The ABS said the total number of Australian travellers increased by nearly 65 percent to a total of roughly half a million.

In 2006, Indonesia was the ninth choice for Australian travellers. Other top destinations for Australian tourists are New Zealand, the United States, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Competitive international airfares are said to be one reason for Australians taking more overseas holidays.

The number of international arrivals to the archipelago’s main tourist location, Bali, fell dramatically after the October 2002 and October 2005 Bali bombings, as travellers feared further attacks.

The highly publicised drug trial of Australian Schapelle Corby also deterred tourists. Corby is currently serving a 20-year sentence for drug smuggling in Bali but many Australians still believe she is innocent.

The so-called “Bali nine” case involving a nine members of a drug ring caught trying to smuggle 8.2 kg of heroin from Bali into Australia in April 2005 has also created fierce debate. Six of them are currently awaiting execution in Bali.

The Indonesian government has a goal to attract seven million tourist arrivals during this year’s Visit Indonesia programme and expects to make some 6.7 billion dollars in foreign exchange revenue from tourism this year.

Last year, Indonesia received around 5.5 million international visitors, which was half a million short of official targets, but still generated around 5.3 billion dollars in foreign exchange income.

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/CultureAndMedia/?id=1.0.1781299010

BALI (AP): The “Bali Roadmap” for new climate negotiations leads to one address and one date: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and Jan. 20, 2009.

That’s when a new occupant of the White House will be sworn into office, and when a fresh U.S. team, with what many expect to be a new attitude, will take up the negotiating mandate issued here Saturday at the end of the two-week U.N. climate conference.

For seven years, these annual sessions have witnessed a long-running diplomatic feud between the U.S. administration of President George W. Bush, dead set against international obligations for industrial nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, and most of the rest of the world, which favors them.

The faceoff played out again here in Bali this past week, when the U.S. delegation blocked an effort to insert into the “roadmap” an ambitious suggested negotiating goal for the next two years – emissions cuts of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

The “emissions cutters” were spurned again, in a repeat of what has happened consistently since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which mandated relatively small reductions but was rejected by the U.S.

Time now may be on the cutters’ side.

From California to New England, U.S. state governments are enacting their own mandatory caps on carbon dioxide and other industrial and transportation gases blamed for global warming. Scores of U.S. cities have adopted Kyoto-style targets, trimming emissions via “green” building codes, conversion of municipal fleets to hybrid vehicles, energy-saving lighting and other measures.

Judging from recent opinion polls, natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the southeastern U.S. drought and the California wildfires apparently are awakening more and more Americans to the potential perils of climate change.

“The majority of the United States is with you,” California’s environment secretary, Linda Adams, told the hundreds of Bali conference delegates last week. “We know that climate change affects all of us.”

In Washington, too, there’s movement after years of inaction. A U.S. Senate committee has approved the first legislation mandating caps on greenhouse gases and sent it to the full Senate.

“What you see is a new direction coming,” said David Doniger, a veteran climate policy analyst with the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council. “And this new direction is a very clear indication of where our policy is going in the future.”

That policy will be set primarily by the new president, and the Democratic presidential candidates and at least two of the Republicans – Arizona’s Sen. John McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee – have endorsed mandatory emissions caps.

To many at Bali, the U.S. election calendar dominates the climate calendar. Even the diplomatically cautious and precise Yvo de Boer, U.N. climate chief, managed to hint that delegates should bide their time in the coming 2008-2009 negotiations.

“I really hope that that is a discussion” – about emissions reduction levels – “taken up toward the end of that two-year debate,” he told reporters.

But decisive U.S. action, even after Bush, is far from assured.

“The real problem is Congress,” Michael R. Bloomberg, New York’s climate-activist mayor, told a Bali gathering this past week. “They’re unwilling to face any issue that has costs or antagonizes any group of voters.” In fact, the emissions-caps bill may face trouble in the full Senate.

Even swift action may come too late for some.

Rising seas, expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melted land ice, are encroaching on low-lying island states, especially in the western Pacific. In these islanders’ minds, the roadmaps and new directions were needed a decade or more ago.

“We are very concerned that there is so little progress,” Kete Ioane, environment minister of the Cook Islands, told the Bali assembly days ago. “We are merely asking for our survival, nothing more, nothing less.”(***) www.baliblog.com

You can try food at the food stalls or wrung available locally in Bali. One that I can recommend is a food stall located just north of Ubud. (So, if you are staying in bud, there is no reason not to try the Bali local food.) Located at Kedewatan village, the Warung Nasi Ayam (Rice with Chicken Stall) belongs to Ibu Mangku, this place is popular for the locals.

As the name implies, the food available here is steamed Bali rice and many varieties of chicken recipes. When you order the Nasi Ayam, you will be served with a plate of rice with sliced chickens, fried chickens with hot spicy sauce known as sambal, fried nuts and long beans. For Balinese, it is quite delicious. For you it can be quite spicy. So, if you are not used to it, it can be a different “hot” experience.

“Therefore, we will build a park covering one hectare of land for the games which will take place on October 18-26, 2008,” Indonesian Sports Committee (KONI) vice chairman for foreign relations, Indra Kartasasmita, said here Tuesday.

It was reported the 45 countries had confirmed their plans to to take part in Asian Beach Games 2008 when they participated in the Asian Winter Games held in Changchun, China, last February 2007.

The decision to choose Bali as the venue for the regional event was also taken to help revive the tourism industry in the world renown recreational island after it was devastated by deadly bomb explosions in 2002 and 2005.

China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, India, Iran and Indonesia are among countries which have confirmed their plans to take part in the sports event.

Source: www.antara.co.id/en

The village of Trunyan is squeezed tightly between the lake and the outer crater rim of Batur, an almighty volcano in Kintamani. This is a Bali Aga village, inhabited by descendants of the original Balinese, the people who predate the arrival of the Hindu Majapahit kingdom in the 16th century. It is famous for the Pura Pancering Jagat temple, but unfortunately visitors are not allowed inside. There is also a couple of traditional Bali Aga-style dwellings, and a large banyan tree, which is said to be more than 1,100 years old. At Kuban sub-village close to Trunyan is a mysterious cemetery that is separated by the lake and accessible only by boat, there is no path along the steep walls of the crater rim.

Unlike the Balinese people, Trunyan people do not cremate or bury their dead, but just lay them out in bamboo cages to decompose, although strangely there is no stench. A macabre collection of skulls and bones lies on the stone platform and the surrounding areas. The dead bodies don’t produce bad smells because of the perfumed scents from a huge Taru Menyan tree growing nearby. Taru means ‘tree’ and Menyan means ‘nice smell’. The name of Trunyan was also derived from these two words. The women from Trunyan are prohibited from going to the cemetery when a dead body is carried there. This follows the deeply rooted belief that if a woman comes to the cemetery while a corpse is being carried there, there will be a disaster in the village, for example a landslide or a volcanic eruption. Such events have been frequent in the village’s history, but whether women had anything to do with it is a matter of opinion.