Bali blast casts long shadow one week after

5.00pm

BALI - Guido Heckev pours another beer and clinks glasses with his mates in the early hours of today at the Hard Rock Cafe night club fronting Bali's famous Kuta beach strip.

At roughly the same time last week, revellers were scrambling for their lives after a bomb tore through another popular club, the Sari Club, just several blocks away, killing more than 180 people. Hundreds were injured or maimed.

Forty five New Zealanders thought to have been in Bali at the time of the blast remain unaccounted for.

Three New Zealanders have been confirmed dead but New Zealand's Jakarta consul Nigel Allardyce said today that toll was likely to rise.

Heckev, a German tourist who arrived on the Indonesian holiday island the day after the blast, said he did not feel scared about venturing out.

"I feel safe. People should still come to Bali," the 35 year-old assembly-line worker for Mercedes Benz shouted over blaring seventies music.

"My wife is still in Germany and she phoned to tell me to come back but I did not see any reason to end my holiday," he said.

But despite Heckev's holiday mood the club was barely a quarter full and was among only a few in Bali's usually throbbing tourist hub to open for business.

The tropical resort island is almost as deserted by day and hotel occupancy rates have halved to about 35 per cent.

Signs "Big sale" and "Discount" are plastered on shop windows. Shop owners stand on the pavement staring into the empty streets.

In Australia, today was a national day of mourning in honour of the 103 Australians estimated to have been killed by the blast.

The day Australia picked to remember and reflect on their dead came as Indonesian police said they were looking for a woman suspected of detonating the bomb.

Sydney newspaper The Sun-Herald reported today that an eyewitness had seen a woman, thought to be Indonesian, getting out of a mini van outside the Sari Club on the night of the blast.

The witness was stuck in a traffic jam close to the club that was caused by two cars parked in the road, one in front of the other.

The witness said he saw a woman get out of the car at the rear and into the car in front. The car speed off and moments later there was an explosion.

The report said police had confirmed the car at the rear was a mini van packed with plastic explosives.

Indonesia has said the blast was the work of terrorists but has not named any suspects.

Several hotels have received bomb threats in recent days and security personnel are on heightened alert.

Early today police rushed to a five-star hotel in the nearby Legian area after someone reported hearing a loud boom that turned out to be a firecracker.

There is also still a sense of disbelief that Indonesia's once peaceful Hindu enclave has witnessed such tragedy.

Thousands of Hindu worshippers have visited the bomb site -- where forensic experts believe they could find more bodies beneath the debris -- to symbolically cleanse the area that has become a shrine for the dead.

Other people just come and stare at the mountain of flowers and assortment of bike helmets and shoes, picked from the debris and placed at the steps of an adjacent guttered surf shop.

But there are signs of a return to a sort of normality.

Police say they plan to re-open the site and the street, a major thoroughfare, to the public on Wednesday and repairs are being made to some shops and buildings.

Bali Tourism Authority director I Gde Pitana says he is thinking about future events and believes he can win back the confidence of the 1.5 million holiday makers who helped bring in $11.2 billion to the country's tourism sector last year.

"We have already hit the bottom as far as hotel occupancy rates go and I am optimistic that in four to six months time, things will be normal again," Pitana said.

"People understand this attack is nothing to do with any internal problems in Bali like those in Aceh or Ambon," he said, referring to two of Indonesia's most strife-torn areas.

Order has also returned to Bali's main Sanglah hospital, where a week ago more than 250 people overloaded operating theatres and spilled out of the wards.

"On the night of the blast we operated for 10 hours straight and hospital staff were running around like crazy but now we have only 20 people with bomb-related injuries left here and the doctors and nurses are getting a good night's sleep," said plastic surgeon Dr Asmarajaya.

- REUTERS, HERALD STAFF

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Feature: Bali bomb blast

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