would a party of half-a-dozen such tokers emit? What about the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms be like? Would they be able to see other? It wasn’t that I was completely unaware. I knew smoking had evolved and that the tobacco barons had developed new ways to attract and addict a younger clientele in the delivery of nicotine, while extending their questionable business ethics into other less lethal areas of business. In fact, I had even read about just that very thing in a previous issue of the FT, to the effect that the big tobacco majors were now concentrating on e-cigarettes and vaping, sales of which now stood at some US$16 billion and expected to treble to over $40 billion in four years. The only clouds on that horizon being a growing international movement to regulate the sale of these products. In this instance, I just adjusted my chair so I had my back to the man and instead of resuming my reading, forgot about the vapours and fell into a reverie upon life and tobacco over past decades. One way or another, smoker or not, tobacco affected us all. Its aroma and its advertisement, an ever-present factor in our lives. The habit has been around a long time. King James 1st of England (1603-25) not only fulminated against the noxious weed but cut off the head of the man who brought it back from the Americas. It was the introduction of cigarettes, which really kicked tobacco industry into the big league, on a par with oil, coal and transportation. By the 1930s smoking cigarettes was the social norm. It was permitted and catered to almost everywhere. The whole world stank of it. We did, so did our clothes and our homes. We just didn’t realise it. In hindsight one has has to wonder how a non-smoker managed to get through life in such a tobacco-ridden environment. Think of the allure of a beautiful and elegant woman smoking a cigarette, a not uncommon and powerful image back then. As a redblooded non-smoking man how in reality, if your dreams came true, would you be able to make love to that woman? And don’t let’s be gender specific here – it works everywhich way. By 1950 the British Medical Association( BMA)sounded the death knell for tobacco’s glory days, announcing conclusive evidence to show that cigarettes caused lung cancer. To prove the point King George VI of England died of lung cancer in 1952 at the age of 56. Not long after his daughter made a point of revoking the Royal Seal of Approval carried by Benson & Hedges and other British brands. She had good cause to believe the BMA. Nonetheless there followed a vicious 50-year campaign of huge mendacity waged by Big Tobacco to deny the reality, that cigrette smoking was the second greatest killer in the world after road accidents. In the days when I smoked it was only two or three cigarettes day, unless I was drinking. Then I chain-smoked. When they banned smoking inflight by the early 1980s I was happy. I could stop smoking for years at a time. Trouble was - easy to quit, easy to start. I never liked smoking in and around food so lighting-up after a meal was no big loss in restaurants. In fact I reserve a special place in hell for the affected swine who light a cigar when other people are eating. The more expensive the cigar, the more it stank. Since my late 40s I’ve smoked very little and not at all in the past decade. Whatever the case, the whole paraphenalia in and around smoking affected us. When I first started smoking I went up-market, Benson & Hedges in their red and gold tin, Balkan Sobranie Black Russian or enticingly foreign like Gauloises and Gitanes. Then settling down to Senior Service or Players and a spell rolling my own in 60s. By the mid 70’s I had pretty much settled down to Benson & Hedges gold or Marlboro Light, which was when I finally graduated to tipped cigarettes. Like publishing, the British and American tobacco barons exercised dual dominion over the world when it came to international brands, so I never really got into American cigarettes, but somewhat familiar with the ‘jetplane’ brands of the 50s and 60s (Rothmans, Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, etc.), until the advent of Marlboro Man that is. One phase I observed with interest and faint contempt was the early 70s fashion branding of cigarettes in huge packs by Cartier, Dunhill, Davidoff and the like, inevitably accompanied by a gold or silver bric lighter from Dupont or other purveyor of cadet luxe. For most of us I suspect, looking back at the golden age of tobacco, now that the stench is gone, is a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. We grew up and matured alongside it all - the packaging, the accoutrements, the advertisements, the sponsorships – all designed to entice. By the time I looked up the man with the laptop and his vape had gone. You know what? E-cigarettes etc. kill only a handfull of people a year, so on the scale of lethality I reckon folks can be left in peace to take a small toke of nicotine in the great outdoors, without the heavy hand of the law being invoked. That said, I do wonder a bit about the involuntary sharing airborne particles lung to lung. Alternative Voice Copyright © 2019 ParacelsusAsia You can read all past articles of Alternative Voice at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz ParacelsusAsia Comments or queries ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com Goodbye Holly Golightly, Goodbye Marlboro Man... When Islam first arrived in Indonesia in the 15th C., it came ready-packaged in a mystical doctrine that was widely welcomed across Java. Though widespread conversion from the Hindu-Buddhist faith to Islam was complete by the 1600s, the old belief systems did not disappear. Buddhism and Hinduism had a presence on Java for 1000 years and their influence still survived in many rites, symbols, customs and traditions such as the wayang theater forms and architectural features like the split gate that reflect Java’s ancient past. Researchers who today struggle to trace the dynamics of religious change in modern Java are unanimous in one thing: syncretic Javanized Islam has been on the run, pushed hard by conservative, orthodox forces since the 1980s. Javanese have now largely abandoned their pre Muslim beliefs that were intermixed with animist, Hindu and Buddhist leanings and avalanched over to observant conservatism. This imported hard-edged guise of pious Islam is hostile to the veneration of any image or object that might tempt believers away from the single-minded worship of the one God, Allah. Bandit Saints of Java is a challenge to that perception which can only hold water if one assumes that Java’s unique religious heritage and Indonesia‘s pre-national history have died out or are irrelevant in the present. This unusual work of nonfiction dives deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities, legends and lore in the wacky, teeming world of local pilgrimages that is largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists. The book convincingly illuminates how a brash, new, energetic religion changed but not wholly supplanted the old Buddhist/Hindu belief systems. The religion of Java lives on in the venerable mausoleums of legendary saints and spirit guardians who represent local, traditionalist native faith with all its mysticism and magic and obsession with holy places and the dead. For modern Indonesians, saint veneration and local pilgrimages are central to their Islamic identity and the practice of their religion that adopts a tolerant, understanding and humanistic approach. The author argues that many Javanese are able to stay strong in Islam while honoring their semi-divine ancestors who are known as the Nine Saints (Wali Songo). The pilgrimage sites, which Quinn calls the new heathen landscape of Indonesia, are not your usual shrines but fusions of holy ground, the focus of memorable stories and objects of religious devotion. Hundreds of these places of worship, big and small, sprawl across Java as well as Indonesia’s outer Islands. Visiting them has become normal in modern Java and serve to assuage those who face an interminable wait - now averaging 17 years - to go on the haj to Mecca. The saint’s graves are havens of refuge and respite embedded solidly in the practices of everyday life for scores of millions of people. The Indonesian Ministry of Tourism reported that 12.2 million people visited the tombs of the Nine Saints in 2014. A few of the sites, like that of Sunan Bonang in Tuban, host up to a million visitors a year. In the final months of the Ramadan fasting month, 20,000 pilgrims a day visit the tomb of Sunan Ampel in Surabaya. The popularity of local pilgrimages has given rise to a highly profitable services sector called wisata ziarah (pilgrimage tourism) in which pilgrims are whisked around by chartered bus to as many as 9 tombs in 6 days. Run on a shoestring, the tours are composed mostly of women who wear like-colored t-shirts, sleep in the bus, mosque or rest pavilions, eat takeaway food and shop for religious souvenirs. So relentlessly popular are the tours that most participants don’t even get close to the small, inner burial chamber but have to sit in dense ranks on tiled patio floors all around the vicinity. Most are off the beaten track and don’t appear on modern maps or make it into the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook. These landmarks inherited from the distance past are buried under the new geography of cities, highways, ports, railroads, factories, plantations, administrative boundaries and tourist attractions. They roost at the top of staircases on steep hillsides, lie in the darkness of caves, shelter in the tiny scraps of forests still left on Java, crouch under the arbors of trees in quiet villages, hidden in the cluttered old quarters of the island’s major cities or in district level towns like Blora, Tuban, Kediri, Demak, Tegal, Karawang, Sumedang, Banten, Kudus, Magelang, Jombang, Mojoagung and Gresik. Often the temples lie besides or opposite the high-rise domes, shiny halls and Middle Eastern-style minarets of flamboyant modern mosques whose straight-laced parishioners view the local pilgrimage sites as nests of idolatry and backwardness. George Quinn is a one-of-a-kind scholar of Indonesian studies. Possessing a native speaker level command of Indonesian and Javanese, this Australian specialist holds a BA from Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University and for many years headed the Southeast Center at the Australian National University. As an Indonesianist - or more precisely, a Javanist - of the first rank, he is adept at writing in a number of genres - fiction, literary criticism, lexiography, history. He TOKO BUKU Reviews of English language books on Indonesia Review by Bill Dalton For any publishers interested in having one of their books considered for review in Toko Buku, please contact: pakbill2003@yahoo.com. Copyright © 2019 You can read all past articles of Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn has published countless papers and articles reflecting his decades-long travel and research in Java. Quinn didn’t write this brilliant discussion of Java’s pilgrimage culture from the sterile confines of a university office under towering bookcases but actually lived the experiences reported in his book. Only a man on the spot would be able to describe in such rich detail the packed, fetid atmosphere of tombs and the details of architecture. Though not a Muslim himself, he is as informed about the nuances of Javanese Islam as any practicing Indonesian ulama. Often Quinn was the only tall, fair-skinned outsider granted as a matter of courtesy a priority place in the inner sanctum. Key-keepers without exception made him feel welcome and were lavish in their responses to his innumerable and sometimes provocative questions. His respect (dare I say reverence?) for the old Sufi saints are equal in ardor to any devout Javanese worshipper. The writer’s marvelous, tactile description of the venerable 15th C. Demak mosque 25 km east of Semarang, is a case in point. There are myriad, priceless scenes of devoted pilgrims - a milling hubbub of murmuring prayer and singing in crowded incense-filled chambers. The text is populated by strange supernatural characters like Gatholoco, the “walking human penis;” a guardian of a holy mountain who became an icon of male vigor at 79; a Muslim saint who was gay and an atheist Sufi saint who took his dogs into the mosque. Others were outright tricksters like the wise pre-Islamic jester Semar. All the esteemed personages are echoes of Java’s ancient tantric heritage that fused Hindu-Buddhist tantra and yoga with Sufism. The majority of the saints were opponents of followers of austere Arab-style Islamic orthodoxy with their pretentions of Middle Eastern dress, their faux-pious mannerisms and claim to religious piety and learning. Bandit Saints of Java paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it’s actually practiced today by many of Java’s 130 million people. The author is a superb, witty and entertaining writer who vividly records what he saw and felt close-up on the ground. Though some of the material is almost impossibly esoteric, the book’s most vital contribution in my mind is that it gives one faith that Indonesia’s lovely, animist native kajawen beliefs will endure in the end under the onslaught of the harsh tenets of hardline Islamist Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia. This erudite and well-researched study gives us the hope that Java will continue to hold dear its own soft, Sufi-inspired interpretation of Islam. Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn, Monsoon Books 2018, ISBN 978-191-204-9448, paperback, 448 pages, dimensions 20 cm x 13 cm. Have you noticed? The Balinese don’t like rain, they don’t drink rainwater and they certainly don’t like it on their heads. It is something to do with picking up evil spirits on it’s way from the sky. Which reminds me, I picked up an evil spirit the other day, it was supposed to be gin and tonic but I suspect it was a particularly evil batch of Arak. “Arak attack” is of course the name of a condition not a drink. Arak does have it’s uses though - it is very good for cleaning carburettors. Have you also noticed, the Balinese don’t have gutters. The logic is, in fact, sound. Get the water off the roof straight onto the ground and organise for it to run away somewhere out of the way. This is also good because much of it ends up back in the water table. It is a bit of a pain though isn’t it. It starts peeing down, cats and dogs turn into elephants and whales and as Mr Murphy would predict you are just about to leave for work with papers clutched under your arm. You wait with a sheet of water running off the roof in front of you, it doesn’t slow so you make a dash for the car. Damn, where is the key on the key ring? Then the key just won’t go into the lock. You flop, wet through, on the car seat and you stare out through the windscreen as the rain eases off. The soggy papers clutched under you arm are starting to run ink onto your shirt. The worst bit was that initial drenching as you plunged through the sheet of water coming off the roof. A gutter can be a good idea. You can get plastic gutters and downpipes here in Bali with all the fittings (apart from good brackets but we’ll come to that). Prices are very reasonable and installation is not difficult but does need to be planned. Be careful because most Indonesian people know very little about gutters. Unfortunately the fact that water does not flow uphill has never been pointed out to Indonesians. Have you noticed how much time and effort goes into building those drainage channels along the sides of the roads, and have you also noticed how the bottoms of the channels don’t always flow downhill, they go up and down with the surface of the road? I can’t count the number of times I have climbed on a roof to find out why water is coming in to find a valley gutter between two roofs which is lower in the middle than at the end where the water is supposed to run out. Gutters come in a round semi circular section and square box gutters. Two sizes are available in both the round and square section and the size you chose is dependent on the roof area that will flow into it. Don’t underestimate how many cats and dogs will fall out of the sky in a particularly fertile wet season. You should also make sure the downpipe can take a full sized cat. A technical point. Round gutters and round pipes such as sewers are known as “self cleaning”. It works like this - as the amount of water flowing decreases it falls to a lower level and is concentrated in a smaller width in the pipe, the cross section of flow reduces so the speed of flow down the pipe or gutter is maintained thereby helping to wash things away. In a flat bottomed gutter this is not the case. As the amount of water flowing falls it still has to fill the same width of gutter so the speed of flow drops and anything being washed down falls to the bottom and is left. The Victorians understood this principle well when building sewerage systems in Britain. Having said this I would always recommend the square box section gutter for use in Bali. Why? Because you can get good brackets for them. The brackets for box section gutters are good solid plastic that hold the gutter firmly in place and can take a reasonable load. The brackets for round gutters, on the other hand, are flimsy sheet steel. They rust immediately so they quickly look a mess. Worse they bend very easily so one dose of cats and dogs and your gutters sag in the middle and the water doesn’t drain away properly. You may be interested to know that round gutters are being heavily promoted by the “Denpasar Save The Mosquito Society”. You also need enough brackets. The Indonesian habit of “saving a bit of money for my poor old mum” means that local contractors will agree to put up a gutter but leave out most of the brackets only putting enough brackets up to hold the thing in dry weather. Cats and dogs, and water for that matter, are very heavy. You must insist that brackets are placed as close as 60 cms apart (ok, ok, two feet to you imperialists, why don’t you get a life, a metric one that is, join the real world....... I do like the inch though. It is such well proportioned thing isn’t it. Even it’s name has a rather nice ring to it. I don’t really like centimetres very much, in fact I hate the horrible little things but we must move on. I stopped using a bone to bang in a nail a long time ago.) You must plan the slope of a gutter along with the placement of downpipes. A slope of 1% to 2% is fine (as long as you have enough brackets to keep it firmly in place) and again enough downpipes to suit the area of roof being drained. You might consider doing the island a favour by not putting your rainwater into the drains but instead returning it to the water table either through a soak pit or an old well. It is clean, fresh, sterile water after all. Believe it or not if development continues at it’s present pace Bali will have a water shortage in the not too distant future. A final word of advice, paint your plastic gutters, brackets and downpipes. Ultra violet light from the sun damages the plastic. You may see that old pipes can become faded and the plastic brittle when exposed continually to sunlight. The grey plastic has a pigment in it to protect it from UV but the sun is intense here and you will extend the life of the plastic if you paint it. Now where did I put that evil spirit? Phil Wilson The Acne Guide To Removing Cats and Dogs From Your Roof Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. It’s been a bit wet. In fact it has been so wet that the ducks have all had new seals fitted to their nether regions. A leaky duck is a very unhappy duck you know. My next door neighbour has started behaving quite odd. He has suddenly started collecting animals. Two horses, two cows, two dogs, two cats - strange really they are all in pairs. It has been a bit of a bother though, their amorous behaviour is keeping me awake all night. He got two rabbits a couple of weeks ago and now he has 3,726 of them hopping around all over the place. An enterprising bloke down our street has a new sign up outside his shop: “Arks made to order, new models always in stock” It is, of course, LRT (leaky roof time) again in South East Asia and the time when you remember that last year you promised you would repair that leak in the roof “when the dry weather comes”. The dry weather has come…and gone and the roof is still leaking. There are a lot of leaky roofs at the moment. I was talking to an insurance salesman last wet season. He had his head in his hands. “Merry Christmas” I said. “Get stuffed” he said. A week later I saw him again. “Happy New Year” I said. “Where can I buy razor blades?” he said “my gas oven has run out of gas.” “You can’t bake a cake with a razor blade” I responded. “Get stuffed” he said. For some who have lived in Bali for a while a leaky roof is just part of the wonderful texture that makes life in Bali what it is. For others, however, leaking roofs drive them mad and drips anonymous is picking up new members again. You may hear them from time to time mumbling the drips anonymous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the drips I cannot fix, the strength to fix the drips I can and the wisdom to know where to put the bucket.” Why do so many roofs leak? Well there are a number of reasons: 1. Most houses have roof tiles that are handmade and so vary slightly and don’t lock together quite as well as they should. 2. When installing roof tiles the spacing of the lathes that support the tiles is often not as accurate is it should be and as a result some designs of roof tiles won’t seat properly. 3. Standard practice on houses in Bali does not include the use of sarking or underfelt as a waterproof membrane under the tiles. 4. Standard practice is for ridges to be heavily concreted into place, only small amounts of movement in the house will crack the concrete. 5. Poor waterproofing of end walls where the roof meets the wall. 6. Insufficient slope on roofs which results in wind driving rain up the tiles and into the roof. 7. A bizarre lack of understanding of the mysterious ways of water. 8. Unfortunately many tukangs don’t understand about roofs. Last week I went to see a man with water pouring into a bedroom. When we came to inspect the roof it was surprisingly well made and one of the few roofs in a “standard” house I have seen with a full membrane installed under the roof tiles. Unfortunately small leaks where the end walls meet the roof had been “repaired” by people who, instead of repairing the roof properly from the outside, tore out parts of the membrane from inside and in fact made the problem much, much worse. For information about flat concrete roofs go to https://www. mrfixitbali.com/roofs-and-gutters/flat-concrete-roofs-235. html Be careful who you let onto your roof. Waterproofing is a bit of an artform really. It is surprising how only a very small crack in concrete combined with that insidious capillary action can produce a significant drip underneath and a substantial loss of demeanour for a house dweller. The results of a leaking roof can be devastating and Bangli has a special wing to care for leaking roof victims. Leaking roofs can also damage your house and contents. How to avoid your roof leaking The most important factor is to find contractors who know what they are doing to install or repair your roof. If you are building a new house put a waterproof membrane under the roof tiles and make sure the roof is properly installed. If you have a leaking roof make a note of where the drips are. If they are next to a wall or in the ridge then you may have to wait for dry weather before they can be properly sealed. If leaks are in the centre of the roof moving tiles around may be sufficient BUT be very careful who gets onto your roof. Many roof tiles in Bali are very fragile because the has clay been fired at low temperatures using wood (often less than 800 degrees). To get effective fusion of silica ideally you need to get up over 1,000 degrees. As a result tiles break easily and someone climbing around on your roof can do a lot more damage than you can imagine. I recently met a very poor Indonesian family who had saved hard and recently had their roof upgraded replacing bamboo beams with timber. The upgrade was a nightmare with badly placed and broken tiles everywhere. As a result the house was flooded and one room remains unusable. They cannot afford to have the roof repaired. A tragic story but unfortunately all too common in a country lacking in standards, training and understanding. If your roof is badly leaking it might be a good idea to simply start again. The tiles can be removed, a waterproof membrane installed and the existing tiles replaced. This is a comprehensive waterproofing job, the tiles will not be damaged because they have not been walked on and the cost is not too high because the existing tiles can reused. Any broken tiles can be replaced and the tiles can be painted to seal them. There are other options such as replacing your tiles with “Colourbond” but we’ll talk about that another day. Of course if it carries on raining at this rate the roof leaks will become somewhat irrelevant and an ark might become a sound investment. Leaking Roofs “Ark The ‘Erald Angels Sing” Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. I have come across many sad cases over the years of honest people who are building their dream home only to find that the builder has scarpered, the money has run out and there is a distinct dearth of windows and doors, electrical wiring is nowhere to be seen and there is some really effective ventilation where the roof should be. Enquiries follow only to reveal that the 8 teams of workers that came and went over the 14 months the project dragged on for left because they hadn’t been paid. Sadly pleonexia is alive and well in the construction industry and contractors know that the average owner builder, Mr and Mrs Nicefriendlypeople, are easy prey for their games. Lambs to the slaughter comes to mind. Such cases are common in Bali and inevitably the “builder” has been paid more than the work he has completed. He will have worked out that by running off now he will end up with more profit than if he finishes the project and he will avoid the most difficult period when he is doing the finishing work and trying to get final payment. Sometimes he may add insult to injury by demanding even more money, his argument being that the money paid is less than the amount of work completed. When a contractor walks away from a half finished job it leaves all sorts of problems. The project is likely to be considerably delayed and it may be difficult to find a new contractor willing to take on the mess that someone else has left. Unfortunately the sort of contractor who perhaps had planned all along to walk away from a half finished job may well be the sort of person that will have also cut corners in the work. So how do we protect ourselves? We use standardised systems that; if well set up, properly thought out and a rigidly applied; minimise the risks involved and keeps contractors in check. These systems use a Bill Of Quantities and a Schedule of Payments. A good Project Manager can set up and manage these systems for you. Bill Of Quantities A Bill of Quantities (or BoQ) is a detailed list of all the tasks that have to be completed to construct the project. Each part of the work is fully described and costed so everyone knows exactly what is to be done and how much it will cost. Let us look at a typical Bill Of Quantities and see what information and the level of detail you should expect. On the website at www.mrfixitbali.com/images/ sampleprogressreport.pdf you will see a sample report from a database designed for managing project progress and payments. The Bill Of Quantities is broken down into headings for each section of the work such as: • Site clearing and project setup • Foundations • Structure • Floor slabs • Walls • Roof and ceilings • Windows and doors • Electrical Installation • Plumbing Installation • Ceramic wall and floor tiling • Painting • Drainage • Water Supply We also need to add on: • Architect’s Fees (10%?) • Structural Engineers Fees • Construction Tax (10%) • Legal costs (IMB, contract fee, etc) Under each of these headings will be a breakdown of the tasks within that heading with the estimated costs. The tasks should describe the work to be done, the type or level of quality of the materials to be used and a quantity such as cubic meters (excavation, fill or concrete), square meters (tiling, roofing and painting) or per item (washbasins, toilets, doorhandles, stress pills, etc.). The price for a single unit and the total price for the totals needed for the project is also given. The description also should, where relevant cross refer back to the drawings in order to tie the specifications stated on the drawings as part of this document. This provides legal protection. The costs are totalled up to give us the TOTAL cost of the project. Alright so we now have our Bill of Quantities and this should become a part of the legal documentation that becomes part of the building contract. The builder must sign up to agree to construct according to this document. You might want to add a penalty clause should he not complete the contract, if he refuses such a clause this might ring warning bells. The Schedule of Payments Now we come to the important part, we have to determine a schedule of payments. We start by saying we’ll give you so much to get started. This gives the contractor some cash to pay for some materials and start up costs. Next we have to work out how we will carry on paying as the project proceeds. We have to make sure the contractor has enough money to carry on working but also make sure that if he heads for the hills we are not out of pocket. This might sound difficult but remember there is a profit margin for the contractor in each part of the project and we can use the profit margin on the work he has already completed as the advance for the cost he will incur on the next part. This means that after each payment is made you and the contractor are square, you have the work completed and he has his profit so far. It is advisable to avoid paying large amounts. If you have only 3 or 4 payments for the whole project the amount paid and the amount of project completion will vary to a far greater degree than if you use smaller, more frequent payments. Construction companies tend to use a more rigid approach. They will set milestones and pay only when the milestone is achieved. For example they may only pay for the roof when every part of the roof is completed and has been inspected and passed. Ok now the final stage is to manage the Payment Process. Before any payment is made the project is inspected and payment made according to the actual work done. You will need an engineer to go through the bill of quantities and check each line item to assess the percentage of completion. This is totalled up to give you the total financial value of the construction that has been completed. If you look at the sample file you will see that there is a column second from the right with the percentage complete entered which is then calculated into a monetary value for the amount of work completed in the right hand column. Armed with this information, some common sense and a healthy dose of assertiveness, you can now make sure you are not paying more than you should. A good contractor will understand all this. He/she will give you a detailed Bill of Quantities and will respect your desire to get progress inspections carried out before you release money. If you know you are not a very assertive person beware that the contractor may sense this and feel that he can exploit you. It might be best to find someone to represent you in dealing with making payments but make sure it is someone you trust. Look out for tell tale signs of dodgy dealings. Don’t let emotions take over, be methodical and never assume the contractor is your best friend and is going to be benevolent to you. Keep an eye out for vagueness or lack of detail in the Bill of Quantities. Excuses should ring alarm bells. If he cannot keep his workers this suggests there is a problem. If the staff walk off find out why and if they have not been paid you can bet your life the contractor will be dishonest with you. It is also well to remember that happy workers will do better work than unhappy workers. Protection comes from having aclear definition of what is to be done, what has been done and accurate costings for the two. Are You Planning To Build? - Take Great Care Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. A building permit has to be obtained before construction of any building in Indonesia begins. The building permit is also known as an IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan, it specifies the approved initial design of the building but it also continues through the buildings life stating what the building can be used for. Here we look at what the IMB is, how you apply for one, the documents you will need and some notes about compliance with building regulations. The IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan IMB stands for Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan which literally means “permit to establish a building” commonly known as a “Building Permit”.It is an approval from the government to build a building. IMBs are important, very important. Make no mistake, after the land certificate the IMB is probably the most important document regarding properties in Indonesia. The building permit is not only a permit to carry out the initial building but it also continues through the building’s life as a registration document. The permit defines (through a pile of associated documents that are lodged with the application) the specification of the building that is or has been built and the purpose the building can be used for. All buildings in Bali should have an IMB Unfortunately many don’t. The IMB is the responsibility of the owner of the building. If you are the owner then it will be your responsibility, if you rent or lease a building it is your landlord’s responsibility. Do not buy or lease a building that does not have an IMB or you may have problems. If you lease a building that has an IMB and wish to use it for a different purpose than is stated on the IMB (say you want to use your building for keeping elephants or perhaps for night time activities involving “social networking” when it is currently registered as a private house) then the IMB must be changed. If a villa is to be rented out rather than used as a private residence you also probably need to be careful. Balinese people often do not bother getting an IMB but take note - they can get away with it. Don’t assume that you will be able to. Once a government official smells a walking ATM with a foreign passport you will (or will not) be surprised just how quickly compliance with the law can be officially urged. This may happen even more quickly should your neighbour not like elephants or does not appreciate the more subtle aspects of “social networking”. How to get an IMB or Building Permit Obtaining an IMB is really a part of the town planning process. Permits are issued by the Dinas Tata Ruang Kota dan Pemukiman which means the Department of Town Planning and Settlements. With the IMB certificate comes a metal plate rather like a car number plate to be mounted at the front of the building. Documents you will need To get an IMB it is necessary to submit a pile of documents that will include the following: • A land certificate including the relevant survey plan. • An ijing Kavling (permit to subdivide) if one is needed. • Correct land zoning for the building that is planned. • Drawings of the buildings that comply with local building regulations. • Structural and services drawings to make sure that the buildings have been properly designed and specified. • Signed permission from all owners of directly neigbouring properties. A common pitfall for unwary property buyers in Bali is the fact that, while there are many professional developers that do the right thing, there are quite a number that start building before they have obtained an IMB. This is illegal. I recently came upon what is, sadly, an all too common occurrence, a very expensive villa nearing completion which we were able to determine had no IMB. I suggest that if someone is going to spend perhaps a million dollars building a villa it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that a building permit is obtained beforehand. In fact it is hard to understand why developers or builders so often proceed without an IMB. If they comply with the regulations and obtain the permit at the start they will avoid problems and increased expense later on. Keep everything legal Many assume that financial lubrication will achieve anything but bear in mind three things: 1. The further the building process progresses, the larger the dose of lubricant that will be required. 2. The fact that someone (perhaps your developer) does not wish to seek an IMB before starting the building process is a sign to you, it immediately suggests a lack of integrity and further that something is probably not right – perhaps the design is not acceptable or there is not a full set of drawings.. 3. Times are changing, government is being cleaned up and lubricant is becoming a dirty concept, it may be that an IMB is obtained now but, beware, if the building doesn’t comply you could well have a problem later on. It appears that many IMB applications in Bali are “arranged” and “eased” through the system. This is not a good idea because the staff in government departments have a tendency to move on and a holder of an arranged IMB may suddenly find new staff have arrived and start to check the records. Remember that the drawings and specifications of your building submitted for the IMB remain on file and at any time in the future they may be pulled out and compared to the building. This is what has been happening in and around Singaraja in recent months where local authorities have been carrying out checks to make sure that houses have IMBs, that the building usage matches the IMB and also that the building taxes have been paid. Do not doubt the government’s resolve, a bad outcome can lead to demolition and several expatriates in that area have been warned, if they cannot resolve their issues they may well find themselves in trouble. Compliance with building regulations Compliance with building regulations is checked in the IMB process. For example it is policy that buildings should be no higher than the palm trees. How high is a palm tree, well, for implementation purposes, it is defined as five floors or 15 metres. There is, of course, one famous exception to this rule – the Grand Bali Beach Hotel which was built by the government in the 1960s before the “palm tree” rule was established. Building design must have elements of Balinese design The design of buildings is also checked in the IMB process. It is stated government policy enshrined in legislation that buildings are to have elements of traditional Balinese design in them. Building Permits out well-known shoe/boot companies like Sagara, Jalan Sriwijaya, Winson, Txture, Junkard and Santalum make luxury foot ware that are quite popular in Japan and the U.S. among shoes enthusiasts. *Indonesian boots are interesting due to the construction, shapes and styles. The skill required to make a sturdy boot by hand takes at least five years to learn and the process of making a boot takes 2-3 days. *Indonesians consider the Caterpillar the ultimate high-quality boot. *The most popular Santalum boot is the Service boot, very similar to the Viberg service boot. *Bandung Collection shops, found in every sizeable city in Bali, sells high quality shoe ware at local prices. * Multipurpose cleaning tool The sapu lidi is a broom made from middle dried ribs/veins (lidi) of either coconut or areca palm fronds (sapu) tied together to form a hard broom. Different lengths and thicknesses of this traditional Indonesian and S.E. Asian “coconut” broom are used for specific purposes. You can take the spines from a larger broom apart and then tie them together again in desired sizes/thicknesses to serve a number of unique uses. Different types of sapu lidi are usually not interchangeable. If a certain sapu lidi is used to sweep the floor, it’s not used for the bed and vice versa. Younger, more flexible ones are used to clean mattresses, carpets, foam, kapok-stuffed pillows and to craft dinner plates (ingke in Balinese); older bound spines are used more for outside cleaning; younger ones are used to swat and brush your bed (tebah kasur in Indonesian; ngibas in Balinese) to remove dust and other debris to the floor. A sapu lidi can also be used as an insect swatter, for example to chase away mosquitoes before lowering the kelambu mosquito net. Smaller, thinly bound ones can reach into corners and under furniture. Short stubby strong ones are used for cleaning clogged grimy drains and gutters. Long flexible ones are used for sweeping dirt or paved yards, terraces, walkways and parking areas – a morning ritual that takes place across the whole archipelago. Attached to a long pole, a coconut broom is also used to clean ceilings of dust, spider webs, ant and hornet nests (as well as evil spirits). The * Ride in style! Since airfares are triple what they were a year ago, buses are now an attractive option. More accurately described as “luxury coaches,” buses traveling west out of Bali have toilets, comfortable reclining airline-style seats and include snacks and meals. Every passenger is given a blanket and pillow. These coaches take the toll roads on Java, so fares have gone up from, for example, Rp250,000 from Bali to C. Java before the toll roads to now around Rp300,000. High volume music videos play non-stop, so sit as far away from the monitors as possible if you don’t like noise. Passengers’ phones take turns charging from multiple power outlets on or near the driver. The bus stops about half-way at a buffet restaurant for meals, water, ice tea or hot tea. *The fanciest buses from Bali to Yogya (Rp350,000), Bandung and Jakarta are operated by Pahala Kencana. Cheaper buses to all around Java are run by Gunung Harta, Sedyamulya, Safari Darma Raya and Restu Mulya; approximate fare: DenpasarYogya Rp270,000, Denpasar-Malang Rp200,000, DenpasarSurabaya Rp180,000. *If you stand on Jl. Bypass west of Denpasar’s Ubung Terminal in a place where it’s easy for a bus to stop, you are often able to bargain the official fare down considerably. (However, if the bus is inspected by a company employee, they might make you hide in the toilet.) *Trains are also more competitive now, about the same cost as buses because bus fares have risen because of toll road surcharges. * Shoe Sense There was a time when Indonesian shoes were popular in Europe and S.E. Asia until the Vietnamese took over the market. Only China, India, Vietnam and Brazil are bigger footwear exporters than Indonesia, although Indonesia accounts for only 4.4% (US$4.85 billion in 2015) of global market share. *Dutch colonizers brought with them a love of durable leather footwear that resulted in an Asian boot industry centered in the West Java capital of Bandung. *For strong, tailorm a d e , Goodyearwelted boots (without paying European prices), check Please send your budget ideas, bargain deals and money saving tips to pakbill2003@yahoo.com Copyright © 2020 Bill Dalton You can read all past articles of The Frugal Balinist at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz strength of the tightly bound sapu lidi is also a symbol of national unity. * Unsung heroes Wardah cosmetic products are cheaper but just as good (and safe) as more expensive brands like Caring Colours by Martha Tilaar. *Teh Botol Less Sugar is not as sweet and is more refreshing than Teh Botol sweetened tea, sold everywhere, which is no longer bottled in glass but in plastic which imparts an unnatural flavour. Teh Kotak, on the other hand, is packaged in paper, thus has a more natural taste and is also more eco-friendly. The Pucuk is yet another more pleasant alternative. *Bango brand kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) is preferred by many over the ABC brand. This less chemicalized sauce is used to cook many iconic dishes like semur (Indonesian beef stew with potatoes and tofu), nasi goreng (fried rice) and mie goreng (fried noodles). It also serves as an indispensable condiment for the classic rice dish telur orak arik (scrambled eggs). *High-quality Sedap products are gaining in popularity among Indonesians because they are cheap and tasty. *Indonesian brands with foreign names are underrated because some people don’t know they’re made in Indonesia. This goes for the famous Rockport shoe line and the Hoka-Hoka Bento Japanese restaurant chain that is actually an Indonesian franchise. The clothing company, Executive, is also Indonesian, as is the “cool” cafe Excelso. The Frugal Balinist 20 One of the more solitary small pleasures I enjoy throughout the week is settling down to a good read with the Weekend FT in a café serving half decent coffee. Apart from the cringingly ghastly “How to Spend it”, the magazine supplement written by FT hacks with leaden wit and obvious contempt for their readers - by definition themselves possessing no style of their own and in need of being told “where to get it”, the rest of the newspaper provides some first rate long form and investigative journalism covering life in general , beyond the financial. Since the FT content is behind a pay wall and I have no interest in the weekday newspaper itself, it’s not worth my stumping up for a subscription. Fortunately for me the weekend print edition is usually on sale at Periplus bookshops around Bali. On one occasion, seated at a table on the deck of the Starbucks in Renon Plaza, engrossed in a good read trying to control the flyaway pages of my newspaper I was enveloped in a cloud of smoke. I was partly aware that a dapper Indonesian man in his early thirties had arrived and sat down at an adjoining table, put down his coffee, opened his lap top, and positioned his handphone together with some other device alongside. Preparing to be irked and ready to rustle the pages of my broadsheet ostentatiously enough to attract attention for a warm-up death glare, I realised that the smoke didn’t actually reek of tobacco, as I had automatically assumed it would. As I was registering this, the man raised a small expensive-looking rectangular black and silver object to his mouth and took a toke. Upon exhale an astonishingly copious cloud of vapour billowed forth, was taken by the wind toward and past myself, on to envelop other tables nearby, only dissipating on the far side of the deck. Impressive in its way. What kind of a storm cloud, I wondered, would a party of half-a-dozen such tokers emit? What about the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms be like? Would they be able to see other? It wasn’t that I was completely unaware. I knew smoking had evolved and that the tobacco barons had developed new ways to attract and addict a younger clientele in the delivery of nicotine, while extending their questionable business ethics into other less lethal areas of business. In fact, I had even read about just that very thing in a previous issue of the FT, to the effect that the big tobacco majors were now concentrating on e-cigarettes and vaping, sales of which now stood at some US$16 billion and expected to treble to over $40 billion in four years. The only clouds on that horizon being a growing international movement to regulate the sale of these products. In this instance, I just adjusted my chair so I had my back to the man and instead of resuming my reading, forgot about the vapours and fell into a reverie upon life and tobacco over past decades. One way or another, smoker or not, tobacco affected us all. Its aroma and its advertisement, an ever-present factor in our lives. The habit has been around a long time. King James 1st of England (1603-25) not only fulminated against the noxious weed but cut off the head of the man who brought it back from the Americas. It was the introduction of cigarettes, which really kicked tobacco industry into the big league, on a par with oil, coal and transportation. By the 1930s smoking cigarettes was the social norm. It was permitted and catered to almost everywhere. The whole world stank of it. We did, so did our clothes and our homes. We just didn’t realise it. In hindsight one has has to wonder how a non-smoker managed to get through life in such a tobacco-ridden environment. Think of the allure of a beautiful and elegant woman smoking a cigarette, a not uncommon and powerful image back then. As a redblooded non-smoking man how in reality, if your dreams came true, would you be able to make love to that woman? And don’t let’s be gender specific here – it works everywhich way. By 1950 the British Medical Association( BMA)sounded the death knell for tobacco’s glory days, announcing conclusive evidence to show that cigarettes caused lung cancer. To prove the point King George VI of England died of lung cancer in 1952 at the age of 56. Not long after his daughter made a point of revoking the Royal Seal of Approval carried by Benson & Hedges and other British brands. She had good cause to believe the BMA. Nonetheless there followed a vicious 50-year campaign of huge mendacity waged by Big Tobacco to deny the reality, that cigrette smoking was the second greatest killer in the world after road accidents. In the days when I smoked it was only two or three cigarettes day, unless I was drinking. Then I chain-smoked. When they banned smoking inflight by the early 1980s I was happy. I could stop smoking for years at a time. Trouble was - easy to quit, easy to start. I never liked smoking in and around food so lighting-up after a meal was no big loss in restaurants. In fact I reserve a special place in hell for the affected swine who light a cigar when other people are eating. The more expensive the cigar, the more it stank. Since my late 40s I’ve smoked very little and not at all in the past decade. Whatever the case, the whole paraphenalia in and around smoking affected us. When I first started smoking I went up-market, Benson & Hedges in their red and gold tin, Balkan Sobranie Black Russian or enticingly foreign like Gauloises and Gitanes. Then settling down to Senior Service or Players and a spell rolling my own in 60s. By the mid 70’s I had pretty much settled down to Benson & Hedges gold or Marlboro Light, which was when I finally graduated to tipped cigarettes. Like publishing, the British and American tobacco barons exercised dual dominion over the world when it came to international brands, so I never really got into American cigarettes, but somewhat familiar with the ‘jetplane’ brands of the 50s and 60s (Rothmans, Stuyvesant, Pall Mall, etc.), until the advent of Marlboro Man that is. One phase I observed with interest and faint contempt was the early 70s fashion branding of cigarettes in huge packs by Cartier, Dunhill, Davidoff and the like, inevitably accompanied by a gold or silver bric lighter from Dupont or other purveyor of cadet luxe. For most of us I suspect, looking back at the golden age of tobacco, now that the stench is gone, is a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. We grew up and matured alongside it all - the packaging, the accoutrements, the advertisements, the sponsorships – all designed to entice. By the time I looked up the man with the laptop and his vape had gone. You know what? E-cigarettes etc. kill only a handfull of people a year, so on the scale of lethality I reckon folks can be left in peace to take a small toke of nicotine in the great outdoors, without the heavy hand of the law being invoked. That said, I do wonder a bit about the involuntary sharing airborne particles lung to lung. Alternative Voice Copyright © 2019 ParacelsusAsia You can read all past articles of Alternative Voice at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz ParacelsusAsia Comments or queries ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com Goodbye Holly Golightly, Goodbye Marlboro Man... When Islam first arrived in Indonesia in the 15th C., it came ready-packaged in a mystical doctrine that was widely welcomed across Java. Though widespread conversion from the Hindu-Buddhist faith to Islam was complete by the 1600s, the old belief systems did not disappear. Buddhism and Hinduism had a presence on Java for 1000 years and their influence still survived in many rites, symbols, customs and traditions such as the wayang theater forms and architectural features like the split gate that reflect Java’s ancient past. Researchers who today struggle to trace the dynamics of religious change in modern Java are unanimous in one thing: syncretic Javanized Islam has been on the run, pushed hard by conservative, orthodox forces since the 1980s. Javanese have now largely abandoned their pre Muslim beliefs that were intermixed with animist, Hindu and Buddhist leanings and avalanched over to observant conservatism. This imported hard-edged guise of pious Islam is hostile to the veneration of any image or object that might tempt believers away from the single-minded worship of the one God, Allah. Bandit Saints of Java is a challenge to that perception which can only hold water if one assumes that Java’s unique religious heritage and Indonesia‘s pre-national history have died out or are irrelevant in the present. This unusual work of nonfiction dives deep under the surface of modern Indonesia, exploring personalities, legends and lore in the wacky, teeming world of local pilgrimages that is largely invisible to journalists, scholars and tourists. The book convincingly illuminates how a brash, new, energetic religion changed but not wholly supplanted the old Buddhist/Hindu belief systems. The religion of Java lives on in the venerable mausoleums of legendary saints and spirit guardians who represent local, traditionalist native faith with all its mysticism and magic and obsession with holy places and the dead. For modern Indonesians, saint veneration and local pilgrimages are central to their Islamic identity and the practice of their religion that adopts a tolerant, understanding and humanistic approach. The author argues that many Javanese are able to stay strong in Islam while honoring their semi-divine ancestors who are known as the Nine Saints (Wali Songo). The pilgrimage sites, which Quinn calls the new heathen landscape of Indonesia, are not your usual shrines but fusions of holy ground, the focus of memorable stories and objects of religious devotion. Hundreds of these places of worship, big and small, sprawl across Java as well as Indonesia’s outer Islands. Visiting them has become normal in modern Java and serve to assuage those who face an interminable wait - now averaging 17 years - to go on the haj to Mecca. The saint’s graves are havens of refuge and respite embedded solidly in the practices of everyday life for scores of millions of people. The Indonesian Ministry of Tourism reported that 12.2 million people visited the tombs of the Nine Saints in 2014. A few of the sites, like that of Sunan Bonang in Tuban, host up to a million visitors a year. In the final months of the Ramadan fasting month, 20,000 pilgrims a day visit the tomb of Sunan Ampel in Surabaya. The popularity of local pilgrimages has given rise to a highly profitable services sector called wisata ziarah (pilgrimage tourism) in which pilgrims are whisked around by chartered bus to as many as 9 tombs in 6 days. Run on a shoestring, the tours are composed mostly of women who wear like-colored t-shirts, sleep in the bus, mosque or rest pavilions, eat takeaway food and shop for religious souvenirs. So relentlessly popular are the tours that most participants don’t even get close to the small, inner burial chamber but have to sit in dense ranks on tiled patio floors all around the vicinity. Most are off the beaten track and don’t appear on modern maps or make it into the pages of a Lonely Planet guidebook. These landmarks inherited from the distance past are buried under the new geography of cities, highways, ports, railroads, factories, plantations, administrative boundaries and tourist attractions. They roost at the top of staircases on steep hillsides, lie in the darkness of caves, shelter in the tiny scraps of forests still left on Java, crouch under the arbors of trees in quiet villages, hidden in the cluttered old quarters of the island’s major cities or in district level towns like Blora, Tuban, Kediri, Demak, Tegal, Karawang, Sumedang, Banten, Kudus, Magelang, Jombang, Mojoagung and Gresik. Often the temples lie besides or opposite the high-rise domes, shiny halls and Middle Eastern-style minarets of flamboyant modern mosques whose straight-laced parishioners view the local pilgrimage sites as nests of idolatry and backwardness. George Quinn is a one-of-a-kind scholar of Indonesian studies. Possessing a native speaker level command of Indonesian and Javanese, this Australian specialist holds a BA from Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University and for many years headed the Southeast Center at the Australian National University. As an Indonesianist - or more precisely, a Javanist - of the first rank, he is adept at writing in a number of genres - fiction, literary criticism, lexiography, history. He TOKO BUKU Reviews of English language books on Indonesia Review by Bill Dalton For any publishers interested in having one of their books considered for review in Toko Buku, please contact: pakbill2003@yahoo.com. Copyright © 2019 You can read all past articles of Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn has published countless papers and articles reflecting his decades-long travel and research in Java. Quinn didn’t write this brilliant discussion of Java’s pilgrimage culture from the sterile confines of a university office under towering bookcases but actually lived the experiences reported in his book. Only a man on the spot would be able to describe in such rich detail the packed, fetid atmosphere of tombs and the details of architecture. Though not a Muslim himself, he is as informed about the nuances of Javanese Islam as any practicing Indonesian ulama. Often Quinn was the only tall, fair-skinned outsider granted as a matter of courtesy a priority place in the inner sanctum. Key-keepers without exception made him feel welcome and were lavish in their responses to his innumerable and sometimes provocative questions. His respect (dare I say reverence?) for the old Sufi saints are equal in ardor to any devout Javanese worshipper. The writer’s marvelous, tactile description of the venerable 15th C. Demak mosque 25 km east of Semarang, is a case in point. There are myriad, priceless scenes of devoted pilgrims - a milling hubbub of murmuring prayer and singing in crowded incense-filled chambers. The text is populated by strange supernatural characters like Gatholoco, the “walking human penis;” a guardian of a holy mountain who became an icon of male vigor at 79; a Muslim saint who was gay and an atheist Sufi saint who took his dogs into the mosque. Others were outright tricksters like the wise pre-Islamic jester Semar. All the esteemed personages are echoes of Java’s ancient tantric heritage that fused Hindu-Buddhist tantra and yoga with Sufism. The majority of the saints were opponents of followers of austere Arab-style Islamic orthodoxy with their pretentions of Middle Eastern dress, their faux-pious mannerisms and claim to religious piety and learning. Bandit Saints of Java paints an astonishing portrait of Islam as it’s actually practiced today by many of Java’s 130 million people. The author is a superb, witty and entertaining writer who vividly records what he saw and felt close-up on the ground. Though some of the material is almost impossibly esoteric, the book’s most vital contribution in my mind is that it gives one faith that Indonesia’s lovely, animist native kajawen beliefs will endure in the end under the onslaught of the harsh tenets of hardline Islamist Wahhabism imported from Saudi Arabia. This erudite and well-researched study gives us the hope that Java will continue to hold dear its own soft, Sufi-inspired interpretation of Islam. Bandit Saints of Java by George Quinn, Monsoon Books 2018, ISBN 978-191-204-9448, paperback, 448 pages, dimensions 20 cm x 13 cm. Have you noticed? The Balinese don’t like rain, they don’t drink rainwater and they certainly don’t like it on their heads. It is something to do with picking up evil spirits on it’s way from the sky. Which reminds me, I picked up an evil spirit the other day, it was supposed to be gin and tonic but I suspect it was a particularly evil batch of Arak. “Arak attack” is of course the name of a condition not a drink. Arak does have it’s uses though - it is very good for cleaning carburettors. Have you also noticed, the Balinese don’t have gutters. The logic is, in fact, sound. Get the water off the roof straight onto the ground and organise for it to run away somewhere out of the way. This is also good because much of it ends up back in the water table. It is a bit of a pain though isn’t it. It starts peeing down, cats and dogs turn into elephants and whales and as Mr Murphy would predict you are just about to leave for work with papers clutched under your arm. You wait with a sheet of water running off the roof in front of you, it doesn’t slow so you make a dash for the car. Damn, where is the key on the key ring? Then the key just won’t go into the lock. You flop, wet through, on the car seat and you stare out through the windscreen as the rain eases off. The soggy papers clutched under you arm are starting to run ink onto your shirt. The worst bit was that initial drenching as you plunged through the sheet of water coming off the roof. A gutter can be a good idea. You can get plastic gutters and downpipes here in Bali with all the fittings (apart from good brackets but we’ll come to that). Prices are very reasonable and installation is not difficult but does need to be planned. Be careful because most Indonesian people know very little about gutters. Unfortunately the fact that water does not flow uphill has never been pointed out to Indonesians. Have you noticed how much time and effort goes into building those drainage channels along the sides of the roads, and have you also noticed how the bottoms of the channels don’t always flow downhill, they go up and down with the surface of the road? I can’t count the number of times I have climbed on a roof to find out why water is coming in to find a valley gutter between two roofs which is lower in the middle than at the end where the water is supposed to run out. Gutters come in a round semi circular section and square box gutters. Two sizes are available in both the round and square section and the size you chose is dependent on the roof area that will flow into it. Don’t underestimate how many cats and dogs will fall out of the sky in a particularly fertile wet season. You should also make sure the downpipe can take a full sized cat. A technical point. Round gutters and round pipes such as sewers are known as “self cleaning”. It works like this - as the amount of water flowing decreases it falls to a lower level and is concentrated in a smaller width in the pipe, the cross section of flow reduces so the speed of flow down the pipe or gutter is maintained thereby helping to wash things away. In a flat bottomed gutter this is not the case. As the amount of water flowing falls it still has to fill the same width of gutter so the speed of flow drops and anything being washed down falls to the bottom and is left. The Victorians understood this principle well when building sewerage systems in Britain. Having said this I would always recommend the square box section gutter for use in Bali. Why? Because you can get good brackets for them. The brackets for box section gutters are good solid plastic that hold the gutter firmly in place and can take a reasonable load. The brackets for round gutters, on the other hand, are flimsy sheet steel. They rust immediately so they quickly look a mess. Worse they bend very easily so one dose of cats and dogs and your gutters sag in the middle and the water doesn’t drain away properly. You may be interested to know that round gutters are being heavily promoted by the “Denpasar Save The Mosquito Society”. You also need enough brackets. The Indonesian habit of “saving a bit of money for my poor old mum” means that local contractors will agree to put up a gutter but leave out most of the brackets only putting enough brackets up to hold the thing in dry weather. Cats and dogs, and water for that matter, are very heavy. You must insist that brackets are placed as close as 60 cms apart (ok, ok, two feet to you imperialists, why don’t you get a life, a metric one that is, join the real world....... I do like the inch though. It is such well proportioned thing isn’t it. Even it’s name has a rather nice ring to it. I don’t really like centimetres very much, in fact I hate the horrible little things but we must move on. I stopped using a bone to bang in a nail a long time ago.) You must plan the slope of a gutter along with the placement of downpipes. A slope of 1% to 2% is fine (as long as you have enough brackets to keep it firmly in place) and again enough downpipes to suit the area of roof being drained. You might consider doing the island a favour by not putting your rainwater into the drains but instead returning it to the water table either through a soak pit or an old well. It is clean, fresh, sterile water after all. Believe it or not if development continues at it’s present pace Bali will have a water shortage in the not too distant future. A final word of advice, paint your plastic gutters, brackets and downpipes. Ultra violet light from the sun damages the plastic. You may see that old pipes can become faded and the plastic brittle when exposed continually to sunlight. The grey plastic has a pigment in it to protect it from UV but the sun is intense here and you will extend the life of the plastic if you paint it. Now where did I put that evil spirit? Phil Wilson The Acne Guide To Removing Cats and Dogs From Your Roof Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. It’s been a bit wet. In fact it has been so wet that the ducks have all had new seals fitted to their nether regions. A leaky duck is a very unhappy duck you know. My next door neighbour has started behaving quite odd. He has suddenly started collecting animals. Two horses, two cows, two dogs, two cats - strange really they are all in pairs. It has been a bit of a bother though, their amorous behaviour is keeping me awake all night. He got two rabbits a couple of weeks ago and now he has 3,726 of them hopping around all over the place. An enterprising bloke down our street has a new sign up outside his shop: “Arks made to order, new models always in stock” It is, of course, LRT (leaky roof time) again in South East Asia and the time when you remember that last year you promised you would repair that leak in the roof “when the dry weather comes”. The dry weather has come…and gone and the roof is still leaking. There are a lot of leaky roofs at the moment. I was talking to an insurance salesman last wet season. He had his head in his hands. “Merry Christmas” I said. “Get stuffed” he said. A week later I saw him again. “Happy New Year” I said. “Where can I buy razor blades?” he said “my gas oven has run out of gas.” “You can’t bake a cake with a razor blade” I responded. “Get stuffed” he said. For some who have lived in Bali for a while a leaky roof is just part of the wonderful texture that makes life in Bali what it is. For others, however, leaking roofs drive them mad and drips anonymous is picking up new members again. You may hear them from time to time mumbling the drips anonymous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the drips I cannot fix, the strength to fix the drips I can and the wisdom to know where to put the bucket.” Why do so many roofs leak? Well there are a number of reasons: 1. Most houses have roof tiles that are handmade and so vary slightly and don’t lock together quite as well as they should. 2. When installing roof tiles the spacing of the lathes that support the tiles is often not as accurate is it should be and as a result some designs of roof tiles won’t seat properly. 3. Standard practice on houses in Bali does not include the use of sarking or underfelt as a waterproof membrane under the tiles. 4. Standard practice is for ridges to be heavily concreted into place, only small amounts of movement in the house will crack the concrete. 5. Poor waterproofing of end walls where the roof meets the wall. 6. Insufficient slope on roofs which results in wind driving rain up the tiles and into the roof. 7. A bizarre lack of understanding of the mysterious ways of water. 8. Unfortunately many tukangs don’t understand about roofs. Last week I went to see a man with water pouring into a bedroom. When we came to inspect the roof it was surprisingly well made and one of the few roofs in a “standard” house I have seen with a full membrane installed under the roof tiles. Unfortunately small leaks where the end walls meet the roof had been “repaired” by people who, instead of repairing the roof properly from the outside, tore out parts of the membrane from inside and in fact made the problem much, much worse. For information about flat concrete roofs go to https://www. mrfixitbali.com/roofs-and-gutters/flat-concrete-roofs-235. html Be careful who you let onto your roof. Waterproofing is a bit of an artform really. It is surprising how only a very small crack in concrete combined with that insidious capillary action can produce a significant drip underneath and a substantial loss of demeanour for a house dweller. The results of a leaking roof can be devastating and Bangli has a special wing to care for leaking roof victims. Leaking roofs can also damage your house and contents. How to avoid your roof leaking The most important factor is to find contractors who know what they are doing to install or repair your roof. If you are building a new house put a waterproof membrane under the roof tiles and make sure the roof is properly installed. If you have a leaking roof make a note of where the drips are. If they are next to a wall or in the ridge then you may have to wait for dry weather before they can be properly sealed. If leaks are in the centre of the roof moving tiles around may be sufficient BUT be very careful who gets onto your roof. Many roof tiles in Bali are very fragile because the has clay been fired at low temperatures using wood (often less than 800 degrees). To get effective fusion of silica ideally you need to get up over 1,000 degrees. As a result tiles break easily and someone climbing around on your roof can do a lot more damage than you can imagine. I recently met a very poor Indonesian family who had saved hard and recently had their roof upgraded replacing bamboo beams with timber. The upgrade was a nightmare with badly placed and broken tiles everywhere. As a result the house was flooded and one room remains unusable. They cannot afford to have the roof repaired. A tragic story but unfortunately all too common in a country lacking in standards, training and understanding. If your roof is badly leaking it might be a good idea to simply start again. The tiles can be removed, a waterproof membrane installed and the existing tiles replaced. This is a comprehensive waterproofing job, the tiles will not be damaged because they have not been walked on and the cost is not too high because the existing tiles can reused. Any broken tiles can be replaced and the tiles can be painted to seal them. There are other options such as replacing your tiles with “Colourbond” but we’ll talk about that another day. Of course if it carries on raining at this rate the roof leaks will become somewhat irrelevant and an ark might become a sound investment. Leaking Roofs “Ark The ‘Erald Angels Sing” Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. I have come across many sad cases over the years of honest people who are building their dream home only to find that the builder has scarpered, the money has run out and there is a distinct dearth of windows and doors, electrical wiring is nowhere to be seen and there is some really effective ventilation where the roof should be. Enquiries follow only to reveal that the 8 teams of workers that came and went over the 14 months the project dragged on for left because they hadn’t been paid. Sadly pleonexia is alive and well in the construction industry and contractors know that the average owner builder, Mr and Mrs Nicefriendlypeople, are easy prey for their games. Lambs to the slaughter comes to mind. Such cases are common in Bali and inevitably the “builder” has been paid more than the work he has completed. He will have worked out that by running off now he will end up with more profit than if he finishes the project and he will avoid the most difficult period when he is doing the finishing work and trying to get final payment. Sometimes he may add insult to injury by demanding even more money, his argument being that the money paid is less than the amount of work completed. When a contractor walks away from a half finished job it leaves all sorts of problems. The project is likely to be considerably delayed and it may be difficult to find a new contractor willing to take on the mess that someone else has left. Unfortunately the sort of contractor who perhaps had planned all along to walk away from a half finished job may well be the sort of person that will have also cut corners in the work. So how do we protect ourselves? We use standardised systems that; if well set up, properly thought out and a rigidly applied; minimise the risks involved and keeps contractors in check. These systems use a Bill Of Quantities and a Schedule of Payments. A good Project Manager can set up and manage these systems for you. Bill Of Quantities A Bill of Quantities (or BoQ) is a detailed list of all the tasks that have to be completed to construct the project. Each part of the work is fully described and costed so everyone knows exactly what is to be done and how much it will cost. Let us look at a typical Bill Of Quantities and see what information and the level of detail you should expect. On the website at www.mrfixitbali.com/images/ sampleprogressreport.pdf you will see a sample report from a database designed for managing project progress and payments. The Bill Of Quantities is broken down into headings for each section of the work such as: • Site clearing and project setup • Foundations • Structure • Floor slabs • Walls • Roof and ceilings • Windows and doors • Electrical Installation • Plumbing Installation • Ceramic wall and floor tiling • Painting • Drainage • Water Supply We also need to add on: • Architect’s Fees (10%?) • Structural Engineers Fees • Construction Tax (10%) • Legal costs (IMB, contract fee, etc) Under each of these headings will be a breakdown of the tasks within that heading with the estimated costs. The tasks should describe the work to be done, the type or level of quality of the materials to be used and a quantity such as cubic meters (excavation, fill or concrete), square meters (tiling, roofing and painting) or per item (washbasins, toilets, doorhandles, stress pills, etc.). The price for a single unit and the total price for the totals needed for the project is also given. The description also should, where relevant cross refer back to the drawings in order to tie the specifications stated on the drawings as part of this document. This provides legal protection. The costs are totalled up to give us the TOTAL cost of the project. Alright so we now have our Bill of Quantities and this should become a part of the legal documentation that becomes part of the building contract. The builder must sign up to agree to construct according to this document. You might want to add a penalty clause should he not complete the contract, if he refuses such a clause this might ring warning bells. The Schedule of Payments Now we come to the important part, we have to determine a schedule of payments. We start by saying we’ll give you so much to get started. This gives the contractor some cash to pay for some materials and start up costs. Next we have to work out how we will carry on paying as the project proceeds. We have to make sure the contractor has enough money to carry on working but also make sure that if he heads for the hills we are not out of pocket. This might sound difficult but remember there is a profit margin for the contractor in each part of the project and we can use the profit margin on the work he has already completed as the advance for the cost he will incur on the next part. This means that after each payment is made you and the contractor are square, you have the work completed and he has his profit so far. It is advisable to avoid paying large amounts. If you have only 3 or 4 payments for the whole project the amount paid and the amount of project completion will vary to a far greater degree than if you use smaller, more frequent payments. Construction companies tend to use a more rigid approach. They will set milestones and pay only when the milestone is achieved. For example they may only pay for the roof when every part of the roof is completed and has been inspected and passed. Ok now the final stage is to manage the Payment Process. Before any payment is made the project is inspected and payment made according to the actual work done. You will need an engineer to go through the bill of quantities and check each line item to assess the percentage of completion. This is totalled up to give you the total financial value of the construction that has been completed. If you look at the sample file you will see that there is a column second from the right with the percentage complete entered which is then calculated into a monetary value for the amount of work completed in the right hand column. Armed with this information, some common sense and a healthy dose of assertiveness, you can now make sure you are not paying more than you should. A good contractor will understand all this. He/she will give you a detailed Bill of Quantities and will respect your desire to get progress inspections carried out before you release money. If you know you are not a very assertive person beware that the contractor may sense this and feel that he can exploit you. It might be best to find someone to represent you in dealing with making payments but make sure it is someone you trust. Look out for tell tale signs of dodgy dealings. Don’t let emotions take over, be methodical and never assume the contractor is your best friend and is going to be benevolent to you. Keep an eye out for vagueness or lack of detail in the Bill of Quantities. Excuses should ring alarm bells. If he cannot keep his workers this suggests there is a problem. If the staff walk off find out why and if they have not been paid you can bet your life the contractor will be dishonest with you. It is also well to remember that happy workers will do better work than unhappy workers. Protection comes from having aclear definition of what is to be done, what has been done and accurate costings for the two. Are You Planning To Build? - Take Great Care Copyright © 2020 Phil Wilson You can read all past articles of Fixed Abode at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz Previous “Fixed Abode” articles can be found subject indexed on our website at www.mrfixitbali.com. Opinions expressed are those of Phil Wilson. He can be contacted through the website or the office on 0361 288 789 or 08123 847 852. A building permit has to be obtained before construction of any building in Indonesia begins. The building permit is also known as an IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan, it specifies the approved initial design of the building but it also continues through the buildings life stating what the building can be used for. Here we look at what the IMB is, how you apply for one, the documents you will need and some notes about compliance with building regulations. The IMB or Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan IMB stands for Ijin Mendirikan Bangunan which literally means “permit to establish a building” commonly known as a “Building Permit”.It is an approval from the government to build a building. IMBs are important, very important. Make no mistake, after the land certificate the IMB is probably the most important document regarding properties in Indonesia. The building permit is not only a permit to carry out the initial building but it also continues through the building’s life as a registration document. The permit defines (through a pile of associated documents that are lodged with the application) the specification of the building that is or has been built and the purpose the building can be used for. All buildings in Bali should have an IMB Unfortunately many don’t. The IMB is the responsibility of the owner of the building. If you are the owner then it will be your responsibility, if you rent or lease a building it is your landlord’s responsibility. Do not buy or lease a building that does not have an IMB or you may have problems. If you lease a building that has an IMB and wish to use it for a different purpose than is stated on the IMB (say you want to use your building for keeping elephants or perhaps for night time activities involving “social networking” when it is currently registered as a private house) then the IMB must be changed. If a villa is to be rented out rather than used as a private residence you also probably need to be careful. Balinese people often do not bother getting an IMB but take note - they can get away with it. Don’t assume that you will be able to. Once a government official smells a walking ATM with a foreign passport you will (or will not) be surprised just how quickly compliance with the law can be officially urged. This may happen even more quickly should your neighbour not like elephants or does not appreciate the more subtle aspects of “social networking”. How to get an IMB or Building Permit Obtaining an IMB is really a part of the town planning process. Permits are issued by the Dinas Tata Ruang Kota dan Pemukiman which means the Department of Town Planning and Settlements. With the IMB certificate comes a metal plate rather like a car number plate to be mounted at the front of the building. Documents you will need To get an IMB it is necessary to submit a pile of documents that will include the following: • A land certificate including the relevant survey plan. • An ijing Kavling (permit to subdivide) if one is needed. • Correct land zoning for the building that is planned. • Drawings of the buildings that comply with local building regulations. • Structural and services drawings to make sure that the buildings have been properly designed and specified. • Signed permission from all owners of directly neigbouring properties. A common pitfall for unwary property buyers in Bali is the fact that, while there are many professional developers that do the right thing, there are quite a number that start building before they have obtained an IMB. This is illegal. I recently came upon what is, sadly, an all too common occurrence, a very expensive villa nearing completion which we were able to determine had no IMB. I suggest that if someone is going to spend perhaps a million dollars building a villa it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that a building permit is obtained beforehand. In fact it is hard to understand why developers or builders so often proceed without an IMB. If they comply with the regulations and obtain the permit at the start they will avoid problems and increased expense later on. Keep everything legal Many assume that financial lubrication will achieve anything but bear in mind three things: 1. The further the building process progresses, the larger the dose of lubricant that will be required. 2. The fact that someone (perhaps your developer) does not wish to seek an IMB before starting the building process is a sign to you, it immediately suggests a lack of integrity and further that something is probably not right – perhaps the design is not acceptable or there is not a full set of drawings.. 3. Times are changing, government is being cleaned up and lubricant is becoming a dirty concept, it may be that an IMB is obtained now but, beware, if the building doesn’t comply you could well have a problem later on. It appears that many IMB applications in Bali are “arranged” and “eased” through the system. This is not a good idea because the staff in government departments have a tendency to move on and a holder of an arranged IMB may suddenly find new staff have arrived and start to check the records. Remember that the drawings and specifications of your building submitted for the IMB remain on file and at any time in the future they may be pulled out and compared to the building. This is what has been happening in and around Singaraja in recent months where local authorities have been carrying out checks to make sure that houses have IMBs, that the building usage matches the IMB and also that the building taxes have been paid. Do not doubt the government’s resolve, a bad outcome can lead to demolition and several expatriates in that area have been warned, if they cannot resolve their issues they may well find themselves in trouble. Compliance with building regulations Compliance with building regulations is checked in the IMB process. For example it is policy that buildings should be no higher than the palm trees. How high is a palm tree, well, for implementation purposes, it is defined as five floors or 15 metres. There is, of course, one famous exception to this rule – the Grand Bali Beach Hotel which was built by the government in the 1960s before the “palm tree” rule was established. Building design must have elements of Balinese design The design of buildings is also checked in the IMB process. It is stated government policy enshrined in legislation that buildings are to have elements of traditional Balinese design in them. Building Permits industry centered in the West Java capital of Bandung. *For strong, tailor-made, Goodyear-welted boots (without paying European prices), check out well-known shoe/boot companies like Sagara, Jalan Sriwijaya, Winson, Txture, Junkard and Santalum make luxury foot ware that are quite popular in Japan and the U.S. among shoes enthusiasts. *Indonesian boots are interesting due to the construction, shapes and styles. The skill required to make a sturdy boot by hand takes at least five years to learn and the process of making a boot takes 2-3 days. *Indonesians consider the Caterpillar the ultimate high-quality boot. *The most popular Santalum boot is the Service boot, very similar to the Viberg service boot. *Bandung Collection shops, found in every sizeable city in Bali, sells high quality shoe ware at local prices. * Multipurpose cleaning tool The sapu lidi is a broom made from middle dried ribs/veins (lidi) of either coconut or areca palm fronds (sapu) tied together to form a hard broom. Different lengths and thicknesses of this traditional Indonesian and S.E. Asian “coconut” broom are used for specific purposes. You can take the spines from a larger broom apart and then tie them together again in desired sizes/thicknesses to serve a number of unique uses. Different types of sapu lidi are usually not interchangeable. If a certain sapu lidi is used to sweep the floor, it’s not used for the bed and vice versa. Younger, more flexible ones are used to clean mattresses, carpets, foam, kapok-stuffed pillows and to craft dinner plates (ingke in Balinese); older bound spines are used more for outside cleaning; younger ones are used to swat and brush your bed (tebah kasur in Indonesian; ngibas in Balinese) to remove dust and other debris to the floor. A sapu lidi can also be used as an insect swatter, for example to chase away mosquitoes before lowering the kelambu mosquito net. Smaller, thinly bound ones can reach into corners and under furniture. Short stubby strong ones are used for cleaning clogged grimy drains and gutters. Long flexible ones are used for sweeping dirt or paved yards, terraces, walkways and parking areas – a morning ritual that takes place across the whole archipelago. Attached to a long Q Ata Handbags. Wild ata grass root, indigenous to the Bali’s foothills, is so sturdy that it’s said to last 100 years. The material is much stronger than rattan because it is water, heat and insect resistant. On Bali, hand woven ata basketry has been developed into a fine art. Ata products, which come in all shapes and sizes, can take two months to handcraft (harvesting, peeling the outer layer, drying the weed by slow smoking, soaking in honey, weaving, applying protective coating, etc.), and are three times more expensive than rattan items. On the 2nd floor of Denpasar’s Kumbasari market, on the other side of the river from Pasar Badung, many small vendors sell cloth-lined 35-cm-diameter ata cylinder handbags (also called “Moon Bags”) for Rp100,000Rp150,000 (after bargaining), whereas buying one online, at Ubud’s tourist market and even at the source in Tengenan village of East Bali, costs Rp250,000-Rp300,000. Real ata grass artifacts have a natural warm golden color (rattan appears light beige), retains its tough outer layer (skin) and exudes a faint honey-like aroma. * Shoe Sense There was a time when Indonesian shoes were popular in Europe and S.E. Asia until the Vietnamese took over the market. Only China, India, Vietnam and Brazil are bigger footwear exporters than Indonesia, although Indonesia accounts for only 4.4% (US$4.85 billion in 2015) of global market share. *Dutch colonizers brought with them a love of durable leather footwear that resulted in an Asian boot Please send your budget ideas, bargain deals and money saving tips to pakbill2003@yahoo.com Copyright © 2020 Bill Dalton You can read all past articles of The Frugal Balinist at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz pole, a coconut broom is also used to clean ceilings of dust, spider webs, ant and hornet nests (as well as evil spirits). The strength of the tightly bound sapu lidi is also a symbol of national unity. * Unsung heroes Wardah cosmetic products are cheaper but just as good (and safe) as more expensive brands like Caring Colours by Martha Tilaar. *Teh Botol Less Sugar is not as sweet and is more refreshing than Teh Botol sweetened tea, sold everywhere, which is no longer bottled in glass but in plastic which imparts an unnatural flavour. Teh Kotak, on the other hand, is packaged in paper, thus has a more natural taste and is also more eco-friendly. The Pucuk is yet another more pleasant alternative. *Bango brand kecap manis (sweet soy sauce) is preferred by many over the ABC brand. This less chemicalized sauce is used to cook many iconic dishes like semur (Indonesian beef stew with potatoes and tofu), nasi goreng (fried rice) and mie goreng (fried noodles). It also serves as an indispensable condiment for the classic rice dish telur orak arik (scrambled eggs). *High-quality Sedap products are gaining in popularity among Indonesians because they are cheap and tasty. *Indonesian brands with foreign names are underrated because some people don’t know they’re made in Indonesia. This goes for the famous Rockport shoe line and the Hoka-Hoka Bento Japanese restaurant chain that is actually an Indonesian franchise. The clothing company, Executive, is also Indonesian, as is the “cool” cafe Excelso. The Frugal Balinist