Before the 1980s, most people here filled their days working the rice fields or fishing, and a bit of fish with some rice was enough to make people happy. Now everyone thinks about money and profit. Tourism has been good for the economy, he says — but he thinks it's gone too far. Since Bali started being marketed worldwide as paradise, tourists and investors alike have kept arriving, and haven't really stopped.
He's careful about where he places blame. Never the tourists themselves — the big investors, mostly foreign, are another matter. They buy large tracts of land, bring in outside labour to build a hotel, and once it's running, the profits flow to the foreign owner with little in the way of taxes reaching the Balinese government. Many coastal hotels don't want local people on ‘their’ beaches; locals who show up anyway get sent away, and the stretches of shoreline still open to them keep shrinking. Big hotels import much of their food, too, since not everything they want is grown locally.
These are a few of the most important reasons why the local people do not profit at all from the presence of big hotels.
There's a secondary problem tied to the construction itself. Most of the workers brought in to build these hotels come from other Indonesian provinces — Java, Lombok — and once the project's finished and the work dries up, many simply stay in Bali. Not a problem by itself, until they run out of money, at which point some drift toward crime.
Employment has grown, he'll grant that, but mostly at the bottom — roomboy, gardener, the low-ranked jobs. Management roles almost always go to outsiders. The wages Balinese workers do get rarely cover a decent standard of living, and when the money runs out entirely, land often gets sold — usually to a foreign investor planning another hotel, restarting the same cycle.
The environmental cost, in his professional view as a coastal engineer, is the most serious problem of all. The Bali Turtle Island Development project has visibly reshaped the currents around Sanur, washing away beaches that used to hold their ground. Nearby, a mangrove forest is under threat from the same project; the turtles that gave Turtle Island its name are gone, and coral cutting continues regardless. The scale of damage from this single project is enormous, and the government, in his words, still hasn't stepped in.
Outside the big hotel sector, he sees tourism working better — people making an honest living selling souvenirs, food, and drinks, with tax revenue reaching the wider community when money is spent locally rather than inside a resort. But he worries the sector is overcrowded already: more people arrive from other provinces hoping to cash in on tourism every day, while the actual number of visitors hasn't grown to match, leaving everyone competing over a static pool of tourist spending.
Crime, drugs, and prostitution have all become visible in ways they weren't before tourism, almost entirely carried out, in his account, by people not originally from Bali. Balinese culture, he insists, simply doesn't run that way — if a Balinese person is short on food, he borrows from a neighbour rather than steals from a stranger.
There are no elephants in Bali, but tourists like elephants, so what do you do: you import an elephant from India and present it as a real Balinese elephant.
He isn't bothered by that particular invention — finds it almost funny, honestly. What troubles him more are changes to actual ceremony he doesn't fully understand: temple visits that once allowed any sarong now require the correct colour and a blouse; cremations that have shifted, for reasons no one can quite explain, to entirely black dress. Ceremony space on the beach keeps shrinking as hotel development claims more shoreline. But the underlying faith, he's clear, hasn't moved an inch.
“If this process continues,” he says, “Bali will be ruined in twenty years.” Not the tourists' doing, in his view — the investors' and the government's.