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Including the two beach sites of Kuta and Legian, this area is a major draw card for travelers, offering cheap accommodation, western food, great shopping, surf, sunsets and riotous nightlife. Although it’s fashionable to disparage Kuta for its rampant development, low-brow nightlife and crass commercialism, the cosmopolitan mixture of beach-party hedonism and entrepreneurial energy can be exciting. It’s a tourist gold rush town with a get rich quick mentality and a planning horizon to match.

Kuta is not pretty but it’s not dull either, and the amazing growth is evidence that a lot of people still find something to like in Kuta. It’s still the best beach on Bali, with the only surf which breaks over sand instead of coral. Lots of cheap accommodation is available and there’s a huge choice of places to eat. Shops and hawkers offer everything from fake flimflamer-laid out in boxes that open like jaws as you approach to genuine antiques offered with a considerably softer sell. Even the tourist themselves have become a tourist attraction, with visitors coming from Java to ogle the topless bathers, and from other resorts to tut-tut at the tackiness of it all. And despite at the excesses, away from the traffic clogged streets Kuta is still a village: a place of quiet compounds and narrow alleys, where devotional offerings are placed in front of houses and neighbors emerge in the coolness of the evening to gossip in the street