Bali Experience

With a mere three million inhabitants hosting upwards of a million foreign guests each year, today’s Bali has become a complex, cosmopolitan island of contrasts. Today’s Bali is a gorgeous, crazy, glittering tropical rave, where day turns into night and night back into day with barely a pause for breath under the strobe lights of Bali’s legendary nightspots. It is also a place for peaceful contemplation, where removed from the pulse of the crowds the only sounds breaking the silence are the frogs and crickets humming their tranquil songs. It is a place where neon flashes, where delicately drawn paintings arouse in the viewer a mystical, magical mood and where the bright stars of the southern hemisphere cast their silvery light over ancient temples and sculpted rice terraces. Today’s Bali is a place of incredible luxury, where lucky guests can escape the cares of the world in fantastic five star hotels with their every wish and whim catered to in gracious style. And today’s Bali is also a place where intrepid travellers can enter a social world that, in many ways, still follows ritual rhythms established generations ago. For its guests, Bali lays out a banquet of choices: from the perfect pasta al dente, imported smoked salmon and caviar, and American burgers and fries to local delicacies such as roast suckling pig, smoked duck and luscious fresh seafood. It offers a variety of entertainments available nowhere else on earth: from temple hopping and traditional dance performances to surfing, sailing, sunning and even elephant riding. The options are virtually endless, the possible pleasures limited only by one’s inclinations, imagination and spirit for adventure.

And today’s Balinese possess a complicated character as well. Your tour guide who has polished his English (or his Italian, or his German, or his Japanese) so well may also be an expert in reading the ancient palm leaf lontar manuscripts written in the Kawi language brought to Bali five centuries ago. Your waiter, decked out so stunningly in his sarong, headdress and ceremonial sash to serve you tropical treats with traditional flair, may ride on his Harley-Davidson back to a home equipped with a satellite dish beaming down all the latest news and trends from CNN and MTV. Your hotel maid, whose artistic touch is evident in the care she takes to tidy your room, almost certainly goes home in the evening to place flower and incense offerings to the gods and ancestors in the household shrines that mark the corner of her house yard. Your driver, whose knowledge of Balinese culture is so exhaustive, may well take his taxi home, pile his kids in the back seat, and head over to McDonald’s or the Hard Rock Café. Your local travel agent has probably seen as much of the world as you have, even if she never forgets that the home of her ancestors is on Bali. Even the young boys with their rock-n-roll T-shirts and American blue jeans who offer to sell you watches or Coca-Cola or transport or toys are certain never to miss the temple festivals that mark the turning of the age-old Balinese calendar.

Today’s Bali, despite the romantic rhetoric, is not a paradise. It is something far more human, far more complex, and far more fascinating: home to the Balinese people, their complex culture, and their colorful stream of welcome guests.