Just back from a week in Bali, was a great family holiday. It was more expensive then I expected especially the price of food and beer. Also the people were generally not very friendly and always trying to rip you off. I felt that they had a lot of resentment towards tourists and their history shows this. When I try to view Bali from their perspective. I can understand their feeling. their whole way of life has been affected by tourism both positively (a great source of income) and negatively (their way of live and environment). I would love to have seen more of Bali, but with 2 young children who were only interested in the pool we felt that we would just stay close to the hotel... I bet the island is beautiful and on the last day as I sat on the beach I felt saddened by the continuous, monotonous drone of the speedboats, jet skis and various other water craft dragging parachutes and inflatable tubes dragging tourists at inflated prices. I fact the beach at Benoa, Nusa Dua was so busy that you could smell the fumes from the hotel balcony long after the tide had drifted beyond the reef and the touts had packed up for the day.
The Holiday was expensive; first there was the visa fee $25 US per person (even the kids), food and beer was much the same price as UK (more expensive than Korea) then just in case they hadn't managed to sting you for every last cent you have to pay Indonesian the departure tax 150,000 rupiah (about $20 US) in cash!
Beer was about 30,000 rupiah and food about 60,000 rupiah
