ABSTRACT
In the recent decades of emerging growth and affluence in Asian economies, travel is increasingly regarded as a necessary pleasure. Despite the growth of massive movements of Asian tourists within Asia, however, there has been a tendency until recently to still think of tourists in the region’s developing countries as coming from the West, with domestic tourism largely ignored. Indeed, in a paper on domestic tourism on the island of South Sulawesi, Kathleen Adams (1998) pointed out a fact that many people who had written about tourism in Indonesia had been overlooking. She argues that the greater number of tourists in Indonesia were actually domestic, despite the fact that the ‘dreams’ and plans about tourism in Indonesia had often been centered on foreigners.1 This observation about Indonesia was shown to be generally true in the ‘South;’ in a collection of essays on ‘native tourists,’ Ghimire (2001a; 2001b: 2-3) pointed out that the ignoring of domestic tourists was common in lesser developed nations, and policies have always been directed towards international tourism. Given the increasing numbers of domestic tourists in the ‘South,’ and the likelihood that they have different needs and wants, and affect places differently than foreign visitors, this is a major oversight. In this chapter, then, I intend to examine the question of how officials plan for foreign and domestic tourism. Since 2003, there has been an increasing attempt at the national level in Indonesia to recognize and cultivate domestic tourism; however, I have found that at the local level the way tourism is envisioned varies. My intention here is to examine this variation in ideas about tourism planning in two neighboring (and at one time united) regencies in eastern Indonesia, with specific reference to the differences in developing domestic tourism.
