Jeff Greenwald's despatch from Bali from www.seacology.org

Today, I am pleased to bring you something genuinely interesting from the web. It's about the water palace at Tirta Ganga which I did not visit, having been rather underwhelmed by the water palace at Ujung, and it's about poo, which is being treated by architect and environmental engineer, Emerald Starr, who has lived in Bali since 1988 and designed the Sacred Mountain Sanctuary near Sideman. (If you want to see what someone named Emerald Starr looks like, there's a photo of him on the seacology page linked to.) I popped into the Sacred Moutain Sanctuary when driving past. I cannot recommend it to the casual traveller. The bamboo bungalows are a bit weird, and the whole place looked very underfrequented. It caters, I think, mostly to spiritualists' retreats, and my driver told me the gardener whispered to him that the whole thing was for sale.

It's also about relatively benign sounding Balinese royalty, like the pictured Dr. A.A.M. Djelantik, the 86-year-old son of the Balinese king who built the Tirta Gangga Water Palace in 1948. He is said to have been internationally honored for his work in public health. I am deeply suspicious about benign royalty, but I keep reading about them in Bali, and Dr Djelantik looks so lovely. Who can rip open the seedy underbelly of this oligicharcical remnant? Anyone? Bali