37. Bali, after the moment that have shaken Kuta and the traditional Balinese harmony

By Filipe Morato Gomes	Where is Bali?
Bali is still trying to recover from that sad moment. In Kuta, Balinese tourist capital, people are worried about the future. They ask tourists to travel to Bali, assure Bali is safe and don't understand why it all happened to them. “We are peaceful people”, a taxi-driver told me with tears in his eyes.

Saturday, 12th October, 2002. Legian Street was overcrowded as usual on a Saturday evening. Bars and discos were the meeting point for tourists from different nationalities, on the busiest day of the week. The Australians prevailed, but there were also English, Japanese and visitors from many other countries. And Legian Street was the main point of that night bustle. In most of the bars, bands sang songs at visitors' pleasure, trying to attract passers-by indoors. Kuta, Bali tourist capital, lived from the tourism industry when the clock marked almost midnight. And then the unthinkable happened. In the whole town a strong noise was heard. In Paddy's, one of the most popular dancing bars, something very serious had happened. The panic was installed and people ran outside, to the street, desperate, seeking for shelter, hiding from something they couldn't explain what it was yet. In an island where harmony is a supreme value, nobody wanted to believe that sound was in fact what it sounded like. However, a few moments latter, the buzz of a second explosion, much stronger than the previous one, echoed on tourists and Balinese people's tympanums. Sari club, overcrowded, had been reduced to a cloud of dust powdered with fragments of a bomb. All of a sudden, two hundreds corpses got off their earthy life. And never did Bali look like the same place.

Tourists in Danau Bratan Temple, north of Bali

On my second day in Kuta, the calendar marked a Saturday again. Instinctively, I went to Legian. I looked at the illuminated commercial ads on the street, got in and out of a couple of bars taking the pulse to the atmosphere until a neon attracted my eyes: “Paddy's”. I stepped in. It was located slightly to the south of the previous place. Inside, the atmosphere was cheerful. Many young Australians emptied highly alcoholic cocktails while happily dancing and listening to songs which invited one's body to rock. Many Javanese prostitutes used the lack of a lighter as a technique to start chatting with the male foreigners in the bar. Good-looking Balinese, with long dark hair, dark-skinned and muscled body, tried their luck with the blonde Australian girls. And some faces with familiar features talked, danced or sipped a Bintang, a pleasant Indonesian beer.

They were Portuguese teachers teaching their mother language in East-Timor. During Easter school break they use to come to Bali to have a good time and have access to goods which they could hardly find in the youngest country in the whole planet. “In East-Timor there are too many things missing. We come to Bali to shop, relax and amusing ourselves”, three Portuguese female teachers who have been working in East-Timor for four years told me.

A farmer in a rice field, central Bali

But in spite of the apparent bustle, nothing could compare to the season before that fatidic 2002 night. In an island which lived and still lives from tourism, the consequences of the bombs were devastating. In the six months after the explosions alone, the number of arrivals in Bali reduced by half. “Since the bombs, there are no tourists”, a street vendor complained, confirming the unvarnished truth of the statistics. Besides, the type of visitors in Bali seemed to have changed. The older and wealthier ones had moved away from the island to local distress. “Business is very bad indeed. And the tourists who come to Bali nowadays have no money to spend”, complained Christian, anglicized name of a professional taxi-driver, tuned by the same standard of distress. “So far I have not been able to understand why they did this to us”, he continued. “We are peaceful people”, Christian told me with tears in his eyes.

For the tourists and travellers who stroll along Legian Street, it was also difficult not to feel a bit of emotion. A memorial had been set up in honour of the victims exactly in the place where Sari club was first built. It consists of a wall decorated in a very simple way, having some inscriptions which one could not guess from the distance. Some steps ahead, looking closer, one could see a list of names. Everyone knew those were the names of the two hundred innocent people who had been killed when the explosions occurred. Many passers-by stopped, shocked, looking at the list; others took photographs of the memorial. And the remembering of the consequences of the bombs was enough to make the eyes of those who stopped in front of the memorial wet.

The names were right there, the real names, representing lives of people who were looking for amusement in the wrong place at the wrong time. Corpses belonging to natives of twenty-two countries had lain just in that piece of soil, two and a half years before. I was just inquiring about the nationalities of the victims when a name became bigger and bigger to my eyes. I lit incense and left a flower in the memorial. God bless Diogo!

(originally written in Portuguese)

Author's note: Diogo was a Portuguese victim (fortunately, the only one) killed in Kuta, Bali, during the bombings of October 2002.

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