Destinations Known | Bali sees hardly any foreign tourists in 2021 as travel restrictions continue to bite, but its beaches still drown in rubbish

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.