You're my hero! Wow! I am so jealous of this experience. This is a million times better than a zoo!! How I wish I could go there! Keep up the good work. These little stories are great and the photos are sweet. I'll share them with my ten year old daughter today. :)
Really nice blog! Great photos... A few points I'd make on your closing paragraph, in that part of Indonesia $5 day is a great wage, 5x the average plus the money they make from tourists. It's more like a westerner taking a dangerous mining job at $500 a day, the risk of black lung vs the great wages in the short term. I can see why an uneducated guy from Ijen would be tempted by this job, lots of unemployment not much alternative. Pretty much every adult male in Indonesia smokes, the tobacco companies have a lot to answer for across the whole of Asia, that being the norm I don't think it indicates disregard for their families... just another symptom of poor people willing to trade the long term for the short!
If $5 a day is a great wage for them - it explains why they do it. But I still consider them self-killers. I wouldn't exchange half of my life for any money.
HOW LUCKY ARE YOU? "It has been my dream to look into the crater of an active volcano and now it has come true"...couldn't agree more...scary but stunning!
Must see, Must do's... Very insightfull post! You are right, people are triggered to go and see something especially if many guide books rave about it. I have mainly traveled in Indonesia, so I haven't had the chance to see the ricefields in Thailand, Philippines etc. But somehow Bali's ricefield is an amazing sight maybe because of the whole picture around it which is mainly created by the Balinese people who for instance pray to the rice goddess every day and place offerings for a good harvest, the nearby temples where the villagers conduct colorful religious ceremonies and there are many places where you can walk through the ricefields. Unfortunately the tourism has had a negative impact on this famous landscape as hotels and resorts are building on this land. Hopefully the Balinese government will soon realize that rice might be more important than the income for tourism and will stimulate and support farmers more in the near future...
> Hopefully the Balinese government will soon realize that rice might be more important than the income for tourism
I think there is no such problem really ) If rice fields are one of the tourist sites - the more tourists will come to see them, the more the local government will be interested in preserving these landscapes - it will benefit for both tourists and farmers.
Hi :) It's a few years already since I left the country where I was born - never to return there. In this blog I want to share my travel experience, my thoughts and impressions. And I want to tell you how much my ideas about the world got changed. When you travel you see that in different countries people live very differently, and with time you are no longer stuck to the stereotypes of only one nation, you can choose your own life style taking the best from all others.
My big interest is psychology, so I'll write not only about places but also about people who live t... full info
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Daniel Doughty
Nice pictographs!