Meeting Sherry

As I mentioned, there are quite a few expats living in Ubud. Before arriving I’d been in contact with Sherry, who used to write for the Inside Indonesia (www.insideindonesia.org) online magazine. While she has moved into more translation and editing work, she still sat down to talk with me at Three Monkeys Café, located just a few blocks away from the Monkey Forest.

Canadian by birth, she’s lived in Indonesia for over 10 years and almost 8 ½ of those years in Ubud, Bali. Sherry has helped with the organizing part of several alternative tourism programs, and has worked as a communication facilitator between groups and locals. Sitting down with her, I got to hear some interesting stories about taking a group through Papua to talk with the local tribes people in the Baliem valley. Closer to home, she also discussed the challenges of village home stays in Bali. From the tourist perspective, she explains, “they want a genuine experience, not someone trying to sell them something.” From the perspective of those just beginning to operate local homestays, many were a bit shy and embarrassed about hosting visitors in their humble home. In addition, while some go on pilgrimages, very few travel for the sake of travelling, and it is still a foreign concept, especially in villages, to go to a place with no set purpose, but just to observe. In a creative activity Sherry helped arrange, they took the tour group and the villagers running the home stay to the Bali bird park. This allowed both parties to interact together, and for the villagers to get a glimpse of what it was like being a tourist.

Another interesting pointer I received from Sherry is the importance of stories. From her observation at the local level, many of the community created programs that last are the places that integrate a story and connect with their visitors. For example, just taking visitors to a village doesn’t produce a connection. Even taking visitors to a village and pointing out different trees, plants, etc. doesn’t produce a connection. However, going that next step of taking visitors to a village, and integrating stories people can relate too, and pointing out trees and plants but explaining their use from a cultural standpoint is more likely to engage visitors.

It was an enjoyable time sitting down and talking with Sherry, and she offered some very interesting insights about developing tourism initiatives at the local level.