I like the name Bali.
There’s something lucid, gentle and titillating about the sound of it — a soft start and a gliding end. Graceful and clear, like a woman who knows what she’s after. Except, Bali is not.
In Mad Men, Rachel Menken tells Don Draper about the word “utopia”. She explains that the Greeks had two meanings: eutopos, meaning “the good place”, and outopos, meaning “the place that cannot be”. In Legend, Ronnie Kray tells Leslie Payne, “Did you know that ‘utopia’ is the Greek word for ‘nowhere’? For 50,000, I can make that somewhere. I can turn it into a place where people will smile at me, and children will dance.”
Bali, in many ways, is like utopia — nowhere made somewhere; somewhere that is both a good place and a place that cannot be.
This beautiful, tranquil, otherworldly island in the eastern Indonesian archipelago has survived two terrorist bombings within three years.
The day after one of these tragic incidents, the police found six legs and three heads, but no bodies — a clear sign of suicide bombers. Three naïve locals had bought into the nefarious, God-fearing rhetoric of an extremist group and paid with their lives.
Over the past decade, the Indonesian government has run rehabilitation programmes and offered economic support to the families of terrorism convicts. But how much has truly changed? We don’t know. The locals don’t know either.
I had been to Bali twice before — both times with someone I thought was the love of my life. For five years, it was my one and only favourite place in the world. But now, I’ve seen more and gathered a few other favourites, so I’m not so sure.
In February this year, I travelled to Bali for a weekend. Having stayed in Seminyak and Canggu before, I booked a place in Kuta — a small Balinese cottage-style hotel planted right in the middle of everything: seedy clubs, sweaty backpackers, bogans, and shelves of garish souvenirs, including beer openers in questionable shapes and sizes.
My intention was simple. I wanted time to myself. I wanted to reminisce about the good times and perhaps recreate better ones — if “recreate” even makes any sense.
I needed closure as much as I needed a new beginning. And closure is nothing more than acceptance and forgiveness — given only by oneself.
The truth is, I never really understood — nor believed in — the idea of recreating memories. The Oxford Dictionary defines “recreate” as “to create again”, and “create” as “to bring something into existence”. How do you bring into existence something that already exists?
The first time you smell the sweet scent of frangipani. The first time you watch the sunrise after a long hike up a bubbling volcano. The first time you swim naked. The first time you make love in a garden while fireworks burst in the distance.
How do you recreate that?
This third time, I deliberately chose to travel alone and to arrive on a Friday night.
A middle-aged, sincere-looking Balinese man from the hotel picked me up. As we drove out of Ngurah Rai Airport, familiar scenes of life called out to me and jostled against me — like what happens at an ex-classmate’s wedding. Suddenly, people you once sat with, your first crush, your arch nemesis, and all those bittersweet memories tap on your shoulder to say hello. And you feel a quiet sense of achievement, knowing how far you’ve come, but also a touch of nostalgia.
If I showed you a random street in Bali, you might not be able to tell where in South East Asia you were. Like any town in the region: low-rise, unremarkable concrete buildings with clay roofs; locals and tourists colliding; food stalls; entire families balancing their lives on Yamaha motorbikes.
After half an hour of smooth traffic, we reached Jalan Legian and came to a halt. Indonesian traffic is relentless.
We made small talk. I practised my rusty Bahasa. He called his wife. I checked my phone countless times, even though it was on aeroplane mode. I was impatient, yet oddly enlivened.
This wasn’t how I intended to spend my Friday night.
So, impulsively, I left my bag with him, got out of the car, and finished the rest of the journey on foot in the rain.
One hour in Bali, and I was already working on my trust issues — this place can only do me good.
You see, everything we do is about trust — trusting the plane to take off on time, trusting our employer to pay our wages each month, trusting that what we pay for is what we receive. The difference between trusting in first-world countries and trusting in places like Bali is this: in the former, your trust is reinforced by regulations. In Bali, there isn’t much.
You trust with the bottom of your heart, despite knowing things might go wrong. There is no guarantee of a safety net at the end of your leap of faith — although there might be a local policeman who catches you when you fall, only to ask for a bribe. Getting into a cab, renting a bike, eating what’s placed before you, finishing the last drop of your Long Island Iced Tea and hoping it is what it claims to be — you simply have to trust.
So what do you do? You lower your expectations. You set a maximum limit on what you can afford to lose. My bag contained clothes, toiletries, and three rolls of cheap paintings I’d bought from Saigon the week before. And rather obnoxiously, I told myself that if I lost them, it would simply become another dinner-party story to tell my friends when I returned to London. That’s what living in a first-world country does to you. I’m not sure which is worse.
That night, the world shrank into a dingy reggae bar. The music from the live band wilted in the oppressive heat of the muggy tropical night. The loud, drunken slur of a group of Australians made the open space feel claustrophobic. In a place like this, I met C and Y from Germany, who looked just as out of place. They helped finish my two-for-one Bintang beers, and we quickly became friends.
Outside, the night was a hot, heaving mass of a Friday crowd. Local prostitutes, young and old, lined the streets, offering their services without shame, without hesitation, without even a hint of helplessness. Indifferent. Nonchalant. It was as though they had fully accepted this as who they were and what they did. Like cupboard food, they offered cheap and immediate satisfaction to lazy, hungry men — consumable even past their expiry dates.
Behind them pulsed ear-splitting music, flashing neon lights, scantily clad dancers on poles, and motorbike drivers with LSD tucked into their waist packs, eager to take tourists on a reckless joyride.
The next day, C and I hired a motorbike and rode to Uluwatu Temple — a Balinese Hindu sea temple perched dramatically on a steep cliff. We weren’t entirely sure the bike was safe. We paid a fiver, and C handed over his ID. Google Maps was useless; the roads were chaotic. He hadn’t ridden in a while. I hadn’t trusted a stranger with my life in a while. So it felt like a fair trade.
We sped through relentless traffic, shifting weather — fine rain one moment, scorching sun the next — then waded through a shallow flood near the airport, with planes flying alarmingly low above our heads. I had never experienced anything so frustrating, yet so exhilarating.
Hours later, thirsty, sticky and in awe, we stood quietly by the sea, watching the sunset and listening to the waves crash against the rocks a hundred metres below.
In January 2016, after David Bowie’s death, it was revealed that he had requested his ashes be scattered in Bali.
I don’t know what Bali gave Bowie. But Bali has given me a great deal. Like the hangover that pounds in your head and the sunburn that stings your skin, the recovery is painful only because you know you gave everything to that one hell of a party — perhaps the most haunting, exhilarating and heartfelt one you will ever have. But recover you will, because Bali is as soul-wrecking as it is healing.
It must have healed Bowie.
It healed me.
So how do you bring something that already exists into existence?
Perhaps it isn’t impossible — when what once existed has been lost.
And you are ready to create, again.
With love x