Before the 1980s, I Made Mangku says, life on Bali moved at the pace of the rice fields and the tide. A piece of fish, some rice, and people were happy. Then the island was marketed to the world as paradise, and paradise started filling up.
He is careful about where he places the blame. Not on the tourists — he has never blamed them for what came next. It's the big investors, mostly foreign, who bought up the land, brought in workers from other islands to build the hotels, and then kept the profits for themselves, paying almost nothing back to the Balinese government in tax.
Some of those hotels don't want Balinese people on what they now consider “their” beaches. The places locals can still go keep shrinking. And when construction ends and the imported labourers are out of work, some stay on the island with no income and drift into crime — not because they're Balinese, Mangku points out, but because they were brought here and then abandoned.
The jobs that do go to local people are almost always the lowest-paid ones — roomboy, gardener — while management positions go to outsiders. When the wages aren't enough to live on, families sell their land to survive. That land is bought by another investor, who builds another hotel, and the cycle turns again. Eventually the money from the sale runs out, and there's no land left to generate any more income at all.
“If a Balinese person does not have enough food, he will borrow from his neighbour. He will not steal from a stranger.”
The coastline has paid its own price. Mangku points to the Bali Turtle Island Development, whose changes to the currents have washed away the beaches at Sanur and put the mangrove forest nearby under threat. There are no turtles left at Turtle Island. The coral keeps getting cut. And still, he says, almost in disbelief, the government has not stepped in to stop it.
Away from the big hotels, he sees something better: locals selling food, drinks, and souvenirs directly to tourists, keeping the money — and the tax revenue — on the island. But even that is getting crowded. More and more people arrive from other provinces hoping to make money from tourism, while the number of tourists stays roughly the same. Everyone chasing the same income ends up competing against each other for it.
Crime, drugs, and prostitution — almost unheard of before — are now part of daily life in the cities, carried in, he believes, by people who aren't originally from Bali. Balinese communities, he says, still look after their own; a hungry neighbour borrows food, he doesn't steal it. That much hasn't changed, and he doesn't think it will.
Even Balinese culture itself has started bending to what tourists expect — elephants imported from India and presented as local, because visitors like elephants and there aren't any here. Mangku finds that more funny than offensive, a harmless way to make a living. What troubles him more are the quieter shifts: temple visits that once needed only a plain sarong now require the right colours and a blouse, cremations that are suddenly all black when no one used to dress that way, and less and less beach left to hold ceremonies on at all.
Underneath it, he insists, the things that matter haven't moved — the family structures, the care for elders, the Hindu faith. What has changed is who is deciding Bali's future, and it isn't tourists, and it isn't Balinese people either. It's investors and a government that let it happen. If nothing changes, Mangku believes Bali will be ruined within twenty years.