Warning: This post is about the environment...

I confess... I'm not what one would call an environmentalist.

I'm not actively anti-environment or anything. And when I think about it, lots of things I do routinely are environmentally-friendly - at home, I don't use the car very much, take short showers, rarely buy bottled water and try to turn lights off.

But I'm not switching every appliance off at the wall, eschewing meat and insisting on using only clean solar energy. And I still occasionally drive the car five minutes to the supermarket...

Here in Bali, it's much the same. We're not driving (ok, a few taxis here and there), or hiring motorbikes and make a point of refusing plastic bags...

The bottled water takes a bit more effort though and mostly because the island is so poorly set up for it. According to the signs posted all over Bali, there are 30 million water bottles used every month in Bali. That's EVERY MONTH!! It's enough to make even the most buried environmental conscience shudder a little.

Part of the reason so many bottles are used is because you can't drink tap water here, so the vast, vast majority of cafes serve water in sealed plastic bottles as a way of assuring their paranoid customers that the bottle has not be refilled by the cafe out of the tap. Having spent a bit of time here now, I cannot imagine any cafe cheating it's customers out of clean water, but unfortunately the sealed plastic bottles seems to be the status quo now.

(just as an aside, to those journalists - aka agents of the Australian tourism board - who write articles bashing Bali's allegedly dirty beaches, I actually think it's pretty impressive how clean the place is considering the amount of rubbish generated by tourism)

To avoid filling the streets with used plastic bottles, Phil and I each brought our own water bottles over here. We have a water cooler in our apartment with a 20 litre water bottle which gets refilled. It's incredibly cheap (about $2.20 per 20L bottle) and easy to fill up the bottle in the morning and take it out with us during the day.

Quite a few stores have also realized that the number of plastic bottles is a problem and now sell metal drink bottles next to a big sign reminding us of the 30 million bottles a month statistic. One small problem... there's virtually nowhere to fill them up!! Yup, not one of the stores which sells the water bottles also sells refills. While it's fine for us to bring out your water bottle filled in the morning, if you need more water, it's straight back to the plastic bottles. And most tourists wouldn't even have access to a water supply like we do.

It would be so easy for a store to have a 20L bottle and sell refills for $1 or so. A couple of places in Ubud do it, but so far I haven't found one place here in the south that does.

Even the gym I have joined here doesn't provide water, but rather sells plastic bottles, despite also selling the metal water bottles at reception. I just outright refuse to buy water in plastic bottles at the gym, so often get to the bottom of my water bottle and just fall into an increasingly uncomfortable state of dehydration... geez, and I wondered where all those headaches were coming from!

I have been thinking that it might be nice to do something useful over here and I've been trying to think of a way to get more stores/cafes to sell water in a sustainable way. I could drop some flyers at the venues which sell the metal water bottles suggesting they invest in a water cooler and charge customers a small amount for refills, but flyers just seem so lame... Anyone got a better idea??? I just know you guys are more creative then me!!

Wow, what a rant! I did warn you that this post was about the environment, but its ended up even more altruistic than I'd intended!!

Don't worry though, if you come for a visit to Bali, you can shower as long as you like - especially now that rainy season has hit. This is the cafe I'm writing in as the midday deluge hits:





The whole courtyard ended up filling lime a giant bath. I love it - it feels so cleansing.

Finally, I had to share with you.... cheese TimTams.

I haven't been brave enough to try them, but I'm pretty sure they're filled with cheddar rather than something sweet like marscapone...eeewwww...




On the upside, I think they're halal... Phew, right??

- Posted using the drops from a thousand rain clouds