This week’s travel dream: In search of transcendence in Bali

The Indonesian island of Bali is “a place that floods the senses,” said Peter Jon Lindberg in Travel + Leisure. “All of it is beautiful to behold”—from the sculptures of the Hindu god Ganesh to the thatched Balinese homes to the gutters “strewn with frangipani petals from yesterday’s canang—peace offerings in banana-leaf baskets.” In the States, we keep our art and religious icons locked away in museums and churches; in Bali, “devotional arts and crafts are everywhere you look, spilling onto the sidewalks.” Part of what makes Bali unique is this “thin line between the sacred and the mundane.”

These days, however, there is also a thin line “between the genuine and the disingenuous”—and it’s one that has come close to disappearing altogether since the island became Indonesia’s top tourist destination. Bali’s allure has always been about both “spiritual pursuits and sybaritic pleasures.” With so many luxury resorts popping up and promising “unique entrée” into the island’s spectacularly vibrant culture, it’s gotten to the point where “sybaritic pleasures are reframed as spiritual pursuits.” A massage magically becomes a healing ritual, a morning hike a pilgrimage, and lounging by the pool an “opportunity to meditate.” Along with fresh towels and room service, your hotel will now “bring Bali to you.”

For my most recent visit, I stayed at the Alila Villas Soori, on the island’s “disarmingly quiet” southwestern coast. I spent mornings alone at Tanah Lot, a temple “poised on a rocky headland that becomes an island at high tide.” As part of a hotel package, I ventured to the cave-enclosed Pura Goa Gong, a centuries-old temple named after a type of stalagmite that resonates when struck. The real highlight was a cooking class that first required an “impossibly pretty” drive past “mist-shrouded fields that seemed to sparkle in the sunrise” and a visit to a market of stalls selling chicken heads, snails, and dried fish. The seven-course feast I eventually cooked was a “transcendent meal”—proving indeed that everyday experiences can also be spiritual.

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