The biggest, brashest, most untraditional resort in Bali, KUTA-LEGIAN-SEMINYAK conurbation, continues to expand from its epicenter on the south west coast, just 10 km south west of Denpasar. Packed with hundreds of losmen, hotels, restaurants, bars, clubs, souvenir, shops fashion boutiques and tour agencies, the eight km strip plays host to several hundred thousand visitors a year, many of them regulars and a lot of them Australian surfers - all here to party, to shop or, indeed, to surf.

Its hectic, noisy, full of hassling hawker, traffic jam, constant building work. The main drag, jalan Legian is often so heavy with vehicle that traffic just crawl along it, every inch of road jammed with taxis and tourist buses, minibuses, bemos, dokars, motobikes. And yet, for all its hustle, it's a very good humoured place, almost completely unsleazy, with no strip bars, no highrises (nothing over the height of a tall coconut tree, in fact), hardly any neon and remarkably little crime.

For many travellers, it's not only the crowds and the assault on the senses that's off-putting, it's the fact that the place seems so un-Balinese - incomparable to the village atmosphere of Lovina or Sanur, for example, or the arty ambiance of Ubud. They have a point of course: KFC, McDonald, Holiday-Inn, and Shangri La are all here. Time, Newsweek and the Australian are sold on every street corner, Holywood Blockbuster show reguraly at the dozens of video-bars, and almost every bartender, waiter, and losmen employee engages effortlessly in slang-ridden English or Japanese banter.

But despite its internationalism, the resort remains charmingly and distinctly Balinese because villagers do still live and work here and, like their compatriots accross the island, continue to make religious offering, attend banjar, meeting, hold temple festivals. Every morning the women of Kuta-Legian-Seminyak don their tample sashes and place offerings in nooks and crannies,in doorways and under tables. You're more than likely to wake to find a tiny coconut-leaf basker filled with flowers and rice on the steps of your verandah. Kuta, Legian and Seminyak all have their own temples ( there are at lest three in each of the former villages), but none is particularly outstanding, and neraly all lock their gates to tourists except at festival times, when you're usually welcome dto attend so long as you're suitably attired.