rBali, th,G EF'im fffteFlltath o Ð 3
Photographer Kees Metselaarwas enjoying a break in the Indonesian capital when news of the Bali bombing broke. Equipped with only a single camera and no laptop or transmitting equipment, he nevertheless flew down to cover the event. His recollections: hen the bomb exploded in the Sari Club
in Kuta on the island of Bali my wife Vaudine England and I were celebrating
the 50th birthday of a good friend in a trendy restaurant in Jakarta. I had gone to Indonesia with only the party on my mind. No photo job. All I had with me was one camera. We heard about the explosion in the middle of the night. By morning it was confirmed that more than 100
people had died. Vaudine, Southeast Asian correspondent for tl,:re South China Marning Post, }rad
FCC Member Andy
Þ
T T T J o
Chworowså1
flew to
Bali to support his
brother who, though injured in the
some hustlers around, though. A local youth tried to sell me some horrific pictures he had taken on the night and the morning after. I remember they mainly showed bits of bodies. By Monday morning, Jalan Legian, the street at the he art of the night club quarter, was blocked off in front of the Bounty Club. Police and forensic specialists had started their investigation. IJnfortunately for them the scene was compromised. All day on Sunday, people had been allowed to walk at will over the site . The story of course had become Southeast Asia's
bombing, stayed on
to search for his friends and comfort bereaved relatives
own 9/11. Correspondents were flying ^o o o Þ p
in from all over the world. The Hard Rock was buzzing as if the Rolling Stones were in town. We had escaped to
Poppies Cottages, one of my favourite haunts in the heart of Kuta.
Many Hong
Kong-based
correspondents and FCC members were around. Early on we bumped into Fritz
von Klein, NBC bureau chief with cameraman Richard Jones and Adrian Brown from Asia Pacific Vision (APV) . Mike Chinoy had landed.
managed to get the first plane out to Bali. I lingered, wondering what I could do with minimal equipment. But bymid-afternoon I gave in to myinstincts and Ijoined the press exodus to Bali. I wouldjust have to improvise. The Hard Rock Hotel was the HQ of choice for the press crowd. It had satellite facilities for the TV crews. We stayed there for one night. It felt strange. The Johnny Winter guitar riffs and garish colours just didn't do it for me. The magnitude of the disaster was still sinking in. Unsettled, we vowed to move out the next day. Kuta was subdued. The streets were eerily empty. Normally, even in the low season, they would be bustling with tourists and hawkers. There were still
20
I visited the main hospital with its hopelessly small morgue. Reporters, jostling past empty coffins and distressed family members, roamed the grounds. The morgue itself was closed off to the press but local school kids took turns to peek over the wall, drawn by the morbid appeal of burnt corpses. The by now closed-off "Ground Zero" area became hallowed ground, surrounded by wreaths donated by hotels and bars. Sombre groups of tourists, many of them Australian, paid their respects. I walked there with FCC stalwart Andy Chworowsky. His brother had been partying in the Sari Club at the time of the explosion. Luckily he survived. Several of his rugby mates were still missing. We had a few drinks in Made's, another of my favourite places. It was a very strange feeling to be in such a lovely and familiar setting for all the wrong reasons. I THE CORRESPONDENT DECEMBER 2002/JANUARY 2003
had no idea my brother was in Bali until he phoned me to tell me he had been caught up in the blast but was OK. I had heard the news on the radio. I knew where the Sari Club was, and that Peter and his fellow Taipei Baboons Rugby Team members regularly partied there when they were in Bali, but it never occurred to me that he might have been in the club at the time. When Peter regained consciousness after the explosion, people were running over him trying to get out. He looked one way and saw an inferno. He looked to the side and saw a portion of roof collapsed against a wall. He managed to climb up and over the debris of the roof to safety. Peter told me that five of his friends were missing team-mates and the girlfriend of one of the -four survivors. He still held out some hope, but after spending Saturday night and all of Sunday searching through the casualty wards, he was beginning to believe there was little chance of finding any of them alive. Two of his team-mates were seriously injured and were airlifted to Australia and mostly burns - with less serious injuries were on Singapore. Others their way back to Taiwan. As the senior member of the team (most were in their 20's while he is 43) the responsibility of trying to bring order to their situation naturally fell to Peter. He was dealing with almost constant phone calls from anxious relatives, government officials and reporters from all over the world. On the phone, he sounded like he was keeping things together, but he THE CORRESPONDENT DECEMBER 20024ANUARY 2003
also, naturall¡ sounded exhausted. Before he hung up, he managed a little grim humour. In 1978, my parents,
sister and
I
survived
a crash of a Boeing 737 in
India.
Peter, who was at university at the time, wasn't due to join us until a week later, so he missed it. He jokingly wondered if this was some
Hyderabad,
Karmic debt repayment. I laughed and told him I didn't think it applied here. I told him goodbye and that I loved him. A friend atCathay managed to get me onto the next flight to Bali that left the following morning. At the airport, I ran into Richard Jones, who was also on the way to Bali as the cameraman for NBC News. It' was obvious that journalists occupied most of our cabin I recognised the CNN and the TVB crews; the rest were identifiable by their fishermen's vests. At Peter's hotel, I walked into the lobby and immediately bumped into FCC member Vaudine England who was at the hotel to interview rugby team members from Hong Kong. Her husband Kees both of them had flown in Metselaar was also in Bali mobile numbers, and the previous day. We exchanged I went to find my brother's bungalow. As soon as I got into the room, the phone rang: I answered it. It was the mother of James, one of the missing players. She and her husband had just arrived from Sydney, and were at the crisis centre trying to hnd out anything. She said they needed to know what their son was wearing on Saturday night. I kept my voice as helpful and practical-sounding as I could, realising that this mother had almost certainly just lost a son. As it turned out, they were later able to provisionally identify 21