Dreamland Beach

This guide to Dreamland Beach in Bali follows the Balinese fishermen who once called this cove Cimongka, the Australian surfers who renamed it Dreamland, and the army trucks that arrived in the 1990s sent by Tommy Suharto, the dictator's youngest son, to clear the way for his own resort. It traces his company's push to buy out landowners and build a four-hundred-hectare development before the 1997 Asian financial crisis froze construction for years. A golf course now drinks desalinated seawater a few hundred meters behind the sand.