After the New Order government rose to power in 1965, the Western world again became entranced with Bali. But these new foreigners who flocked to Bali's mythic shores were of a different breed than the cultivated,
culture-crazed crew of the 1920s and 30s. It was the turn of the 1970s, and the hippies had landed. With their long, flowing hair, their free-spirited ways, and their feathered and beaded finery stuffed into backpacks, these
counter-cultural types found Bali the perfect place to enact their ideas of an alternative lifestyle. Resurrecting the old images of Bali as a center of peace, harmony, ancient wisdom and the infamous love magic, they swarmed the beaches of Kuta and began creating their own society, centered around the worship of sea, sun, spiritual communion and limitless libido. Those were the days when Kuta was still a sleepy-eyed village, dotted with small homestays and simple food stalls, where for only a few dollars a day one could find all the nourishment needed in the form of tropical fruit, tofu, magic mushrooms and hallucinogenic sunsets. As word of Bali's blissful beachfront bounty spread, other adventurers followed, especially surfers drawn to Bali's coral-strewn coastline, which soon gained worldwide fame as
the wildest place in the East to catch a wave.