What a great way to start the year!  The import crisis seems to be over and 50 containers of alcohol were cleared off the docks in time for the New year.  The prices haven't really changed a lot for wine, but you can now buy spirits for a reasonable price.

The ridiculous thing is that the government, in introducing the 300% duty on booze, now has a new problem on their hands - black market alcohol.  So they are losing out on their "legitimate" excise to the bootleggers!  And to make it cheap and up their profits, the black market spirits are doctored.  Yup ... those industrious little indos are now producing bootleg spirits that "smell like" the real thing if you have already had a few, but are dangerously laced with methanol.  Speculation is any day now an expat or young Indo who dares to imbibe will die from this and only then will the government do something about the new problem.  Thankfuly they aren't tampering with wine!!

Our guard told us about 3 months ago he could get some things on the black market (at that stage we were oblivious to the methanol addition) so hubby  ordered a bottle each of Jack Daniels and Scoth.  As he sipped the first JD and coke, he said "This tastes wrong - could it be off?"  I had a smell and immediately detected what I though was pure alcohol in it - what we now know is methanol!!  How scary.  And yep, we binned the bootleg booze that night and warned our guard and his friends not to drink it lest they wish to be poisoned!

Imported food is starting to reappear on the shelves and we don't have to go to the "secret room" to find things not on the shelves, such as brown or caster sugar, or imported breakfast cereal.  But a box of Special K still costs around au$10 and weetbix are not much less for a large packet.  One thing unchanged is cheese - I bought a packet of Bega extra tasty 250gm the other day and it worked out at about au$7.20!!!

The Indonesians counter the expat food shortage complaints with "Well, you are living here so buy Indonesian produced food".  Most of us would be happy to, but some things you can't subsitute in recipees and there are no locally produced equivalents.  Well, they produce "caster sugar" but it is actualy what Aussies call icing sugar - try making chocolate brownies with that!  Or putting what Indonesians call brown sugar (similar to raw sugar) on the kids' porridge of a morning .... just won't cut it!

So for now we just sit tight and wait patiently ... and continue paying stupendous prices for some luxuries we can't live without 

Expats are now all discussing who is going to get the axe as the economic crisis casts it's shadow across the world, but the ridiculously funny thing about this country is that, thanks to the extremely high levels of corruption and dirty money being laundered, it will probably be minimally affected by the worlds downward spiralling financial woes!