Get Vacation To Unique Place

Ubud The Heart Of Bali

This part of Indonesia remains welcoming and serene

TOURISM to Bali began in the early 1920s, when the Royal Dutch Steam Packet Company added the island to its itinerary. By 1930 there were about a hundred visitors a year; a decade later the figure was 250. The ships stopped off the north coast, where passengers were ferried to shore first aboard tenders and then on the backs of Balinese men. Most visitors would traverse the island by motor car to the capital city of Denpasar, in the south, where they stayed at the luxurious Bali Hotel, opened in 1927.
THERE is still too much artistic endeavor in Bali, though the scene is not as lively as it once was. The last great burst of creativity came in the early sixties, again at the instigation of a foreigner. In 1960 a Dutch painter named Arie Smit, who had been living in Bali for four years, was strolling through the countryside near Campuan, and came upon some boys who were drawing in the sand. He was struck by their talent, and invited them to his studio. There he gave them paints and brushes and instructed them in technique but made no suggestions as to color or content, and kept his own richly coloristic, Matisse-influenced paintings out of sight. The results, which became known as the Young Artists movement, were vigorous genre scenes, often broadly humorous, rendered in bright, flat colors with strong contour