Word: indonesia
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...Travel Warning, Embassy Warning: U.S. citizens urged to defer non-essential travel to Indonesia...
...Almost every day I find several such messages in my email inbox. Since I live in Indonesia, which has been in a lukewarm but fairly consistent state of conflict for the past five years, I don?t find their presence particularly jarring. First the Asian financial crisis hit us in the mid-90s, and the rupiah went from 2,500 per dollar to 11,000 per dollar in about 90 days. Then came the anti-Suharto revolution, and the beginnings of Indonesian democracy. Then the presidential election, where a plurality of popular votes went to Megawati but the politicians...
...Every crisis has brought new embassy travel warnings to my inbox. And every time a travel warning for Indonesia arrives, I hear a collective murmur from my multinational friends here, whose ranks include indigenous Balinese villagers increasingly dependent on tourism, Chinese-Balinese businesspeople and American and European expats working in the large tourist hotels. The murmur is always the same. "Tell them Bali is different?" they urge me. "Tell them Bali is safe, even happy...
...Bali is an island in the nation of Indonesia, which itself is composed of 13,000 islands straddling the equator, in roughly the same time zone as Hong Kong and Vietnam. Bali is about the size of Delaware, with a population of 3 million exuberant Hindus. To the west of Bali, separated by a strait of just several hundred yards, is the island of Java, which is about the size of California, with a population of 100 million Muslims. Stretching east is an archipelago with hundreds of small to medium-sized islands, islands with names like Sumba, Sumbawa, Lombok, Flores...
...tiny speck right in the middle of the incredible rainbow of cultural diversity that is Indonesia, Bali has a happy role as the tourism center of Indonesia. Traditionally an isolated society of fierce warriors, Balinese culture was shaped by a wave of kings and princes who crossed from Java to Bali about 700 years ago to escape the invading Muslims. They set up their kingdoms in Bali and then defended their turf so fiercely that even the Dutch did not bother to subjugate them until the 20th century...