Bali police round up the gigolos
By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent
Sunday, 2 May 2010
For years they have been a familiar sight: the bronzed young men who patrol Bali’s main beach, offering friendship – and often more – to female foreign tourists. But now the “Kuta cowboys”, as they are known, face an uncertain future, thanks to an uproar provoked by a warts-and-all documentary.
Cowboys in Paradise has infuriated tourism officials on the Indonesian holiday island. Twenty-eight suspected gigolos, described by police as “young, fit-looking and tanned”, were rounded up and questioned following a raid on Kuta Beach last week.
An all-female task force of officers of a certain age carried out the raid.
The men are still missing.
Boadicea's Chariot 
I shall say this very quietly Jan! But there were also numbers of bronzed young men on Kuta beach who would entertain male foreign tourists when I visited some good few years ago.
I haven’t been to Indonesia for a long time, but if I say that I would have loved to send some of the louts I taught in Darwin there for a few months to teach them just how lucky and privileged they were compared with Indonesian children of the same age you might have some idea of the poverty of the place. Mind you, I doubt that the louts would have survived for more than a few days, let alone months… 🙂
Did the ‘warts and all’ documentary also highlight other sexually transmitted diseases? Yurk
This only really jumped out at me from the Indie this morning becos no 2 son is just starting a holiday in Bali. I assumed it was a paradise island but from your comment, Boadicea, it’s a very tough life indeed for the locals.
It’s a long time since I was in Indonesia, but I did visit Bali, Kupung,and Flores. Bali is quite different from the rest of Indonesia, being a mixture of Hinduism and Animism, while most of the rest is Muslim.
Life is tough… There are images that are imprinted in my mind that will never leave me. Young children of five or six selling ice at the bus stops on the way out of Kupung. An elderly woman in a temple in Bali, obviously in the last stages of a wasting disease smiling at me and trying to communicate. Children marching to school in the early morning, and knowing that they were the ‘morning shift’ – and that there’d be a different group going later for the ‘afternoon shift’. A young woman who tried to return a newspaper I’d casually left in a hotel room the week before, and whose eyes shone with delight when I said she could keep it to help improve her English…
No, my ‘louts’ in Darwin who reckoned they intended ‘to write for the Government’ (sign on the dole) when they left school would not have survived long.
Nice to see your face on the front page, Jan… in the small icon it is very hard to see at all.
Oh dear, Boadicea. Those experiences say it all, really. It would be nice to imagine that the profits of tourism might improve the lot of the impoverished, but that’s obviously too much to expect.
Nice, Pseu? It’s bloody embarrassing!!! 🙂
You could always change it…. but I like it. SO there.