Text: Leonard Lueras
Photos: Dick Hoole

A lot of us remember a Kuta lit by flickering kerosene lamps, eerily quiet, another sort of place during another special time when the only excitement was cockfights, traditional performances of Balinese music and dance (and not for the tourists, mind you), daily religious rituals and long days of surfing all the waves you could stand. People also still recall that when there was nothing productive left to do, scores of people spent pre-twilight hours watching Kuta sunsets while hallucinating from the effects of incredibly potent magic mushroom omelets.

Nowadays that all seems like part of a psychedelic daydream long past. Kuta today is literally a tropical neon jungle, a paradise being lost to cost, and, a beach like no other beach. What we have here is an Asian Tijuana steeping in a chaos made up of crass commercialism and hedonistic excesses, but surviving by being held together by the religious and caste strictures of a traditional Balinese fishing village. Kuta can be a rude scene indeed, but more tourists – both foreigners and Indonesians – visit this honky-tonk beach resort more than any other holiday destination in this vast and interesting country.

Twenty-five years ago the opposite was true. There were many dull, dreamy, and languorous moments in a sleepy fishing village with no electricity, mostly dirt roads and few restaurants and losmen (small guest inns). In those days if you were a surfer and didn’t like to surf alone, you had to spend half your morning wandering around looking for somebody else who would like to go surfing with you. Finally, surf partner acquired, you would paddle out to the break of your choice and have endless waves to yourself – day after day after day.

Those days became hazy memories quickly once large numbers of visiting surfers and itinerant world travelers began arriving in Bali and reporting home about this magical place.

Sooner than any oldtimers expected, serious bands of highly proficient waveriders on earnest surfaris began arriving in Bali and invariably establishing a coconut forest headquarters at Kuta. These wave-worshipping travelers provided a natural market for the enterprising Balinese and an industry, or series of industries, was born. Since those halcyon days of the early Seventies, Kuta has never looked back and has today evolved into an international travel industry phenomenon.

Surfing and surfers, as it turned out, were the catalysts which created the Kuta style of today, but they were and still are only the tip of a booming visitor iceberg that is now traveling on its own uncontrolled inertia. Indeed, first came the surfers and a motley group of non-surfing peers called “hippies” (remember “hippies”?) but they were soon followed by the masses.

Everyone under the sun is strutting about Kuta these days. They’re everywhere, from everywhere, on every flashy and blinking street corner and bar. That isn’t to say that surfers have been tossed to the wayside. Look around and you will see more surf shops in and about the greater Kuta – Legian – Seminyak area than you will find in all of Hawaii. The Kuta-headquarted surfing business has become, as they say in other types of boardrooms, big business.