indo adventure - day 6: ooof.
So, I am well aware I've only been here for 1 day, however I am really not liking Canggu (pronounced "chon-goo"). There's a term I just learned called "tourism gentrification", and apparently Canggu is one of the more acute examples in Southeast Asia. The digital nomad and surf tourism wave of the last decade has transformed what was a genuine Balinese fishing and farming village into something that serves primarily wealthy foreigners while pushing local Balinese life to the margins. The names of the businesses alone tell the story: "Burger Brothers," "Bamboo Blonde," "Mondays Suck" — an imposed culture that has very little to do with Bali and everything to do with the people who have colonized it, this time economically rather than politically.
Some will say: but the foreigners bring money into a country that needs it. I'd push back on that — hard — on two fronts. First, a significant portion of that money doesn't stay with Balinese people. Foreign-owned businesses, villas, and co-working spaces send revenue back out of the country, while land prices driven up by foreign demand price local families out of their own neighborhoods. The fishermen and farmers who once worked this land aren't the ones running the coffee shops. Second, the very economic vulnerability that makes Indonesia "a country that needs it" has colonial roots. The Dutch forced cultivation system of the 19th century compelled Javanese farmers to grow cash crops for export and stop cultivating food for themselves, creating the structural dependency on external economic forces that persists — in different forms — today. Tourism didn't rescue Indonesia from that legacy. In many ways, it extended it.
And then there's the water. Canggu's tourist villas and hotels consume groundwater at rates the local population cannot sustain, contributing to a genuine water scarcity crisis. So brass tacks, as a numbers problem: the ledger doesn't balance in favor of the Balinese people of Canggu.
And it's not just the water. While showing me around Ubud Thursday and taking me to Canggu yesterday, Rana pointed out something I had noticed but not understood — the tangle of cables throughout what I have seen of Bali are electrical and internet cables, with the internet cables hanging below the power lines in a chaotic dangerous mess. This is what infrastructure looks like when it was built for a rural Balinese village and then asked to carry the electricity and high-speed internet demands of thousands of digital nomads, villas, beach clubs, and co-working spaces. New connections get added to existing lines in a piecemeal way because the grid was never planned for this load. The people who created this demand have generators and backup systems. The local families who live with the consequences year-round do not.
I genuinely feel guilty being here as it feels like simply learning and having an awareness cannot mitigate the fact the my mere presence is contributing to the problem. I am glad to be leaving tomorrow, though I will be sitting with all of this for some time.