A tourist caravansary

It took a young Californian surfer and his wife to first notice Kuta's tourism potential. The year was 1936. Robert and Louise Koke decided to leave Hollywood and start a small hotel in Bali. They describe their discovery of Kuta as follows: The next day we cycled ... to the South Seas picture beach we had been hoping to find. It was Kuta ... the broad, white sand beach curved away for miles, huge breakers spreading on clean sand."

The hotel they founded was called the Kuta Beach Hotel, naturally. It was a modest establishment but things went reasonably well in spite of an occasional malaria attack and a run-in with a young and fiery American of British birth by the name of Ketut Tantri, who managed to stir up controversy wherever she went during her 20-odd years in Indonesia.

After the War, tourism in Bali all but disappeared. And when the first tourists began to trickle back during the 1960s, Kuta was all but forgotten. Suddenly and without warning, however, a new kind of visitor began to frequent the island during the 1970s, their preferred abode in Bali was Kuta Beach.

Nobody quite knew what to make of the first long-haired, bare-footed travelers who stopped here on their way from India to Australia - nobody, that is, except for the enterprising few in Kuta who quickly threw up rooms behind their houses and began cooking banana pancakes for this nomadic tribe.

The main attraction here was and still is one of the best beaches in Asia - and the trickle of cosmic surfers and space age crusaders in search of paradise, mystical union, and good times soon turned into a torrent, as tales of Bali spread like wildfire on the travelers' grapevine. Stories of a place where one could live out extravagant dreams on one of the world's most exotic tropical islands - for just a few dollars a day - seemed too good to be true.

Within the space of a few years, Kuta's empty beaches and back lanes began to fill up with home stays, restaurants and shops. Most visitors stayed on as long as the money lasted, and many concocted elaborate business schemes that would enable them to come back, investing their last dollars in handicrafts and antiques before leaving.

In Kuta and Legian, the clothing or "rag trade" developed rapidly. Fortunes have been made and a handful of young entrepreneurs who began by selling batiks out of their backpacks have made it big. With the new affluence has came a lifestyle of flashy villas and sultry tropical evenings beneath moonlit palms.

By the end of the 1970s, nobody knew quite what was going on. Up-scale tourists were mixing in increasing numbers in among the "hippie travelers" and deluxe bungalow hotels were popping up between US$2 a night home stays. With them came the uncontrolled proliferation of shops and bars and tourist touts lurking on every street corner. By the 1980s, Kuta was no longer an underground secret. More..