If you go to Bali I believe you should not just avoid the anti-Balinese Indonesian businesses, but also the anti-Balinese foreign expatriate owned or operated businesses too. Be warned though, Bali's nasty expats are very adept at coming over all Balinese friendly and charming on the Internet; it is not until you know what questions to ask that exposes their true selfish wannabe colonial ways and not until you meet them face-to-face that you develop a sudden need to be someplace else. I want to add history shows my distaste for the Bali expat brigade began long before my legal problems in Indonesia and that I am not alone in my views.

The more I became exposed to Bali's expat community the more I realize the rancid Indonesian pond not just encouraged life on the bottom to surface near the top but even attracted it to the pond in the first place.

I want to say at this point that not every expatriate on Bali or in Indonesia is either anti-Balinese or to be avoided; many small foreign hotel owners actually deliver more local goodwill and Balinese authenticity along with western standards than anyone else, including the Balinese. Not every expatriate is as bad as law breaking, corrupt police officer colluding travel agent John M. Daniels (founder of PT Bali Discovery Tours) seen top left apparently about to fall asleep from the riveting occasion of a surprise party at a Suharto owned hotel. But you need only around expatriate groups in Hong Kong or Singapore, where large financial and other businesses dominate SE Asia, who are the worst expats in the region and you will get an unequivocal "Indonesia". My Austrian neighbour in Phuket who was a senior engineering project manager at the new Bangkok International Airport and whose business was located in Singapore told me Singaporean expatriates "Avoid the failures in Indonesia with a gusto and a wince". Indeed, contempt for Indonesian expatriates is widespread. As I said before though, there are some great expatriates in Bali, it is just they are swamped in numbers by the ugly mass that are the complete opposite.

Why am I doing this expatriate bashing page? Because they do great harm to the Balinese by role playing as superior western colonials who are trying simply to line their own pockets while feigning benevolence to the locals. I will give you the perfect example - you will hear virtually every expatriate in Bali prattle on about how they help the Balinese, but when you ask them substantial questions like "Do you pay above the minimum wage?", "Do your staff get time off for holidays and maternity leave?", "Do you guarantee your staff's jobs during quiet periods or send them home without pay?", "Does every last cent of the service charges you collect go solely to your staff (not to you) and in equal proportion?", "Do you pay all due taxes (or run a 'twin book' tax fraud system as is normal)?", "What charitable work do you do and / or donations do make?" and you watch the buggers squirm! It is not just that, they take the "Dog eat dog" or rather "Back stab back stabber" ethics of Indonesian business people and add grotesque self professed piety to it. Truly, I have never met such a bunch of lying, fake, cowardly, inane, boring (to the point of suicide), merciless, uncaring social deviants in my entire life.

It is not just me and other SE Asian expatriates that detest them either, Bali's expats actually hate each other and with a vengeance. If you talk to the substance abusing slightly hippy expat community of Seminyak, the alcohol guzzling brothel using western discharges of Sanur, the less than artistic self believed pot smoking artisans (or is it "artists") of Ubud and the morose nasty brigade of Lovina, they all hate each other, really, and the Balinese hate them! Just ask them! But when you think about it, the reasons and the truth are clear to see. Bali's largest businesses would get swallowed up in comparison by the petty cash accounts of many western corporations. Indonesia is hardly the enterprise center of the world. Many of Bali's expats are actually running from something; you only need to read the Australian press about how all these alleged Australian pedophiles in Indonesia have criminal records back home which the Indonesian authorities somehow failed to pick up on. I am telling you, so many of the Balinese expatriate business community are criminals on the "run" from their won countries, I have absolutely no doubt; dubious little oiks now afflicting the Balinese while playing the holier than though fiddle.

Then you have the expatriate community who are in Bali trying to find themselves! Oh, I do not have an agenda so much against them, just a will to avoid them. I have met countless foreign expatriates who are in Bali for the spiritualism of the thing, often helped along by narcotics. If I have to sit in a crowd of them while they go on and on about Bali's spiritual hold over them I really feel like shouting "Guys, the Balinese would swop their gamelan sounds and palm trees in a heart beat for what you have left behind at home. Don't you get it, Bali is a throw back to another era the indigenous people are trying to modernize while you try to regress to something further back because you can not stand reality. Live the Balinese reality for a while and you would kiss your passports all the way home!". Truly, I have met many a Balinese who refuse to speak to foreign expatriates because they live in another world. Let me give you a good example why. The following pond life are typical examples of foreign expatriates who hold themselves out as pillars of Balinese society and yet look at what they get up to!

Bert Vierstra, then and now (before and after polluting Bali). I believe Dutchman Bert Vierstra is the quintessential epitome of a nasty expatriate in Bali. Vierstra runs the Bali Expatriate forum fittingly enough, he is well suited to represent them in my opinion; he also runs a real estate business in Bali. Previously I actually promoted Bert's brand new Bali expat forum on my Bali and Lombok Travel Forum and also sent him potential customers for his real estate business; I never asked for anything in return but that did not mean I wanted or expected his hate. When Bert Vierstra's friend got banned for spamming and posting hate messages on my travel forum, Bert Vierstra repaid my kindness by running a "How to hack the Bali and Lombok Travel Forum" thread (discussion) on his expatriate forum; that's right, Bert Vierstra openly discussed how to unlawfully hack my web sites. You want to know what Vierstra gave as the reason why when I emailed him over this? He told me I had not sent him enough customers!

I think Bert Vierstra still looks like a nasty piece of work and a wannabe nazi despite wearing a Balinese handbag on his head, what do you think? I wonder who or what Vierstra is running from in the Netherlands, his hairdresser?

Anyway, almost for sure Bert Vierstra is operating unlawfully through fraud and corruption in Bali. I say this not just because the Balinese real estate business is plagued with fraud, given the target foreign buyers can not legally own land in Indonesia and the norm for getting around this is a loan agreement with some Balinese "name giver" which many agree is unlawful as it gives foreigners control of land and therefore is a attempt to circumvent the law (watch out villa owners, watch out). It is because Bert has been very silly with what he publishes on the Internet and how he does it. You see Bert sells real estate to foreigners in Bali on his commercial web site bali-information dot com. On that site he provides details of getting visas (of course if you buy one of Bert Vierstra's villas, you want a visa to come and enjoy it right?). On his visa page is a link to his other business, a Bali Visa Agent; Bert tries to hide the fact he owns it in the domain registration information but carelessly put his own email address as the business owner's (duly witnessed by a 3rd party Bert). Vierstra also has published detailed pictures showing clearly his very privileged and many might say inappropriate association with the head of immigration in Singaraja (the locale of Bert's business of course), see Bali Immigration (also witnessed in case you remove it Bert). Seems Bert Vierstra may well be getting visas for his customers unlawfully through corruption bungs! But be warned, corruption works while the corrupt are in control and unlawfully bought villas and / or gained visas are subject to confiscation if law and justice ever prevails.

Moving from the highly dubious expatriate real estate business world in Bali to the group of expats you can only call "La las". One of the little muppets on Bert's Bali Expatriate Forum and a good friend of Vierstra (which speaks volumes) is also a perfect example of a typical expatriate cuckoo in Ubud Bali; American Roy "Majapahit" (yes, one Roy Thompson changed his last name to "Majapahit", the name of the last Balinese dynasty!). Roy claims to be a close friend of former police chief Made Pastika, a combat marine veteran (despite apparently being only 4 and a half feet high) and a senior member of the Golkar party! Roy actually is a well known beer drinking tuna eater (which apparently is his favorite food and not the only thing that smells in his house) who owns a dagger shop in Ubud which he sleeps over accompanied by his delusions and poor Balinese wife Ni Nyoman. Roy was the boy who actually tried to hack my forums with Bert Vierstra's help. Funny how they both like to be photographed in Balinese garb huh?

From Bali garb to Bali garbage, now onto liar and highly dubious Bali business women Melina Caruso-Mulyadi of MMC Marketing (bali-paradise dot com) "fame"; seen here appropriately next to Arie Sabtono Sukirno the MD of law breaking travel agents Bali Discovery Tours. Melina Caruso-Mulyadi of Bali Paradise is allegedly one the most respected foreign expatriates in Bali, so what I have to tell you about her given my disdain at much of if not most of Bali's expats should come as no surprise to you. Unless Melina Caruso-Mulyadi had a complete lapse of memory about her involvement with Jack Daniels and his nasty lie machine the Bali Update or she is an outright liar; I think we can safely assume the later. You see I received a tip off that she actually helped (from hotel rooms around Asia no less) Daniels' email lies about me (you may recall, I sued Daniels over what he wrote), so I put this to her; that she was involved and therefore also legally liable for these lies. Melina Caruso as she is better known replied "Neither myself nor my company MMC Marketing Group have any form of ownership, involvement or responsibility for the Bali Update."

Unfortunately for Melina Caruso, her friend and fellow liar Jack Daniels gave an interview with a Pattaya Thailand rag (I wonder why Daniels was in Pattaya), he said; "The Bali Update remains essentially a one-man writing effort by a man who has a real full-time job. I am backed up by a very talented lady, Melina Caruso of Bali- Paradise on line, who administers the electronic aspects of our newsletter and handles our many subscribers." Of course when I sent Melina details of the article which showed her to be a liar, like I believe all frauds who lie and get caught act she did not reply past that point. The thing is, how many other lies does Melina tell in business and on her web sites. There is plenty of credence to those old expressions "Once a liar, always a liar" and "You can never trust a liar". Knowing Melina Mulyadi of MMC Marketing AKA Bali Paradise Online is a liar must draw into question the sense of being involved with her or her businesses.

However it is not just that Melina Caruso of Bali Paradise dot com is a liar that makes dealing with her risky, her business is also highly dubious in other areas to say the very least. When I confronted Melina Caruso-Mulyadi, I also pointed out that her business the "MMC Marketing Group" had registered false information with ICANN (the Internet registry) for her company's bali-paradise dot com domain. In fact, in November 2006 I filed two false registration complaints against her and her company with ICANN. This is highly unprofessional of her and MMC Marketing / Bali Paradise to say the least, but it also shows just how fake and phony the Bali institutional tourism industry that Melina is a part of really is. You see Melina Caruso-Mulyadi has the gaul to publish criticisms of her competitor's web businesses and their internet ethics on her Bali Paradise and MMC Marketing web sites. But upon inspection of her own sites even a layman should see what Melina Caruso says can be taken with a pinch of salt; her MMC Marketing site claims to offer web design & development services while her Bali-Paradise dot com site has some of the worst and most outdated web design going; just take a look at this W3C Report on Bali Paradise. Oh I am sure Melina will be shouting and screaming to get her ugly web site html design fixed when she reads this, but I have printed up the report showing 78 errors no less on her main / front / index page alone. So who in their right mind would want to have her company design their web site? This to me typifies one area of what is wrong with so many Bali expats; they puff their chests out and elude to being the epitome of professionalism while actually being the biggest group of trumped up amateurs in the world. But it gets worse.

Melina Caruso-Mulyadi claims to be a "net detective" and against the dodgy internet operators, but let us just take a look at MMC Marketing Group for a minute! I can find no trace on Melina's various and often untenably pious web sites about what, legally, the MMC Marketing Group is! No mention of a head or registered office, just phone numbers and email addresses for Bali (1), Australia (2) and the USA (1); the later appearing to be an answering service. One minute the domain owner for bali-paradise dot com is MMC Marketing Group with an Australian address, the next it has changed to MMC Marketing Group with a Bali address. No mention of company status either, neither MMC Marketing Group, Ltd. denoting a registered Australian company, nor PT MMC Marketing Group denoting a registered Indonesian company. All you ever seem to find when you look for information about Melina Caruso-Mulyadi's company on her web sites is a generic "MMC Marketing Group", "support" addresses in Bali and Australia, plus email addresses. I even did a search for her company with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (search for yourselves here) but it aint there either. It looks like the MMC Marketing Group is an unlawfully trading (tax avoiding) sole proprietorship loosely based in international airspace between Bali and Australia! So much for your web and business ethics Melina; I'd say this makes you an unlawful fraud as well as a liar.

I truly believe the above Bali expatriates are typical of the vast majority of expats in Bali; criminals on the run from other countries, pedophiles & sex trade worker users, law breakers, corrupters, and spiritual la las; all pompous self-righteous abusers of the Balinese in their own way. Sincerely, I have never seen a place like it for gnarling embittered shop keepers and wannabe designer haute cuisine soul seeking failures of the western world to accumulate. Again though, there are some great foreign expats in Bali; generally I believe those with their own hotel and sometimes villa businesses, plus some retirees that are worth sharing a beer with. For myself, I realize I too am not a conventional businessman and given my aptitude for saying what I see, I am seldom given to making friends amongst such people. But I do not hold myself out to be some pillar of ethics and society as these human deviants do, even though I did more for the Balinese than any of them. I am a traveller who managed to make more money than most of these cronies while doing walkabout and seeing what beaches I could run my laptop from, which is why I think Bali expatriate life was and still is so undesirable to me; I see Bali's expats at best as unadventurous bar flies with more BS than a large cow field. I think the expat adventurers who once roamed Bali have long gone, leaving behind those who know no better and totally clueless as to what they would do if the Balinese ever chucked them out; let us drink to that!