Bali sees hardly any foreign tourists in 2021 as travel restrictions continue to bite, but its beaches still drown in rubbish
- Bali’s record low comes as GDP shrank 3.4 per cent in the first nine months of 2021, though domestic tourists are stepping in to lessen the blow
- Thirty tons of rubbish were removed from just one Bali beach on December 7, as the wet seasons’ heavy rains redirect waste from the island’s rivers
For the Indonesian resort island of Bali, October 14 was not the auspicious date it was supposed to be. It was instead decidedly anticlimactic.
That Thursday heralded the long-awaited reopening of the island to vaccinated international travellers – at least, from 19 countries – until it didn’t. In the end, only two foreign tourists arrived in October, compared with about 500,000 in the same month in 2019, “and not a single direct international flight has landed on its shores since”, Time magazine reports.
Those two intrepid souls brought Bali’s total international arrivals this year to 45, making it “the lowest number of foreign tourist visits we’ve ever recorded”, Nyoman Gede Gunadika, section head of tourism for Bali province, told CNN Travel.
The New York Times attributes the lack of arrivals in Bali and other Southeast hotspots that are theoretically open to the fact that “travelling to these destinations from other countries is such an undertaking – amid rules, fees, a lack of flights and lingering uncertainty around new outbreaks – that very few have bothered”.
That seems like a reasonable conclusion, particularly as the Omicron coronavirus variant is causing restrictions to retighten, including for those entering Indonesia, who are once again subject to a 10-day quarantine period. Oh, and the country has stopped issuing tourist visas for the moment, which could have something to do with the lack of arrivals.
As Time notes, “Indonesia has enough reason to be especially wary of another virus spike”. For several weeks over the summer, it was the epicentre of the coronavirus and some 140,000 people died. Despite that, less than 40 per cent of the national population has been fully vaccinated and, although the rate of inoculation is significantly higher in Bali, such reticence leaves Indonesia vulnerable to another surge.
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“Bali’s economy bears the brunt of that vigilance as it shrank 9.3 per cent in 2020, the worst among all of Indonesia’s provinces”, Time reports. “Its gross domestic product fell 3.4 per cent in the first nine months of [2021].”
Thankfully, domestic tourists are stepping in to lessen some of that economic burden. Dayu Indah, head of marketing at the island’s tourism office, told The New York Times that 12,000 visited over the weekend of December 11 and 12, while the head of the Badung regency branch of the Indonesian Hotels and Restaurants Association told CNN that “on weekends, about 13,000 domestic tourists are visiting Bali”.
But although the proportion of Indonesian to international arrivals might be unprecedented, there are some things that never change, among them the amount of rubbish that washes up on Bali’s beaches during the annual rainy season.
“Thirty tons of trash were removed from Kuta beach today, as the wet season begins to bring large quantities of waste to the beaches in Bali,” news site Coconuts Bali reported on December 7. A week later, at least eight sea turtles were stranded in Badung, one of which later died, “because of all the floating trash”, according to Coconuts.
Stretches of sand smothered by discarded plastic bottles, cups, cans, nets, twigs and more are nothing new at this time of year. Heavy rains carry waste from the island’s rivers to the surrounding ocean before much of it is deposited unceremoniously on to the shoreline – an ugly reminder of the convenience of consumerism.
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“It’s not new and it’s not surprising and it happens every year, and it’s been growing over the last decade,” Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal researcher at Australia’s CSIRO science agency and an expert on global plastic pollution, told The Guardian newspaper in January.
“The increasing amount of plastic washing up was in line with the global rise in the production of plastic. Beaches around the globe were seeing an increase in waste, but in monsoonal countries we do find a much stronger seasonal effect,” Hardesty added.
In January 2019, The Jakarta Post reported that “Bali is preparing a by-law that will impose a US$10 levy on foreign tourists” for environmental and cultural preservation, noting that the island was “battling against the growing volume of plastic waste that has polluted its beaches and waters”. But then the pandemic happened, the world stopped travelling and Bali’s tourist tax was forgotten.
Just think, if it had been implemented, the island would have earned a whopping US$450 this year to combat its perennial plastic crisis!
Then again, with more tourists comes more money – but also more waste.
Vietnamese province to end elephant tourist rides
In what Hong Kong-based charity Animals Asia calls a “historic and groundbreaking move”, the Vietnamese province of Dak Lak has agreed to end elephant rides. The provincial government signed a memorandum of understanding with Animals Asia in which it said it would put a stop to “elephant riding tourism and other activities which affect elephant welfare and human safety, including the use of elephants in certain events at festivals”, according to the charity.
Dak Lak is home to 27 of the 32 elephants in Vietnam still used to give tourists rides. “This will effectively end in Vietnam the outdated practice of using elephants to give tourist rides, which negatively impacts their physical, mental and psychological health, as well as being a safety risk for humans,” Animals Asia says.
Asia largely snubbed in list of best emerging travel destinations
Online travel guide Travel Lemming recently released its list of “50 best emerging travel destinations for 2022”, and Asia barely makes an appearance.
Compiled by the site’s 15 writers and editors, the North America-heavy ranking aims to wean travellers off places that traditionally suffer from overtourism and features “emerging destinations we think are worthy of your tourism dollars”.
At the top is Queretaro, a Mexican state in which “winemaking is absolutely booming”. The “remote wilderness” of North Cascades National Park, in the US state of Washington, is in second place, with Canada’s Prince Edward Island in third.
You have to scroll to the 16th spot before an Asian destination – Cambodia (particularly Kampot and Koh Rong Samloem) – gets a mention. Then there’s Japan (Mount Fuji, Hiroshima, Nara) at number 22, Malaysia (Penang, Borneo, Petronas Towers) at 27 and… that’s it.
