The poverty trap

By ANDREW BAIN

The village of Tirta Gangga is a place of classic Balinese imagery, its once-royal water palace afloat in a flood of rice terraces. Stalls and restaurants crowd the palace entrance, their owners hawking to the trickle of tourists still venturing to this eastern reach of the island.

In the open pagoda of one restaurant I met a quietly-spoken waiter named Komang Gede Sutama. In profile he bore a striking resemblance to Tiger Woods, though their lives couldn't have been more dissimilar. Komang had been waiting tables at this restaurant for eight years and had never been paid, a parsimonious arrangement that he considered entirely reasonable.

Komang, 37, worked at the restaurant in order to talk to diners, to ask them to walk with him. For he was first a trekking guide, and Tirta Gangga was potentially one of Bali's prime trekking regions, set among a network of paths through the rice terracing that stepped up the slopes of the island's highest mountain, the 3142m Gunung Agung. Until recently, Komang had every reason to be confident of his future, having been listed by Lonely Planet as one of two recommended trekking guides in the village. Now he is destitute.

Visitor statistics show that Balinese tourism is in a rapid recovery. Before the Kuta bombing in October 2002, Bali averaged around 120,000 visitors a month. In the first four months of last year, soon after the bombing, this more than halved.

But in the same period this year nearly 440,000 tourists arrived on the island.

What hasn't yet returned is the intrepidity that once saw tourists fan out across the island, filling its every corner with people and money. For many, the familiarity of Kuta or Jimbaran still calls, but for Komang in far-removed Tirta Gangga, recovery is as distant as the urban thrust of Denpasar.

When I agreed to spend a morning trekking with Komang, I became his first client for two months. He charged me the equivalent of $8, enough to pay a term of school fees for one of his three children.

We set out at dawn the next morning, but for Komang the day was already long. As he'd done for months, he'd woken at 2am to prepare his other business - the Balinese crackers his teenage daughter would sell to stalls and restaurants on her 90-minute walk to school. He then walked an hour from his village to meet me in Tirta Gangga at dawn.

I had seen Komang leave the restaurant the previous night at about 10pm, his hour-long walk home still ahead. He was surviving on less than three hours sleep a night. "I am used to it now," he assured me. "I am not tired."

But he was hungry. At our walk's end it would be Komang who made my breakfast back at the restaurant, but he no longer ate breakfast himself. Finding money for his children's education came even before meals.

"I used to like tea, coffee and breakfast in the morning," he said in his self-taught English. "Now, no. I eat once a day, at one o'clock. Sometimes we used to have fish, now just vegetables."

From Tirta Gangga we headed through the rice terraces, their banks as abundant with sweet potato as their flooded landings were with rice. Women emerged from the forest, stepping down slippery, rocky slopes, loads balanced on their heads and children wedged on their hips.

"So heavy," I commented as we stepped aside for one woman, a child in her arms, another on the way, and about 20 coconuts in a basket on her head.

"On Bali, that's not heavy," Komang smiled.

We stepped into the forest, its canopy swallowing the sun but barely shadowing the production of the villagers. Pineapple and tapioca covered the floor, while coffee and the fierce thorns of the salak palm sprouted through the understorey.

Darkened squares denoted the presence of huts. We stopped at a tiny bamboo hut darkened by both forest and lack of electricity.

"This is where my mother lives," Komang said. It was the hut in which he'd grown up and was smaller than an average room in a Western home. I had to crouch to look in, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the hut's perpetual darkness. Divided into two sections, its walls were stained black with smoke. At one end was his mother's bed, at the other, a cooking fire.

Later, we would find Komang's mother at work in the forest. She was a frail woman of indeterminate age - probably 60, though she looked in her 80s. She dug at a taro plant, familiar as a garden plant in New Zealand, the roots of which had replaced potato in her diet this season.

Komang had been free of such poverty for years, but was now again in its grip. The origin of his suffering was, unsurprisingly, the Kuta bombing.

The tragedy was personal for Komang and his village, with his young cousin killed in the blast. Three months before the bombing the cousin had landed a job in Kuta. It had been a time of celebration for his family; work in a place where tourist money flowed like springs.

"He was so happy to receive work ... and his mother and father lost their only son," Komang said, grief still scratching at his voice.

Before the attack, Komang would reliably lead about one trekking party a week into the fields and forest, or to the summit of the holy Agung. In the months after the blast, his custom dwindled to nothing, but it did return. What has happened since to Komang's trade has been more insidious and less headline-grabbing than a bombing. It has been a series of lurches and setbacks, a form of slow rot.

Komang has watched world events act like a tourist barometer for Tirta Gangga and his now insubstantial business. First Sars frightened visitors from all things Asian. Then, last January, bird flu hit the region like an aftershock. A month later came a more hurtful blow when the Indonesian Government introduced a 30-day visa for visitors to the country.

"Some people are very clever but also stupid, and the Government is clever but stupid. It makes a visa for 30 days, but some people want to come to Bali for longer and spend money, which helps the poor people. And now they can't."

Finally, he watched, fearing violence and another drop in tourist numbers, as Indonesia held its elections, but their peaceful passage was balm-like, a flicker of hope. Everything was linked to karma, the devoutly Hindu Komang kept repeating, and perhaps Tirta Gangga's was finally turning.

"Maybe now we finish the elections, maybe more tourists come. In one year I think that things will be better again."