Travel

We hired a messed up Toyota with ample space for our luggage and made our way to the place we all had fond memories of - Uluwatu. Since we had no hotel bookings and it was two days before Christmas our search for accommodation was not as easy as we had anticipated so we drove from hotel to hotel seeking something suitable and in our budget.

We were immediately overwhelmed at the amount of destruction and decay that we found in our old stomping ground. The once lush holiday villas and resorts were now rundown 'pondoks', smelly, rotten hotels greeted us wherever we went, and our hearts sank.

Finally we arrived at Dreamland Beach, which is located on the Bukit Peninsula. From our previous visits we knew a bit about Dreamland Beach's sad history. During the eighties this beach region came under the attention of Tommy Suharto (official name Hutomo Mandala Putra), the youngest son of Suharto who was the President of Indonesia. He wanted the entire Dreamland area and also the Nusa Dua area to be controlled by him through his company PT Bali Pecatu Graha and used the Indonesian army to evict all locals who opposed him.

Suharto then started to intimidate the landowners so he could buy their land at a cheap price and develop resorts similar to those found on Nusa Dua, which he could rent to international hotel brands such as the Hilton, the Westin and the St.Regis. In the nineties Tommy Suharto had big plans of changing Dreamland beach area into a golf course with villas and a hotel but then the Asian financial crisis put a hold on his ideas. The area was left to rot.

On our last visits we found youngsters standing at the grandiose entrance collecting Rp5,000 (R5.00) per car, motorbikes were allowed to enter free. Today you will pay Rp 15,000 for car parking and an entry fee of Rp 75,000 per person to enter this enormously extravagant white elephant.

But there was more bad news for Dreamland Beach as in 2002 Tommy Suharto was convicted of ordering the killing of Supreme Court Judge of Indonesia, Syafiuddin Kartasasmita and was sentenced to 15 years in jail of which he only had to sit 4 years.

After his release from jail the construction of the area started with the building of a 4 km long road all the way down to the beach. Little warungs (Indonesian styled restaurants) and massage ladies were closed down, only to be replaced by an ugly concrete building containing shops and other overpriced restaurants.

Soon an 18-hole golf course was built, which is the hottest golf course on the island, as you will have a hard time finding trees. A desalination pipe, which leads into what once was the best surf spot in Bali, the water is used up to keep the golf course green. A couple of years ago Dreamland Beach changed its name to New Kuta Beach but everyone still remembers it as one of the saddest destructions of Bali's natural resources.

We stayed in a hotel that was infested with Chinese and Indonesian tourist. It was not pleasant to share our space with this lot - I guess what finally broke my spirit was what I saw in the pool one stormy night. Trying to find some solitude I made my way to the main pool. Kareoke was in full swing at the entertainment centre and there were a few friendly Chinese couples at the pool bar. But there was this couple in the pool drinking. They looked like they were there for a while, their speech was loud and slurred.

The woman was chain-smoking, ashing her cigarette into the pool and then disposing of her stompies in the plant next to her. The man was making these noisy snorting sounds as he was clearing his nose and throat and loudly spitting into the pool. To this day my stomach turns when I think of this episode. I guess I am grateful because the next morning we packed and left the tourist trap and found a beautiful villa in the heart of the party town, Seminyak, however that is another story for our next episode of "Family Travels".