Chasing Endangered Automotive Species In Bali, Indonesia

Photography by Ted Gushue

As I mentioned in my piece on Saprol Vespa Repair in Bali, the tiny island nation is not exactly internationally renown for its car culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. I recently spent a week exploring the island and was pleased to find a thriving Volkswagen Thing scene, a pocket of Toyota FJ40s, and a smattering of other interesting four-wheeled friends.

Like many of Asias developing, and even developed nations, cars are taxed exponentially in Bali, making them a significant luxury good. Drivers can expect to pay upwards of 300% tax on everything they drive, a fact that I’ll be exploring more over the next few days in stories I’ve put together on the classic car scene in Bangkok. I’m simply fascinated by the passion it would take to overcome such hurdles to car ownership, unsurprisingly it leads to people being extremely proud of their automobiles.

Due to a significant language barrier, I wasn’t able to get as much from these chaps as I would have liked, but did manage to fire off a couple of shots along the way. Please enjoy and jump into the comments with any questions, I’ll do my best to answer.