While shooting for our report about the garbage problem on the island of Bali, we were invited to attend a traditional Hindu dance ceremony in a little village temple. In Bali, Hinduism is blended with a very old religions entrenched in nature. Traditionally, people in the village used to live in balance with nature, like using banana-leafs to package or wrap food.

The dance in the video is a "flirting" dance. It's a way for the children to learn the rules and how to behave. But the traditional rules don't have an answer to the garbage problem. Many people dispose of their rubbish by just throwing it away, because they don't know what else to do. What they told me is, they see the problem and they wait for solutions.

(For those of you keen on finding out what our reporter looks like, check out the video at 1mins08secs.)

We start at one of Bali's beautiful beaches. The tourists here are complaining about the garbage on the Island. The woman on the sun-lounger in the film says that there are too many people in the country who don't work. She adds that those people should clean up the streets. But she's not aware that a lot of people are already collecting garbage on the trash dumps. There's just too much of it. One of the reasons for the growing garbage is the booming tourism industry on the island. Tourists are producing most of the trash. Environmentalists are working on a solution–a functional recycling system. A woman collecting garbage says that she separates the glass from plastic bottles to sell them later on.

People living on a dump. These Balinese collect plastic bottles and other stuff that can be sold for recycling. For a kilo of bottles, they get around 5 Euros. That's how recycling works on the island. It's a basic system but the only one that works. There are high-tech dumps elsewhere. But they're not working because nobody is able to maintain the machines. It seems to be the only way to get rid of all the garbage.

GLOBAL IDEAS Reporter Manuel Özcerkes has just started filming in Bali for one of our upcoming reports "Recycling in Bali":

Today was the first day of filming. We were looking for illegal dumps. We found one and the smell was overpowering. Even though it's probably not that old, the trash already fills a small valley. Around and on top of this dump live a few families. They collect plastic bottles to try and earn some money.
 
In the afternoon we went out to a black-sand beach. We needed the beautiful Bali images we were used to as a way to balance out the trash dump. It was perfect surfing weather. The beach was empty and quite amazing. Unfortunately there was no time for a dip in the water, because there is still a lot to do here. A lot to see, a lot to learn and a report to create.