by Diana Darling
photographs by Iskandar
A re-print from Latitudes October 2003
Bali's fate as the world's favorite "last paradise" was imposed on it by its conquerors, of which there were several waves during the 20th century. Each successive political order manipulated Bali's image to sanitize its own. It is interesting to track this process by considering the circumstances-often violent-in which successive regimes sponsored their principal hotels: The Bali Hotel (1928), built by the colonial Dutch; the Bali Beach Hotel (1966) built by the new Republic of Indonesia under Sukarno; and the Nusa Dua resort complex, an expression of Suharto's New Order in the 1980s. Meanwhile, alternative styles of tourism generated by expatriates have always grown alongside official tourism. Where does this leave the Balinese themselves?Bali's history of tourism begins with a shipwreck. In 1904, the Sri Kumala-carrying a cargo of shrimp paste and kerosene-foundered off the coast of Sanur. A dispute over the salvage of the ship between the Dutch colonial government and the powerful southern Balinese raja of Badung lasted two years and ended in processional suicide when the largest-ever Dutch military expedition invaded Bali at Sanur beach. The raja ordered the palace set on fire, and then the entire royal household of Puri Denpasar-wives, children, servants-walked (some ran) into the Dutch cannon-fire. This was the famous puputan, the "fight to the death" expected of Balinese princes faced with certain military defeat. On the afternoon of same day, the same horror repeated itself in a related palace in Denpasar, Puri Pemecutan, in the midst of today's shopping district. Another puputan ended the rule of Klungkung in 1908.
Bali's puputan were not a good reflection on Holland as a colonial power. Tourism might give people a better idea of how well things ran in the Netherlands East Indies. Just a few weeks before the fall of Klungkung, the Royal Packet Navigation Company (KPM) had opened an Official Tourist Bureau, encouraging visitors to come see the beauty of Java. Bali was not deemed sufficiently pacified for visitors until 1914. That same year, the Official Tourist Bureau issued a guidebook telling visitors what to expect when they visited "the island of a thousand temples."
Early tourists to Bali had to be tough; just getting there was hard. The guidebook explains that one may disembark at the harbor in Buleleng on the north coast, or in Benoa in the south. The former is recommended, since Benoa "is only a small place, the steamer mooring at a pier of very simple wooden construction. The Traveller lands here and after passing the customs, takes one of the small sailing boats which are always in readiness to convey passengers to the other side of the bay. It is not a very nice crossing, and sometimes "the Traveller" would have to wade to shore.
Moreover, there were no hotels in Bali in 1914. Visitors were permitted to stay at various colonial government rest houses (pasanggrahan) where a few rooms were available to travelers if no officials happened to need them at the time. A footnote in the guidebook says "Rest houses provide good meals, drinks, and good beds with sheets, but no blankets and no towels." Because of the scarcity of accommodations, the guide book cautions that "parties larger than three cannot visit Bali at one time."
This problem was somewhat rectified in 1928 when the KPM opened the Bali Hotel, a quiet, single-story stretch of white buildings which still stands today on Jalan Veteran in the heart of Denpasar. Remarkably, the Bali Hotel was built on the very site of the Puri Denpasar puputan.
The colonial Dutch style of tourism was monopolistic in its commerce, authoritarian in its control of foreign visitors, and paternalist in its regard toward the Balinese. It was thought that Bali should be protected as "a living museum" of the 14th-century classical Hindu-Javanese culture that the island was believed to conserve in its own special style. The dilemma (which has not yet been resolved) was how to share this treasure without ruining it in the process.
On the part of the Dutch, this was not merely sentimental aestheticism: the colonial government was rightly worried about nationalist movements originating in Java, particularly from populist Muslim organizations with a wide rural base. The colonial policy in the "East Indies" had been to co-opt local nobility as subordinate rulers. One argument the Dutch gave for displacing these leaders and replacing them with themselves was that the princes were venal. If so, that would have made it easier to work with the princes than to address the needs of whole societies. It turned out to be a divisive strategy which would have tragic consequences later in the century. In the meantime, however, the political advantage for the Dutch in promoting tourism to Bali was in being seen as a benevolent colonial power-the protector of a way of life in which music, painting, ritual, agriculture, and civic order seemed to be an integral reality, spontaneously carried out by sexy-looking people with flowers in their hair and an outrageous sense of humor.The Dutch left abruptly with the invasion in 1942 of Japanese troops, on the same beach in Sanur where the Dutch had landed in 1906.
The Bali Beach Hotel
Between 1942 and the opening of the Bali Beach Hotel in 1966, Bali suffered the following hardships, known to be very bad for tourism: the occupation by Japanese military forces; the re-occupation by Dutch forces; famine and civil strife; the devastation of eastern Bali by volcanic eruption; and mass murder in the tens of thousands.
Nonetheless, tourism in those days was perceived by international bodies like the United Nations as a low-impact way to transfer capital and technology from the developed world to the Third World.
The newly independent Indonesia began planning its tourism strategy in the 1950s. Taking clues from the colonial Dutch, Sukarno's government nationalized the KPM's properties and changed the name of the monopoly to Natour. Then, using Japanese war reparation funds, the government built the eleven-story Bali Beach Hotel on Sanur beach. This glaring luxury hotel, built in the "International style" that was the pride of Third World presidents in those days, loomed over beach like a beacon of hope that the next invaders would be international tourists. Unfortunately, when the hotel was inaugurated in 1966, the country was closed to visitors because of anti-communist massacres under way at the time.
Nusa Dua
After sidelining President Sukarno and putting an end to the Indonesian Communist Party and anyone thought to be associated with it, Suharto's New Order government turned to the task of national development with all the efficiency and convenience afforded by a military dictatorship. Tourism, after oil and agriculture, was to become the nation's most important source of foreign revenue. In a move similar to the colonial Dutch after the puputan, Bali was promoted as the nation's "window to the world," and it was hoped that tourism would boost the nation's prestige after the republic's messy beginning. It was understood that tourism would also be a tremendous cash cow. The centerpiece of New Order tourism in Bali was the 425-hectare Nusa Dua resort complex on Bali's southern peninsula.
"Innovative" is not the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of this resort complex of five-star hotels, run by such established firms as Hilton, Hyatt, Sheraton, Club Med, and Hotel Indonesia International-and yet it emerged from some pioneering ideas. Given that the main objective was to raise money for the central government, the Nusa Dua Master Plan nonetheless tried to include the local population as beneficiaries. They were allowed to share in the electricity, fresh water, and roads that the project introduced to the area; and a tourism training school was built on the grounds with priority given to students from the neighboring villages.
A regulating body (the Bali Tourism Development Corporation) was appointed to supervise the installation of infrastructures and the leasing of hotel sites, to be run by international management companies. The BTDC would also monitor design guidelines, established to assure a certain visual harmony and to suggest traditional Balinese architecture-for instance, roofs should all be of terracotta tiles, and Balinese decorative motifs in carved stone were encouraged. Significantly, no building should be higher than a coconut palm (15 metres), or in other words, none should look like the Bali Beach Hotel, now unanimously decried as hideous.
There were problems, of course. Some people complained that their land was acquired under duress. And water for the project came from the mountain lakes above the rice-growing region of Tabanan, to the detriment of the farmers there. Nonetheless, the government considered Nusa Dua such a success that it was to serve as the prototype for similar projects around the archipelago-a grand scheme that evaporated in the financial crisis of 1997 and the subsequent collapse of the New Order regime.
Another project cut short by the crisis was the Garuda Wisnu Kencana (GWK) monument and entertainment park. The idea was to build the largest statue on earth and coat it with gold, to help attract tourists to Bali. Critics of the idea argued that Bali already had more tourists than it could handle, wouldn't it be better to use the $80 million to improve the island's inadequate education, health care, waste management, public transportation, telecommunications, and supply of clean water?The other ones
There always had been alternative movements in Bali's tourism. Some early visitors to Bali found the Bali Hotel oppressive and looked for informal lodgings in Denpasar, or by the sea in Sanur, despite that beach being infested with mosquitoes and ghosts. In 1936, the American couple Robert and Louise Koke discovered what was then a glorious beach in Kuta, and set about building the Kuta Beach Hotel-a few large bamboo and thatch bungalows between the palm grove and the beach. The big attraction at Kuta beach was surfing-which Robert Koke is said to have introduced to Bali-and a cocktails & beach existence that persists today.
Other early tourists, in search of "the real Bali", tracked down that paragon of expatriate chic, Walter Spies, in the hills of Ubud. Well-bred amateur ethnographers, artists and other sensitive types established a loosely bound expatriate colony there which never entirely disappeared during Bali's turbulent years, and flourished anew in the boom years of the last decade of the New Order. Ubud, having no beach and frowning on discos, developed a tourism in which the chief entertainment was blending into the rural village landscape. Until the mid-1980s, accommodations in Ubud were mostly "homestays"-little pavilions in people's backyards where tourists could live cheaply and take part in the life of their Balinese host family. But when the late-20th century flood of goofy capital reached even Ubud, not even Ubud could resist a little luxury. The first cultural luxury hotel was the Amandari.
Set into rice fields on the Sayan ridge, the Amandari hugs the terrain and clings as closely to the principles of traditional Balinese courtyard and pavilion architecture as is possible when you include air-conditioning, marble floors, a garden bathroom and the occasional private swimming pool. Local villagers were employed as laborers for almost two years carrying stones, setting mud bricks and weaving thatched roofs in the course of building this strikingly pretty new place on earth. At first glance, the hotel looked like an unusually well sited Balinese village. None of the laborers would have imagined that it would cost a year's wages just to stay overnight there.
Then one day in 1989, the place was finished. The inaugural ceremonies were conducted with massive offerings, a flock of priests and a generous program of festivities to which everyone, including the laborers, was invited. The following Monday, the laborers threatened to burn the place down. Why had they been dismissed, they demanded to know, with tears of anger in their eyes."Well, the buildings are all built now," explained the manager, gently. "We don't need a building crew anymore."
"But you promised us work," said the spokesman for the aggrieved. "We sold our land with the understanding that now we could live from tourism."
"Yes, of course," said the mediator, a nice man from Ubud. "But the hotel is open now, and it needs another kind of laborer. It needs management expertise-accountants; food & beverage personnel; sales & marketing personnel; personnel personnel."
The local people blinked, hurt and confused. But they blinked first, and of course they had to give way.
Diana Darling's favorite getaway destination is Pyongyang.
