Bali Guide
Introduction to Bali
The island of Bali is part of the Indonesian archipelago, a 5200-kilometre-long string of over thirteen thousand islands, stretching between Malaysia in the west and Australia in the east. Sandy beaches punctuate the dramatically rugged coastlines, and world-class surf pounds both shorelines.
The island is small – extending less than 150km at its widest point – volcanic, and graced with swathes of extremely fertile land, much of it sculpted into terraced rice-paddies. Bali remains the only Hindu society in Southeast Asia, and religious observance permeates every aspect of modern Balinese life.
With a tourist industry that dates back over eighty years, the tiny island of Bali (population 3.1 million) has become very much a mainstream destination, offering all the comforts and facilities expected by better-off tourists, and suffering the predictable problems of congestion, commercialization and breakneck Westernization. However, its original charm is still much in evidence, its distinctive temples and elaborate festivals set off by the lush landscape of the interior. Although tourist arrivals plummeted after the bombs of 2002 and 2005, causing an island-wide recession that continues to bite, visitors are returning in their previously high numbers (2.5 million in 2007).
Bali endured years of colonial rule under the Dutch East Indies government, which only ended with hard-won independence for Indonesia in 1949. Since then, the Jakarta-based government of Indonesia has tried hard to foster a sense of national identity among its extraordinarily diverse islands, both by implementing a unifying five-point political philosophy, the Pancasila, and through the mandatory introduction of Bahasa Indonesia, now the lingua franca for the whole archipelago. Politically, Bali is administered as a province in its own right.