It May Not Be Ibiza,
But With Its Burgeoning Dinng, Art, And Nightlife Scene,
The Once-Sleepy Seaside Village Of Seminyak has All The
makings Of Tropical Asia's Most Vibrant Resort Enclave
By : Jamie James
When l first moved to Bali, in 1999,l signed a one-year
lease on a cheerful two-room house with a big garden in
Seminyak, the “nice” part of Kuta. In those
days, the place was still pretty funky. When l knocked of
work at sundown, l would grab a big bottle of Bintang beer
(wine was virtually unobtainable back then) and pedal my
bicycle down to Jalan Oberoi to unwind by watching the sun
settle over the rice fiends. Glittering green paddy extended
in a patchwork down to the shore road, marked off by rows
of coconut palms that swayed in the perpetually purling
ocean breeze. The road was a Mess but there wasn't much
traffic. There were a couple of restaurants, a few stands
selling sarongs and rattan placemats, but the mood was rustic,
relaxed - imbued with the magical essence known as “the
real Bali.”
Nowadays that house is advertised as a villa, and the poky
little village of Seminyak has become the site of tropical
Asia's first tourism boom in the 21st century.
Unlike previous Bali booms, the lure isn't the island's
fabled culture, or the romantic beaches, but the promise
of glittering nightlife and sophisticated.
Shopping and dining. In seven years we've gone from Nescafe
to cappuccino; even humble warungs offer a martini menu.
Jalan Oberoi (officially, Jalan Laksmana) is lined with
galleries, boutiques, and restaurants, cheek by jowl all
the way to the beach.
Traffic can be hectic in high season, but one thing remains
unchanged-the road is still a mess. Yet even that is a sign
of progress: from early morning till dusk, big trucks rumble
along loaded with limestone, sand, and lumber, raw materials
for more resorts, more shops, more swanky private villas.
In the 1960s and '70s, when foreign visitors began arriving
in Bali in serious numbers, the beaten path led father south,
to Kuta, where surfers, hippies, and other scruffy young
vagabonds were seriously partying; the farther north you
went, the quieter and more secluded it was. Then, in 1978,
the Oberoi hotel group opened the first luxury resort in
Bali, choosing a location in Seminyak, on the same breathtaking
coastline as Kuta but well away from its honkytonks and
budget hostels-far enough out, they hoped, that no one would
ever build near them. The Oberoi was at the end of an unlighted
dirt track-almost impassable force mud seven it rained-that
had no name until people started calling it Jalan Oberoi.
The new resort flourished in remote, solitary majesty until
1993, when a stylish international restaurant, La Lucciola,
opened further up the beach near Pura Petitenget, one of
the island's most important temples. A few years later came
the debut of The Legian, a quasi-Mogul palace that has matured
to become Bali's grand hotel.
With the opening of the ultra-stylish haut-Aussie playhouse
Ku De Ta, right next to the Oberoi, in 2000, modern Seminyak
was born. In 2004, the international travel press discovered
it. A major story in the New York Times- the ultimate proof
that leisure destination has established itself in the world
market place-rhapsodized about the 'high-end gloss' it discovered
here: fancy restaurants, first-class spas, and hip nightclubs
have all cropped up in the last year, adding new spice to
a scene that, not long ago, bordered on Stale. “Departures
the magazine for American Express Platinum cardholders,
declared, 'The scene has become so stylish that Seminyak
has been dubbed the Ibiza of Southeast Asia.”
Residents of Bali, if they had ever visited madly chic
lbiza, might have been excused for scratching their heads
in perplexity. Resemblances between Spain's glamorous, frenetic
island resorting lazy ol’ Seminyak exist, but the
differences are more pronounced: for one thing, as any loyal
Seminyak will tell you, we've got the better beach here,
hands and bare feet down. For another, options for accommodations
comprise not only luxury resorts and fabulous seaside villas,
but also comfortable budget bungalows for 30 bucks a night,
a short stroll from the beach.
Yet there’s no doubt that in the past seven years
Seminyak has become a substantially different place: indeed
there's nothing quite like it in Asia. As in lbiza, the
rich and famous may be glimpsed coming and going, but for
them Seminyak's main attraction is that they can escape
the crowds. The principal fallacy in comparisons between
Bali's chic new enclave and swish Mediterranean resorts
like lbiza is that even when it's fully booked, Seminyak
is not unpleasantly jammed; the tour buses still herd the
masses to Kuta and points further south to Tuban, Jimbaran,
Nusa Dua.
Even if visitors to Seminyak nowadays are well grounded
and well heeled, and they drink mango martinis and metropolitans
instead of local beer and arak, it's still Bali-slow and
relaxed, delightfully out of it. The islands of the Indonesian
archipelago are something of a buzz-free zone, which makes
the success of establishing Seminyak as a fashionable brand
all the more remarkable. Among the leading cheerleaders
for the area's dramatic repositioning in the travel marketplace
has been The Yak, an oversized glossy magazine that features
thongs and big jewelry over serene sunrises. “Some
people come to Bali for the culture, some come for the cocktails
says British-born Sophie Digby, one of the magazine's editors.
“seminyak is for party people.”
Digby is simply putting spin on the old paradigm of tourism
in Bali that serious culture vultures headed for the hills,
to Ubud, while louche lotus-eaters congregated in the sunny
south. The sudden rise of Seminyak has turned the stereotype
on its head: there’s a lot going on here now besides
sex, sunshine, and surf. When New York art dealer Richard
Meyer moved to Bali five years ago to open a photography
gallery, he chose Seminyak over Sanur and Ubud, the traditional
centers of the Bali art scene since the first invasion by
foreign travelers in the l930s. ''I chose Seminyak because
it has a feeling of venturesomeness,” Meyer says.
“it’s a younger crowd more stimulating. There's
nothing stimulating about Ubud now. it's become decoration.
Richard Meyer Culture, as he calls his gallery, began by
exhibiting vintage vernacular photography from throughout
the archipelago: portraits of country folk from Sumatra,
commercial photography from hip Jakarta in the Sukarno era,
ancient family snapshots from Bali. Last year, he began
showing contemporary work, mounting a series of portraits
by Bali's most famous foreign resident, landscape designer
and author Made Wijaya (aka Michael White, of Sydney).
In February, Meyer exhibited a show of male nudes by Rama
Surya, an internationally acclaimed photo journalist from
Sumatra. In one series of photographs, the artist's young
sons romp in the garden, looking more like benign fairies
than human children; in another a famous yogi demonstrates
advanced poses-naked, in a sculpture park in east Bali.
Mostly Muslim Indonesia, as a nation, is more puritanical
than Hindu Bali, where group bathing is a venerable tradition;
there was some fear that the exhibition might stir up a
controversy, as the national assembly in Jakarta considers
a bill to define pornography in much more stringent terms,
making it virtually synonymous with nudity. Meyer says,
'I invited the police and the village leaders, and gave
them colas and let them have a look. They didn't have a
problem !.
Rio Helmi, perhaps the most successful photographer based
in Bali, has long operated a gallery in Ubud. Last year
he opened a storefront space on Seminyaks main drag, to
get away from what he calls ''the art mafia of Ubud.”
He chose Seminyak, he says, “because there's much
more happening down here, a lot of energy for new things.''
Helmi is candid about choosing the location for the volume
of tourist traffic: his main motive in opening here was
to sell his own striking photographs of Bali and the world
beyond. But he also plans to hang two to three shows a year
featuring other Indonesian photographers; the first in the
series will be an exhibition of work by Eddy Hasbi.
The newest art gallery in Seminyak is a tiny chocolate-box
of a space called Casa Iseabo, on Jalan Laksmana, just down
the road from the Oberoi and Ku De Ta. The owner, Susana
Archibald, an effervescent blonde with the freckles and
sunny disposition of an Aussie in the tropics, had her heart
set on opening her gallery there.
“This is the location'' she recalls enthusiastically.
“If I hadn’t found a place here, I wouldn't
have opened the gallery. The street has a nice village-y
feel. l love the trees it's like a little boulevard.”
Archibald;s first exhibition was a selection of expressionistic
sculptures hewn from limestone blocks, by the legendary
Balinese artist I Bunyan Cemul. At 78, he is one of the
last links to the golden age of visual arts in Bali; the
Pita Maha group founded in Ubud in the 1930s by European
artists such as Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet, and their
princely patron? Cokorde Gede Agung Sukawati. Cemul was
also present at the creation of modern Seminyak: at the
entrance to the Oberoi, under the boughs of a mighty banyan
tree, stand a pair of Cemul's comically fearsome figurers
wrapped in black-and-white checked poleng cloths-gargoyles
standing guard at the junction of Bali's past and future.
According to Made Wijaya an enthusiastic student and storyteller
of the island's history, the origin of Seminyak came some
500 years ago, when a holy sage from Java named Dang Hyang
Dwijendra landed his bark on what is now Seminyak Beach.
There, on a propitious spot next to a freshwater estuary,
he built Pura Petitenget, which remains one of the most
powerful and influential temples in Bali. On the holiday
of Melasti, thousands of people from 50 or more villages
in the surrounding area bring sacred objects to Pura Petitenget
to bathe them in the sea.
Wijaya says that Petitenget has always had a reputation
for eeriness: in Balinese, peti is a betel-nutbox, traditionally
the repository of a Hindu holyman's powers and tenget means
''spooky.'' ''The temple was famous for a particularly fearsome
form of the Barong,'' he says, referring to one of Bali's
most revered dance dramas. ''From the beginning, Seminyak
was wilder-it had a wild coastline, a wild spooky temple,
and its people were the wild ones, the high rollers.'' Since
the '70s, this part of Bali has been a favored residential
area for expat artists and designers. There are many board
shorts-to-riches tales about the creative inhabitants tucked
away in Seminyak's alleyways. The first to stake out a place
on the shore was Emilio Migliavacca, an Italian designer
who markets his brilliantly colored floral-print creations
as Milo. He built an eccentric, turreted dream house at
the end of modern Jalan Dhyanapura that remains one of the
most imaginative expressions of the expat fantasy life in
Bali. Many of the island's best-known design houses began
in the Legian-Seminyak area, including Paul Ropp and Biasa.
Seminyak has also benefited by being out in front of the
Great Asian spa boom. Traditionally, in Bali as throughout
the region, massage was mostly therapeutic in purpose, performed
in settings so basic that they verged on squalor. Then the
concept of a luxury spa started to catch on, in the beginning
in association with five-star hotels; the first in Bali
was the Mandara at the Chedi (now the Alila), near Ubud.
Soon there was a wide choice of establishments offering
an experience that was aesthetically pleasing as much as
healing, at affordable prices. Susan Stein, who has created
many spas throughout Asia, now runs a massage business called
Jari Menari (“Dancing Fingers”), at rates midway
between those of the fancy hotel spas and the old ladies
who pinch sunbathing foreigners on Kuta Beach. Stein explains,
Massage should be a necessity, not a luxury.''
From its early, spooky days, Seminyak has also been a favorite
haunt of gay people, a legacy that stands behind the emergence
of Indonesia's first gay party town another point of resemblance
to lbiza and other chic Mediterranean resorts. Several gay
clubs and bars have come and gone in Indonesia over the
years, cropping up here and there with varying degrees of
openness (notably the Hulu cafe, a funky beer club with
drag show on Jalan Padma in Kuta). But the scene along Jalan
Dhyanapura is the country's first reasonable approximation
of a gay pub crawl.
Two nightclubs, Q Bar and Kudos, are the anchors, with
late-night shows and dancing. They have attracted a constellation
of gap owned shops and restaurants to Dhyanapura, which
cater to the same market. Liquid, an established discotheque
a few doors down from Q Bar, recently changed its name to
Kwin (pronounced “Queen” in Indonesian) and
reopened as a gay venue, a move intended to boost business.
The scene here is exuberant and open, yet it lacks the tired
naughtiness of Thailand’s tacky gay resorts.
The crowds are mixed in every way, in terms of age, nationality,
and sexual preference; many young Japanese women visitors
come to the gay clubs on Dhyanapura to ogle the lads. More
significant even than its growing market share is gay Seminyak's
new sense of community. The most visible manifestation of
this came in March, when Bali sent its first-ever contingent
to the Gay Mardi Gras in Sydney. A week before the parade,
a fund-raising benefit was held in Seminyak at Waroeng Bonita,
a garden restaurant on Jalan Petitenget. Partiers mingled
under the candlelit frangipani trees, amid the aromas of
a sizzling barbecue; in the pavilion, dancers in glittery,
feathered costumes performed routines ranging from belly
dancing to sexy Vegas-style numbers. The restaurant's owner
and host, the eponymous Bonita, swirled and sashayed through
the crowds in his signature Audrey Hepburn-style picture
hat, keeping the mood carefree. At midnight, the revelers
were transported by vans bedecked with rainbow bunting to
Kudos and Q Bar, where the party continued into the wee
hours. You might almost have thought you were in lbiza.
Jamie James |
