FEW DESTINATIONS HAVE BENEFITED FROM MODERN TOURISM QUITE LIKE BALI. BUT WHEN YOU SELL CULTURE FOR PROFIT, ASKS JOHN BOWE, CAN YOU REMAIN TRUE TO YOURSELF?
I have a neighbor named Richard. He’s a prime example of what I call a Baby Boomer Bummer. Richard was a globe-trotter in the late ’60s and ’70s, before exotic travel became popular with the masses. When I pass him in the hall with my suitcase, he always asks where I’m going — then interrupts to wax euphoric about how much better my destination was back in his day. Evidently, food and sex were not only free, but better and unlimited.
When I told Richard I was going to Bali, I braced myself for the worst. Few places provoke baby-boomer rhapsody like this Indonesian island. It makes them so sad: hundreds if not thousands of years of cultural evolution undone by a few decades of modern, Western-style development, much of it of the globalized luxury persuasion. But this has always struck me as a naïve, not to mention selfish, point of view. Yes, of course, Bali was a different place before it had a Four Seasons, a Hard Rock Hotel, two million tourists a year, terrorist bombings and so on. And, of course, at some level I — like all travelers — want every quaint corner of the world to remain untouched. Yet whom does t
