Expansion of the comfort zone: the tourists are back in Bali, in Seminyak they don’t even have to fear sanded swimming trunks anymore.
Image: AFP
The tourists are back in Bali – and with them the problems: congested roads, garbage on the beaches and angry fundamentalists. A recent ban has also scared off unmarried couples.
Herr Suarnatha apologizes. “The traffic was pretty heavy again,” he explains his delay. It took him more than an hour in his car to travel the 20 kilometers from his house in Kuta to the hotel above Pantai Beach: “At times nothing worked, especially around the international airport.” And there’s the friendly sixty-year-old with the mustache even with his life theme: Bali’s mass tourism and its consequences. As early as 1993, I Made, “the second born”, as everyone calls him, founded the Wisnu Foundation to fight against the increasing environmental destruction caused by tourism. Since then, he and his team have been organizing campaigns, conducting investigations and trying to teach the local population more environmental awareness. But more tourists mean more problems.
Tourism flattens the rice fields
At the beginning of the 1990s, almost a million foreign visitors came to the island, in the boom years before the pandemic there were sometimes even more than six million – mostly Australians and Chinese. “The negative effects of tourism are enormous,” he complains, pointing to the high water consumption, the littering and, above all, the increasing urban sprawl: “Between 700 and 1000 hectares of rice fields are lost every year,” the activist estimates. Especially around the old artists’ town of Ubud and in the hinterland of the beach towns, it sometimes looks like a chessboard: here a parcel of rice fields, there a hotel or villa property and narrow concrete paths in between. It goes on like this for kilometers and kilometers, because everyone seems to want to fulfill their dream of the tropics on the island. Anyone who owns a property in Bali has made it – be it the businessman from Jakarta, the wealthy pensioner couple from Sydney or the nouveau riche start-up founder from Shanghai. In an emergency, straw men help, because officially foreigners are not allowed to own land in Indonesia.