Gary LaMoshi, Denpasar – Even a vicious dry-season rainstorm that lasted nearly 24 hours couldn't dampen spirits among Bali tourists and the island's hospitality industry. Nearly two years after bombs killed more than 200 people in the main resort area of Kuta Beach, foreigners are streaming back to Bali.
Signs of the upturn are everywhere this summer high season, and follow a surprisingly strong Christmas-New Year holiday period. Traffic is crawling again around the Simpang Siur traffic circle linking Kuta to other leading tourist destinations. More and more motorcycle co-pilots ride wrapped in copper wire or rubber hoses, or drag wheelbarrows or plywood sheeting behind them, key indicators of a surging construction sector. The Yak, a new glossy, oversized magazine, chronicles lives and times and real-estate opportunities in too-hip Seminyak.
And most important, pale shoulders and broad bottoms crowd local sidewalks and beachfronts. "If there are no problems with the September [presidential runoff] election, we could get back to where we were before the bomb," says Mahalia Pantja, Bali business development manager for Tour East, a local tour operator headquartered in Singapore. With the way things are going, Pantja's estimate may be too conservative.
Record June arrivals
Bali's foreign direct arrivals in June topped 131,000 people, just ahead of the record for that month set in 2002. Australian visitors led the way, taking advantage of their winter school holidays to catch some sun. "In April-June we had more passengers than in all of last year," Andrea Jeremy from Australia's Qantas Holidays reports before digging into a Balinese lunch from a balcony seat overlooking high tide at the venerable Desa Segara Resort on Sanur beach.
Australian and Indonesian officials jointly opened the October 12 Australian Memorial Center at Bali's Sanglah Hospital this month, commemorating the 88 Australian victims of the nightclub bombings on Jalan Legian two years ago. The Australian government contributed A$4.5 million (US$3.3 million) to build the new burn and intensive-care unit, and speakers from both countries emphasized the close ties between Australia and Bali at the ceremony. An estimated one out of every 10 Australians has visited Bali; the island is a two-hour flight from Perth on the west coast and six hours from Australia's east coast. Some recent Australian visitors say they've come to Bali to help the island's tourism industry in its time of need, but Australia's consul general in Bali told reporters last month that he thinks people are just looking for a cheap vacation.
Since February, though, the greeting from Indonesian Imigrasi officers has been, "Welcome to Bali, please pay cash." New visa rules require Australians and holders of 20 other passports to purchase entry visas at the airport (US$25 for 30 days, or $10 for three days). This visa-on-arrival regime applies to other key tourist sources including Japan, North America and most European Union countries (some, such as former colonial ruler the Netherlands, are not among the lucky 21 and must get a visa from an embassy or consulate before they land. See Visa changes darken Bali's happy holiday recovery, January 17). And yet this added annoyance and competitive disadvantage – beach resorts in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia don't require visas for those nationalities – doesn't seem to have slowed Bali's comeback.
Cheap seats to the world's best island
Many signs point toward the post-bomb boom – oops, let's say rebound – continuing. Airline services are adding more Bali-bound seats, including a new Singapore Airlines service from Ahmedabad in western India and Air Asia bargain flights from Kuala Lumpur, with return fares starting at less than Rp500,000 (about US$56). Indonesia's national carrier Garuda is restoring service it cut in the wake of the bombing and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of early 2003.
In its just-published annual World's Best Awards issue, Travel & Leisure magazine named Bali the top island destination for the third straight year, based on survey responses from more than 425,000 T&L readers. The magazine, affiliated with the American Express travel-services empire, also chose Bali as Asia's top tourist destination and ranked four Bali hotels in its global top 100. The Four Seasons Sayan Terrace in the highlands cultural hub of Ubud was rated the leading resort hotel in Asia, while the beachfront behemoth Ritz Carlton Bali Resort in Jimbaran Bay took honors as the best hotel priced at less than $250 a night, surprising perhaps, given the property's popularity with trendy young Japanese. Who knew those Hello Kitty-hugging parasito shinguru (parasite singles) where really value hounds?
The British government delivered further welcome news on July 6 when the Foreign Office dropped its travel warning for Indonesia due to the threat of terrorism. (The United Kingdom posted its warning after the Bali bombings, closing the barn door after 22 Britons died in the blasts.) The Foreign Office said the change was part of a worldwide strategy to use terrorism warnings "more sparingly", restricting them to cases of "extreme and imminent danger" of a terror attack based on specific intelligence reports. The British Embassy in Jakarta, however, noted that its assessment of the terror threat in Indonesia hasn't changed, but that's not as important as tour organizers now being able to get insurance on packages to Bali.
Britain before the bombs
Before the bombings, the UK generally placed fourth among overseas arrivals to Bali behind Japan, Australia and Taiwan, but ahead of Germany and the United States. In 2000, the last "normal" year before the September 11 terror attacks, more than 107,000 Britons came to Bali. Last year, just over 50,000 turned up, according to figures from the official Bali Tourism Authority.
Britain's move to drop its travel warning has raised hopes that other Western countries, most notably the United States, will roll back their travel advisories on Bali. Fallout from the bombings goes well beyond the heady tourist-arrival numbers, as this excerpt from BaliDiscovery.com, a leading clicks-and-bricks destination manager, notes: Arrival figure[s], although impressive, do not reveal the approximate 50% downturn in tourism business for Bali resulting from the fundamental remix of nationalities that comprise these totals when compared to only a few short years ago. The downward economic impact of the supplanting of long-haul, long-staying and high-spending Western Europeans and North Americans by regional visitors on brief, low-spending visits is not reflected in the aggregate totals for arrivals.
In the years leading up to the Bali bombings, visitors from the Asia-Pacific region made up about 60% of the total overseas arrivals in Bali, according to official figures. This year, visitors from the neighborhood comprise nearly 73% of the total. That figure is up 4 percentage points from 2003, showing that the trend is heading toward more visitors from nearby countries.
Changes in the tourist makeup are a reminder that despite the dry season, according to the calendar, and the recovery in the tourism industry, according to raw arrival figures, Bali still faces stormy weather before it puts the 2002 blasts firmly in its past.