Two Years On, Bali Has Bounced Back.

On the 18th of February 2020, the Governor of Bali in Indonesia made a painful decision. As of midnight that day, the island was to be shut off from the rest of the world.

 In 2019 Bali welcomed almost nineteen and a half million international and domestic visitors who came for the sun, the culture and a damn fine time. Then, in the blink of an eye, that influx of free-spending westerners disappeared, leaving behind what would soon prove to be a trail of life-changing economic disasters. 

Previous disruptions to the island's tourist industry were relatively short-lived, as the disruption to flights during the eruption of Lombok's towering Mt Rinjani. With that disruption, the Balinese believed this pandemic was merely a hiccough and would soon be over. With it, the tourists would return, and the hundreds of thousands whose livelihoods are firmly tied to the tourist industry would be safe.

Sadly that assumption was not to be.

Weeks turned into months and ultimately into years. Hotels, retail stores and the hundreds of hotels that dot the island began to cut back and eventually lay off all their staff, with no alternative for them to find another job. A few remained open, desperately clinging to a false sense of hope, but even they succumbed to the quiet that was enveloping the landscape. Also, ex-pats were not immune to this phenomenon, and Bali witnessed an exodus of residents who had years before made Bali home. Unfortunately, once they left, there was no prospect of them returning as there was no vaccination program in place for the first year of the plague. As a result, villas with their well-tended, lush gardens were locked up, staff laid off, and within months, those self-same villas had begun to fall into decay.

It became a time of waiting for waiting. 

The unemployed Balinese slowly drifted home to their villages and resumed practising their primary occupation, farming. Over time, the island fell quiet; no arriving or departing aeroplanes disturbed the quiet. Cars and motorbikes disappeared from the streets, and inter-island ferries were anchored offshore to lay idle for a couple of years. 

Then came the curfews, not lockdowns as such, but all restaurants that had managed to stay open were ordered to close by 8 pm. Driving the streets at night after that early witching hour was like travelling along roads in the last slow hours of morning. Silence became the norm, and telling the truth at times was absolute bliss.

It was also a much-needed healing process for the environment, and Bali seemed to take a breath, tired from the weight of accommodating millions of visitors from around the world.

It became a time to heal and for people to re-evaluate their existence. Over the two years of this interruption, the rainy season seemed to know to extend its monsoon rains so that the water table could replenish itself and crops flourish. As a result, garbage shrank to a manageable level, and for once, the dry riverbeds were no longer clogged with mountains of plastic.

My partner and I began to revel in this hiatus, exploring places I had never visited on roads devoid of traffic. "Secret' waterfalls became sanctuaries enjoyed by just the two of us without hordes of marauding foreigners and persistent touts selling 'Made in China' souvenirs. However, my selfishness was often tempered by seeing shops and warungs ( roadside food stalls) closed and falling into decay, for, as one proprietor said to me sadly, "no one comes here anymore." 

This simple statement clashed with the message, "If you are going to be trapped in a pandemic, this is undoubtedly the place to be.

In late 2021 a glimmer of hope began to blossom as the island's population, and the rest of Indonesia received their first and second dose of the life-saving vaccine. COVID numbers started to fall along with a rapidly declining death rate. That dim light at the end of the long dark tunnel proved not to be an oncoming train but a signal that the end of the pandemic was nigh.

Sadly, Bali remained closed during the lucrative Christmas holidays, but developers and astute investors seemed to be able to sniff the air and declare that opportunities abound. Empty shops and more prominent retail outlets suddenly began to experience an avalanche of takeovers and frantic renovations. The phrase, 'one man's meat is another man's poison' seemed rather apt. Long neglected gardens of the larger hotels became hives of activity as the detritus of the previous two years was swept away by gardeners who had once again found employment.

Impatience mounted during January as the millions of Balinese collectively waited like marathon runners at the start line for the Governor to fire his starting gun. And then finally it happened. A government mandate decreed that arriving visitors with proof of double vaccination did not have to produce a negative PCR test result. Quarantining in a hotel for five days was scrapped.

Within days, the hordes began to descend!

The sound of aeroplanes the morning silence, and that phenomenon that beguiles the island had as if by magic, reappeared….. traffic. Gone is the joy of sailing off across the island on nearly deserted roads or trying to find it after you have parked in a public car park where you used to be the only one, but now there are ten thousand identical black bikes just like yours.

And so COVID, after dominating everyone's existence here, has become a distant memory as mask-free tourists stroll the beaches, fill the bars and restaurants and spend their much needed foreign currency. 

One can only hope that the pandemic has given the authorities food for thought by trying not to place ALL of the emphasis on tourism but to look at alternate ways of deriving a living. However, for now, Bali welcomes visitors to what Nehru once described as "The Morning Of The World."

Bali, Indonesia May 2022

Paul v Walters is the best-selling author of several novels and anthologies of short stories. When not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali, he occasionally rises to scribble travel tales for several vox pop journals.