Indonesia: reopening Bali to tourists between economic survival and controversies
Tourists returning to Kuta Beach in southwest Bali on October 14, 2021. AP - Firdia Lisnawati
Text by: Gabrielle Maréchaux Follow
3 min
After three postponed announcements, the day has finally arrived.
The tourist island of Bali in Indonesia is starting to accept again some vaccinated foreign travelers from handpicked countries.
For the island's economy, which depends 60% on tourism, this is good news and we are already preparing for 2022, the year when 3.6 million foreign visitors are expected.
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From our regional correspondent,
Going to work in the fields, converting to construction, selling homemade products on social networks ... For a year and a half, all tourism stakeholders in Bali had to urgently find alternatives to survive, with the net shutdown of mass tourism from abroad during the pandemic.
Hendra is one of the few French speaking tourist guides on the island.
He feels lucky to have been relatively spared by this heavy blow which took many of his friends and colleagues by surprise.
“
I started to be a guide in French in 2003, when I left high school,” he
says from his village in the north of the island.
Fortunately I did relatively well, because I had anticipated.
Before the pandemic, there was the eruption of Mount Agung and there too, we did not work much.
So I told my wife, we need another activity, if we don't have a lot of tourism to survive.
I had already opened a small Balinese restaurant before the pandemic and I will continue to do that for now.
I am waiting to see how things will evolve.
"
Abandonment of the agricultural sector
Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a strategy that the island's government should also apply for Sukma Arida, a tourism researcher at Udayana University, in the south of the island.
“
Whenever tourism is in difficulty, it was already the case with the attacks in 2002 or then with the eruption of the volcano, the government loses the opportunity to think about a more balanced economy between tourism, agriculture and SMEs , he
notes.
In my opinion, Bali's biggest mistake was to abandon the agricultural sector and devote itself mainly to the tourism sector which is however very dependent on external circumstances in its development from the 1990s. It is a shame, because the agricultural sector is at the heart of Balinese society, with for example the rituals that surround the Subak, a social organization around the irrigation of rice fields which is classified by Unesco.
"
In the Indonesian national press, the researcher did not fail to denounce "
the deification of foreign travelers
" either.
In recent months, the few Westerners who remained in Bali thanks to visas allowing it or to the status of expatriates, did not have very good press.
A number of newspapers regularly published the escapades of foreigners breaking the sanitary rules.
She mentioned, for example,
the shooting
of an X movie on a sacred mountain, this
American
who monetized this advice to circumvent immigration laws, or even
these influencers
and their gags shot without masks.
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