I was sitting on a broken beach chair when I lit a cigarette.It is to be noted that I smoke infrequently — only when drinking — but for twenty or so thousand rupiah, I was willing to make a concession. My large sunglasses sat square on my nose and I pushed them upwards to assuage the light, feeling sweat bead against my skin. The air was sticky, thick with incense and sweat, and this made passersby frantic. 

I touched down in Bali on a whim when I was eighteen. It was a few weeks after graduation, when all I cared about was dying my hair blonde and my digital camera. I remember sitting in the airport and scrawling a vague itinerary in my notebook, waiting for a delayed 6:35 am Jetstar flight to Denpasar. 

It goes without saying that summer trips to Bali, like mine, are ritualistic for a lot of middle-class Australians. I remember a childhood spent coveting beaded braids and knock off DVDs, and an adolescence craving tan lines and sultry bikini photos at FINNS Beach Club. Walking through the airport towards hazy lines of Gojek riders, currency exchange booths and souvenir stores felt like a rite of passage.

And for the 1.5 million of us that visit each year, it is. Bali seems to hold this allure over the Australian psyche, earning a firm place within our cultural canon. It is beautiful, proximate, cheap — it has become synonymous with the attainable ‘exotic’. 

It became a destination around the 1920s and 30s, when Dutch colonisers began to market it as this luxurious and foreign oasis. They built the first hotel on the island as an ingress for the West, years before president Sukarno’s Bali Beach Hotel.

In the 80s and 90s, mass tourism took off, with arrivals increasing by 33 percent at the turn of the decade.

And today, it contributes to 60-80 percent of Bali’s economy, employing around 25 percent of the population and supporting a further 55 percent. But while it brings many job opportunities for the island, they are often low paying, seasonal and precarious low-entry hospitality roles. Instead, developers and hotels reap the profits of local labor.

Alongside them, young Westerners search for reprieves from a 9-5, working as life coaches, influencers and digital nomads. They catalogue quests for personal growth and self optimisation, while oftentimes evading income taxes, increasing property demand and pricing out locals.

And upon becoming disillusioned with Bali, they bemoan its flaws. I have stumbled across many videos titled WHY I AM LEAVING BALI and WHY I REGRET MOVING TO BALI. The West is accustomed to a culture of taking and using, with little desire for contribution.

In their paper on touristification, Milano, Novelli and Russo posit that overtourism becomes a regime, existing as a “complex and deeply entrenched system”, exerting control over landscapes, economies and social dynamics. Resources become strained, developers capitalise on minimal spatial planning regulations, and rice fields are bought out. Overdevelopment is rife, and unfinished buildings litter the streets.If a hotel opens next to a local farmer, land taxes skyrocket, and they are driven out of their homes. 

Subak, the irrigation system, and Hindu symbol of harmony between people, nature and the spiritual realm, becomes disrupted by a diversion of water to urban areas. And in these areas, an average five star hotel room uses 2,300 litres of water per day, with tourists accounting for 65 percent of water use. 

The island has grown to need unsustainable levels of tourism to sustain itself. It has become reliant on the very practice that is dismantling it. 

In the same way the industry exerts control over the environment and job market, it exerts control over culture. Tradition becomes commodified, changing the way that visitors access and understand it. 

I can’t help but think back to when I watched the Kecak in Ubud. Everybody in the audience ordered tickets in English, shoving the information brochure in their backpocket. They filmed the dance with their iPhones, took photos with the dancers, and walked back to their resorts en masse. It was transactional, a surface level engagement. The practice became a spectacle, watched with little regard for cultural significance.

Capitalism has made it seem as though knowledge, of the self and the world, can be packaged and consumed. We become privy to this Western delusion that a commodified version of a different culture or religion is an authentic and useful tool for self actualisation. We buy yoga packages, Melukat purification rituals, and healing sessions. We chomp at the bit, as though experience comes with an airplane ticket and hotel package bought from Expedia. 

And it is within this neat packaging that a lot of our engagement with the foreign becomes centred around the concept of ‘sightseeing’. Tourists act as though miles of landscape and centuries of tradition can be condensed into a checklist, viewed from a bus and captioned neatly with (Location) has my heart xx.

In his book The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara remarks that “the tourists traveling in their comfortable rail coaches could only glean the vaguest idea of the conditions in which the Indians live, from the fast glimpses they catch as they speed past our train”. For Guevara, tourists flock to Lima, tour Cuzco and return home. For Bali, tourists flock to Canggu, tour the rice fields and buy a souvenir.

Engagement with place becomes surface level, oftentimes solely for aesthetic, productive and social benefit, as opposed to genuine interest in or respect for the culture.

In her essay the ends of empathy, Rayne Fisher-Quann writes about “an emotional dialectic that undergirds much of modern life”, positing that our comfortable existence relies on emotional detachment.

I think that visiting Bali relies a lot on a certain detachment, and on sustaining a lack of empathy, and awareness, for the way that our role in overtourism is affecting the locals and the island itself. 

I recall some twenty-somethings walking in front of me on the pavement in Seminyak. They passed offerings to the gods, meandering towards market stalls. I watched them lower and lower and lower the price of a fridge magnet until they were satisfied, placing it in their counterfeit purse and walking towards a club.

I stopped bartering when a man asked what two dollars was to me. I didn’t have an answer. What is two dollars to me?

Compared to Australia, Bali is cheap. It becomes even more so when tourists figure out that they can ‘set their own price’, acting as though losing an extra dollar or so would be calamitous. With a newfound purchasing power, consumption becomes practically non-volitional. The only active decisions become how much you are willing to pay, and how much you are willing to fight for this price. 

On our way to Ubud, our taxi driver told us about how his wife passed away in childbirth. His two children live in Java with his parents, where he sends money over. He still can’t afford to send them to school. Driving us to our beachfront accommodation, he asked us to be careful when getting out, because it isn’t his car and he doesn’t want to damage it.

What is two dollars to you?

As I write this, it’s the early afternoon. I am at a beach club, watching three men stack beer cans by the pool. I’m sinking cocktails, sunburned, inebriated. My notebook has wet rings from glasses of water that hold down my pages in the breeze. Children are splashing around, the sun is hazy over their parents lounging beside them.