[chanting foreign language] matt davis: bali is one of the world's most popular holiday destinations, but has it become a victim of its own success? wayan: tourism started to explode. more people's coming in from outside than the peoples living here. matt: decades of unhinged tourist development has come at a cost. gary bencheghib: the island of gods had become the island of trash. [singing foreign language] matt: now, mostly closed to the outside world,

does bali have a chance for change, a chance to reset. gede robi: bali tourism industry based on these two things: nature and culture. we cannot sacrifice them. [chanting foreign language] male: normal temperature. please wear a mask. matt: i arrive in bali via a domestic flight from indonesia's capital, jakarta. for almost a year, the international airport has been shut. tourism has come to a grinding halt. male: please wear a mask. ♪♪♪ matt: walking through the international airport here, a place i've been through many times in my life

is just quite surreal. it's normally bustling with international tourists coming to the island of the gods, but today it's so quiet, i can hear the air-conditioner. that's the only sound. [speaking foreign language] matt: over the past decade, the number of visitors to the island grew rapidly, from 2 to 6 million. around 80% of the balinese economy was generated by tourism. [speaking foreign language]

matt: bali has been shut before. the 2002 kuta bombings and the erratic eruptions of volcano agung hurt the tourism industry, but ultimately it bounced back. this time no one knows when the pandemic will end. marchello aryafara: in the beginning, we thought this is gonna be one month, two months maximum. matt: it's now been 12 months. for marchello aryafara and the lifeguards of kuta beach, their job has changed dramatically. marchello: fifty people. not 50,000 as normally. fifty people. maximum 100, including the lifeguards.

♪♪♪ male: the beach are dead. there's no activity. lifeguard still come. if something happens, lifeguard have to be there. male: ready? go. male: the activity of the lifeguard never stop. matt: this beach is usually crammed with tourists, touts, and hawkers. today, kuta and nearby seminyak are empty. marchello: people who sell massage or merchandise on the beach, i heard they all go back home to their village. very sad situation because many friend of mine,

i don't see them around. i hope they're okay, you know. i hope they're still all right. ♪♪♪ matt: for the past year, government handouts have helped, but they haven't gone far enough. the balinese are relying on each other to make sure those going without get fed. male: [speaking foreign language] i'm giving the food to the man who need the food, and to some homeless people in bali. male: [speaking foreign language] male: i had a tattoo shop, but i lost everything. but i'm happy to be giving all the free food. i am so happy, i am glad for that. the thing is, we need to be grateful for what we have at the moment. female: thank you. male: balinese people, we always pray, and we believe in the gods. male: thank you.

male: every day i am selling here. and i hope tomorrow will be better, yeah? tomorrow will be better. female: thank you. male: thank you. ♪♪♪ female: it's weird. there's just no one. it's like ghost town. i miss bali getting busy and traffic. i miss traffic! matt: as the tourist centers of south bali grapple with economic collapse, i want to find out how the balinese are coping in more remote areas. ♪♪♪

matt: i'm standing on the beach here in sanur, on the east coast of bali, and very shortly i'll be jumping aboard one of these high-speed boats to cross the badung strait to nusa lembongan. female: please prepare your boarding pass. use your face mask. take off and keep your shoes. matt: now, last year, there were more than 20 boat companies operating off this beach, sending thousands of tourists back and forth to the island every week. but now, there are only two boats and two trips a day. ♪♪♪ matt: for decades, this cluster of islands off the east coast of bali remained sleepy backwaters with little tourist development. ♪♪♪

troy sinclair: nusa lembongan remained, for a long time, a bit of a hidden secret. over the last five years that sort of changed. matt: hotelier troy sinclair has spent the past 18 years here. he's seen tourism explode. troy: we're talking, you know, a massive change in volume and in the numbers coming in. ♪♪♪ matt: here on nusa lembongan, the rapid growth brought jobs. most of the locals found work in tourism. almost everyone here has been impacted by the shutdown.

male: no money, none. troy: now, that's all villas and bungalows all along the hill there. all pretty much empty. matt: with no money coming in, staff have been let go and maintenance is on hold. troy: this one went down the other day. pontoons are day-trip businesses. moor up against these big pontoons, and they then go into the island for tours to the instagram shots. this pontoon under normal circumstances would have had guys on it every day, checking it, diving on it, looking at it, you know. obviously, in these conditions, they simply don't. and a small leak can lead to this very quickly. you know, i've been here a long time, my staff are essentially family. instead of, you know, letting things fall away or shutting up

shop, how do we ensure that they have jobs to come back to? matt: a short motorbike trip from lembongan is the island of ceningan. every day, people crossed this bridge to earn a living in lembongan's tourist trade. [speaking foreign language] matt: for generations, the channel was used by local families to farm seaweed. but with the arrival of tourism, this industry died off. the farms made way for day clubs, and selfie swings.

the seaweed farms have returned, because most on the island are now out of work. wayan: my name is wayan. i come from ceningan island. from 1984, something like that, my family, they work at the seaweed farm. matt: at low tide, wayan and his parents harvest seaweed. working by day, or by night, it's tough work. male: seaweed no good. wayan: my parents doesn't want me to seaweed farm because this is very hard, very, very hard.

we have nothing choice, so we have to back to nature. matt: the seaweed is dried before being sent to java for processing. there, it's turned into beauty products, sushi, and medicinal extracts. female: three again? matt: wayan left the island to study tourism. that was the golden ticket for many of his generation. as mass tourism arrived here, wayan returned in the hopes of building a better life for his young family. wayan: tourism started to explode. more people's coming in from outside than the peoples living here.

matt: before the pandemic, wayan and his wife invested their life savings to build a bungalow for tourists. wayan: i tried to build my own business, even i have to loan money from the bank. matt: the bungalow has only seen a few guests. wayan: this pandemic is still going. so this is the worst things happen. especially when i had to borrow money from the bank, and then for me now, it's very hard to return this one back. matt: when wayan worked at a high-end resort, he earned $800 australian a month. now, seaweed farming brings in less than $300, and his young family has grown. female: [speaking foreign language] wayan: this is my little house. so, here with my family. the younger daughter, three months. kama, my wife. matt: nice to meet you. kama: nice to meet you too.

female: [speaking foreign language] wayan: when arrive at my home after getting my seaweed here, my kids are smiling. your tiredness is gone. so, that's more important. wayan: [singing] kama: we still survive here, yeah, because of the seaweed. ♪♪♪ wayan: hm, smells good. wayan: [speaking foreign language]

matt: change is on everyone's mind. back on the mainland, generations of balinese are coming together to plan a different future for the island. ♪♪♪ christia dharmawan: this is a wake-up call for all of us. so that we realize that we cannot just depend on one industry, and we have to develop all the other industries that actually have great potential. matt: christia dharmawan runs events at her family's venue, kebon vintage. it's become the place for many of these big conversations. christia: i think it's a good time for reflection this year, for sure. going back to loving our island and make sure

that people don't abuse our island, as well. matt: for years, locals have been unhappy with the negative impacts of mass tourism. cok ace: it is the time for us to [speaking foreign language] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ pak gus agung: the infrastructure is

a problem here in bali. matt: it's clear to pak gus agung, the head of bali's tourism board, what needs to be done. pak gus agung: we need, like, school. sixty-five percent of balinese people not graduate from junior high school. not enough water. not enough electric. not enough road. traffic and rubbish, number one problem in bali. bali has already had tourism more than 100 years. all the moneys come but 70% go out from bali, because the business is not operated by balinese people. the way of thinking have to change. matt: bali's rubbish problem had begun to tarnish its picture perfect reputation long before the pandemic.

the island lacks a centralized waste system: there's nowhere for this to go. gary: the island of gods had become the island of trash. matt: that's something bali-raised gary bencheghib is trying to change with his organization, sungai watch. gary: what very little people realize is that, you know, all of this is plastics that, you know, literally fills up the brink of kuta beach comes from somewhere. and it comes from the rivers. rivers are essentially the toilets of indonesia. they're on the backs of hotels, villas. with this lack of waste management that we have on the island, our rivers in bali have turned into garbage dumps. matt: the covid shutdown provided an unexpected opportunity.

gary: there's this sense of we wanna go somewhere, we wanna do something. and so that's really where we started our weekly clean-ups around that same time. progressively, you know, we went from, like, 20, 30, and now we're all the way up to, like, 150, 200 people. ♪♪♪ gary: because of covid, people have more time. there's this community out there that wants to clean and press the reset button on bali before we open up to international tourism. ♪♪♪ matt: so here we are, standing waist to knee depth in the rivers. the badung district has got all these workers here. they've all lost their jobs in the covid pandemic. they used to work in tourism, et cetera. now, they're out here every day, attacking these rivers

with sickles, with chainsaws, whatever they've got. it's a war on plastic. there's a long way to go. gede: my name is gede and before, i'm been work be a driver. but right now, because of the pandemic we have no job anymore in the tourism and now we going to the river, to cleaning the river. hopefully soon, the tourism is coming again to bali and we clean already! male: the people in the village, the locals, we join to clean the river, the beach, the land, and the rice field. thank you. female: i have a rice field back in my home town and my father, he have a problem with plastic every single day. so that's why, like, i need to find a community who solve this kind of problem.

matt: rivers crisscross the island, flowing through villages, farms, and rice fields. they sustain local communities, and the tourism industry. but the rivers are under pressure: tourists per capita generate three and a half times more waste than locals. gary: we're bringing 2 tons of trash every day in our research station to sort. there's a sorting table here to sort plastics into 15 different types of categories. bring it to recycling. matt: of the 300 tons of plastic collected so far, only a third can be recycled. gary: these guys, unfortunately, can't be recycled. this is a one-time use and it has a lifetime behind it, you know. it lives longer than our grandkids' kids' kids' kids' kids' kids' kids. what we're trying to leverage is the brands

that are responsible for the plastic packaging. gary: sachets of instant-- matt: through their comprehensive documentation, sungai watch hopes to hold the manufacturers accountable. gary: sungai watch, in many ways, is more of a data river clean-up organization. so, really, giving that transparency as to what we're finding in the rivers online, for everybody to see, so, you know, they can engage. gede: i believe, like, every generation has their own revolution. our topic now is about the environmental issue. male: [speaking foreign language] matt: gede robi is a musician and an educator. his band, navicula, are rock and roll royalty. for two decades they've brought politics to the young people of bali through their music. gede: i love rock and roll so much because in concert we can collect a concentration of audience in one place.

even the religion is transferred by shadow puppet, by theater. so, what's the difference with this--with the rock and roll? matt: today, robi is putting the final touches on his film entitled "pulau plastic," translated, means "plastic island." gede: in indonesia alone, more than 93 million plastic straws are used every day. more than 500 million plastic bags, single use plastic bags, is used every day. matt: produced with local ngo kopernik, this film is a shift for robi from years of frontline activism. he wants this documentary to put pressure on decision makers. gede: in bali, the tourism industry and the waste that created by this industry has also become a problem. more people come, then more waste. it's such a, like a, it's [speaking foreign language]

male: logical. gede: it's really logical, right? what is important for us is prevention. matt: robi believes that the answers to the island's problems can be found in its traditions. gede: in bali, there is some traditional rules to make a balance between economic prosperity and natural preservation. but we're long way lost. more money, more money, is betraying this concept. matt: will bali return to the way it was after this pandemic ends? gede: this is the big lesson for us to shifting our priority. economy and ecology is not two separate things. we understand that we live from the nature. we cannot damage the nature. specifically in bali, the concept is nature and culture tourism.

that's our asset. that's what we sell. we cannot shit where we eat. right? ♪♪♪ matt: a year on from the start of covid, bali is preparing to reopen to visitors. tourism will return to the island of the gods and bring with it much needed money. matt: what type of tourism do you want? cok: we want to-- everybody, peace in bali. [speaking foreign language] our nature in bali. pak: this is the time for bali to do. balinese people look at themself, yeah? so, like, we will learn. i think the government learns, the industry learns, and the people also learns. ♪♪♪

pak: taksu is our blood. you cannot describe it, because it's process. balinese people, since they are in the mom pregnant, it's already start. it's not religion. it's bali. ♪♪♪ matt: the kuta lifeguards are winding down for the day. no one knows exactly when these beaches will be full again, but marchello and his crew will be waiting. marchello: when the tourists coming, we hope they're not littering; the beach has been very clean. i hope you guys still come to bali. we here for you. you can bring good energy, we can give our energy

for you guys. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪

rowd clapping] crowd: nina, nina! nina, nina! nina, nina! nina! eric campbell: nina baginskaya is a 74-year-old great-grandmother who's become the icon of a revolution. maria pugachjova: i've never been scared since the 9th of