The Rough Guide to Bali & Lombok

The islands of Bali and Lombok are part of the Indonesian archipelago, a 5200-kilometre-long string of over thirteen thousand islands, stretching between Malaysia in the west and Australia in the east. Sandy beaches punctuate the dramatically rugged coastlines and world-class surf pounds both shorelines.

Located just east of the island of Java, Bali has long been the primary focus of Indonesia’s tourist industry; its eastern neighbour, Lombok, has also recently grown in popularity. Both islands are small (Bali extends less than 150km at its longest point, Lombok a mere 80km), volcanic and graced with swathes of extremely fertile land, much of it – particularly on Bali – sculpted into terraced rice-paddies. Culturally, however, Bali and Lombok could hardly be more different. Bali remains the only Hindu society in Southeast Asia, and exuberant religious observance permeates every aspect of contemporary Balinese life; the Sasak people of Lombok, on the other hand, are Muslim, like the vast majority of other Indonesians.

The tiny island of Bali (population three million) draws in more than one and a half million foreign visitors every year, plus around a million domestic tourists. As a result, it has become very much a mainstream destination, offering all the comforts and facilities expected by better-off tourists, and suffering the predictable problems of congestion, commercialization and breakneck Westernization. However, its original charm is still very much in evidence, its stunning temples and spectacular festivals set off by the gorgeously lush landscape of the interior. Meanwhile, Lombok (population 2.3 million) plays host to only 250,000 foreign visitors annually (and about the same number of domestic tourists), and boasts only a handful of burgeoning tourist resorts, retaining its reputation as a more adventurous destination than its neighbour. While there are established resorts on the coast and in the hill villages, Lombok still has extensive areas that have yet to be fully explored by visitors.

Until the nineteenth century, both Bali and Lombok were divided into small kingdoms, each domain ruled by a succession of rajas whose territories fluctuated so much that, at times, parts of eastern Bali and western Lombok were joined under a single ruler. More recently, both islands endured years of colonial rule under the Dutch East Indies government, which only ended with hard-won independence for Indonesia in 1949. Since then, the Jakarta-based government of Indonesia has tried hard to foster a sense of national identity among its extraordinarily diverse islands, both by implementing a unifying five-point political philosophy, the Pancasila, and through the mandatory introduction of Bahasa Indonesia, now the lingua franca for the whole archipelago. Politically, Bali is administered as a province in its own right, while Lombok is the most westerly island of Nusa Tenggara province, which stretches east as far as Timor.