About Hotel Kerobokan
Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan, the ironic nickname for Bali’s most notorious prison.
This Australian true crime book, Hotel Kerobokan — internationally titled Hotel K — paints a graphic picture of this bizarre prison set in the heart of the tourist Mecca, Bali.
Drawing on hundreds of prisoner interviews, it takes you deep into the filthy, disease-ridden cells where a United Nations of prisoners live crushed together in misery.
The truth of the jail explodes off every page.
Read the shocking inside story of Bali’s notorious jail.
This book exposes the surreal and the hilarious. Hotel K ‘guests’ can buy almost anything — from room upgrades and days out at Seminyak Beach, to wild sex nights on mattresses under the stars with hookers. It’s all organised by pliable, itchy-palmed guards for cashed-up prisoners.
Money talks in Hotel K.
One of many westerners who enjoyed time out was Italian surfer Juri who was serving life for trafficking 5-kilos of cocaine in his surfboard bag. Ostensibly, escorting him to a dentist appointment, the guards would pull on Juri’s board shorts and then sit incognito on Kuta beach. Juri surfed while his mum, who’d flown from Italy to take care of him, sat on the sand with the guards’ machine guns tucked into her beach bag.
Outside it’s paradise. Inside, it’s hell on earth.
Hotel K graphically exposes the comical as well as the dark side; the rampant drug use, murders made to look like suicides and the gang, Laskar Bali, which ruled the jail through violence and terror.
Explore Kathryn Bonella’s other books about Bali.
Hotel K’s concrete cells have been home to a procession of the infamous and the tragic including the Bali Bombers, the Bali 9, the King of Denpasar, Australian beauty school student Schapelle Corby, model Michelle Leslie, Gordon Ramsay’s brother Ronnie and British granny Lindsay Sandiford, sentenced to death for cocaine trafficking.
More Bali True Crime Books
Interested in reading more of Kathryn’s Bali true crime books: Operation Playboy, Snowing in Bali and Schapelle Corby My Story.
Read a review of Hotel K in The Dark Heart of Bali →