What's Bali Raw?

For too long, Bali has been portrayed to the world as the paradise of paradises. But Bali is also violent, ugly, distasteful and living in Bali can be a game of survival.

This is the Bali that I know and I have called home for almost a decade, a Bali where the fittest survive and those with the biggest wallet and the greatest connections endure.

There is much I love about Bali, but I became so tired of tourists gushing blindly about how wonderful Bali is. The truth about the people living in Bali - the Balinese, Indonesian locals and expats, including myself - needs to be known, and journalists often seem afraid to write about it. 

And so I started writing a book called Bali Raw: An Expose of the Underbelly of Bali, Indonesia ...