I’ve been visiting Bali for 31 years – I’ve never been more worried for the island’s future

I first landed in Bali in November 1993. Unlike today, the airport wasn’t jammed with flights from around the world, rather you caught one of the few flights from Jakarta each day and entered the island via the open-air immigration area where the two stations rarely had a queue. I was on my honeymoon and a bit giddy for my first visit to the fabled island. My expectations were immediately exceeded.

Glancing at my passport and noting my birth date, the officer handed it back to me and purred: “Have a wonderful birthday in Bali.” My heart soared. If ever a place deserved the overused term “magical”, this was surely it.

In the days that followed, I was entranced. Even back then I’d been warned off Kuta (“Mopes, dopes and miserable drunks”), so we’d headed for the hills and Ubud on the vague promises of art and culture, which turned out to be true. We found lodging in the Hotel Tjampuhan, a somewhat shambolic old royal compound in an impossibly green river valley near the centre of town.

Against a background symphony of birds, bugs and critters, the laid-back attendant explained the amenities: a wooden statue of a naked man stood next to a rickety lounge chair. If I took the statue’s removable penis and knocked the statue’s head, the attendant would appear with warm peanuts and cold beer. Our one-night stay soon became two, then three, then four, then more.

At night we’d go to deserted bamboo pavilions built in the rice fields. A troupe of dancers and musicians in costume would materialise out of the golden twilight and begin a performance that felt mythical and lyrical. I sat, entranced, to watch the show.

That trip to Bali was life-affirming, however, like my marriage, the island as it was when I visited in 1993 wouldn’t last. By 2004 I was writing guidebooks to Bali, spending several months a year travelling to every corner of the island and loving it. My stock line was “When I get off the plane and smell Bali, my blood pressure drops 20 points.”

In 2004 I thought the changes were extraordinary. In retrospect I was naive. In the south, development of the rice-growing area known as Seminyak – today filled with resorts and beaches with serried sunbed arrangements – was just beginning, and there were only unconfirmed reports of a single villa being built in the uncharted beachfront wilds of Canggu. As opposed to today’s coagulated nightmare of streets jammed with hulking mega-clubs blocking views of the beach.

That year my friend Hanafi and I could still find an undeveloped, white-sand beach in the east named Pasir Putih. Today there are competing toll roads to the clubs on the sand here built by local communities jockeying for wealth. (Pro tip: if you’re reading a breathless post about Bali and encounter some variation on “endless white beaches,” stop right there as over 95% of the beaches are some shade of grey, brown or black.)

In the following years work kept me in Bali for several months of the year (some years, I never left). The island was – and is – dynamic in ways like no other place in the world.

Today, the entire south is traffic-choked, from the Instagram cliché that is Canggu, where influencers touting the digital nomad dream angle for a patch of sand, craning their necks towards their phones to get the perfect snap with beach, smug expressions and matcha latte all in shot.

At the long-erased surfer dive of Uluwatu, where the once pristine limestone cliffs have been blasted away for artificial beaches, Ibiza-style clubs and ostentatious resorts. The velocity of change can be bewildering. When researching a project, I save the trendiest areas for last, lest they become unrecognisable during the six weeks I’m elsewhere on the island.

It’s largely the same in Ubud, the once slow-paced village I fell in love with 31 years ago. The sound of gamelan practice has been replaced by car horns from traffic jams that rival the south. Watching dazed day-tripping tourists stumbling around the centre, I empathise with the ones wondering what all the fuss is about.

And yet, with a shred of effort, you can still leave crowded Bali behind via back roads through vistas of green so vibrant it hurts the eyes. There are homestays to be in villages barely found where you can wake up and hear the birds and see a distant volcano. Head to the coasts in the far west for beaches where it will be you and the waves and a few residents curious about why you’ve dropped by.

The Ubud of old is still there too. Sure some of the eight or so dance performances around town each night have been given over to low-brow tastes, with yuck-it-up humour befitting a pantomime or a Vegas lounge act. But you can still find at least a couple that are as honouring of the island’s spiritual traditions as ever.

Though this might not last, as a recent blight infecting performances are groups of westerners loudly getting up 15 minutes into the performance and leaving, letting everyone know that this is just not for them.

Of course, whining that you’re too late to Bali is as old as tourism to the island is. On my third visit to Bali in 2024, I was with a group of friends playing the “when were you first told Bali is ruined?” game. My 1993 was a piker’s entry. Several heard that on arrival in the 1980s. The winner heard it on arriving in 1971.

Still, I’ve never worried more about the island’s future. My old friend Hanafi mourns the loss of community and that “even the simplest of ceremonies is done with an eye towards tourism”.

Eka, a lifelong Ubud resident, notes that: “We do everything for tourism. We’ve lost our sense of harmony for tourism. We’ve given up our family gardens for tourism.”

In September last year, a new round of bans on villa construction in the rice field areas and new resorts in the south were announced, but I’ve lost count of the number of times these prohibitions have been proclaimed before, even as the number of high-end hotels has quintupled in the past 20 years. In January this year, this latest ban was abandoned.

Meanwhile, Bali broke ground for a massive subway system in the south of the island and plans have been mooted for a huge toll road project off the coast, about where people now enjoy views of the setting sun.

Age has given me time to ponder my own role as a promoter of travel to Bali – no matter how small – in its arrival at an existential crossroads. I also know that I still respond to that smell, still treasure my Balinese friends and am still moved by the sounds of gamelan echoing across the rice fields at night.