In Reply to: Share experiences posted by Jenni C. on Monday, 5. April 1999 at 22:39 Bali Time:
Well anyway the organisation that deals with restricted items owing to them being rare species...
When we were in Bali in February, I went into a new shop in Monkey Forest road, the bit that is near the football pitch. He was selling carved Mammoth tusk, and the pieces were truly beautiful, but both my husband and I were very worried about it, the whole thing seemed quite improbable. Sooo... I e-mailed SITES from somewhere in Ubud and asked them whether I could bring the stuff home. Unfortunately I didn't e-mail them until about three days before we left and so I didn't give them enough time, the point is that they DID reply to me and were most helpful, saying that it was quite O>K> with them I just had to contact my own country's customs to check that it was OK with them, but I'm sure that if it's ok with SITES then its ok with government agencies. That lovely carved mammoth could be sitting with the rest of my elephant collection(None ivory) right now, if only I had thought of e-mailing SITES as soon as I got to Bali, or even before I went. Think on that maybe everybody should do this, we all know about Ivory, but it's hard to recognise shells, snakes, insects, mammoth tusk (for goodness sake!) or any other bits of animals. However perhaps it's not a good thing to covet bits of animals in the first place!! Anyone else got any stories to tell about this sort of thing, for instance who buys the snake handbags and croc handbags that are all around in Bali? Are there any forbidden woods etc??? Anybody else bought mammoth tusk??