New Products on Raru
We’ve added lots of new products to RaruDesign.com in the past couple of days and are giving the site a little makeover. We plan to keep with the same simple theme but add a few new nifty functions. Our plan is to expand the shop by adding more vintage home decor items.
Some of our favorite new items include:
An amazing Hmong Hilltribe Textile handbag
and some gorgeous ikat pillowcases
Browse around and enjoy!
What to buy in Bali: Batiks
What to buy in Bali: Bali has many fantastic hand-made goods including baskets, textiles, and jewelry. My favorite Indonesian textiles are batiks and ikats. (more about ikats later).
Batiks are created using woven natural fiber cloth, usually cotton or silk. Hot wax is then applied to the fabric in stages alternating with dipping the fabric in dye. The fabric is eventually boiled to remove the wax but often remains a bit stiff until it has been washed repeatedly. Batiks are produced in other countries as well, but Indonesian batiks have unique and incredibly intricate patterns.
This photo shows an artist diligently applying the wax to fabric in order to create a batik.
This blurry picture shows some blocks used to make block printed batiks. These blocks are metal but many are also carved. The block is dipped in wax and then pressed onto the fabric, like a stamp.
This photo is of an almost complete batik. It is almost covered in wax, and has been dyed several times.
The Airport: Catching a cab
You’ve got your visa, and some cash (if not read the last two posts).
If you need to take a cab, upon exiting the airport there is a window directly to the right of the exit door where you can pay for a taxi. Pay at this window and you will get a fixed rate on your cab fare and pay far less than if you simply exit and start heckling with the cab drivers. After you pay the fare at the window, men will grab your bags and walk you to a cab. When we exited one man grabbed one bag each, so we had a gaggle of men carrying our bags. When we reached the cab 50ft later, they expected individual tips. We tipped them well and yet they still gave us a hard time. Saying “you know this is only 1 dollar etc” Which is a generous tip for carrying 1 bag 50 ft. We also didn’t have much small change (since we had just left the ATM). Cab fare to a hotel in the Legian Beach area was 70,000 rupiah ($7). A ride all the way to Ubud is more like $27 or 270,000 rupiah.
Streetbikes are also available for hire and are definitely the cheapest way to get around.
The Airport: Getting Money (Rupiah)
Now you are through the visa area, and you will walk past a maze of money changers on your way to get your luggage and exit the airport. You will need Rupiah if you are going to exit the airport and hire local transportation (cab or motorbike). Money changers are famous for ripping off tourists, and for slight of hand, so if you use one make sure you use your own calculator and don’t hand the money back after you have counted it.
In general I recommend traveling with an ATM card to get cash. There are plenty of ATMs in Bali and they you don’t need to be carrying a bunch of cash. Traveler’s checks are accepted mostly by banks, which are bit more time consuming than ATMs. Also most large scale transactions can be carried out with credit cards.
There is also a group of bank ATMs available to get Rupiah and they will likely give you the best rates. If you can, check with your bank before you leave home to find out what the fee is for international transactions, some cards charge minimums or up to 4% on each transaction, whichever is higher. It is best to know the exchange rate approximately, to help you figure out how much to take from the ATM so check out the signs posted outside of the money changing booths for the rate or look before you leave home because ATMs will display amounts in Indonesian Rupiah. Indonesian Rupiah are worth about 10,000 to the US dollar. One trick that helped me remember the currency exchange is that one million Indonesian rupiah equals 100 US dollars. So when you start talking about millions of rupiah, you are talking hundreds of dollars.
For details on snagging transport outside of the airport see the next post.
The Airport: Do I need a visa to go to Bali?
People presenting passports from some countries currently don’t require visas to enter Bali, Indonesia
- Brunei Darussalam
- Chile
- Hongkong Special Administrative Region
- Macao Special Administrative Region,
- Malaysia
- Morocco
- Peru
- Philippines
- Singapore
- Thailand
- Vietnam
Everyone else does. People presenting passports from the following 63 countries are able to get visas upon entering Bali, Indonesia.
- Algeria
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Bahrain
- Belgium
- Brazil
- Bulgaria
- Cambodia
- Canada
- Cyprus
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Egypt
- Estonia
- Fiji
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- Iceland
- India
- Iran
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Kuwait
- Laos
- Latvia
- Libya
- Liechensteia
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Maldives
- Malta
- Mexico
- Monaco
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Oman
- Panama
- People’s Republic of China
- Poland
- Portugal
- Qatar
- Romania
- Russia
- Saudi Arabia
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- South Africa
- South Korea
- Spain
- Suriname
- Switzerland
- Sweden
- Taiwan
- The Netherlands
- Tunisia
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States of America
These visas cost $25 US and are given at the airport in Bali. The visas last up to 30 days but can be extended for another 30 days for an additional $25. The fancy visa stamp also takes up two full pages in your passport (as in the entire space on two facing pages), and you have to have room for it in your passport. Also your passport needs to be valid for 6 months after the expiration date of the visa (30 days), or they wont issue a visa to you. If you want to stay longer than 60 days, you have to leave Indonesia before returning.
Getting the visa in the airport is relatively fast, there are 6 counters to process incoming visitors and it probably took 10 minutes including waiting in line when I was there. There is an ATM that dispenses US dollars before the visa counters, but the visa administrators do not give change and you must have US dollars.
To read details about what happens next upon arrival in Bali, check out my other airport posts. (where to get money, and how to get a cab)
Bali is for lovers
Bali is for lovers, especially lovers of shopping. I didn’t really know what to expect when I was invited to go on a trip to Bali by Aunt B. One minute we were talking about how cut the onions for the soup and the next minute she casually mentioned that she had an extra ticket for a trip to Bali. Little did she know I would pounce like a komodo dragon (they are really good at pouncing). I didn’t even know where Bali was exactly, but I had to jump at the chance to get out of the Pacific Northwest for January and into what I hoped would be a warmer dryer climate. I looked up Bali on Wikipedia after I told my travel plan to my parents who asked some basic parental questions and I realized how embarrassingly little I knew about the place I was going to be visiting. The first major Wiki breakthrough was that Bali isn’t its own country (thank goodness I read the Wiki article before talking to anyone else) but is one of the 17,508 islands that comprise Indonesia. The second Wiki breakthrough was that Bali was a peaceful place full of happy smiling people. Pretty much as soon as I had learned these two satisfying facts I decided to push the Bali trip into the back of my mind in hopes remaining focused enough to finish my graduate degree and defend my thesis in December.
Four days before the trip I turned in the final draft of my thesis but still di
dn’t take the time to read the guidebook my parents had so lovingly mailed from Amazon.com. I was taking full advantage of the fact that I would be travelling with another more experienced traveler who had not only invited me on the adventure, but was also going to be doing some “business” while in Bali. At the time I really couldn’t imagine what business we could be doing in Bali other than drinking Singapore Slings and applying gratuitous amounts of sun-block, but I soon found out.
What we were doing in Bali was sourcing, or a shopping trip at the professional level.
Aunt B not only has designed clothing, home goods and textiles for some of the most well known designers and companies, she has sourced the construction of these items from places like India, China, Vietnam and Europe. Now with her own luxury design company, B needed to source high quality handmade items in smaller batches and that was what we were doing in Bali.
Shopping for goods made in far flung places is easy, but finding the really good stuff, determining if it is the real stuff, not getting ripped off, and bringing it all home is not as easy, and is the subject of this blog. Sourcing has become a passion of mine and beginning with Bali I’ll discuss importing, shipping and locating the best goods, jewelry, textiles, furniture, and antiques for the best prices from around the world.