Bali's
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
|
