Louise Williams, Mataram – The lobby of Lombok's expansive Senggigi Beach Hotel is bristling with machine guns. The verdant tropical gardens beyond are dotted with soldiers and idle staff, their Hawaiian-print uniforms still neatly pressed. The white sand beach, the resort's swimming pools, the rows of deck chairs all lie empty. The front-desk manager explains politely and apologetically: "Right now we are experiencing nil occupancy, there are no deliveries so we have only the staff canteen with a little food, but we are secure, the hotel is safe."
Across the road, Rolando's disco lies in ruins, one of the scores of targets of last week's religious riots which have devastated Indonesia's "little Bali", two hours by boat to the east of the country's most famous resort island. Right along this picturesque strip of Lombok's coast, the five-star resorts are locked down.
That the Senggigi Beach Hotel is willing to share what food is left is due to the manager's generosity and discretion. His competitors to the north and south are closed to all.
Hotel worker Rudi, aimlessly skimming the empty pool for leaves, says: "I was yelling at them [the mobs] please do not burn down the hotel, then the hotel will be gone and we will have no jobs."
At the Capuccino Bar up the road, a young man who calls himself Harry says his coffee shop is open, but unfortunately without any coffee.
The espresso machine, he says, was "evacuated" to his village in the hills when the tourists fled. "It is hard to find a good Italian espresso machine on Lombok.
That is my asset, so I cannot take the risk of bringing it out," he says, gesturing towards the lush, green hills. "Now what will we do – we cannot make money here any more, how can we live?"
On the sand, the beach hawkers are desperate, thrusting strings of pearls, sarongs, T-shirts, and handicrafts in the air, shoving each other out of the way. The price is anything you want to pay – the sale is for today's food, so local pearls are being offered for $A10 a string.
"I was crying when I saw the riots. We have no other jobs – didn't they understand that the Christians owned the shops that we needed?" says Andy, begging for any sale.
For Indonesia, the impact of the mob violence in the streets of one of its main tourist destinations goes way beyond the actual destruction – the churches, the shops and the houses of the Christian minority burned by Muslim mobs.
The image of thousands of Western tourists fleeing hotels belonging to chains as familiar as Holiday Inn and Sheraton gives Indonesia's serious security problems an international focus, which could damage tourism and foreign investment further in a nation already crippled by a protracted economic crisis.
In many ways Lombok is the same, sad story of violence which has rocked the nation for the past two years. Angry mobs vent their frustrations by burning and looting, destroying their own local economies.
The battle lines are religious, but the underlying tensions are economic. In Lombok, the locals say, it was the poor, young unemployed from the dry, harsh central and eastern regions who set fire to the capital, not the relatively prosperous employed in the tourism industry.
"Lombok is an internationally recognised resort area, so whatever happens here will be seen on television all over the world, directly reflecting a bad image about Indonesia's safety and security," says Wiwin, resident manager at the Senggigi Beach.
"Tourism makes up 40 percent of the income for this island alone. Beyond that, we may have people deciding to avoid Indonesia altogether, which would impact Bali as well.
"To be honest the tourist industry here was just not prepared – we were not ready to evacuate staff and tourists, we did not have stockpiles of essential goods." His own hotel secured a Garuda Airlines 737 to airlift all guests and the Christian staff to to Bali. Like many hotels, the Senggigi Beach had food for four days only.
It has almost run out. Petrol, too, is scarce because the trucks are not willing to deliver. Yesterday, the staff canteen had only tofu and rice on offer.
The Christians were still leaving Lombok under military guard this weekend, and many said they would not be coming back in the short term.
With shoot-to-kill orders and extra troops deployed, locals say essential services can be resumed within two to three weeks.
But the damage to yet another community, now divided by religion and anger, cannot be repaired so quickly, nor can the damage to one of Indonesia's essential industries.
Everyone here agrees the riots were started by outsiders, who were provoked by politicians bent on undermining the civilian government in Jakarta.
In October last year on Lombok, Muslim mobs burned an Australian flag in protest over Australian military intervention in East Timor.
"That was automatically 28 percent of our market gone," says one hotel manager. "We were just recovering from that. What I am worried about is that this will be the last straw, after Timor, with Ambon still raging, people will just say let's avoid Indonesia for the next five years."