KUTA - Place Interest In Bali

KUTA
Kuta/Legian beach is living proof that one man’s hell is another man’s paradise. This bustling beach resort has in the short space of just two decades spontaneously burst onto center stage in the local tourist scene. It is here that many visitors form their first (if not only) impressions of what Bali is all about. Many are shocked and immediately flee in search of the “real Bali” (a mythological destination somewhere near Ubud).

The truth is, nevertheless, that certain souls positively thrive in this labyrinth of boogie bars, beach bungalows, cassette shops and honky tonks — all part of the Kuta lifestyle. What then is the magic that has transformed this sleepy fishing village overnight into an overcrowded tourist Mecca — with no end in sight to its haphazard expansion?

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, and 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.