Creating a New Version of Paradise
The island of Bali has long been characterized in the West as
the last "paradise" on earth a traditional society
insulated from the modern world and its vicissitudes, whose
inhabitants are endowed with exceptional artistic talents and
consecrate a considerable amount of time and wealth staging
sumptuous ceremonies for their own pleasure and that of their
gods - now also for t1me delectation of foreign visitors.
This image is due in large part of course to the positive effect
Bali's manifold charms have on visitors, but we should recognize
that it is also the result of certain- romantic Western notions
about what constitutes a "tropical island paradise"
in the first place. Moreover, we need to understand that Bali's
development into a popular tourist destination has been the
result of specific actions and decisions on the part of governing
authorities.
Colonial beginnings
To become an important tourist destination, Bali had to fulfill
two conditions. Firstly, an island which had previously been
known mainly for the "plunderous salvage" of shipwrecks
and "barbarous sacrifice" of widows on the funeral
pyre had to instead become an object of curiosity for Westerners
in search of the exotic. Secondly, the island had to be made
accessible. Barely a decade after the Dutch conquest of the
island around the turn of this century, both conditions were
met.
It was in 1908, just after the fall of Bali's last raja, that
tourism in the Indonesian archipelago had its beginnings. In
this year, an official government Tourist Bureau was opened
in the colonial capital of Batavia, now Jakarta, with the aim
of promoting the Netherlands Indies as a tourist destination.
Initially focusing on Java, the Bureau soon extended its scope
to Bali - then described in its brochures as the "Gem of
the Lesser Sunda Isles."
In 1924, the Royal Packet Navigation Company (KPM) inaugurated
a weekly steamship service connecting Bali's north coast port
of Buleleng (Singaraja) with Java (Batavia, Surabaya) and Makassar
(now Ujung Pandang, on Sulawesi). Shortly there after, the Kpm
agent in Buleleng was appointed as the Tourist Bureau's representative
on Bali, and the government began allowing visitors to use the
rest houses or pasanggrahan originally designed to accommodate
Dutch functionaries on their periodic rounds of the island.
In 1928, the KPM erected the Bali Hotel in Denpasar - the island's
first real tourist hostelry - on the very site of the puputan
massacre and mass suicide of 1906. Following this, the KPM also
upgraded the pasanggrahan at Kintamani, which from then on hosted
tourists who came to enjoy the spectacular panoramas around
Lake Batur.
Early visitors to Bali sometimes arrived aboard a cruiser that
berthed at Padangbai for one or two days, but more often aboard
the weekly KPM steamship via Buleleng. Passengers on this ship
usually disembarked on Friday morning and departed aboard the
same boat on Sunday evening, giving them just enough time to
make a quick round of the island by motorcar. The number of
people visiting Bali in this way each year increased steadily,
from several hundred in the late 1920s to several thousand during
the 1930s.
