Biting the Apple

(First published in Bali Advertiser, May 11, 2005)

How much more tourism can the island take? How much more traffic? How many more craft shops? How many more Kutas? How many more jets? The answer is that it never stops, the roads are widened, the hotels multiply, the direct flights increase. Commercialism has crept into every aspect of Balinese life… It is now clear that the unbelievably complex social and religious fabric of the Balinese is at last breaking down under the tourist onslaught. (Bill Dalton, Bali Handbook, 1990, as quoted by Michel Picard in Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, English Edition, 1996)

Bali was probably an easier sell as paradise when Balinese girls and women gathered topless in the markets to do the day’s business. Michel Picard in Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture thought so. “The breasts of Balinese women no doubt constituted a major attraction to the island during that time,” he wrote about the period between the two World Wars, when Bali achieved international fame for the beauty of the island and its women.

On my first trip to Bali in 1998, I was happy to find that some women, when not expecting to see tourists, still went topless in fields north of Ubud. And I was pleased and embarrassed the day I turned my bicycle off the road to Goa Gajah from Ubud and found myself in the middle of village bath time, with naked men and boys to the left and naked women and girls to the right. I plowed on looking down at my front tire. It was more than erotic titillation. I was able to report to friends in Singapore that the ‘real’ Bali still existed outside the tourist centers.

Don’t be shocked at equating topless and bathing women with the continuing existence of Balinese culture and all that pertains to it. It’s an old equation among writers that helped create the idea of Bali as earthly Eden. Hickman Powell, author of The Last Paradise, 1930, was disappointed on landing at Buleleng and finding just another grim colonial Asian city. As he traveled towards the ‘real’ magic of south Bali, Powell was still skeptical until he saw a solitary woman walking along the road, a pot on her head, with “the bronze bowls of maiden breasts project(ing) angular, living shadows… and all at once she was but a part of a vast spreading wonderland, embodied dreams of pastoral poets.”

Dalton, in 1990, thought old Bali still existed, too, despite the lead quote. “If you get away from the commercial strips of Sanur and Kuta, there are still literally hundreds of villages which haven’t changed since Covarrubias’s book was written in the 1930s,” he wrote a few pages later. This probably isn’t as true as it was 15 years ago. Paved roads, electricity, television and phone service now reach almost everywhere, integrating previously remote villages into the national and global world.

Nowadays, too, trash is piled up in ravines along the roads. Coastal rivers run dark, dirty and full of plastic. Denpasar’s sewage system and roads are overworked and inadequate. Tourist buses and market traffic sometimes so clog Ubud’s center that vehicles are backed up all the way to Monkey Forest. Yet Indonesian officials keep raising the targets for tourist arrivals and people keep arriving to hit them.

The tourist arrival target for all of Indonesia in 2005 is six million, according to a Jan. 3 Jakarta Post article. That would mean Bali tourist arrivals of 1.56 million judging by Bali’s percentage of Indonesia’s total for 1994-2003. It’s a small increase over the almost 1.5 million that arrived Bali in 2004, but it’s almost a 50 percent increase over 2003 arrivals. (Arrivals in 2003, slowed by the Kuta bombing of 2002, dropped below 1.1 million for the first time since 1995.)

If Bali arrivals as a percentage of total Indonesian arrivals hit 30 percent in 2005, as they did in 1999, this year could see 1.8 million tourists in Bali. The problem isn’t where to put them all. Occupancy rates at classified hotels regularly run at 50 percent and at non-classified hotels at 30 percent. There are rooms, even accepting that arrival figures reflect only tourists entering Indonesia at Ngurah Rai. The problem is the quality of the Bali tourism experience will continue to drop as more people arrive to burden the island’s infrastructure and return home to report on traffic jams, polluted rivers and garbage heaped along the roads.

“Even the tourism industry is beginning to admit that if something is not done soon, the degradation of the environment could condemn the future of tourism in Bali,” Picard wrote a few years after Dalton talked of the unchanged Bali of the 1930s.

Early writers worried about cultural pollution. Economic pressures and a national television culture are probably just as much to blame as tourism for any decline in Balinese traditions. Thousands of rural communities in the U.S. have died without ever becoming “paradises.” Tourism perhaps even helped to preserve the culture by getting the Balinese to look at their traditions through the wondering eyes of the foreigners, as Picard argues. Maybe that’s why Balinese culture and traditions have held up as well as they have under modernity’s onslaught.

The primary pressure from tourism has been on the environment. Conde Nast Traveler listed Bali as the top “island paradise” destination in 2004. Time did it in 2003. Magazines five, ten, fifteen years from now won’t do so unless tourism officials and the tourism industry stop viewing Bali as a tourist Utopia to be sold, look at the real Bali of traffic congestion, dirty water, and roadside litter, hitch up the sarong and clean it up.

(The statistics for Bali tourist arrivals and hotel occupancy rates were taken from the BPS Statistics Indonesia Web site, www.bps.go.id.)

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi