Away from the posers, lads in bucket hats and end-of-season footballers, this Indonesian island’s natural beauty astounds.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.The first thing my wife says when we get off the plane in Bali is: “God, I love that smell.” She said this the last time we were here, in 2015, so I know that it’s not some made-up thing. And she says this as we are disembarking, when we are within spitting distance of the plane’s hulking, soot-smeared turbines, when really all we should be able to smell is avgas and the person who was sitting beside us for seven hours.
I first went to Bali in 1985, as a 16-year-old, with my parents. Back then, I was obsessed with three things: one, the idea of perfect surf, which there was; two, the potential for marijuana growing wild, as I had been told by a mate at school; and three, cheap music. Records were still expensive at home, but in the tourist centres of Kuta and Legian there were shops selling cheap bootleg cassette tapes.
I’ve returned many times since, and obviously, it’s changed. Back then, Kuta was cute, with lots of quiet alleys and family-run losmens. Sometime in the mid-1990s, however, the area ate one too many end-of-season AFL tours and mutated into the thrashing, wart-ridden hydra of consumer tourism that it is today, crawling with sloppy, sun-pinkened drunks in VB singlets and Austrian sex-tourists who got lost on their way to Bangkok’s Patpong Road.
An example of canang sari, a daily offering to the gods left by locals, which are found across the islands.But what’s perhaps more interesting about Bali are the things that somehow, against all the odds, haven’t changed. Bali is, after all, one of the most over-touristed destinations in the world: 5.37 million people visited in 2023, down from 6.3 million in 2019 pre-COVID. This is an astonishing number considering Bali’s population is only 4.6 million.
It helps that they live in such a beautiful place. Here’s an example: for most of my life, the phrase “breathtaking view” was meaningless. Just words, like “delicious food” and “total comfort”. Then, one sunset on our most recent trip, I walked out to the edge of a cliff overlooking a surf break called Impossibles. It was my first time at this particular place but on some level, I guess I was expecting the view to be pretty good. At least above average.
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