Bali Animal Welfare Association

You might have seen my blog post I did last night about my Indonesia trip. This is a little carry on from that.

Whilst we were there, we visited a coffee plantation. As soon as we got inside, we saw some small monkeys and baby deer inside a very tiny and dirty cage. All of the animals were visibly distressed. I asked the staff how often the animals were let out of their cages and they said never. 

At first I didn’t want to go near the animals as I didn’t want the staff to see another tourist fawning over ‘cute animals’ in horrific conditions, so I held back. After a while I decided that I would approach the cages so that I could hopefully capture what would be some emotive portraits of them, that would make people want to donate to the Bali Animal Welfare Association to help their cause.

I was obviously pretty upset seeing the conditions these beautiful animals were kept in, but the thing that upset me most was that I had unknowingly contributed to the cruel practice by visiting the plantation in the first place, as I’m usually pretty careful about these things. 

The BAWA website has some great info about responsible tourism, which I wish I had read up on before we went to Indonesia. A lot of it is common sense but there are some tips in there for stopping further cruelty in places where you wouldn’t think it existed.

We saw a few other incidents of animal cruelty in Bali, and I’m ashamed to say that most of them were for the tourists benefit.

We had an absolutely beautiful time in Indonesia, but what would make it even more beautiful would to be abolish the cruel practices against animals, as with a lot of places (the whole world basically). That’s a pretty big ask, but any donations to the BAWA association will help a little as well as travelers who are clued up on responsible tourism.

Here is a link to donate :)

http://bawabali.com/donate-to-bawa/

Indonesia

Here are some of my travel photos from a little trip we recently had to the island of Bali, Indonesia. We spent the majority of our time in Uluwatu, which felt just like home. We had a few days in Seminyak as well, which was lovely but I felt a bit like I couldn't breathe there, just really on edge, but as soon as we got down to Uluwatu I felt completely settled. What a beautiful and spiritual place full of smiles. Anyone was up for a conversation, and they weren't even trying to sell me things most of time. Except for sometimes, but they were still lovely. 

I seem to have a bit of a penchant for photographing doors, textures, and little details when I'm travelling. I like these things, but when we went to leave our accommodation my partner said to me 'so have you got lots of photos of the place' and I said yes, he replied "but have you actually got any proper photos or just photos of old locks on doors". I told him of course I had taken photos of not just details of the place, with a 'do you think I'm stupid' face, and then quickly went and took some wide angle shots of the accommodation because I hadn't actually taken any.
I suppose I'm just a person who really loves little details, and Bali is just full of them, unlike home... like all the twisty roots on plants, and the moss growing out of statues, and the handcrafted old walls, and the organic, rough textures of basically everything just really fascinated me and I found that those things were what I wanted to record.

The Uluwatu area is full of cliffs, and when the tide goes out late afternoon it leaves lots of little caves and rock pools to explore. I can spend hours just wandering up and down rock pools and finding all the ocean's treasures and following little fish around so I was right at home. The only difference to being at home was that the fish were neon blue and yellow, the  overhanging rocks would drip into the pools (a lovely accompanying sound) and occasionally you had to avoid a monkey that had come down for a beach wander/handbag raid. Monkeys..... so cute but so scary.

Once we got the hang of the scooter and the optional white line rules, we went for a big drive down to the south coast. We came to the edge of a jungle/cliff where a huge resort was being built, and there was a little wooden sign that said "Lams Beach", pointing to the roughest goat track I had ever seen, right down the cliff. We looked off the edge of the cliff to see a beautiful beach, no else in sight and a shipwreck....sold. So we trekked down this little path into the jungle which had been very crudely carved out of the cliff down to the beach. On the way down we found a little cave which had a small traditional Balinese bed in it and a few other things, and also what looked to be some World War 2 relics. Pretty special. Down on the beach there were a couple of fishing huts that clearly hadn't been used in a while, and a whole lotta rubbish. That was very sad, seeing the effects of humans on what was such a beautiful, untouched location. Shortly after getting down to the beach, we looked back up and cliff was on fire, which was not so great but it went out after a while. Had my heart beating pretty fast for a few minutes though. My heart also got a workout when we went to climb back up the cliff, and had to face two of my worst fears - cows and monkeys (I'm slightly ridiculous). Neither cow nor monkey came near us though. Great adventure! 


Beautiful place, beautiful stay....... beautiful doors.
paris x