kutamaya

A Bali beach you'll never want to leave
Wayne Arnold NYT
Friday, February 27, 2004

BALI, Indonesia Everyone who is anyone in Bali's expatriate community shows up for sunset and cocktails at Ku De Ta.

As the shadows lengthen, the island's cognoscenti drift onto the bar's breezy beachfront deck, their linen shirts billowing open to expose native jewelry, their Thai fisherman's pants revealing calves tanned and toned by long walks on Kuta Beach. A deejay spins his latest chill mix, the international assemblage settles into chaise longues and the sun plunges into the Bali Strait.

It's the typical end to a typical day in Seminyak, Kuta's trendy northern neighbor. A few kilometers from the center of Kuta, away from the packs of Australian and Japanese surfers that rule the tourist strip, Europe's well heeled revel in their own barefoot Balinese playground.

Once a quiet village, Seminyak is now one of a handful of settlements that have been engulfed by Kuta's vacatino megalopolis, with its T-shirt shops, tawdry bars and touts. But Seminyak has remained distinct in style and clientele, playing shiraz to Kuta's ice beer.

"It's chalk and cheese," said Arthur Chondros, an Australian who helped start Ku De Ta three years ago and now manages the restaurant and bar. "Seminyak is a bit more outgoing and a bit more risky. It's got an opinion."

People who stay in Seminyak are for the most part long-term visitors, guidebook émigrés whose weeklong visits turned into monthlong sabbaticals. Some have taken up residence, setting up businesses.

They are backpackers all grown up and wielding credit cards. They don't write postcards; they send text messages on their mobile phones.

I discovered Seminyak only recently, in October, despite at least a dozen visits to Bali over the last decade. Allergic to Kuta's carnival atmosphere, I typically leave Ngurah Rai International Airport south of Kuta and head literally for the hills - to Ubud and the highland rice paddies beyond it.

But if Kuta is boisterous in the extreme, Ubud and its environs offer what verges on an excess of serenity. A few days of quiet contemplation amid its dragonflies and amphibian nocturnes is enough to make anyone pine for a beery Australian singalong. So when some friends decided to rent one of Seminyak's many luxury villas, I eagerly signed on.

Seminyak provided the perfect balance of seclusion and exhibition, a polished port of call for those staying in the villas moored in the nearby rice paddies. And unlike Ubud, Seminyak has a beach, the quiet end of the beach that makes Kuta one of the world's famous surfing spots.

Kuta was also the target of terrorists in October 2002, when more than 200 people were killed by a bomb at a nightclub; the area now has an ephemeral air. Fewer people have visited Bali since then: Tourism dropped by about half, chilled by the Kuta bomb, severe acute respiratory syndrome and a bomb in Jakarta. The Balinese economy was hard hit, and local people suffered.

In its consular information sheet, the U.S. State Department continues to warn that "Indonesia is experiencing an ongoing terrorist threat," particularly from the Jemaah Islamiyah organization. It says that the terrorist attacks in Jakarta and Bali took place in areas with large numbers of foreign tourists and expatriates, and clearly indicate that a security threat extends to private citizens. The travel warnings are on the Web at travel.state.gov/travel.

Lately, though, visitors are returning in bigger numbers, as monthly arrivals of foreigners to Bali's airport have recovered to roughly two-thirds their level before the bombing.

For the traditional visitor, Seminyak has a selection of fine hotels, including the beachfront Oberoi, which resembles a traditional Balinese village. One of Bali's first luxury hotels, it was designed in the early 1970s by the Australian architect Peter Muller, who also designed the Amandari Resort near Ubud. The Oberoi is such a landmark that the entire area around it at the northern end of Seminyak is often referred to simply as Oberoi.

Most of the people who stay in that area, however, wouldn't be caught dead in a hotel, no matter how luxurious. Renting villas is the thing there, which affords distance from crowds but proximity to the scene. Many villas are a short drive away.

"People want to go to restaurants and bars and be where the action is," said Dan Brooks, a documentary photographer from London who came to Indonesia to film Komodo dragons and ended up staying to manage and rent villas for a company called Elite Havens. The first villas in Bali, according to Brooks, were built in the 1970s by disenchanted trust-fund kids who got tired of roughing it in Bali's simple local huts. For a few thousand dollars, they built respectable Balinese-style villas, open-plan affairs with several bedrooms under traditional, thatched roofs. When they went home for the holidays, they rented out their villas to their friends. An industry was born.

By the 1990s, foreign visitors to Bali discovered that building a villa could be a lucrative investment: The rental income more than recouped the cost of construction and maintenance. The Asian financial crisis fueled the boom in villa-building; when financing for new hotels dried up, Western-trained contractors turned to villa projects.

Now companies like Brooks's match villa owners with tenants. They are gaining such popularity that many businesses around Asia have begun renting villas for exclusive retreats rather than hotels. Not surprisingly, some rival the fanciest luxury resorts. The five-bedroom Istana, for example, sits on a cliff with a sunset view and starts at $1,000 a night.

My friends and I opted for a more bohemian feel, splitting a three-bedroom villa festooned with purple lanterns and throw pillows embroidered with tiny pieces of mirrored glass.

There are choices to fit almost every budget or preference. The three-bedroom Villa Liamika in Seminyak sits about 200 yards from the beach and rents for as little as $400 a night. Farther inland is the four-bedroom Istana Semer, which goes for $375 a night or about $94 a room. The Maharaj, on the other hand, has five bedrooms and rents for around $300 a night, or $60 a room.

If you have enough friends or family members in your group, a villa offers a wonderfully intimate - and economical - alternative to a hotel. Like self-enclosed resorts, they come complete with cooks, maids, security guards and, in our case, a couple of mangy watchdogs. The villa staff can arrange house calls by masseuses or yoga instructors.

If you want to dine in, all you have to do is give the staff a few hours warning. You pay only for the food; the services of the cook are included in the price of the room. At the end of a stay, a generous tip acknowledges their attention to your whims. Most villas are equipped with a stereo, TV and DVD player. Some even have Internet access. With two iPods among our group to pump tunes through the stereo, our villa quickly became a home away from home.

The New York Times

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