Most young local people assume tourism means money, she says — but direct benefit to ordinary people is rarer than they think. Most of what circulates comes from big investors, and whatever taxes get paid rarely go toward protecting the culture that tourism is actually selling. Many genuinely local people live far from the tourism zones entirely, in remote villages, and yet remain objects of tourist curiosity — visitors wanting to see ‘real locals’, even when what they're actually shown is often someone else's version of Balinese culture, filtered through outside guides who don't fully understand it themselves.
I do not like tourists taking pictures of me while I am praying, but guides keep telling the tourists it is okay. It is not.
The commodification goes further than photography. Tourists can now attend a cremation for a few dollars — a ceremony she considers too significant and too personal to be treated as an attraction, however technically permitted. At Besakih, Bali's most important temple, locals have quietly stopped visiting in the afternoon, when tourist numbers peak, choosing early morning or evening instead simply to pray undisturbed. Even in small ways — restaurant waitresses dressed in ceremonial temple clothing, temple statues used as mere decor — she sees pieces of the sacred being steadily devalued.
And still, many young people don't see any of that. What they see are wealthy tourists, and a route toward that same wealth. A room boy, she notes, might earn 10,000 rupiah a day in wages and 30,000 more in tips — a small sum to a tourist, a meaningful one to him. Hotel training programmes, some leading to placements in five-star hotels in Singapore, cost a million rupiah upfront against an eventual ten million in earnings — numbers alluring enough to pull young people toward tourism without necessarily reckoning with what's traded away to get there.
Incomes have risen, but prices have risen faster, squeezing ordinary households harder than before — though she's quick to note that Balinese community bonds have, if anything, grown stronger under that pressure, partly in response to two groups now seen as pressure points: tourists themselves, and the outsiders who've come to work and live alongside them.
New imports have followed the tourist trail — McDonald's, KFC, imported produce, even imported animals like elephants and camels in parks built specifically for visitors. The environmental toll troubles her more than almost anything else: rice fields converted to hotels, trees cut for souvenirs and furniture, riverbed stones mined for construction, coral reefs and turtle populations under real strain. Water scarcity compounds it — hotels draw first, locals get whatever's left, and government response so far has amounted to publishing data without changing anything concrete.
Healthcare, in her account, remains genuinely bad — hospitals ask about payment before they ask about the injury, and without insurance, most people simply can't afford proper treatment. Education quality is fairly uniform at the high school level nationally, but university quality varies sharply, with Java holding a clear edge; her own university's outlying campus, ten kilometres north of the main Denpasar building, is poorly maintained, poorly ventilated, and difficult to reach given Bali's traffic.
Since our motorbike was stolen it has become too expensive for me to travel from school to my house and back every day, so now I often spend the night at school.
The theft happened at a festival — a common target, she says, whenever crowds and motorbikes gather in the same place, a pattern that's grown more common since tourism took off. Replacing it would mean selling the family garden, their one real legacy, something she hopes never becomes necessary, even as she watches other families sell land more freely — sometimes out of real need, sometimes simply to buy something new, a distinction she finds herself unable to fully make peace with.
Crime has risen generally, though she notes it's rarely committed by Balinese Hindus, whose beliefs in karma and reincarnation weigh heavily against wrongdoing. What worries her more is the drift among her own generation — more casual attitudes toward sex and relationships, more abortions, and a fading interest in temple life and tradition, pulled instead toward parties and modern entertainment.
“If this generation is not interested anymore, they will not pass it on to their children,” she says. “The only culture that will be left then would be the commercial culture that's sold to tourists. I hope things will change, and Bali will have a better future than that.”