Back to Bali Courtesy of the Travel Telegraph

Back to Bali – Courtesy of the “Travel Telegraph”
Two years on from the bombings and two months since the Foreign Office lifted its warning against travel to Bali, Fred Mawer reports on what visitors can expect.
(Filed: 04/09/2004)

I'm having a beer with a couple of burly young Australians in Paddy's Pub, a raucous drinking spot in Kuta, Bali's biggest, brashest resort. Sam, from Melbourne, is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the believable claim "Osama don't surf".

"We've been visiting Bali for years," he says, "and we didn't have second thoughts about coming back. The waves are great, the beer is cheap - and the people and the economy need our support."

Sam's T-shirt and comments are defiant references to the terrorist bombs in Kuta on October 12, 2002, that killed 202 people. Eighty-eight of the victims were from Australia; 23 were British. Paddy's Pub itself is an equally graphic V-sign at terrorism: a reincarnation of one of the bombers' targets, it stands 150 yards down the street from the original bar.

The spaces where the former Paddy's and, across the street, the Sari nightclub stood comprise what the Balinese, in an echo of New Yorkers, call Ground Zero. A memorial is being built to those who lost their lives, and there are plans to turn the whole area into a peace park.

For the first time since the bombings, British holiday-makers can easily visit the site to pay their respects, as well as enjoy everything else the idyllic Indonesian island has to offer. In July, the Foreign Office finally lifted its advice against non-essential travel to Bali.

Already, tour operators are reporting a surge in bookings. Indeed, the increase has been so sharp there are not enough flights to satisfy demand, and air fares are likely to rise. By next year, travel companies predict, business will be back to pre-2002 levels.

The year before the bombings, 116,000 British tourists visited the island - the fourth-largest number from any single country. It was seen as an earthly paradise of surf-pounded beaches, shimmering rice terraces and smiling, courteous people.

After the bombings, numbers fell by nearly two-thirds, and most of those still coming were probably backpackers rather than more cautious, higher-spending package holidaymakers.

On the same evening as my drink at Paddy's Pub, I met Kamal Kaul, manager of the Oberoi Bali, at his hotel, a short drive up the coast in Seminyak, an upmarket suburb of Kuta. Set in gorgeous grounds along a prime stretch of beach, the Oberoi is one of the most popular hotels for British honeymooners - at least it was before October 2002.

Bali has been hit not once, but twice," said Kaul. "First by the bombs, second by the travel restrictions on visiting Bali imposed by some governments."

Tourism, on which as much as 80 per cent of the island's economy depends, was initially devastated. In the months immediately following the attacks, many hotels stood all but empty. It was hard for them to recover. The governments of Australia and the United States - countries which, together, in "normal" years would provide a third of the island's tourists - took the same line as the British and advised their citizens to avoid the whole of Indonesia.

The Australian and American warnings are still in place, the US Department of State recommending that Americans "defer all non-essential travel to Indonesia" because of "the on-going terrorist threat".

"A cross-section of Balinese society feels victimised by the travel restrictions," Kaul explained. "Why should they have been imposed for so long, they ask, when no restrictions were imposed on travellers to the United States after September 11 or to Spain after the Madrid bombings?" This sentiment was expressed time and again during my visit.

But despite the warnings, tourists are returning in large numbers to Bali. Kuta's streets were so choked with traffic on a Friday night that my taxi driver suggested I get out and walk the last half-mile to Paddy's Pub. The Oberoi was virtually full when I was there, as were most of the other hotels I visited in the main resorts in the south of the island and inland around Ubud, Bali's cultural heart.

Farther afield, in the remote resorts of Lovina (on the north coast) and Candi Dasa (on the east coast), recovery has been slower. Step out of the car in either place, and locals descend on you with an air of desperation in their touting. On the virtually empty black volcanic sand beach at Lovina, a fruit seller, basket balanced on her head, told me that before the Kuta bombs she could bank on selling six or seven pineapples a day, but now she'd be lucky to sell one.

Darin Storkson, of the Bali Tourism Board, admits the far-flung resorts are still suffering. However, overall visitor numbers so far this year are encouraging, while the continuing travel restrictions have forced hoteliers to tap new markets.

"Many more Asians are visiting Bali," Storkson said, "from South Korea, Taiwan and China. Australians are returning in large numbers." Indeed, Australians regard Bali in much the same way as the British do Majorca, harbouring a particular affection for Kuta, a favourite with backpackers and surfers.

That so many Australians are visiting Bali, in spite of their government's warning, raises an interesting issue. The website of the Department of Foreign Affairs suggests that some insurers might refuse claims relating to a country on the government's danger list - yet all the Australians I spoke to in Bali said that they had had no problems getting cover.

In Britain, by contrast, most insurers refuse to provide cover for those who travel against Foreign Office advice. It is this, as much as the FO warning itself, that has kept so many British tourists away from Bali since the bombings occurred. Which sensible traveller is prepared to spend time in a developing country on the other side of the world without, among other things, any medical back-up?

The FO's lifting of its advisory on Bali needs to be seen in the context of a general review of the way it gives travel advice. In June, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, announced a change of policy. "In future," he said, "in the case of intelligence-based terrorist threats, we shall advise against travel only in situations of extreme and imminent danger." With regard to Indonesia - a predominantly Muslim country with suspected extremist groups linked to al-Qa'eda - the Foreign Office is still giving warning that it believes terrorists are planning further attacks on Westerners and Western interests.

So, does Bali - a Hindu anomaly in the Indonesian archipelago - feel unsafe? In a word, no. According to the Oberoi's manager, "over and over again our guests tell us Bali feels like the safest place on earth" - and I believe him. Not only do the Balinese people foster a feel-good factor, but security has been greatly tightened since the bombings. The police have begun regular inspections of hotels, rating their security for effectiveness. Most of the large or upmarket hotels I visited claimed to have doubled their security staff, and many had installed surveillance cameras at easy access points, such as from the beach. Checkpoints at the road entrances of hotels are now pretty much universal, and guards routinely use mirrored devices to look for anything suspicious under vehicles (it was a car bomb that ripped apart the Sari Club).

At the entrance to some bars and nightclubs in Kuta, such as Paddy's Pub and the Hard Rock Café, guests are frisked with hand-held metal-detecting scanners. In short, security at more obvious targets feels reassuring, and more evident than in any other resort destination I've visited recently, aside from Disney World in Florida.

At the same time, at none of the two dozen or so hotels I went to did I find the security in the least bit off-putting. I put this down to the fact that the security staff are just as amiable and courteous as everyone else who works in Bali's hotels. I even came across a guard with a flower tucked behind his ear, -a suitably emblematic image of why it is such great news that this peace-loving, hospitable island is back on the holiday map.

Bali is quite simply one of the most memorable holiday spots I've had the good fortune to visit in my 15 years as a travel journalist. It's far from being just another flop-on-the-beach destination (in fact, most of the beaches are flawed, with either surf too big for safe swimming or offshore reefs that restrict the depth of the water at low tide). Away from the resorts in the south, the interior, with volcanoes rising above the clouds and terraces of rice paddies, is photogenic beyond improvement. One morning, I took a guided walk from the hotel I was staying at near Ubud, around the paddy fields across the road, and saw women threshing the rice by hand, gaggles of comical ducks waddling over the stubble, and eel traps and kingfishers.

Other attractions include the shopping - in Ubud and the surrounding villages, the number of art galleries and shops selling high-quality local crafts, from jewellery to kites, woodcarvings to batik, is extraordinary; excellent and cheap food (a plate of nasi goreng - fried rice with meat/fish/vegtables - in a local restaurant will set you back about £1); and hotels that, at the upper end of the scale, are some of the best of their kind in the world.

Most of the hotels I visited had beautifully designed spas, romantic bedrooms (often with the option of a bath and/or shower in a private outdoor courtyard, sometimes with their own plunge pool) and engaging, charming service. Staying at the island's clutch of famous Aman and Four Seasons properties costs a fortune, but there is a growing number of delightful boutique hotels that are bargains compared with places of a similar standard in Europe or the Caribbean.

For example, rooms at Uma Ubud, a sleek new boutique hotel that is part of the same group as Parrot Cay in the Caribbean and the Metropolitan in London, start at about £130 a night. In a comparable hotel in Barbados you could pay double that.

Another memorable aspect is Bali's Hindu culture, which permeates every part of society. Every evening in Ubud, dance dramas based on Hindu morality tales are laid on for the benefit of tourists, while colourful religious celebrations are conducted in thousands of temples across the island. I was there during galungan, a 10-day festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil, and the streets of every village were lined with bamboo poles hung with offerings. One evening, as I dutifully watched a tourist show in Ubud, the proceedings were drowned out by a clamorous passing procession put together by the local community and led by a kind of pantomime lion.

The islanders' spirituality has determined their stoic response to the Kuta bombings. "After the bombings," said Ida Lolec, who runs a local travel agency, "many Balinese asked themselves: `What did I do wrong? Did we do enough in terms of offerings?' Now, the Balinese have moved on from the tragedy."

That certainly seemed to be true. At the railings in front of the Sari Club, as I looked at the messages pinned up by relatives of the dead, I was pestered by a young girl offering a massage - a common and perfectly innocent act in Bali. Commerce thrives, even in this place of remembrance.

"The Balinese have accepted the tragedy as part of their karma and Bali's destiny," said Ida Lolec. "With the many purification rituals that were carried out soon after the bombings, they have cleaned the bombings from their minds."

Offerings to propitiate the gods are integral to daily life in Bali. You see banana-leaf trays, filled with rice, fruit, flowers and incense, everywhere - outside homes, at entrances to shops, even outside hotel rooms. At one hotel, I saw a member of staff placing an offering by the mountain bikes. "I do this every day," he said, "to make sure my guests are safe on the bikes." Given the unpredictability of where terrorism will strike next, perhaps such offerings are as reassuring a form of protection as any.

 Fred Mawer travelled with Scott Dunn (020 8682 5060, and Singapore Airlines (0870 608 8886, Singapore Airlines flies daily to Bali via Singapore from Heathrow and Manchester, from £627 return in September. Scott Dunn offers tailor-made holidays to Bali using a wide selection of quality hotels. A package with four nights at the Oberoi Bali and three nights at Uma Ubud costs from £1,257 per person b&b, including flights and transfers, based on two people sharing a room. For Foreign Office advice on Bali, visit Travel advice issued by the Australian and US governments can be read at and respectively.