Sam Cutler

Having returned to Australia from a wonderful month in Bali, I have begun that process which occurs after a holiday of assimilating the experience, analyzing the pleasures, and generally thinking about what happened. My month in Bali got me thinking about another island which I know and love, Ibiza; and I was struck by some of the similarities between the two places, between their experiences as island cultures, and in particular between their sometimes unhappy experiences with mass tourism. Having lived in Ibiza and had a magic month in Bali, I began to feel like I was in love with two women for both islands are decidedly feminine-energy places.

My Balinese holiday also got me wondering whether the experiences of Ibiza in dealing with the masses of tourists whose annual inundations virtually swamp their island, may have some relevance and some lessons for the Balinese. There’s no question that the people of the Balearic Islands (namely Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera) have made some serious mistakes when it comes to tourism and its impact, and it would be  so encouraging if the major mistakes were NOT replicated in Bali. Could the Balinese, I wonder, use Ibiza to LEARN how NOT to develop their island ? How NOT to make basic errors when it comes to improving their standards of living ?

The first major ‘error’ that one observes in both Bali and Ibiza is in the way that both islands have dealt with ‘development’. If there IS, or HAS BEEN, a plan in either place then that plan is so obscure as to be virtually invisible. In Bali one is not allowed to build higher than a palm tree - how HIGH is a palm tree ?? No-one has a definitive answer ! In Ibiza for years there were few if any restrictions upon building, and on my last visit it struck me that the whole island had been infected with a rash of pox-like square boxes (they call them ‘villas’) of the ugliest kind. If there WERE building controls and planning schemes they were obviously ineffective and outdated on BOTH islands. In Bali I was told all the time, “you should have seen this village five years ago, none of this was here” and I could never quite work out whether the person was bragging or apologizing ! Unrestricted building is going on apace, and in Bali the town of Kuta looks just as ugly as the town of San Antonio in Ibiza. Both places are a blight upon their local cultures, an insult to the peaceable inhabitant of the islands upon which they are located, and both places are a festering sore of drunken louts parading their tattoos and generally being obnoxious.

Both Kuta and San Antonio have been built to attract ‘low end mass-market  tourism’ and whilst they were initially successful are now suffering from a perception that they are unsafe because of drunken behavior in the streets, and undesirable because they were designed only for  those who have very little disposable income and are looking for the lowest common-denominator holiday experience. If one wishes for examples of how NOT to build holiday destinations then Kuta in Bali and San  Antonio in Ibiza are outstanding examples. Unfortunately one can see the San Antonio-ization of Ibiza and  the Kuta-ization of Bali proceeding apace ! This is nothing less than a tragedy.

Are we to end up with both islands covered in shops selling fake designer goods with well known labels to no-one ? Both islands have hundreds of stores which remain uneconomic or barely viable selling shoddy goods which not even the poorest tourist wishes to buy. How long can such a ‘false economy’ continue to survive ? Both islands already have hundreds of bars and restaurants which are barely scraping a living, and in both islands the presence of noticeably drunken tourists is a common sight on the streets of the major towns. Prostitution and drugs are readily available, with the excesses of western hedonism particularly entrenched in Ibiza and now beginning to appear in Bali. Is this what the Balinese people actually want ?

Apart from the issue of the type of tourist each of the islands wishes to attract, there is the MAJOR concern of the environmental imprint of unrestricted development. One of the easiest ways of measuring the impact of unrestricted development is in the effect it has on the water supply and in particular the water table. On both islands the water table (the depth at which water exists when one drills into the ground) has dropped alarmingly and is continuing to do so. When porous rocks (which hold the water) are deprived of the water as the table drops, those rocks lose their porosity and they eventually silt up and can no longer hold water. The water table when it is reduced and lowers does NOT re-establish itself. Once it is significantly lowered that is IT ! As a direct consequence of the lowering of the water table through unrestricted demand there is less water available for both development and agriculture. Bali needs to look to the experience of Ibiza and do so urgently.

Prior to the death of the dictator General Franco, Ibiza was a poor and largely self-sufficient island. By and large Ibiza could feed itself and indeed what it ate, it grew. Development funds were directed to the other Balearic islands because Ibiza supported the opponents of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and as a result Ibiza experienced no mass tourism until the mid 1960’s. In a spurt of development funded in large part by German money fleeing a restrictive tax regime in Germany, Ibiza then leapt into action and a rash of low-budget hotels sprang up on the island. A huge casino was built, and San Antonio flourished as a cheap package-holiday destination. The results for the environment have been simply dreadful. The result for the people of the island, similarly so. I lived in a house which I rented which had been owned for hundreds of years by the one family. It was lost at gambling with the family put out into the street. I subsequently rented the place from the man who had won it at cards. Gambling is a MAJOR problem in Ibiza for the people of the island. The casino was built, we are told, for the tourists !

Sewage from the hotels HAS to go somewhere ! Where did it go, and where does it go to this day ? It is conveniently pumped out to sea in pipelines which place the fecal matter some half a kilometer out to sea ! The hotels and guest houses HAD to have water. Where did it come from ? They bored wells and pumped it from the water-table which is now so low that many of the wells which had hitherto been in existence for hundreds of years are now dry. The experience of the small island of Ibiza is there for all to see, available in research by Spanish Greenpeace and various agencies of the European Union and Common Market. Bali would do well to wake up and take heed for it is undoubtedly the case that their are worrying similarities between the two islands experiences. The water table in Bali is dropping, NOW. Bali is importing rice !

When I first went to Ibiza in the sixties it was a relatively unspoiled place. The Ibicencos had a vibrant culture and a method of farming that was ancient and had withstood the test of time. Their fields were lined by wonderful dry-stone walls, they grew olives and almonds and fruit, grapes were in abundance, and their neatly white-washed houses were of a design and a simplicity that harked back over a thousand years to the era of the Phoenicians. At the local fiestas the Ibicencos would appear in their best traditional clothes, proudly wearing the red cap of the Catalan people of which they are a part. All of the families proudly spoke their native tongue even though it had been suppressed by a fascist dictatorship for almost forty years. They played their traditional music which they had secretly kept alive. Most of this, other than the language, is eoither gone or fast disappearing in the space of less than a generation. The Balinese would do well to take note of what has happened !

No young person in Ibiza wishes to be a farmer. Most of the fields lay fallow with the walls collapsing because no-one wants to do the hard manual labor that’s involved in the maintenance of dry-stone walls. Within a matter of years there will be few people left who possess the skills or the knowledge to farm in the traditional manner.  Ibiza long ago ceased to be self-sufficient and all its food needs are met through importing food from the Spanish mainland. There is talk of a water pipe-line from the mainland, and already the power needs of the island (electricity and fuel) have to be imported. No-one but the very elderly wears national dress, where only thirty years  ago it was quite common to see it upon people of all ages. The olive presses on the island which for centuries pressed olive oil no longer work and are now installed in people’s houses as designer objects. Where once people all over the island could make baskets, I doubt one could find anyone under sixty years of age with the skill today. The experiences of Ibiza will, I fear, be replicated (if only in part) in Bali because they are the experiences of a culture that has embraced tourism. What should the Balinese do ?

If I could wave a ‘magic wand’ I would arrange for a delegation from Bali to go to Ibiza to make connections with the Ibicenco tourism and culture people. With Spanish and Catalan government departments which deal with the environment. With universities and places of higher learning which deal with the impact of tourism on society. I would set in motion a continuing ‘dialogue’ between the two cultures that existed for the benefit of the peoples of the two places. In this way, I believe, some of the worst excesses of the Ibiza experience could be spared the people of Bali. AND, some of the BETTER experiences could be shared. For all is not doom and gloom, though the overall picture is pretty depressing. The Catalan people have a rich and vibrant culture that goes back many hundreds of years, and they would love the Balinese culture for its richness and historicity - the cross-cultural benefits of the two islands being in ‘harmonic communication’ would be wonderful.

With my ‘magic wand’ I call upon the cultural and business elites of BOTH islands to respond to this call - you both have so much to benefit by becoming friends and being in meaningful communication. BUT, alas, I am only a writer and a dreamer. A poet who has enjoyed both magical places, a man whose heart has been moved by the soulful generosity of both peoples. Ibiza and Bali, the two most beautiful islands of my dreams. In Ibiza I became a writer, in Bali I hope to live as an old man. I remain deeply in love with both places in a marriage made in heaven. “Om swasti astu”, as my Balinese friends would say when they met the people of Ibiza; who would reply in friendship and good cheer,  “benvingut” !

© sam cutler 2009