Paradise is an Outside Mandi…., with Relating Optional
For upward of 25 years I have spent around 60 percent of my time in Hong Kong. For the past dozen years or so, having built a house here, it has been Bali. Much the time I’ve commuted between the two, though latterly I’ve now been forced to include Los Angeles where I now find myself spending 3 months of the year, but that’s circumstance, not choice.
In many ways Bali and Hong Kong make the ideal combination. First, the weather. In Hong Kong, it has to be said the climate is not the greatest. The summer is long, hot and humid. Spring is rainy and humid and late Winter is cold and drizzly. In Hong Kong the tendency is to spend far too much time indoors, in positively Arctic air-conditioning. In fact if you don’t make determined efforts, you find yourself spending your life going from air-conditioned home by air-conditioned car to air-conditioned office, to air-conditioned gym, with visits to air-conditioned restaurants, clubs and shopping malls, back to air-conditioned home. If you are strict with yourself, you can have interludes of “fresh air”, though that is a commodity not easily come by in Hong Kong, with it’s heavily polluted skies and waters. You could say, that for nine months of the year Hong Kong’s weather is unpleasant with about three months that are tolerable to nice.
Living Al Fresco
Contrast that with Bali. When Hong Kong is at its worst Bali is at its best. Bali has at least 10 months of good climate and it’s never really unpleasant for very long, except on those freak years when it just rains, and rains…. and rains, and we all mope about, eyes dilated with 1,000 yard stares. But that hasn’t happened in a while. For three to four months of the year, it’s just blissful. Sunny blue skies, a cool constant breeze that kisses the skin, the distant clatter of the kites up aloft, the sheer greenness of it all and the space to breathe. Though I have to say, we seem to have been a bit short-changed weatherwise this year. Best of all, we get to do most of our living outdoors. Where else in the world can you remember being able to do that? Not one for damp sheets our household hasn’t dispensed with air-conditioning entirely. The bedrooms are air-conditioned, we have a den that is, and a place for winter clothes. Except for sleeping, 90% of our time is spent in the fresh air. And that is perhaps the biggest blessing of all - the air really is fresh and so far, you are unlikely to come out in a rash or need a stomach pump if you go swimming. In Bali you can have that rare and most wonderfully expanding experience, at least for most of those of Northern European extraction, of having your very own open-air bathroom.
Both Bali and Hong Kong are very special places on this Earth. There is absolutely nowhere else quite like them. The character of each place could not be more different and yet, to my mind, more complementary. Hong Kong is a great international business city, topographically dramatic (when you can see it), and culturally dynamic with a very distinct buzz all of its own, that has actually gotten better post-1997. Bali is all the things Hong Kong is not. It is laid back, enjoys a homogeneous depth of art, religion and culture that no one could accuse Hong Kong of. As for a place of business? Bali showers the visitor with blessings if you come to kickback, but the minute you stick around and particularly if you get into achievement mode, you will be tested. For the more rajassic of us, this is just another blessing in disguise.
Only Connect….
In Hong Kong things work. The infrastructure, the bureaucracy, getting your computer or your plumbing fixed, whatever. It is quick and relatively seamless. Hong Kong is a corporate paradise, and while it never was as laissez faire as touted, you are not dogged by regulation or corruption at every turn. In Hong Kong people mind their own business and get on with their lives. In Bali, everything works, but in a very different way and if you don’t find that out, it will drive you bonkers. Nothing is ever as good, or as bad as it seems. Nothing lasts. Everything is fluid. For the more linear-minded of us we can pretend all we like, but if we don’t flow with it for real we are going to make heavy weather of things. And for some of us, horror of horrors, we have to relate! Not just to our nearest and dearest, to our colleagues and associates, but to everyone! The tinker the tailor and the candlestick maker. For those of us to whom universal serial relating comes as something of an effort, consider it is as yet another of Bali’s blessings, or better move on.
The fundamental adjustment it seems to me, for Westerners raised and educated from childhood in the theory, if not the practice of common law and “democracy”, is this. We believe that we have a God-given right to do as we please, provided there is not a law to say we cannot. Despite the obvious fact that the rich are different, we like to believe that we are all equal before the law. In most of the rest of the world, in Asian societies, in Russia, the Middle East, it is not like that at all (except that bit about the rich). You do not have the right to do anything. You need a license from someone. That means that almost anyone can come and shake you down, right down to the pettiest official. Most of us Westerners don’t like this at all and find it deeply threatening. But in actual fact in a place like Bali it is just different, no better and no worse. Instead of spelling out exactly what you can and cannot do in a thousand laws and regulations that make lawyers rich, you just have to pay somebody something and be “licensed”. Of course this is subject to abuse and foreigners make easy targets and attract a different tariff, but by and large it works and you can do almost anything you want when “licensed” and probably a lot quicker too. Contrast this with most countries in the West. Why do you think it is that you can’t put a new loo in your house without getting planning permission and being turned down, while local businessman and Rotarian, Joe Bloggs, gets away with godawful liquor stores all over town?
China without the Grease….
In a sense, Hong Kong is an almost perfect cross-cultural society, a Chinese city with all the benefits of the West. It has a quick and clean bureaucracy. You can renew a passport, ID card or driving license cheaply and in next to no time at all. Unlike Mainland China and Singapore you can say what you want without let or hindrance. You can start and run a company without being taxed into oblivion or being bogged down in red tape. Shanghai may be reclaiming its title as the commercial capital of China and have a buzz all of its own but there, none of the above holds true. They have even developed an educated middle class that seems to be holding its own against the diktat of Beijing. All they need to do is clean up their ecological act and the place would be dam’ near as good as it could be. But that may be expecting too much.
So when the pace, the noise, the crowds, and sheer exuberance of the place palls, and you pine for a slower gentler pace and bags of space, when you want blue skies, clean air and a profusion of green, in fact when you want a proper home and not apartment living, it’s off to Bali. Or for many Hong Kongites it’s Phuket, but that’s not a contest in my book.
Green Lung with Broadband?
Bali may be changing, in many ways for the better and in some ways that are sad to see, but If Bali can become the green lung with broadband for Asians and expatriates in S.E. Asia, not to mention Jakarta’s denizens, to the benefit of all it’s people, as opposed to the heavier depredations of yet more mass tourism, then that is all to the good, whatever the retro bores may say. Though they do have a point when it comes to some of the tack being sold as holiday homes, I readily agree.
And then, when all this fresh air and relating becomes a bit much, or organic things are begin to grow on you as it were, it’s off to Hong Kong, or even LA, which is where I pen this. Not a lot of chance of either here, the fresh air and relating I mean.
