Tourism has poured billions of dollars into Bali over decades. Where has it all gone?

1 hour ago 1

What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.

As Australians tend to demonstrate, a trip to Bali can be hazardous. Many routes to the ER or jail involve a degree of hubris. Classics include scooter prangs and poorly concealed drugs.

The predominant danger, though, is far more mundane – and right under your nose. Crumbling, blocked, narrow, sloped and jutting tickets to a botched holiday – the island’s footpaths.

Motorcyclists travelling on the footpaths in Canggu.

When roads in Bali are jammed, which is always, footpaths become de-facto motorcycle lanes, terrorising unknowing pedestrians and hastening the degradation of the pavers. You could break a shin in some of Bali’s potholes.

Dwi Ermayanthi of Ubud Story Walks, a walking tour company, is a veteran, and says, “I’ve fallen a couple of times myself.” The team advises against prams. “We also worry when we have elderly clients.”

Tourism operators have discussions with government types from time to time. “But nothing happens,” Dwi says.

So, she and her team made a funny video.

Miming to the sultry voice of Tank Evans from the animated movie Surf’s Up describing his trophies as “ladies”, the team flips the monologue into a showcase of Ubud’s finest footpath fails.

(“This is my lady, Amy. Little Suzy. Brianna. Y’know why we call her Brianna, right?“)

It was an in-joke … with everyone. And it resonated. The response to the video was so overwhelming that authorities stopped by, “inquiring about the purpose of the video”.

“I explained, and they took note of my explanation, which was that it was meant as a joke,” Dwi says.

“They said it was scheduled to be fixed.”

It wasn’t.

The social posts are light-hearted, offensive only to Bali’s civil works bosses. But they scratch at something more serious than broken footpaths.

I visit Bali semi-regularly for work, and most days I’m frustrated at something. It’s often the matter of getting around.

Invariably, I return to the question. Why is the infrastructure so bad?

Tourism has poured billions of dollars into Bali over decades. Where has it all gone?

Traffic is interminable. Even the one-and-only toll road, built over the sea to ease congestion ahead of the 2013 APEC Summit, hits a bottleneck caused by a poorly designed traffic light intersection at Benoa.

“It’s like this all the time,” said my apologetic Grab (ride-share) driver one night as we crawled two kilometres in an hour.

Despite years of talk, there is no train. And don’t drink the tap water.

Garbage lines every street and path. Once pristine mangroves are clogged with the stuff – and it would be worse if local volunteers hadn’t been wading through sludge with rubbish bags to clean it up.

Some might say it’s part of the “charm”. I don’t. My lament is not for the visitors. It’s for the ordinary Balinese, who deserve better from the rivers of AUD, USD and Euros that flow to the island.

Where has the money gone?

The short answer is Jakarta.

Almost all taxes collected in Bali head straight to the central government. “It then goes all over Indonesia,” says Dr Agung Suryawan Wiranatha, an expert in tourism and the environment at Bali’s Udayana University.

“If contributions correlate with money being reinvested in an area, the poor remain poor and the rich become even richer.”

In this sense, Bali is a bit like Western Australia used to be with Australia’s GST distribution.

Unlike the West Australians, though, the Balinese never really complained.

Still, fairly reasoning that it deserves a bigger slice of its own pie, the provincial government last year implemented a $15 tourist levy, which every one of the annual six million foreign tourists are supposed to pay. Problem is, only about a third do.

The government doesn’t exactly help its own cause. Signage at the airport about the levy has all but disappeared. There certainly aren’t payment counters. Online is fine, but many visitors remain unaware of their obligations.

Another money problem stems from corruption, which is rife across Indonesia. In addition, some laws are just easy to bypass. Foreigners wishing to set up a business, for example, are supposed to stump up a certain amount of capital. But why do that when it’s cheaper to install a local as the owner?

The books say the profits are going to an Indonesian, but the money actually winds up in Australian and European bank accounts rather than circulating in the local economy.

Even above-board, five-star international hotel chains spend or send more than half their takings overseas, Agung says.

For all its frustrations, people, especially Australians, love the place. We make up about a quarter of foreign tourists, more than any other country.

But the island’s strategy, or lack thereof, has favoured “let the good times roll” over sustainable growth.

“There’s no city planning,” Agung says.

Shops, villas, homes and restaurants popped up wherever there was money to be made, sometimes with approvals. Sometimes not. The provincial government is now attempting to remedy some historical rogue construction, most notably at Bingin Beach.

It’s a drop in the Bali Sea. The slapdash accumulation of buildings – and livelihoods – between the airport and hotspots such as Kuta, Seminyak and Canggu has turned any thought of street widening into electoral poison.

Tourists navigating the footpaths in Ubud.

The Balinese have a concept called Tri Hita Karana. It holds that happiness springs from the health of one’s relationships with the divine, other people and nature. Fused into laws, this has prevented horizon-spoiling apartment towers.

But setting height limits is easy. Preventing the creep of small-scale construction, especially when Jakarta handles building applications, is more difficult.

You will find spirituality and goodwill in abundance in Bali. That’s tick and tick in Tri Hita Karana terms. On much of the island, however, harmony with the environment is more elusive, no matter what social media influencers like to post.

Bali’s governor and Indonesia’s environment minister linked this month’s deadly floods, which locals described as the worst they had ever seen, with tourism-related overdevelopment. New developments such as hotels and restaurants in forested areas and on small farming plots that still dot Denpasar and surrounds are now banned indefinitely.

The moratorium will be popular among ordinary Balinese fed-up with misbehaving tourists and the plundering of their island for other people’s profit.

In Ubud, Dwi Ermayanthi from the walking tour wonders how hard it can really be to fix the footpaths.

After the first joke video, workers patched-up a gangrenous section her team nicknamed “Brianna” (the name of one of Tank’s trophies in Surf’s Up).

The job was done so poorly they filmed a follow-up, this one borrowing from The Princess Diaries. It’s light-hearted and funny too, like the Balinese themselves. If they were more impatient they might get their governments to fix things. They might also go mad.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.