EPILOGUE 3

BALI IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

A Night in October

If you stand on the northern edge of the Bukit Peninsula, where the high limestone plateau angles down to meet the narrow neck of land connecting it to the rest of the island, the urban heartland of modern Bali fans out at your feet. After dark, in the weeks before the wet season in the third year of a new century, it is a vision of lights.

Directly below, the black crescent of Jimbaran Bay is hemmed with a soft glow where the last diners are picking at their seafood dinners on the beach. At the northern end of the bay, a slow pulse of navigation lights shows where the airport runway is wedged in the neck of Bali like a huge splinter. Beyond that the coast sweeps onwards in an arabesque of dancing lights where Kuta and Legian are in full swing, patched with pure darkness as the rice fields reassert to the north of Seminyak, and then fading to black in the direction of Java. To the right, beyond the eastern end of the airport runway, the muddy blotch of Benoa’s natural harbor is speckled with boats, their lights showing doubled up on the glossy surface. To the northeast, the coast bends away towards Sanur’s cluster of lights, with the Bali Beach Hotel standing proud amongst them, still the only true high-rise on the island. Between these two swelling shorelines is a great smear of illumination where Denpasar is going about its nocturnal business like any middlesized Indonesian city. And beyond that again Bali rises into pure darkness where the roads and rivers run like unseen veins, past Tabanan and Mengwi and Ubud and Gianyar, from the high mountain core.

From up here on the slopes of the Bukit, not yet barnacled with white villas, the whole vision gives out a low hum: a composite of a thousand woks rattling over a thousand guttering flames at street-side stalls; a thousand motorbikes puttering through the gloom; and a thousand songs pulsing from a thousand barroom sound systems; all underscored by an occasional hollow base note as a late flight bowls in for landing out of the darkness.

And then, at five minutes after 11:00 p.m. on this, October 12, 2002, a flare of unexpected light shows to the north, a sudden bright blot on the skyline beyond the airport. It blooms and contracts in silence and has already faded to an indistinct amber smudge and a darkening pillar of smoke by the time the sound of the blast has traveled the five miles across the perfumed night from Kuta.

Aftershocks of the Bali Bombings

The Bali bombings of October 2002 killed 202 people, including 38 Indonesians and 88 Australians. There were two separate blasts. First, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest inside a raucous bar called Paddy’s Pub on the eastern side of Jalan Legian in the heart of Kuta. Twenty seconds later, another bomber flicked the switch on a far, far bigger bomb, packed into the back of a white Suzuki van, pulled up on the other side of the street outside the Sari Club. The two bombers appear to have been a youth from Central Java called Feri and a young man named Arnasan from a poor village in Banten. The men who had actually plotted the attack and built the bombs had already faded away into the night. In the months that followed, however, the investigators, headed by a veteran Balinese police chief named Made Mangku Pastika, tracked them down. They were tried, and on a rainy November night in 2008 three of their number were executed by firing squad on the prison island at Nusa Kembanagan off the southern coast of Java. Others were jailed or killed in shootouts with the security forces. They were connected to the Jemaah Islamiah Islamist network, which was in turn linked to Al Qaeda, and they had planned the bombing as an attack on America and its allies. None of them was from Bali.

Beyond the initial carnage, the bombings did grave damage to the Balinese economy. After the jittery months around the collapse of the New Order, and the dips caused by Ash Thursday at home and the 9/11 terrorist attacks abroad, the tourist industry had been surging forward. Four decades earlier, Willard Hanna had been troubled by projections suggesting that Bali would likely receive 500,000 foreign tourists a year by the end of the century. In fact, a grand total of 1.42 million had flowed through the Ngurah Rai Airport arrivals gates in 2001. Jalan Legian still stretched away northwards through Kuta from Bemo Corner, but it was no longer a sleepy lane; it was a roaring thoroughfare flanked with bars and restaurants, and it ran all the way to Seminyak through three miles of unbroken tourism development. Up in Ubud, meanwhile, though Elizabeth Gilbert had yet to swing by on her Eat, Pray, Love odyssey, and though there were still open rice fields around the lower half of Monkey Forest Road, there were already hundreds of guesthouses and spas and galleries and cafés crowding the town.

Perhaps 25 percent of the entire Balinese workforce was directly employed in the tourist sector, but that was only a small part of the picture, for tourism had long since surpassed agriculture as the dominant economic activity on the island. It supported a large manufacturing industry, churning out clothing and souvenirs. It paid the wages of taxi drivers, and its dollars flowed through the pumps of the island’s fuel stations. Bali’s construction workers were supported by tourism, and out in the poor villages of Buleleng and Karangasem, far from any tourist itinerary, there were medical bills and school fees paid with cash sent back from prodigal sons and daughters serving with a smile in the resorts of the south. Even the migrant food hawkers, offering tepid bowls of meatball soup to off-duty taxi drivers in alleyways on the edge of Denpasar, indirectly owed their living to tourism. It fueled a vast web of transactions large and small, spanning the island from one side of the central volcanoes to the other.

In Bali, just four percent of the population eked out an existence below the poverty line; across the eastern straight in the neighboring province of West Nusa Tenggara, poverty levels were almost five times higher. The difference was largely down to tourism, and now, as tourist numbers collapsed in the wake of the bombing, something suddenly became horribly apparent. For decades, hand-wringing observers had been expressing fears that tourism might “destroy” Bali in the abstract sense of an erosion of “charm.” But the bombs showed all too clearly that it was the sudden loss of tourism that now had the immediate capacity to destroy the island as a prosperous society.

There might have been a violent reaction to the bombings, for Indonesia at the start of the twenty-first century was frequently a place of communal conflict. Since the fall of Suharto, small civil wars had unfolded between Christian and Muslim neighbors in Maluku and Sulawesi; local Dayaks in Kalimantan had rampaged against long-established transmigrant communities from Madura; and all over the country Indonesia’s much maligned but disproportionately wealthy ethnic Chinese community had had reason to fear the mob. And though the scale had been much smaller, Bali had not been immune to this sort of thing.

The growing tourist economy and general urban development had been attracting economic migrants for decades, most of them from the poorer parts of East Java or West Nusa Tenggara. They worked on building sites and as pavement hawkers, hard-laboring young men sleeping five to a room in the grimmest boarding houses of Denpasar, enduring all the immigrant’s eternal opprobrium from the settled locals, and inevitably blamed for every criminal act. Back on April 29, 1999, during the heated run-up to the first post-New Order election, a mob of men in traditional Balinese costume had come out onto the streets of Kuta in the early hours of the morning. While the night’s stragglers were eking out the tail end of the party in Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club, three-quarters of a mile to the north on Jalan Melasti, the sarong- and udeng-wearing vigilantes were overturning the food carts and kiosks of Muslim vendors from Java and dragging the smashed pieces to the beach to be burnt. Who exactly had organized the mob was never clear. Kuta community leaders claimed that the migrants had annoyed local residents with their late night trading; but the episode was clearly symptomatic of wider hostility towards “incomers,” heightened by the uncertainty of those early months of post-New Order reformasi. There had been further violence in early 2002, this time up in Kintamani where locals destroyed the homes of seven Balinese Christian families, always a favorite target for persecution.

After this, after the Ash Thursday riots, and after Bali’s older history of violence, some terrible revenge action against the island’s Muslim minority, both recent migrants from Java and centuries-old communities of Bugis and Sasak origin, in the wake of the 2002 bombings might have been easy to imagine. But that’s not what happened. The anguished response from international media commentators, tourists and expats was predictable: the violence of Islamist terrorism was surely at complete odds with “peaceful Hindu Bali.” But local people, too, reeling from the reality of economic hardship, wounded pride and shared trauma, felt exactly the same, and felt it with absolute sincerity. There could be no violent retribution for the Bali bombings because, as the tee shirts hastily printed up in the weeks that followed would have it, “Bali Loves Peace”….

“Strengthening Bali,” Identity Politics and Invented Traditions

Though there were no revenge attacks, in the aftermath of the bombings a powerful and potentially belligerent local discourse did emerge in response. Its name was Ajeg Bali. The phrase is usually translated from the Balinese as “Strengthening Bali,” and it had actually been around for a while by the time the bombs exploded in Kuta in October 2002. Satria Naradha, the head of the Bali Post Media Group, owner of the Bali Post newspaper, claimed to have invented the entire concept of Ajeg Bali in a moment of divine inspiration as a meditating schoolboy back in the 1980s. But other senior civil and religious figures from Denpasar clearly played a part in developing the concept. It was first properly unveiled to mark the launch of Naradha’s new regional broadcaster, Bali TV, in May 2002, but it wasn’t until after the bombing, as a particularly intense wet season unleashed its downpours over the ranks of empty restaurants and untenanted guesthouses in Kuta, Seminyak and Sanur, that it gained real popular currency.

Ajeg Bali was as vague as such philosophical concepts in Indonesia tend to be, but at heart it rested on the notion that a return to imagined old-fashioned values and a strengthening of Balinese identity and pride was required. Threaded through this was a disquiet at the encroachment of “outsiders,” once again economic migrants from other parts of Indonesia rather than foreign tourists or expats. The extravagantly bearded Hindu-Bali televangelist Ida Pedanda Gede Made Gunung, a Bali TV favorite during the station’s early years and a firm proponent of Ajeg Bali, reminded his viewers that “Many Balinese sell their land to buy a lot of sate, but don’t forget that many immigrants sell sate in order to buy a lot of land.” The movement also played into the rise of the pecalangan. Today, these volunteer village “security teams” are found in virtually every banjar, the smallest of traditional community structures, in Bali. They are sometimes presented as a timeless aspect of “traditional” village life, but before the fall of the New Order they were virtually unknown, and though they could at times slide into petty thuggery and vigilante violence, they now had a gloss of Ajeg Bali legitimacy.

There was also an explicitly religious component to the discourse, with talk of “strengthening” and “purifying” the Hinduism of Bali, a “Hinduism” which had only really been properly acknowledged as such by its participants half a century earlier. Newsreaders on Bali TV took to pressing their palms at the start of their broadcasts and saying Om Swasti Astu, an invented “Hindu” version of the Muslim salutation As-salaam alaikum. The Parisada Hindu Dharma Indonesia, the national Hindu council, meanwhile, had taken to issuing edicts telling people how to pray “correctly,” what color to wear for ceremonies, and what was, in fact, “proper” Hindu practice.

In short, Ajeg Bali, with its call for a return to traditional values, its religious conservatism, its undercurrent of hostility to immigrants and its association with sinister volunteer security teams, had unsettling parallels with aggressive populist right-wing movements the world over. But it also had woven into it that idea first properly voiced during the public soul-searching after the Ash Thursday riots and then emblazoned across tee shirts and bumper stickers as the smoke from the 2002 bombings cleared: “Bali Loves Peace.”

Ajeg Bali, as both an organized movement and a popular catch-phrase, faded away somewhat in subsequent years. But its core concept remained: of a faintly belligerent chauvinism tempered by a sincere and absolute commitment to the image of Bali as a peaceful place. When, on a still evening in 2005, eleven days short of the third anniversary of the Kuta attacks, two new suicide bombers walked out amongst the dining tables on the beach at Jimbaran and detonated the explosives in their backpacks and a third bomber followed suit further north in a restaurant in an upscale shopping precinct in Kuta, killing 20 people and sending a barely recovered tourist industry reeling back into crisis, no one was surprised when no revenge attacks on Muslim migrants ensued.

The Man of the People and the Regencies’ Resurgence

In 2008, the people of Bali went to the polls to elect their own governor for the very first time. All the previous provincial heads, including the last, Dewa Made Beratha, had been appointees, but now, in the ongoing era of post-New Order reform, Indonesia had gone democratic with a vengeance.

The Balinese popular choice for the ultimate top job, Megawati, had actually ended up as president in 2001 after Gus Dur was impeached. But she served a lackluster half-term, and lost out during the first directly democratic presidential election in 2004 to a retired military officer with significant reformist credentials, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, better known in the interests of brevity as “SBY.” This time there was no popular backlash in Bali after Megawati’s national defeat. As for the 2008 gubernatorial elections, here the popular vote did go to the candidate with PDI-P backing, none other than the police officer who had gained international plaudits for his investigation of the 2002 bombing, Made Mangku Pastika.

Pastika was the son of a village schoolteacher from Sanggalangit in Buleleng in northern Bali. He came from a poor background and he had to work selling flowers and cutting grass from a young age. When the 1963 eruption of Mount Agung destroyed local rice fields, his father signed the family up for a government transmigration program, and they shipped out to Sumatra. It was there that the young Pastika, having already worked as a houseboy for an ethnic Chinese family and learnt to speak Chinese as a consequence, and having also done time as a street vendor in Palembang, joined the Indonesian police force. A stellar career followed, and his role in bomb investigation gave him a high, and highly positive public profile in Bali. The shift into politics was a natural one, and he was a genuinely popular choice. What’s more, during his first five-year term, his promise as a man of the people seemed to come good. He initiated an ongoing “home improvement” program to bring gimcrack dwellings in isolated communities far removed from the tourist hotspots up to minimum standards; he made Bali the first Indonesian province to deliver free healthcare to the poorest members of society; and he even took steps to initiate a modern public transport system though this element of his governance occasionally lapsed into fancifulness, not least in an abortive plan to build a round-island railway line. But perhaps Pastika’s greatest credential when it came to man of the people status was his background: he was the first Sudra governor of Bali, the first to come from the majority “commoner” caste. Of the eight provincial heads who had gone before him, all bar the single Javanese transplant had been members of the Triwangsa, the trio of topmost caste designations from which came the priests and the kings.

After Indonesia became an independent republic, the old Balinese aristocracy had not gone away. The outlines of the rajadoms as they had existed under colonial rule—Badung, Bangli, Buleleng, Gianyar, Jembrana, Karangasem, Klungkung and Tabanan—remained as the borders of the kabupaten, the regencies, the level of local governance beneath that of the province. Under both Sukarno and Suharto, and indeed under the new democratic system, members of the old princely families and the priestly elite often headed up the regency administrations as well as being prominent in business and civil society in general. And by the time Made Mangku Pastika was elected governor, the regencies had more power than they had enjoyed since the days of the rajadoms.

B. J. Habibie, the stop-gap Indonesian president who took over when Suharto resigned, had rushed through a great raft of political reforms. Amongst these were new laws devolving extra power and funding to the regency level of government, a move prompted by long-running complaints about Jakarta’s centrist arrogance and nervousness about secessionism after East Timor embarked on its bloody separation from Indonesia. The laws were enacted by Habibie’s successor Gus Dur in 2001, and the regency governments across the country got their hands on such matters as transport infrastructure and planning, not to mention much, much bigger budgets. Decentralization did assuage some of the grumbling about Jakarta’s high-handedness, but it also quickly created new problems of its own. Critics pointed out that it had simply provided fresh opportunities for corruption and cronyism at a local level. And even without the problems of graft, effective, province-level planning could now be hampered by intransigence or ineptitude in the regencies, an issue that Pastika sometimes ran up against during his time as Bali’s governor. Decentralization, then, represented a sort of political fragmentation, an erosion of strong, central governance, and in Bali that had ominous historical connotations.

New Tourism Directions

On January 5, 2011 Governor Pastika announced a moratorium on the building of new tourist resorts in southern Bali.

In the wake of the 2002 bombings, with tourism development temporarily stalled by a rush of canceled bookings, there had been a brief pause for reflection. Some, both foreigners and locals, had wondered aloud whether Bali really had gone too far, pushing beyond the sensible limits of cultural tourism into crass commercialism, and whether the island ultimately bore some kind of responsibility for the terrorist outrage visited upon it. It was an idea that had queasy parallels with the terrorists’ own notions about Kuta as a den of Westernized debauchery. But such worries were quickly forgotten and the serious wobble caused by the second bombings in 2005 notwithstanding, tourist development was soon surging forward afresh. The year before Pastika announced the resort moratorium, foreign tourist arrivals had topped two million for the first time, and everyone expected the numbers to keep rising. But at the same time, average hotel occupancy rates had actually started to fall. The simple fact was that there was too much tourist accommodation in Bali.

The vast majority of the development was still concentrated in the south, in the regencies of Badung and Gianyar, and in the municipality of Denpasar which includes the resort at Sanur. The southern infrastructure was groaning under the strain. Much of the Kuta-Legian-Seminyak strip, which had grown up organically over the previous four decades with little proper planning, was in a state of near permanent gridlock. Water, electricity and sewerage systems were also struggling to cope. Meanwhile, some other Balinese regencies, in particular Karangasem, Jembrana and Buleleng, still suffered high unemployment rates and a serious paucity of development. Pastika’s idea was that a ban on new resorts in Badung, Denpasar and Gianyar would not only relieve the pressure there, it would also help push tourism development into these neglected outlands. But he was fighting a lost cause, not least because he didn’t have the empowered regencies on his side. The regents of Badung and Gianyar and the mayor of Denpasar had no desire to see investment for construction, and rates from established tourism business, go elsewhere. They kept signing permits for new resorts regardless of any paper moratorium issued at the provincial level. From the other direction, meanwhile, the provincial administration was faced with a national tourism ministry determined to see overall tourist arrivals continuing to rise, with optimistic projections heading into the tens of millions by the early 2020s.

What was more, by the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, tourist development in Bali had developed new characteristics. For a start, there were now dozens upon dozens of modern “city hotels,” typically two- or three-story blocks without the slightest hint of “Bali Style” in their architecture, crowded into Tuban, Kuta and Legian. These were a step well above the old homestays that had served generations of backpackers and surfers, and many of their guests were Indonesian. When the planners and predictors of the 1970s had laid out their schemes, they had largely ignored the potential of the domestic tourism sector. Indonesia, they presumed, was a Third World country and the inhabitants of Third World countries didn’t go on holiday. But under the developmental auspices of the New Order, and then during a fresh surge under SBY’s democratic government, the Indonesian national economy had grown dramatically. Some excitable commentators were now proclaiming the country a new economic superpower, a superpower which happened to have the fourth largest national population on the planet and where many people now had significant disposable incomes and an inclination to travel for leisure. Domestic tourist numbers are always far harder to track than those for foreign visitors, but most observers estimated that by 2010 Bali was receiving around twice as many Indonesian tourists as foreign visitors.

Then there were the villas, which were now thickly scattered across the vanishing rice fields north of Seminyak, throughout the palm groves around Ubud, and all over the stony heights of the Bukit Peninsula. At first, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, many officials were inclined to look on this particular type of development favorably. Luxury villas seemed to represent that elusive “high quality” tourism that had long been regarded as a holy grail, with proportionally lower numbers and higher spends. What was more, many of the villas were being directly built by or leased on long terms to foreigners, or to wealthy Indonesians from the big cities of Java. Unlike travelers on cheap two-week packages, those with long-term investments would be far less likely to abandon Bali in the wake of a new terrorist atrocity or some other disaster, or so the reasoning went. Many locals, too, were delighted to get big lump sums by selling off for villa projects plots that had only ever returned a few hundred dollars a year as rice fields. But it soon became apparent that compared to traditional hotels, villas swallowed up a huge amount of land and sucked up vast quantities of water while providing accommodation for a relatively small number of visitors, and by now everyone could see that Bali’s environment was struggling to cope with the pressures of the modern world.

Dying Out: Environmental Impacts

Environmental pressures are nothing new in Bali. Writing of the 1930s, before anyone had built a resort infinity pool on a Bukit cliff-top or sunk a borehole to supply a hotel hot tub, Willard Hanna noted that the island was a place with “too many people, too little land, and too few job opportunities.” Population pressure had already had some very obvious impacts: the swathes of true wilderness that once covered the interior had contracted to the highest uplands and western-most hills by the start of the twentieth century, and the last recorded Balinese tiger, sole survivor of Asia’s easternmost population of these big cats, marooned in Bali when the rising sea levels isolated the island from Java at the end of the last Ice Age, was killed in 1937. By the twenty-first century, it was not just apex predators but the entire Balinese ecosystem and the entire traditional agricultural system which ran alongside it that was facing an uncertain future. This seemingly waterlogged land, drenched with torrential downpours and buried under thunderheads for several months each year, irrigated by a 1,000-year-old network of channels and ditches, and liberally sprinkled with holy water, was in very serious danger of drying out.

According to some estimates, around 65 percent of Bali’s entire water supply goes straight into tourism-related properties, chlorinated for huge swimming pools, blasted from showerheads in some 90,000 hotel rooms, sprayed over lawns and flowerbeds and golf courses and piped out to villas and exclusive resorts in the essentially waterless heights of the Bukit Peninsula. To meet these extravagant needs, water has long been diverted from the delicately balanced subak, the traditional irrigation networks that feed the rice fields of the interior, and also sucked straight up from the ground via boreholes. As a consequence, the mountain lakes that have always acted as the ultimate reservoirs for the whole of Bali have begun to dry out; more than half of the island’s watercourses now stop flowing altogether during the dry season, and in the low-lying areas where there is much ground-water extraction, particularly in the coastal resort areas, eawater has begun leaching into the water table at an alarming rate.

Elsewhere, the rice fields, which once made more restrained use of the natural water supply, have started to vanish. By some counts, around a thousand hectares of agricultural land each year is converted to other uses, much, though by no means all, of it directly related to tourism. Air pollution on the congested roads, vast volumes of trash and dirty seas are other features of the heavily developed southern regions.

By the time that tourism had fully recovered from the aftereffects of the 2002 and 2005 bombings, there was a definite public awareness of the environmental problems and a sense that, just like a terrorist bomb or a politically motivated riot, pollution and environmental degradation could damage Bali’s image. When Time magazine ran an only slightly hyperbolic article in 2011, describing “dunes of surf-tossed garbage” on Kuta Beach and a plethora of other environmental horrors, some local politicians and tourist industry chiefs responded in time-honored fashion, claiming that that the article was a conspiratorial plot to discredit Bali. But Governor Pastika reacted more sensibly, pointing out that “If we want Bali to be known as a paradise island, it needs to be like paradise. That’s a goal we all need to work on together.” By that stage there were already a good number of people working towards that goal: NGOs doing their best to run educational programs and campaigners pressing for more sensible environmental approaches from both government and civil society. But though they could often achieve small triumphs—recycling at village level, the apparent resurrection of the critically endangered Bali starling, and so on—when it came to the ceaseless forward march of big-money tourism development and general urbanization they looked like they were fighting a losing battle.

The wider environmentalist movement seemed to have its unifying moment in the organized opposition to an extravagant plan to fill the natural harbor at Benoa with artificial islands inspired by the similar developments in Dubai. The island complex, first mooted in 2011 and funded by a Jakarta-based developer, was expected to feature luxury hotels, a Disney-style theme park and possibly even a Formula One race track, none of which seemed to have much to do with “cultural tourism.” It was also expected to have a seriously detrimental impact on the already battered mangroves around the fringes of the bay, the last surviving strip of truly natural habit in the area. A Tolak Reklamasi, “Refuse the Reclamation”, movement soon emerged. It had many of the features of the earlier campaign against the Nirwana development at Tanah Lot, with the addition of the more uncomplicatedly admirable elements of Ajeg Bali, plus a dash of 1998-style street cred thanks to the heavy involvement of students, artists and musicians. The sitins and marches that the movement organized, with Made Mangku Pastika now cast in the villain’s role as far as the campaigners were concerned, thanks to his signing of an initial 2013 permit for the project, were widely supported, but, of course, peaceful.

The Benoa reclamation project itself became bogged down in the muddy challenges, its future uncertain. But it is clear that wider environmental issues constitute one of the biggest challenges for Bali’s future, as they do for many other heavily populated, economically boisterous parts of Indonesia.

Paradise Lost and Found

In the twenty-first century, the southern heartland of Bali has become a single conurbation, centered on Denpasar and edged by the main coastal resorts. The once separate communities still have their distinctive characters, from Kuta’s hugger-mugger mayhem to Renon’s dignified air of Indonesian suburbia. But the spaces in between have filled with homes and businesses, and the urban sprawl has long since begun to leach outwards from the core, the Bukit and Canggu transforming into villa-speckled suburbs and ribbons of concrete and commerce creeping uphill towards Ubud and Gianyar. The population of this region is probably about 1.5 million out of a total Balinese population of approximately 4.2 million, bolstered by tens of thousands of temporarily resident tourists at any one time. It is a city and it has many of the problems you would expect to encounter in any city in any developing post-colonial state. There is poverty and inequality, pollution and buckling urban infrastructure despite some impressive recent improvements, not least a toll road, built on stilts above Benoa Bay. There is also a good deal of crime, from house-breaking to convenience store hold-ups, rising rates of HIV infection and a significant problem with drug use.

Some excitable tabloid journalists from overseas, and some similarly excitable netizens with their own interests in Bali, like to declare that all this is evidence of the island’s ultimate corruption. It is a paradise lost, they say, given over entirely to the worship of Mammon. Tourism, as so many predicted for so long, has finally destroyed Bali. But the problems they point to are often exaggerated and are in no way unique to places with a tourist economy. Surabaya, Makassar, Banjarmasin and any number of other urban centers in modern Indonesia also have bag-snatchers, pickpockets, drug addicts, gangsters, bent traffic police and corrupt local politicians, and yet none of these places has an economy founded on tourism. Most of them also have worse levels of urban poverty than the Denpasar conurbation. What’s more, there are dozens of other Indonesian cities similar in size to Denpasar—Malang, say, or Padang—which four decades ago still had quiet streets, a certain sleepy charm, a dash of faded colonial elegance and rice fields in easy walking distance of the center, but which are now also gridlocked concrete metropolises, and without tourism having played any significant part in the transformation. Bali is a part of Indonesia, and a fairly central and prosperous part at that, and Indonesia is a part of the modern world. Had no tourists ever arrived in decades past, Bali would still today look nothing like it did forty years ago. Indeed, an urban periphery of villas and beachfront restaurants is perhaps a pleasanter prospect than one made up of factories, housing complexes and slums.

Those who declare that Bali, or at least the southern part of it, has been spoilt by mass tourism tend not to see beyond their own subjective criteria for an appealing holiday destination, and fail to acknowledge that tourism itself is one of Bali’s biggest draws. The characteristics usually cited to explain Bali’s unique appeal, from the mountain and rice field vistas to the colorful cultural traditions, and from the beaches to the vibrant arts scene, are often equaled or bettered in other parts of Indonesia. But the island’s ultimate trump card is its highly developed tourist industry, and in that it certainly surpasses every other destination in the country. A key attraction for many of the domestic tourists who make up the vast majority of Bali’s visitors today is the island’s “liveliness” as a bustling resort, as it is for many of those from the emerging markets of Russia and China, and as it always has been for the hordes of Australian package tourists and partying teens. Even those who would look down on the specific areas and specific activities that attract those dominant demographics tend not to stray too far from sophisticated accommodation, service and dining, even if they do seek out more tranquil settings up in the hills. Very few travelers truly want to eschew the beaten track.

In any case, it only takes a brief glance at the map to realize that tourist development is actually still concentrated in a remarkably limited area. Beyond the urbanized south, there are only scattered pockets of significant tourist activity. New hotspots are always emerging, of course, mountain villages like Munduk or Sideman, transformed over a few short seasons so that starry-eyed visitors who find a personal paradise one year might discover disappointment the next. But you only need to cross a single ridge to the east or west of the latest emerging destination to enter a valley as yet untrammeled by outsiders, and in Bali there are still a lot of ridges and a lot of valleys.

When it comes to “culture,” meanwhile, no one could convincingly argue that that has been destroyed by tourism. From the most exclusive beach resorts to the humblest mountain hamlets, offerings are still laid out each day, and most temple festivals are actually more lavishly celebrated than in the past. None of this is a tawdry charade, meaninglessly performed for camera-carrying sightseers. It is real.

Back in the early 1990s, as the SCETO master planners’ prediction of the end of “cultural manifestations” began to look distinctly silly and as “cultural tourism” started to seem like a notable triumph, some observing academics made admiring noises about a supposed Balinese capacity for what they called “boundary maintenance.” The people of Bali, they argued, had proved remarkably adept at recognizing which parts of their lives and lifestyles really mattered and which bits belonged to the throwaway field of tourist service, and at maintaining the “boundary” between these supposedly discrete realms. But this interpretation still rests on that restrictive view of what “culture” is, making it exclusively a thing of religious worship and traditional practices rather than allowing it to encompass the full gamut of life, fluid, unbounded, acquisitive and ever shifting. If you accept this broader, more dynamic understanding of “culture,” then it stands to reason that tourism itself is as much an authentic part of Bali today as rice farming. And perhaps tourism as an authentic part of modern Balinese culture has had a more profound impact than simply raising living standards and reinforcing traditions by giving them value as touristic “capital.”

The nineteenth-century history of Bali which Willard Hanna so vividly described was one of endless turmoil and frequent bloodshed, not to mention piracy, slavery, opium and guns. No one at that time, Balinese or outsider, would have for a moment suggested that the island was a place of peace and harmony. That idea was a product of the 1920s colonial domination of Bali, its 1930s “discovery” as an expat paradise, and its later promotion as a cultural tourist destination. The episodes and events described in this book strongly suggest that, historically, whenever Bali has been without stable, overarching governance it has had a tendency to lapse into political violence. In today’s post-New Order era, Bali is freer and more democratic, but it also has less sense of certainty and security, even without the myriad pressures of chaotic urbanization, immigration and environmental degradation. Thanks to decentralization, it is also far more politically fragmented than it was during Suharto’s thirty-year centrist reign. Judging by past precedent, this seems like a recipe for disaster, and yet, beyond the brief flare-up of Ash Thursday, there has been no widespread rioting, no pogroms, no serious attacks on minorities. Violence does still occur, of course. Conflicts between villages over “customary issues” such as access to a disputed temple or burial ground sometimes degenerate into street fighting, and village pecalangan can turn from security team to lynch mob if they get their hands on an “outsider” suspected of a crime. But there’s a sense that such things cannot be allowed to get out of hand, because a wider conflagration would not only be bad for tourism, it would also be somehow “un-Balinese.” The idea that this is an island of peace, once little more than a colonial and touristic cliché belied by the hard facts of history, has become a reality, a part of Bali’s very identity.

Bali has been constantly changing since the moment the seawater first flooded across the shallow valley west of Gilimanuk and made it an island. Traders, immigrants and itinerants have changed the place. Javanese overlords and Indian ideas have changed it. Dutch colonialists, Japanese imperialists and Indonesian ideologues have changed it. The Balinese people themselves have changed it, over and over. And tourism, most certainly, has changed it too, though not always for the worse.