DENPASAR (Indonesia): A waiter at one of the seafood restaurants strung along Bali’s Jimbaran Bay gestures towards the other end of the beach, a sparsely populated stretch of sand where suicide bombs were detonated more than six months ago.
Asian and German tourists keep his restaurant ticking over, he says, but tourists from Australia, who have long flocked here to enjoy Bali’s famed surf and stunning scenery, are staying away.
“Why don’t they come back? We are going bankrupt!” the waiter exclaims.
Six months after three suicide bombers rocked the island, tourism numbers are still in the doldrums, with everyone from taxi drivers to hoteliers complaining about the slump hitting their wallets.
The October 1 attacks by Muslim extremists on bustling eateries at Jimbaran and the main beach strip of Kuta killed 20 bystanders. The bloodshed occurred just three years after the Hindu-majority island was shaken by even more devastating blasts which left 202 people dead, mostly Western holiday-makers.
In February, tourism arrivals were at 73,430, down 26.56 per cent year-on-year, official data shows, while preliminary figures for March are similarly disheartening.
“I’m worried about the numbers,” says Gde Nurjaya, chief of Bali’s tourism authority.
Daily arrivals for the first three months of 2005 averaged 3,900 per day amid bad publicity about Indonesia focused on the tsunami in Aceh, but this year only 2,800 per day have been trickling in, Nurjaya says.
And the number of days tourists stay has dwindled from about 10 days before the October 2002 blasts to five or six days, he adds, as the market shifts from being dominated by westerners to having a heavier Asian component.
“Some of my friends have quit driving taxis,” says Ketut Prastiya, a taxi driver in Denpasar. “Not many tourists are around, so the money is not enough to support their families.”
Some have gone home to their villages, others have found other work.
On a good day, Prastiya makes up to 40,000 rupiah (just under four dollars) in profit, less than half of what he pulled in before the latest attacks. But on a bad day, he ends up owing the taxi company a portion of the 150,000 rupiah he pays to hire his car. He owes about one million rupiah.
Irwan Hidayat, the owner of a spa in Denpasar popular with tourists, says business is down by half compared to the same time a year ago.
“I have to change shifts, rearrange the schedule in order not to fire any of my staff,” he says.
Even in the most popular tourist spots, such as beachside Kuta and Nusa Dua and the cultural town of Ubud, hotel occupancy hovers at around 30 per cent, with the lucky hotels hitting 40 per cent, hoteliers estimate.
Normally, rates would be up to 70 per cent booked, they say.
“The level of occupancy is so low. It is so scary,” says Ratna Radja Ully, secretary of the Bali branch of the Pacific Asia Travel Association. “I don’t know why it is still difficult to get people to come to Bali.”—AFP
