TOURISM

Bali is the Hawaii of the East. Of the four million tourists who came to Indonesia in 1994, more than 750,000 flew straight to Bali. The number of foreign and domestic tourists arriving in Bali is now approaching 1.5 million a year. The growth in visitors, which stands at about 10% per year, is expected to continue through the late 1990s. Bali already has a full half of all the hotels in Indonesia.
     Bali makes a valuable study in the effects of mass tourism on the social and cultural patterns of an indigenous population. Every generation of visitors arrives to "discover" Bali, pronounce it a paradise, then once home mourn that it's lost forever. Visitors are so enthralled with the legend surrounding Bali, many arrive thinking that Indonesia is a part of Bali rather than the other way round.
     Able to survive Islam, war, coups, and occupations, Bali has been less successful in withstanding the tidal waves of tourists. Commercialism has crept into every aspect of Balinese life. You now have to go deep into the interior, up to the mountain villages, to find people still adhering to the old traditions.

Who Are Those Guys?
Two types of foreign visitors arrive on Bali: those who come to relax on holiday, and those who come to experience the culture, to "discover" Bali. Demographically, the highest percentage is in the 25-35 range with an average length of stay of about 12 days. Singapore sends the greatest number of visitors, followed by Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
     The "international class" stay in culture-neuter luxury resorts concentrated in an unseen, unfelt quarantine zone along the southern coastline. With snapshots of volcanoes and rice terraces in their cameras and souvenirs in their hands, they shuttle in air-conditioned buses with tinted windows to talky, fake trance dances, truncated wayang performances, and staged cremations. They return south at dusk to Nusa Dua and Sanur to watch yet more dances by torchlight while eating continental dinners. These tourists have almost no impact on the values of Bali, leaving the Balinese culture more or less intact.
     Then there are the yuppies, the travelers, and the college students. These so-called "cultural tourists" have come to Bali to experience the gentle climate, relatively low prices, good surfing beaches, and general ambience that have made this island a popular hangout for young people for more than 15 years. They stay in inexpensive homestays or beach inns in Kuta, Legian, Seminyak, and Candidasa, romp in the surf off Uluwatu, roar around the island on rented motorcycles or Suzukis, and trip out on magic mushroom omelettes while listening to rock tapes.
     The Germans, Americans, Dutch, and English you see year-round, with the French, Spanish and Italians arriving only in July and August, and the Australians in December and January. Australians come to disco and pub crawl at Third World prices. Australians are more tourists than travelers nowadays; the days are long gone when you could travel overland from Down Under to the U.K. cheaper than you could fly. The Australians are usually in their twenties and seldom venture from the southern resorts. At least 75% are on package tours. The Australians, Asian in temperament, are generally well liked for their easygoing attitude, though Balinese guides quickly grow bored working for them. They have to stay on their toes with the French and Germans, who ask more demanding questions. They come for the culture, while Australians come for the beach.
     Then there are the domestic tourists. The summer months (the Balinese winter) and Christmas holiday season are incredibly busy, with throngs of tourists from Hong Kong and Singapore and rich Chinese from Surabaya arriving by the thousands to rent cars and drive insanely around the island. During these times it's difficult to even walk around Kuta, Legian, and Ubud, and every hotel along the beachfront is booked solid.

History of Tourism
Ever since two members of van de Houtman's crew jumped ship in 1597, Bali's utterly unique, highly developed culture has been endlessly fascinating to Westerners, the paradigm of tropical beauty and exotic adventure.
     The Dutch steamship line KPM began calling at the northern Bali port of Buleleng in the late 19th century, though its cargos consisted mostly of pigs, copra, and coffee rather than tourists. Following quickly upon the puputan of 1906, Bali's first tourist was Dutch parliamentarian H. Van Kol, who reached Bali at his own expense and toured the island with a senior Dutch official. Upon his return to Holland, he wrote of his travels on Bali in a book called Out of Our Colonies. By 1914 KPM was producing brochures rhapsodizing about Bali as an enchanted Garden of Eden.
     Next came a classic book of photos of wild dances, corrupt kings, and bare bodies, published in Germany in 1921 by Gregor Krause. As early as the 1920s, the island drew a steady stream of affluent, intrepid, genteel world vagabonds; these visitors perplexed the Dutch, who looked upon their tour of duty on quiet Bali as a boresome necessity.
     In the 1930s the documentaries Isle of the Demons and Goona-Goona depicted Bali as a paradise on earth. The celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead arrived to extol the island, getting things very wrong in her studies of the Balinese children. The aristocratic Balinist and painter Walter Spies wrote and photographed the proud bronzed Balinese trance dancers and noble dusky peasantry; it later came to light that Spies was attracted to the island for its young boys.
     Bali's first hotel, KPM's Bali Hotel in Denpasar, catered to the rich and famous, including Charlie Chaplin. In the introduction to his 1930 book The Last Paradise, the American dilettante Hickman Powell wrote, "This nation of artists is faced with the Western invasion, and I cannot stand idly by and watch their destruction." In the early 1930s other hotels began to open, and the first souvenir shop was established on Sanur Beach in 1935. Miguel Covarrubias, author of the 1937 classic Island of Bali, lamented the arrival of the tourist hordes. The "absence of beggers," he wrote, "is now threatened by tourists who lure boys and girls with dimes to take their pictures. Lately, in places frequented by tourists, people are beginning to ask for money as a return for a service."
     After the war, Bali was celebrated in songs and movies, which generated a small increase in visitors. Facilities were still few, the infrastructure nonexistent. Still, by the late 1940s, Cassandros Like, the curator of the American Museum of Natural History lamented that tourism had just about ruined Bali. At least, he wrote "the Second World War put a halt to the tourist trade to Bali so that the corruption and dissolution of the culture could be given a respite."
     In 1953, Bob Hope's vapid movie The Road to Bali depicted an island of maidens in grass skirts, unknown here. The mythical "Bali Hai" in James Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific was actually located thousands of miles from the island. Nevertheless, these fictions instilled in the popular mind the idea of Bali as synonymous with tropical beauty and exotic adventure.
     The political upheaval of the Sukarno regime years was not conducive to Western tourism, but it was during the turbulent '60s that the first international-class luxury hotel was erected on the island. With Japanese war reparations money the ugly, garish multistoried Bali Beach Hotel of Sanur was built in 1963. In that same year an international conference of travel agents convened on Bali.
     The anti-communist slaughter of 1966-67 caused only a temporary blip in the inexorable growth of tourism. In 1966 Bali's Ngurah Rai airport was enlarged for wide-bodied jets.
     Since the Bali Beach Hotel couldn't accommodate everybody, traditional style "bungalow" or "cottage" accommodations with thatched roofs and open pavilions rose along the southern beaches. Restaurants, art shops, and travel agencies appeared. In the mid-1970s Australian surfies and hippies discovered Kuta/Legian. Aussie surfing magazines glorified the beautiful beaches, dangerous waves, and laid-back, low-cost lifestyle. In Kuta, enterprising villagers opened pension-style "homestays," cheap restaurants, shops, moneychanging facilities, telecommunication offices, and vehicle rental outlets. Kuta's family-owned enterprises sank revenues back into the local economy, directly benefiting the villagers until their average per capita income was four times the Balinese average.
     As early as 1972 it was widely recognized that developments in Kuta and Sanur were badly planned. The government established the Bali Tourism Development Corporation (BTDC) to more closely monitor and supervise future projects. Bali was earmarked for intense development, with an enclave-type complex planned for Nusa Dua, formerly a fishing village and coconut plantation on the east side of the Bukit Peninsula.
     The backlash began in the early 1980s in the quiet traditional village of Ubud in the Bali uplands. Locals began to curse the tourists for disrupting ceremonies and dressing inappropriately. The people fought to preserve Ubud's natural beauty and ensure that the increasing numbers of visitors did not degrade their customs and culture. This effort eventually fizzled, as Ubud continued to grow pell-mell, the town drowning beneath waves of tourists and eventually exploding into a small city.
     A swinging singles scene of Australians and Europeans formed in the Kuta/Legian/Seminyak region in the late 1980s. These were the boom years. Indonesia kick-started mass tourism in the 1990s with a big "Visit Indonesia Year" campaign. Families bought stereos, television sets, and cars with the money they made from tourists, even sold off rice fields to buy motorbikes to rent, hoping to live off the bounty of the tourist industry indefinitely. A new class of Balinese nouveau riche created jealousy and envy in the community. Business was so good, the Balinese were totally unprepared for the abrupt drop in tourism sparked by the 1993 war in the Persian Gulf. Hotels and restaurants stood empty and the few visitors were hounded mercilessly by the street peddlers who now outnumbered tourists 20 to 1. Suddenly everyone realized just how dependent they were on the tourist dollar.
     The provincial government cleaned up the really disagreeable peddlers and vendors, confiscating their goods if they ventured into a designated hassle-free zone on Kuta Beach.
     A ban was placed on the construction of all international-class hotels within a designated "green belt," and a Rp500,000,000 hotel in Tampaksiring was even razed by bulldozers. The airport was upgraded and handled an estimated 2.5 million air travelers in 1995. Twelve international airlines currently fly into Bali, with 77 international flights each week. There are now at least 35 star-rated hotels on Bali, nine in the Nusa Dua area alone. It is estimated the Ngurah Rai Airport will process 10 million visitors annually by the year 2000.

The Nusa Dua and Other Experiments
In 1974 the government concocted the Nusa Dua Experiment, calling for the construction of luxury hotels along the east coast of the arid, thinly populated Bukit Peninsula. By offering foreign investors 50-year leases with maximum incentives and tax holidays, it was hoped the Nusa Dua resort would accommodate and contain the surge in visitors. Nusa Dua constituted a major shift to elite tourism, planned as an isolated, self-contained ghetto that would allow visitors the experience of Bali but keep their interactions with the natives to a minimum. Because relatively few of the island's 2.7 million people live near the sea and few tourists want to stay anywhere else, the plan looked really good on paper. But the resort was very slow to develop. It was only in the 1980s that Nusa Dua finally came into its own; it wasn't until late in the decade that tourist projections were met.
     In these Mediterranean-style, self-contained hotel resorts tourists can sun their near-naked bodies on white sandy beaches without scandalizing anyone and watch abbreviated psuedo-events performed in expensive hotel foyers. Those with a spirit of adventure may day-trip around the island in air-conditioned buses to preselected villages and tourist sites, leaving untainted the rest of Eden.
     The early 1990s brought a more formal experiment in "village tourism," wherein groups of tourists move discreetly in small numbers with a minimum of intrusion, making direct, low-impact contact with the Balinese. The idea is being tried in three Balinese villages, Jatiluwih (rice-planting and fabulous views), Penglipuran (a nearly Bali Aga village in Bangli), and Sebatu (woodcarving and other art forms). Guests from the southern hotels experience something "real" by joining day or weekend excursions to these villages. This cultural tourism is really just an extension of enclave-style tourist development, consistent with the policy of limiting and canalizing tourist development to minimize its impact on Balinese society.

Tourism Yes
Tourism is Bali's biggest source of hard currency. The foreign currency brought in by tourists improves Indonesia's balance of payments, helping to correct the structural imbalance of trade between the developing and developed nations.
     The government recognizes that tourism is Bali's best hope for raising living standards and bringing jobs and prosperity. Tourism has meant that many people are now able to send their children to school. A senior high school diploma (SMA) is required to enter a tourism school, and all the big hotels only want students from these schools. Work in a hotel in almost any capacity is considered an excellent job. Tour guides and drivers can do even better. They can make between US$400 and $500 per month, compared with a monthly salary of US$100-150 for Balinese high school teachers.
     Many Balinese view tourism as a cure for overcrowding and poverty. Tourism provides extra income for the landless as well as for those put out of work by the "green revolution," the introduction of machines, and shrinking land holdings. Even backpackers leave money. Their priority is to travel cheaply, but the very length of their stay-often up to the two-month limit-means they usually drop more cash than the wealthy tourists who spend but four days on the island.
     It's now common for whole families to work in tourism-father and son as drivers, the mother a waitress, little brother a roomboy in a hotel, the daughter a masseuse. Tourism has created a whole new middle class of hoteliers, art shop and gallery owners, and tourist agents. No one can expect the Balinese to live stuck in the middle ages. The worldliness that the heavy influx of foreign visitors has brought is undeniable. It's common to hear bell captains greet hotel guests in five different languages. Tourist brochures are routinely written in at least three languages, including Japanese.
     Bali's true folk art is no longer living on borrowed time. Communities are willing to subsidize the high costs of sumptuous ceremonies and music and dance troupes, conscious that these expenditures secure the arrival of future generations of tourists. Indeed, some dances and art forms once fading away have been revived by tourist demand. The island's musical ensembles and dance troupes are as active now as at any time in Bali's history.

Tourism No
The impact of tourism on Bali's environment has been horrendous. The island's affluence has given way to ugly urban sprawl in the capital of Denpasar. Even more serious is the environmental damaged caused by the plundering of offshore reefs for coral used in the construction boom of the 1980s. Live reefs are threatened by sewage, runoff, and silt. Over 1,000 hectares of agricultural land are lost every year to art shops, hotels, and housing estates. Megaresorts displace traditional landowners and tenants.
     The southern region is woefully lacking in the infrastructure necessary to sustain a burgeoning population. The water table is sinking, and water is already in short supply. Electricity is barely adequate. The problem of waste disposal has reached crisis proportions. No one seems to know what to do with all the sampah (garbage) as the volume of nonorganic, nonbiodegradable waste grows. Profits made from tourists may soon be canceled out by the cost of maintaining the environment.
     Inflation is inexorably driving up the price of land. In 1993, a restaurant owner on the Bypass paid Rp55 million for 10 are just to increase the bus parking space for her restaurant. Land in Kuta now runs Rp100,000 million per are. The Balinese themselves cannot raise the necessary capital to open big enterprises. Jakarta-based businessmen and women in partnership with transnational corporations now dominate Bali's real estate market. In 1995 The West Australian published a list of the major investors in five-star hotels and golf courses in Bali, revealing that numerous high-end properties are owned by President Suharto's children.
     On Bali popular paintings, carvings, and antiques are mass-produced to satisfy undiscerning collectors, transforming everything from cow bones to coconut shells into souvenirs. Temples are pillaged for artifacts to sell to tourists. Religious ceremonies, dance and gamelan forms, and traditional crafts are all being changed and in some cases subverted to fit tourist tastes. To reach such sacred temples as Tanah Lot, Tampaksiring, Besakih, and the Monkey Forest you have to walk past tawdry commercial corridors of hard-sell souvenir and art shops. Resorts arrange helicopter rides over sacred temples. Pushy vendors infest every nice beach. T-shirts for sale are emblazoned with the message: "Fuck Off! I Don't Want a Massage, Painting, Woodcarving, or Another Hotel!"
     Tengenan, once one of the most traditional pre-Hindu villages in Bali, is overrun by souvenir shops and art galleries. A proposal to create a shopping center outside the walls of the community was rejected by villagers who'd already begun selling souvenirs out of their homes. Blue jeans have replaced sarung, rubber thongs cover formerly bare feet, sacred religious symbols decorate hotels, kerosene burners ignite cremation pyres, and palm-leaf covers protecting offerings have been replaced by plastic flyscreens. Many Balinese young men don't care so much for work anymore, preferring instead to hang around with foreigners or make a living out of short-time romances with fair-haired, round-eyed European women.
     The much-publicized wedding of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall in Ubud in 1990 led inevitably to a Western trend of marrying on Bali. A number of beachfront hotels now specialize in wedding ceremonies for American, Dutch, and Australian couples. The service costs US$1000 and includes traditional costumes, photographer, photo album, lunch, dinner, and champagne.
     Villagers still celebrate religious festivals with traditional Balinese dancing, but they also cluster around TV sets in the evening to watch Indonesian sitcoms. The expansion of hotels has limited access to the beaches for rituals. Balinese residents can now only reach the waters of Sanur via the narrow gang, snaking their way between the large hotels.
     In Italy no one would dare enter a church or cathedral in a short-sleeved shirt or shorts, but in Bali Italians wear this sort of disrespectful clothing into Balinese temples all the time. The only bare-breasted women on Bali today are the Europeans who go topless on the beaches, ignoring government prohibitions against doing so.
     Prices are getting higher, it costs money to use the toilet facilities, the whine of motorbikes is constant, the quality of paintings and carvings is declining, multilane highways and big shopping centers and even condo-type developments ("Own your own Bali Hideaway for US$200,000") are legion, brash disco music drowns out tinkling gamelan, money-minded vendors in the tourist ghettoes of Sanur, Kuta, Denpasar, and Lovina are a constant hassle. Tourism has brought stress, tension, corruption, congestion, pollution, urban blight, and crime. You used to be able to leave your bag in the open anywhere on the island for three days and nothing would move it but the wind. Not anymore. Revered Hindu priests wear graffiti art T-shirts and atheist foreigners can pay their way into a Bali-Hindu wedding. Cremations are held specially for tourists, advertised with signs like: "Cremation this Saturday in Bangli! Rp20,000! Book now!" You can even book a seat in advance in Melbourne.

Real Economic Effects
It's estimated that as much as 80% of all tourist receipts end up outside Bali. This revenue leakage must be measured against the much-touted claims of tourism generating huge foreign exchange earnings. Not surprisingly, the estimated $200 million brought in each year by tourists has not been entirely beneficial for the Balinese economy.
     Actual improvement in the standard of living is significant but not dramatic. Much of the population is poor, in many cases desperately poor. The minimum wage is about Rp30,000 per month. Lowly hotel workers earn only Rp2000 per day, receive free lodging, and if they're lucky get one meal a day. Assistant carpenters earn about Rp5000 per day, young workers in the garment industry sew beads or sequins on clothing for as little as Rp600 per day. The vast majority of Balinese live in villages and do not directly benefit from foreign-exchange earnings. The advent of tourism has widened the gap between rich and poor. A UNESCO study demonstrated that those who benefit most from tourism are directly engaged in the industry-hotel and art shop owners and employees, guides, drivers, hotel workers, musicians, performers.
     Tourism creates jobs, but not all of the type endorsed in the country's development plans. Only about 15% of the workforce is employed directly or indirectly in the tourist industry. Moreover, the low season means a dramatic drop in earnings. Neither do all the jobs go to the Balinese. The larger the hotel, the greater the tendency to employ imported labor. People from Java fill a great number of the responsible positions. Only one sector consists exclusively of Balinese-tour guides. At least it's the Balinese who interpret Bali for the tourist.
     Although Bali may still seem cheap compared to the West, there's a danger that the Balinese are driving themselves out of business by overpricing. When visitors first began arriving in Bali, the exorbitant airfare was quickly absorbed in the low cost of rooms, meals, and transport. But Bali isn't that cheap anymore. Travel agents don't push Bali as much as they used to-Thailand and East Malaysia are the preferred destinations these days. Packaged trips to Phuket are very attractive and represent less flying time from Europe.
     The Balinese have become greedy. Shopkeepers hardly bargain anymore; even in Ubud, their eyes are filled with contempt. Most seem to have no interest in attracting repeat customers. Drivers now routinely ask for US$65 per day; some charge as much as US$100.
     There's ample evidence of overbuilding. You see lots of empty shells of buildings-white elephants-the result of bankruptcies and deals gone bad. One such example is the magnificent five-star Saba Beach Resort, as yet unfinished and now housing only the police guarding the site. Half the restaurants and shops in Candidasa are bankrupt from lack of tourists. What's Left
The best things on Bali are still free: orange and gold tropical sunsets, an astoundingly rich culture, the smiles of the children, the sounds of the talcum-powder beaches, the coral dive sites. You can still get into temple dances and music rehearsals free. Violent crime is almost unknown. Bali's dogs aren't as frightened of Westerners as they once were and don't even bark as much as they used to. You can still live well for US$10 a day or less.
     The tourism cancer is limited to the southern one-eighth of the island. If you get away from the commercial strips of Sanur, Kuta, and Legian, you can find hundreds of villages and vast areas of terraced hillsides which haven't changed since the 1930s. Many haven't changed for millennia. Traveling off the beaten track is no problem at all. You don't need directions; just head for the hills. On Bali you can still get as lost as you want.