hotel kerobokan
Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan, or Hotel K, the tongue-in-cheek nickname for holiday Mecca Bali’s most notorious jail. Its walls touch paradise; sparkling oceans, surf beaches and palm trees on one side, while on the other it’s a dark, bizarre and truly frightening underworld of sex, drugs, violence and squalor. Hotel K has been home to a procession of the infamous and the tragic: Muslim terror bombers, Gordon Ramsay’s drug addict brother, a Balinese King, surfers and unlucky tourists. In Hotel K’s filthy and disease ridden cells a United Nations of prisoners – Italians, Brazilians, Germans, English, French, Americans, Australians, and Mexicans – live crushed together in misery. Rapists, gangsters and killers share cells with illegal card sharks and petty thieves. Hardened drug traffickers sleep alongside unlucky tourists, who’ve seen their holiday turn from paradise to hell over one ecstasy pill. Hotel K is the shocking inside story of the jail and its inmates, revealing the wild “sex nights” organised by corrupt guards for prisoners who have the money to pay, the rampant drug use, the killings made to look like suicides, the days out at the beach, the escapes. It takes you behind the grim white walls and exposes the jail’s role in supplying high-grade drugs to tourists and dealers on the outside, the gang that rules the jail with terror, the corruption that means anything is for sale – including a fully catered Italian jail wedding, or cell upgrades to rival a five-star hotel with a plasma TV and Bose sound system or a Jacuzzi. But most inmates are forced to live in squalor and misery in stinking overcrowded cells. The truth about the dark heart of Bali explodes off the page. www.kathrynbonella.com