I have just put together a guide for setting up and running a business in Bali.

The guide covers all aspects including forming the company, employing staff, taxes and marketing. It is written with Bali in mind, but the information could also be applied to starting a business anywhere in Indonesia.

You can read more about the guide right here.

I haven’t read anything by John Leake, but his next novel on the tsunami and how it destroyed Aceh, should be interesting. It is going to be interesting to see how he is going to tie it into Bali, without it looking to much like an expenses trip paid by his publisher.

“The initial idea came with the cataclysm that was the tsunami. I was on the island of Maui on 26 December, 2004 when the reports of the tsunami came through. It was unfathomable to me that an entire city, Banda Aceh, could be hit by a wave and disappear – that *image* never left me,” Leake told the Jakarta Post in an interview.

My sister recommended me the book Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
. She warned me that it was a “girly book” but I like travel books and since one of the countries the author visits is Indonesia, I thought I would give it a read.

Some parts of the Italy section were good. It was supposed to be about food, but food was only the topic in a few paragraphs. Nothing like an Italian version of a “Year in Province”. Some parts of the book are interesting, but most of the book is about how the author is trying to get over her divorce and an ex-boyfriend.

In India she stays at an Ashram. I don’t know but the whole thing of westerners going to India to find God through meditation is a bit of a tired cliche. She had plans to stay at the Ashram for a while and then travel around India. A convinces her to stay at the Ashram for the whole time she is in India. I think this was a mistake and would have got more out of spending a few months traveling around the country.

Sometimes I think I have problems, but then I see and hear of people who are much worse off than myself and the problems I have really are minuscule compared with them.

Finally she goes to Indonesia (Bali) to meet with a medicine man. She complains about the corruption yet partakes it in herself to get a visa to stay longer in the country. She befriends a female medicine doctor who is poor and has nowhere to live. She raises money from her friends in America and raises $18,000 which she wires to lady’s bank account in Indonesia.

The woman complains she can’t find the right place and says how it would be better if she just had a bit more money. The author and her friends thought they were doing a good deed. Take the story out of Bali though and it would be described as a scam or a con, which the author got played.

The book is going to be made into a movie with Julia Roberts playing the lead.