Thread: Kuningan on The Beach

ahhh, the filthy gots.

Right now in seminyak/legian they are "cleaning things up" (on the surface anyway). The gots i have seen around where i live i believed to be about 50cm deep. For the last 2 weeks, they have had teams of workers shovelling the gunk out of the bottoms of the gots and stacking it beside them on the side of roads. Of an afternoon the rubbish trucks come along and pick it all up. The gots are now about 1m deep due to the scum they have removed. The mess on the side of the road they are pulling from the gots consists of plastic bags, disposable diapers, broken bottles, cans, rocks, mud and a host of other unidentifiable crap. One can also see the odd rice sawah they still have arounfd here here draining into the gots as well, no doubt carrying resdues from fertilizers and insectices long ago banned by most other countries. There are also plastice pipes running from residences disharging directly into the gots....no need to guess what goodies are are being fed into the gots through these.

As a result, the flooding situation on the streets is slightly eased as the gots can drain out to the sea faster due to the increased volume they can carry do to the extra depth they have.

While the short term flooding is temporarily eased due to this, the massive problem of untreated dischrge into the the ocean goes unchecked. No prob if you dont use the ocean (or dont eat seafood!)

Im back on antibioticss at the moment with an inner ear infection after surfing the beaches around seminyak....the link between the got discharge to the ocean and the ear infection is irrefutible.

The entire "got" system, used all over Indo, drains untreated into the ocean. Indonesia has no "service corridor"in their street system. (this is a 3 metre tract of land either side of any road , used for above and underground services such as power,comms, sewerage, rain draning, etc and also used for road signage etc). The service corridor here in Indo is UNDER the road or wherever it can fit, where it in fact exists. (thus the constant road excavations.....NOT road works, but accessing the services UNDER the roads).

There is no hope of ever changing the got system unless the Indo govt claims tens of thousands of homes all over Bali and starts to implement a maintainable service corridor. Then they will have to establish a real rubbish collection service (read P26 of last BA edition on rubbish collection and associated fees based on ethnicity....a touchy subject i know after my daring to mention the diff in golf prices recently!), and most importantly, EDUCATE.

Education alone is not enough without having the infrastucture.....and that just aint gonna happen.

So if your'e a surfer or ocean user in Indo.....in addition to your sunscreen, wax and sunglasses, youd better pack a 3 day course of Azithromycin for your pending ear infection (cheap at least!), and youd better get used to it....that is unless you see the govt claiming tens of thousands of roadside homes all over Bali and implementing a real service corridor.

A "quick course" of Azithromycin 250mg and a bottle of Otopain( pain killing/antibiotic eardrop) can br bought at most Apotiks for around 150,000 RP (harga "not in the mood to bargain...just give me the medicine" and will only take 3 days to finish.