Bali-fication comes for a laidback surfers’ island

Damar, one of the best surf guides on the Indonesian island of Lombok, feels right at home taking tourists out to sea.

With his fluent English and effortless banter, you would never guess what was his childhood fear: foreigners.

“When I was 10 or maybe seven, I used to cry – I used to just pee in my pants when I saw white people,” Damar, now 39, tells the BBC.

That diffidence waned as the laidback island he calls home slowly found its popularity among Western travellers.

Just east of Bali, Lombok boasts the same azure beaches and stunning views as its famous neighbour, but without the exasperating crowds. Lombok’s beaches are still a hidden gem among surfers, as is Mount Rinjani for hikers. Travel sites still liberally use the word “untouched” to describe the island as they offer reasons to venture beyond Bali.

So it should come as little surprise that the Indonesian government has sensed the opportunity to create another lucrative tourist haven on the sprawling archipelago.

The mission is to create more “Balis” – and Lombok will be one of them.

For islanders, this promise of “Balification” is a welcome opportunity but they are also wary of what it brings.

And the change has already begun to hit home in more ways than one.

Mandalika in the south has been chosen as the heart of the “new Bali”.

Its rustic coastline has already given way to glitzy resorts, cafes and even a racetrack. Earlier this month, nearly 150,000 spectators showed up to watch the motorcycle Grand Prix.

Between 2019 and 2021, dozens of families were evicted from their village homes for the construction of the Mandalika circuit. Damar’s was among them.

Confronted with what activists decried as a messy resettlement plan and unfair compensation, he and his neighbours were helpless, Damar recalls.

“I was angry, but I cannot do much. I cannot fight against the government,” he says.

Since the eviction, Damar has bought a plot of land and built his own house, something that many of his neighbours haven’t been able to do. As a surf guide, he estimates that he earns twice as much as a fisherman – a generational profession in his community.

“I’ve never really been to school, so joining the tourism industry was one of the best choices that I have ever made,” Damar says. “Meeting a lot of people from many different countries… It has opened my mind.”

Damar’s indignation about his eviction even comes with a scrupulous caveat: “I’m not angry at the tourists. I’m just angry at my own government.”

The drive to transform Lombok is part of a wider effort to lure travellers away from Bali, which has for decades played an outsized role in Indonesia’s tourism industry.

The island makes up less than 1% of the country’s land area and less than 2% of its 280 million-plus population. Yet last year it accounted for nearly half of all visitors to Indonesia.

But increasingly Bali’s unrelenting traffic and pollution – a direct result of its success as a top tourist pick- are leaving those very tourists disappointed with what has long been touted as the “last paradise”.

As it turns out, that elusive paradise lies just an hour’s boat ride away.

But perhaps not for long.

More and more travellers are catching on to Lombok’s appeal. Last year, 81,500 foreign tourists touched down at its airport, a 40% jump from the year before – still, a far cry from the 6.3 million foreigners who flocked to Bali.

Eager for Lombok to follow in Bali’s footsteps, Indonesian authorities have secured hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, along with a $250m loan from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

This has accelerated the island’s makeover.

In Kuta, a popular town in Mandalika, scrappy surfers’ hostels have been replaced by a mosaic of chlorinated pools and plushy sunbeds, and an international school for the children of expats.

While authorities are hailing it as Lombok’s success story, some see a cautionary tale.

A stone’s throw away on the beach of Tanjung Aan, cafe owner Kartini Lumban Raja told the BBC that locals there “don’t want to be ‘organised’ like Kuta”.

“When beaches start to look like Kuta, they lose their charm. We lose opportunities. We lose natural beauty,” she said.

For months, rumours of evictions had been swirling on Tanjung Aan, which was earmarked for ambitious development plans.

Days after the BBC’s visit in July, they came like a rolling wave.

Security forces descended upon the beach to demolish nearly 200 stalls, including Kartini’s.

Videos from that day show masked men tearing shop fences down with their bare hands as stall owners protested.

“They were banging on things, kicking plywood… it’s truly inhumane,” Ella Nurlaila, a stall owner, told the BBC. “My goodness, this eviction was so cruel.”

The state-owned company leading Mandalika’s tourism drive, InJourney Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC), has secured 2.1 trillion rupiah ($128m; £96m) to build a luxury hotel on Tanjung Aan.

Authorities said the project will create jobs and boost the local economy. But that’s little consolation for stall owners like Ella and her husband Adi, who have sold coconuts and coffee on the beach for the past three years.

“Thousands of people here depend on [coastal land] for their livelihood,” Adi said. “Where else are we supposed to go to earn a living?”

The couple said they had paid taxes for their stall – which, according to Adi, sat on land belonging to his parents.

But ITDC representatives told the BBC that Tanjung Aan is “state-owned land”, and that the tax paid by those businesses “does not equate to legal ownership or land legitimacy”.

This is just the latest bout of tensions over Mandalika’s tourism push.

Just Finance International, a development finance watchdog, has repeatedly flagged “a pattern of rights violations linked to the Mandalika project” in recent years.

UN human rights experts estimate that more than 2,000 people “lost their primary means of livelihood overnight” because of the Tanjung Aan evictions. Stall owners were given neither “adequate notice” nor “suitable” resettlement plans, they said in a statement in August.

“The people of Mandalika must not be sacrificed for a project that promises economic growth at the expense of human rights,” they said.

In its quest for a remarkably different future, Lombok will also have to contend with what this means for local culture.

The predominantly Muslim island is home to thousands of mosques and the indigenous Sasak ethnic group. Compared to Bali, alcohol is not as readily available in parts of the island. On travel forums, tourists are encouraged to ditch bikinis and hot pants for more modest attire.

Such conservative sensitivities may change, or at least be driven further inland, as tourism heats up along the coastline. Travellers who have come to love Lombok are not happy about that either.

“Lombok is so special because it still has its own nature and people come to see that,” said Swiss tourist Basil Berger, a sceptic of the”Bali-fication” of the island.

“If they want to see Bali, they [should] go to Bali,” he said. Turning Lombok into another Bali “is the “the worst thing that they can do”.

There are also environmental concerns. The motorcycle Grand Prix last year drew 120,000 spectators to Mandalika, leaving behind 30 tonnes of rubbish that authorities struggled to clear.

“Before it gets to Bali’s stage of development, Lombok could learn. Because it’s showing the same kind of strain,” says Sekar Utami Setiastuti, who lives in Bali.

The government should ensure “tourism development brings welfare to a lot of people, instead of just bringing tourists to Lombok”, she adds. “Lombok has to find its own identity – not just [become] a less crowded Bali.”

No matter where that search leads, a new era has dawned on Lombok.

Andrew Irwin is among the foreign investors who have taken an early interest in Lombok’s budding tourism. The American is the co-owner of LMBK Surf House, one of Mandalika’s most popular surf camps.

The way he sees it, businesses like his are helping to uplift local employees and their families.

“It’s giving people more opportunities to earn more money, send their kids to proper school, get proper insurance, get proper healthcare, and essentially live a better quality of life,” he said.

While there’s “not necessarily much one can do” about Lombok’s changing landscape, he says, “we can just hope to bring a positive change to the equation”.

Tourism has certainly ushered prosperity into the lives of many locals, who have decided to try their hand at entrepreneurship.

“As long you want to work, you’ll make money from tourism,” says Baiq Enida Kinang Lare, a homestay owner in Kuta, known to her guests as Lara. Her neighbours too have started homestays.

Lara started her business in 2014 with four rooms. She’s now at 14, not counting a separate villa under construction.

As excited as she is about her prospects, she is also a little wistful as she recalled life before the hustle.

“It’s difficult to find time to gather and see everyone. This is what we miss. We feel like the time flies very, very fast because we’re busy,” she says.

This is a feeling that would surely be shared by locals from Bali to Mykonos to Cancun, whenever tourism took off in their patch of paradise: “I miss the past, but we like the money.”