From SMH 1/5/06
Six months after the second bombing attack, the tourist industry is feeling enormous pain as Australians stay away, writes Mark Forbes.
HUNDREDS of candles flicker on beachside tables, mirroring the stars shining above Jimbaran Bay. As smoke from coconut-husk seafood barbecues wafts across the same cafes enveloped by smoke and screams from two suicide bombs almost six months ago, they cast a renewed pall across the holiday island of Bali.
Nearly half the tables are full tonight, quiet by previous standards but busy in comparison with most nights since terrorists struck Bali for the second time. Tourists had returned after the 2002 bombings in Bali, but arrivals dropped by a third in the first three months of this year - and worryingly for the tourism-dependent island, it is the precious Australian customers who have stayed away, down 60 per cent on last year.
Cheryl Oates and her partner, Ron Ionn, are tucking into huge platters of prawns on Jimbaran's beach; they came despite the disbelief of friends back in Sydney.
"Every single person says 'why are you going there?"' says Cheryl. "I say I don't have any fear, when your time is up, your time is up."
Ron is a regular visitor who proclaims he "doesn't want to live in a box, you don't want to be dictated to. We came to support this place ... the food's brilliant, but look at this place, it's harmony."
Their waitress, Wayan Ani, admits to nerves whenever customer numbers swell. "Every time the place is busy I am scared it will happen again. I remember that night."
That night last October Ani's neck was struck by shrapnel from the first blast, leaving her immobilised. She escaped permanent paralysis by less than a centimetre. She wants more tourists to return, for Bali to be "just like before", but plans to use a compensation payment to buy her own roadside stall away from the memories of what she saw as she lay helpless on the sand.
Those scenes also play on many Australian minds - along with the publicity around the now-household names of Schapelle Corby, Michelle Leslie and the Bali nine, with Kerobokan Prison eclipsing Kuta Beach as the prime tourist attraction. The Balinese are also nervous about the Papuan asylum-seeker row with Australia, although most tourists brush the issue aside.
On a bright blue day with perfect surf last week I walked half the length of Kuta Beach before finding a single Australian.
Brendan Clarke from Cairns is on his first Bali trip and had second thoughts on reaching Denpasar airport: "It was nerve-racking. You think someone is going to put drugs in your bag or blow the place up."