Tourism has opened real opportunity for Balinese people — more jobs, more room to start a business of one's own. But that opportunity comes bundled with dependency, he says: if tourism ever collapsed, a great many people would have nothing to fall back on. Plenty of families have already given up farming or rice cultivation entirely to chase tourism income, since it simply pays better — a bet that leaves them with nothing if it doesn't pay off.
Home-based souvenir production, woodcarving especially, has grown into its own economy, with an uncomfortable side effect: in places like Ubud, children increasingly leave school early to start working at home, parents and children both choosing income over education. Prices have climbed with the general commercialisation of the island, and for people working in tourism, income has largely kept pace. For everyone else, it hasn't — daily costs now outrun what non-tourism work actually pays.
Balinese workers in tourism are outnumbered by arrivals from Java, Lombok, and abroad, and struggle to compete with businesspeople who simply have more capital and experience behind them. Imported goods — fruit, meat, medicine, electronics — are easier to find than ever, though public hospital care remains poor, gated by cost, with only thin government support reaching the genuinely poor. Financial services have improved more convincingly: more banks, easier credit, decent savings rates.
If I want water at 7am, I have to get up at 4:30am to fill some buckets with water and go back to bed.
Water sits at the centre of his frustration. Hotels draw first; whatever's left gets spread across the local population, and it isn't enough — a problem that repeats even up in the mountains, where water meant for farmers' irrigation is diverted to hotels instead. Garbage collection works reasonably well in the cities — his own is picked up daily for a small monthly fee — but smaller towns, exactly where tourism's displaced workers tend to live, have no functioning system at all.
Land and house prices have more than doubled in recent years, driven by demand from investors and newcomers. Selling to a foreigner is technically illegal, but a Balinese middleman willing to lend his name to the certificate isn't hard to find. Building height is legally capped at three stories, in the traditional Balinese architectural style; rising land values are pushing developers to lobby for taller buildings, and the government has already begun permitting that in some areas — a shift, he notes, that breaks entirely from the traditional compound style of low, separate buildings each serving their own function.
Law enforcement, in his view, is where things fall apart most visibly. Theft, break-ins, and drug offences have all risen, but the odds of actually being caught remain low, and corruption among enforcers means even a caught offender can often buy his way out. He raises, with real concern, the exploitation of underage girls in some tourist areas — a serious problem he believes demands far more serious government action than it's currently getting, alongside separate concerns about adult prostitution networks operating with little real consequence.
A different, subtler pattern involves young Balinese men — sometimes called ‘Kuta Cowboys’ — who cultivate romantic relationships with tourist women, often around fabricated hardship stories, angling for gifts or money that quietly stops once the tourist returns home. Many young women fall for it without realising what's happening until it's over.
Culturally, the biggest shift he's watched is in the concept of time itself. Punctuality barely existed as an expectation before — a noon appointment might not start until three, without much comment. Now business logic dominates: time is money, ceremony preparation gets pushed outside working hours, and some people simply pay someone else to prepare their rituals for them. Paradoxically, rising incomes mean more people can now afford to attend every temple festival on the island, which produces its own new problem — traffic jams and overcrowding at temples that were never built for that volume.
For me, these developments are a devaluation of our culture, and we should try to conserve our culture at its full value.
Dance and art performed for tourists, he argues, have been shortened and simplified past the point of real quality, and guides — many from outside Bali, without deep grounding in the culture they're narrating — sometimes tell tourists things that aren't quite true, like assuring them it's fine to photograph people mid-prayer, when many worshippers mind quite a lot. Domestic tourists tend to navigate this more respectfully, already familiar with the culture, though they also know how to bargain in ways foreign tourists usually don't.
Personal relationships have loosened generation to generation — unmarried cohabitation, more abortions, more pushback from young people against their parents' authority — changes he attributes more to Western media than to tourism directly. On the governance side, he's encouraged: decision-making around development has started shifting from a top-down model toward genuine local input.
What Bali needs, in his view, isn't more tourists — it's tourism spread more evenly across the island, and a shift in focus from quantity to quality.