” ISN’T BALI SPOILED? ” is invariably the question that greets the returned traveller from Bali – meaning, is the island overrun by tourists, and are the Balinese all wearing shirts? The questioners are visibly disappointed to hear of big hotels, fine roads, and motor-cars; there is still enough of the Robinson Crusoe in travellers to make each one of them want to be the ” only ” white man among picturesque semi-naked, dark-skinned savages, although they would preferably see them from a motor-car or a hotel veranda.

Bali was only conquered by the Dutch, but long before that the libraries of Holland had been filling slowly with scholarly volumes on the literature, the archaeology, and the religion of Bali. However, the remote little island only became news to the rest of the Western world with the advent, a few years ago, of a series of documentary films of Bali with a strong emphasis on sex appeal. These films were a revelation and now everybody knows that Balinese girls have beautiful bodies and that the islanders lead a musical-comedy sort of life full of weird, picturesque rites. The title of one of these films, Goona-goona, the Balinese term for ” magic,” became at the time Newyorkese for sex allure.

The newly discovered ” last paradise ” became the contemporary substitute for the nineteenth-century romantic conception of primitive Utopia, until then the exclusive monopoly of Tahiti and other South Sea Islands. And lately travel agencies have used the alluring name of Bali to attract hordes of tourists for their round-the-world cruises that make a one-day stop on the island. On this day the tourists are herded to the hotel in Den Pasar to eat their lunch, buy curios, and watch hurried performances by bored ” temple dancers ” – ordinary village actors who hate to play in the midday heat.

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