After our whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia, none of us was motivated to move for days. We’d competed for hostels and dodged street vendors at every “must-see” spot from Angkor Wat to Halong Bay. When you find yourself staring at etchings worthy of the term “world wonder” and thinking “Another carving of that elephant-faced god guy?” you know you’re doing something wrong. We needed to stop before we could keep going, and the beaches of Bali were the perfect place to do that. We’d actually gotten this stopover as a free bonus when we’d booked our round-the-world tickets with a San Francisco–based company called AirTreks, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
After only a few days of relaxation, our hotel room in Kuta Beach looked like a college dorm in the aftermath of finals. Magazines fanned across the wooden floor like haphazardly scattered tiles. DVDs towered on the TV like blocks in a game of Jenga. Discarded bags of popcorn, Snickers wrappers, and cans of Diet Coke littered the bedside table. Twisted sheets and limp pillows topped the two twin beds. The only thing missing was an empty keg.
“Time check!” Amanda yelled from the bathroom, and I heard her shake the bottle of mousse she used to tame her curls.
“We have ten minutes until Jen and Stephany get here. But I can be ready in five,” I said. Our threesome had turned into a twosome: Jen’s high school friend was serendipitously in Bali on business, and she’d held Jen “captive” the night before in her fancy hotel in Nusa Dua. Soon enough, however, we would become a foursome.
I pulled from the top of my backpack the orange cotton sundress that I’d bought for $5 in one of the stalls lining the main street. Paired with my rubber shower shoes, I would’ve definitely made Glamour’s list of fashion don’ts. “This is my fifth day wearing the same outfit. I may break the trip record for going the longest without changing clothes,” I said to Amanda.
“I broke the record for staying in bed the longest,” Amanda said. Since I’d reunited with the girls after yoga school, a part of Amanda seemed to have died and been reborn—as if she’d managed to outrun the relentless striving that had plagued her. Even her temper, once quick to ignite whenever strangers showed the first hint of taking advantage of us, had been extinguished. She claimed to have given up working after her dream assignment had turned out to be a time-sucking, research-loaded monster. I was amazed, but still I wasn’t convinced.
“So you’re not going to pitch any more stories for the whole trip ever?” I’d asked when she’d first made the announcement, staring her straight in the eye to gauge any hesitation.
“Nope,” she’d promised. That word alone wasn’t enough to persuade me, but her actions spoke louder: She stopped crafting blogs every night. She abandoned spending afternoons holed up in an Internet café, her station sprinkled with to-go coffee cups and a handful of tattered notebooks. Instead, she had crashed long and hard, sleeping off any lingering itch to be productive, rising only to take surf lessons.
And Amanda wasn’t the only one who’d transformed while we were apart. Jen had not only surprised us by willingly flying solo in Bangkok but had also let go of her fear of never finding love after falling hard for Stephany’s friend Mark. We could be talking about anything, and she would find a way to work Mark into the conversation—when I’d mentioned my sister would be coming to visit in Australia, for example, she’d thrown in “Mark has a sister!” She couldn’t even say his name without smiling. It was as if both of my friends had been plunged into healing waters and emerged as lighter versions of themselves. As for me, I was still waiting to get home to Elan.
“Jen, Amanda won’t wake up,” I’d noted on the third day in Bali, surprised, after coming in from an afternoon run, to find Amanda still wearing her eye mask. “What do you think we should do?”
“Let’s have a movie marathon!” Jen suggested.
“Okay.”
Jen stopped, now surprised herself. “Really? You don’t want to go climb a volcano or something?”
I grinned. “Nah, I need to start on that list of movie classics you wrote out for me so I can get up to speed on pop culture. Besides, why climb a volcano when I can watch Indiana Jones do it better?”
While I’d spent a lot of my time educating myself on health and fitness stuff, pop culture had never been my strong point—and my ignorance always showed in awkward exchanges at dinner parties or office meetings. I’d stare blankly after someone quoted a movie or sitcom that everyone but me seemed to know. I traced it all back to my childhood—my mother used to tell my younger sisters, Sara and Kate, and me that the television was broken from June through August. (It was really only unplugged, but we obviously weren’t the quickest kids on the block.) Then she’d pay us to read books.
I’d much rather have been using my imagination to transport myself into characters’ heads than zoning out in front of the television and would have read for free. By the time I’d hit my teen years, I couldn’t have cared less about TV and instead passed hours and hours reading contentedly by the fire, even when the TV wasn’t broken (or “broken”). I had no complaints, but still, being the only person who didn’t understand a single Seinfeld reference was getting a little old.
So—for a day at least—I’d been happy to follow Jen and rent a DVD player.
“Hey, Pressy and Corby!” Jen said now, strolling into the room with a beach bag slung over her shoulder and a woman I presumed to be Stephany in tow.
“Hi, Stephany! I’m Holly. Nice to meet you,” I said, going in for a hug. She was about half a foot taller than me, with dark blond hair, brown eyes, and a thin face flushed red from the sun. Amanda, who’d already met Steph when she’d visited Jen at college, chimed out her greeting as she emerged from the bathroom.
“What was it like living in luxury for a night?” I teased Jen. I’d imagined a cloud bed and windows facing the Indian Ocean. Maybe she’d had banana pancakes in bed courtesy of room service before getting a massage by the pool. Jen responded by handing me one of the chocolates that five-star hotels sometimes leave on your pillow during turndown service.
Steph had invited all of us to hang out beside one of the dozens of pools at her resort later that week, but today we were going sightseeing—finally. We walked past the swimming pool lined with flowers, through the gates, and into the street. Herman, one of the smiling Balinese salesmen stationed across the street from our guesthouse, was sitting in his usual spot on the steps outside of his family’s single-room office. He was relaxed and friendly. With him, we didn’t feel we had to be on guard to keep from being scammed.
Hanoi’s terrifying cabdriver experience had administered a shot of caution to all three of us. While no one had been hurt (except for maybe the driver’s eardrums after Jen’s deafening screams), we’d each gone through our own sort of grieving process to make sense of a situation that had been part blatant trickery, part cultural miscommunication, and part unwarranted violence.
Though I’d had nightmares about the episode like someone suffering a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder, I knew that incident was only one small wrinkle in the fabric of events that wove our trip together thus far. Rather than muddying my faith in people, our journey proved that for each person trying to take advantage of you, another stepped in with a random act of kindness.
No country we’d visited had illustrated that as clearly as Vietnam. When one young woman had manhandled me before slashing my purse in the markets lining Hanoi’s Old Quarter, another elderly woman had swooped in to my rescue. As the would-be thief dissolved into the crowd (I’d managed to scare her off when I made eye contact just as I caught my wallet before it crashed to the ground), the elderly woman had gasped in outrage before grabbing my elbow. She was about four feet five inches tall with hair that shined silver, and she’d led me past shelves quivering with baskets, lacquerware, and hand-embroidered purses. She’d handed me a cup of tea, stitched up the jagged slit in my purse as effortlessly as she breathed, and apologized over and over again in Vietnamese. I was grateful to her for her kindness and because she was a much-needed reminder that the darkness cast by some gives others the chance to let their light shine.
I didn’t experience the same blatant push-pull with the people in Bali. Instead of the slight undercurrent of resentment toward backpackers I’d felt in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, hospitality was all I felt in Bali. From the housewives placing flower offerings on cars to smiling salesmen such as Herman to giggling children skipping through alleys, the Balinese’s overall attitude seemed light and airy—like powdered sugar or fresh whipped cream. Of course, this one-dimensional view brushed over the hardships they might face, whether it be struggling to feed a family or care for a sick parent. But I’d been awash with gut-level impressions of people whenever I’d first stepped into a new country. From the outside the people in Bali seemed calm, balanced, and graceful.
Seeing us approach, Herman grinned, his mocha skin crinkling at the corners of his eyes.
“Good morning, Charlie’s Angels! You have a new friend with you today!” A picture of the Hindu holy trinity (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) peered at us from his boxlike office window.
“Selamat pagi [good morning], Herman!” After introducing Steph, I asked how much it’d cost to drive us around the island.
“What would you like to see?” Herman asked.
“Are there any temples we can hike to?” I asked.
Amanda explained to Steph, “Holly likes to do something active whenever we’re sightseeing.”
“That’s fine with me. I could use some exercise,” Steph said happily.
Without pausing to think, Herman said, “I could take you to Pura Luhur Uluwatu, one of Bali’s most holy temples.” He explained that the temple was dedicated to the spirits of the sea and set high on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean.
Herman told us to come back in an hour so he could pick up the jeep from his brother. We went to grab breakfast, Steph easily falling into step beside us.
Adding a fourth person to our threesome was like holding up a looking glass: we began to see ourselves more clearly through the reflection in the outsider’s eyes. The three of us had grown so accustomed to our idiosyncrasies that we no longer noticed them. With Steph visiting, the roles we’d each adopted to help us travel more efficiently and the habit we had of dissipating tension with humor came back into focus.
Kuta Beach, the eight-mile ribbon of sand, markets, and massage parlors where most tourists settled on the island, disappeared behind the jeep in a wisp of exhaust. Forgoing the air conditioner, we rolled down the windows to let the damp, salty air tickle our faces, the sun’s rays burning our cheeks as the yellow orb climbed higher in the sky. “Hips Don’t Lie” shook from the radio speakers, and we sang along to the radio until we arrived at Pura Luhur Uluwatu temple.
While climbing the steps to the holy site, I watched a monkey leap from a tree, land on a woman’s head, and grab her sunglasses. The woman spun around like a whirling dervish while her boyfriend screamed and ran in the opposite direction. So much for chivalry, I thought.
A few seconds later, a different monkey attacked me from behind, smacking my hand and waiting for fruit to fall. People feed the animals in hopes of divine rewards, which turns them into mischievous divas. Bali is the only Hindu island in the Muslim-dominated archipelago of Indonesia, and monkeys are considered sacred in Hindu culture as representations of the monkey god, Hanuman. I hoped devotees were reaping the benefits in exchange for their generous feedings, because the monkeys looked pretty fat to me.
“Holly, get closer to the big guy so I can get a picture!” Amanda was poised on the steps above, her camera pointed in my direction.
“Are you crazy?” I was mistrustful of monkeys—they had already stolen my mangoes in Kenya, grabbed my hair while I had been walking the 777 steps to the temple on Mount Popa in Myanmar, and nibbled my shoulder in the Amazon like deer on corn.
I sprinted up the stairs toward her just as another monkey grabbed her hand and almost succeeded in stealing her camera. “Karma is a bitch!” I exclaimed with a laugh as Amanda squealed and surged past Steph and Jen.
We didn’t stop for a breather until we reached the top, but we all froze once we arrived. The sun was flamingo pink and sinking behind craggy cliffs that pierced the sea, the light bouncing off waves as pointy as a sea urchin’s spine.
“I’ve never seen such an amazing sunset,” Steph said, her eyes glowing. “I wish I could travel with you for the rest of the trip. Every day must be one big adventure!”
“Come with us, Steph!” I goaded.
“Well, first I’d have to quit my job, and then I’d have to convince my husband to quit his, too,” she said, taking one last wistful look at the sunset. I froze for a second. Why had no person or thing tied the three of us to home? Steph turned to face us, her hair whipping wildly in the gusts rising from the ocean. Leaning against the ledge of the stone railing, she asked, “What are you going to do when you get back?”
Glancing at one another, we stiffened and stood a little taller. For the first time that day, we weren’t all talking over one another to get the words out. We’d come on this trip looking for insight into what to do next, but even though the trip was more than half over, we still couldn’t answer Steph’s seemingly simple question.
We’d slept under the stars in the Andes Mountains. We’d chanted as the sun rose over an ashram in India. We’d sailed past limestone pillars in Vietnam. We’d prayed in the killing fields of Cambodia. We’d scuba dived among the islands of Thailand. Now, as we stood on top of a temple in Bali, the future seemed like the most distant place of all.
How old are you?” asked the petite Balinese woman who’d introduced herself as Nyoman, while pouring me a cup of coffee. I was sitting at a restaurant table in a garden courtyard. Wide leaves protected me like a parasol from the already hot sun.
“I’m twenty-nine,” I answered.
“Are you married?”
Not that question again. Instead I smiled and said, “No, but I have a boyfriend at home in the States.”
She looked relieved that I wasn’t wandering this earth completely unattached. Family is the thread that binds Balinese society together, with each member shouldering specific roles and duties according to gender and birth order. The eldest brother, for example, traditionally plans all the religious ceremonies not only for his own wife and children but also for his younger brothers’ families. It’s the women, though, who make the offerings to the gods in those ceremonies.
And the impression I’d gotten was that the Balinese preferred doing most things together, from the crowds congregating at the warungs (traditional family-run restaurants) every afternoon to the packs of housewives wandering the markets together each morning. A lone woman traveling without a husband must have seemed like a lost soul. Many islanders deemed it their duty to relieve me of my solitude, as they struck up a conversation whenever I’d separated from Jen and Amanda.
After a little more than a week in Kuta Beach, we’d only just arrived in Ubud, Bali’s cultural center. The girls had chosen to linger in bed that morning, but I’d been too excited to sleep and wanted to explore the town, which was bordered by chartreuse-colored rice paddies and flanked with art galleries.
“Are you married?” I asked Nyoman.
“Yes. I live with my husband and his family, and we have two sons,” she answered. Balinese women typically move in with their husband’s relatives, living in a compound that also houses his parents, his brothers, his brothers’ wives, and their children. She likely also worshiped his ancestors at the family’s temple constructed inside the compound walls. I wondered how long I would last living in such close quarters with my in-laws.
“You look at menu, and I’ll be back,” said Nyoman. I was relieved that the menu offered English translations for dishes such as seafood omelets, fried rice topped with an egg, and vegetables in coconut-milk curry.
Songs spilled from an invisible speaker like a metallic stream of wind chimes, gongs, and cymbals, known as Balinese gamelan music. Sipping my coffee, I watched Nyoman stand in front of a stone shrine at the edge of the courtyard. She lit a stick of incense and waved it around as if in prayer before placing it inside a bowl beside a pile of bananas. The smoke billowed skyward and married with the scent of frangipani, jasmine, and gardenia.
The small acts of daily devotion performed by the Balinese captivated me even more than some of the major monuments of faith—from the temples of Angkor Wat to the ruins of Machu Picchu—I’d seen in the past year, maybe because seeing people actually worshiping made faith seem more tangible. When I’d first arrived in Bali, I’d tripped over the piles of flowers, coconut leaves, rice crackers, and incense dotting the roads and sidewalks. They appeared too beautiful to be trash but too random to be sacred, and I’d heard nothing about them while studying Hinduism at the ashram in India. So I’d approached Herman, who had been sitting on his steps as usual, to ask what they were.
“They are called canang sari—offerings to guard against the evil spirits and bring luck from the good spirits,” Herman explained matter-of-factly.
I’d since discovered that the Balinese practice Hinduism with a nature-worshiping twist. They believe that the world houses both good and bad spirits that can be kept in balance with rituals such as fruit offerings, dancing, and paintings. To stay in harmony, the Balinese believe, you have to keep good relations with the spirits, other people, and nature. I felt a surge of warmth and protection while watching the Balinese housewives communing with the divine every day, placing offerings at family shrines. And regularly stumbling upon those homemade piles of devotion reminded me I was wading through an island of believers.
After making her offering to the spirits, Nyoman approached my table, balancing a steaming plate of fried bananas. “It’s a gift for you to taste,” she said.
“Matu suksama [thank you].” The caramelized sweetness tickled my tongue. An elderly woman hobbled over with a baby cradled in her arms.
“This is my husband’s mother,” Nyoman said. “She watch my son while I work, but I must feed him now.” One of the perks of living with your in-laws is built-in day care. For what communal living lacks in privacy, it makes up for in cooperation, cocooning family members with the security of not having to struggle through life’s challenges alone.
I poured sweetened condensed milk into my coffee and watched the whiteness swirl into the blackness, creating the shape of a blooming lotus flower.
It was the balancing of darkness and light that seeped into every crevice of life in Bali. I could only hope I’d be able to demonstrate the same balance myself—on a bike. I’d read the roads carved into the hills surrounding Ubud made for picturesque rides with sweeping views of the rice paddies. Besides, I wanted to see what life was like outside town and figured pedaling around would let me cover more territory than I’d be able to by jogging. “Do you know where I could rent a bicycle?” I asked Nyoman when she returned.
“My husband’s brother rents them. If you walk Monkey Forest Road, you will find them parked.”
After finishing up my breakfast, I paid my rupiahs, pushed back my chair, and wandered outside. The storefronts’s paintings were awash in primary colors and textures splashed across hundreds of canvases. Painters sat on the steps in front of their shops, fluttering their brushes with the soft touch of a butterfly’s wings. Even the concrete walls bordering the maze of alleys were decorated with art like mounted tie-dye, transforming an otherwise mundane space into something beautiful. Shadows moved across the walls. I looked up to see clouds blowing across the sun and noted that the air smelled heavy, like rain.
Not wanting to linger with a downpour threatening, I easily found the line of parked bikes among the rows of art galleries, organic food stores, and meditation centers. For $2, I had two wheels for the day.
Sliding onto the banana seat, I slung my purse strap across my body diagonally so it wouldn’t slip off. I felt like my childhood self, hopping on my bike to seek out the secrets of foreign lands: the school playground, the church parking lot, my grandmother’s garden. I was free again, belonging to no one.
With the wind tickling my ears and making my eyes water, I pumped my feet, mud from the tires speckling my legs. I rode away from Monkey Forest with its divine divas awaiting gifts of bananas. I passed a temple at the edge of town whose stone pillars were crisscrossed with carvings and shaded with palm fronds. I rode up a steep hill, past houses where children kicked balls around in the yard, stopping to yell “Halloooo!” as I approached. Men lounged on the front steps of their thatched-roof houses, eating balls of rice with their hands. Women carried jugs of water, laughing together as they walked.
I pedaled faster and faster as the sky darkened, trying to outride the rain. I’m free, I repeated to myself with every breath. The houses grew farther apart, and the rice paddies transformed the landscape into a layered green wedding cake. Palm trees dotted the grassy shelves, and a river ran through it all.
I’m free. Children’s laughter poured from a lone compound, and I turned my head to see a woman placing a stick of smoldering incense inside her family shrine. I pedaled faster.
BOOM! Thunder exploded a few seconds before lightning tentacles formed glowing fissures in the clouds.
A sane person would have turned back toward town to avoid potential flash floods—especially when biking in a foreign country where she had no idea where she was going and no one else had any idea where she was. Instead, I was compelled to surge forward to beat the lightning. I tightened my abs and pushed down on the pedals so fast that the world melted into streaks like the tie-dyed paintings I’d admired in town.
I’m free. Raindrops fell, washing away the sweat streaking my forehead. I can do anything, go anywhere, I thought as I crested a hill and started to pick up even more speed on the descent.
What are you going to do when you get back? Stephany’s question blew through my mind like a cold draft as the world breezed by.
I’m free.
Steph had also asked, while we were walking home from an Irish pub, giggling and sweat-soaked from dancing on her final night on the island, “What really made you go on the trip?”
I’d offered my standard answer. “How could I not go? I had two friends willing to travel the world with me and a little savings in the bank. It wasn’t really a choice.” I saw her examining my face out of the corner of my eye, sensing she wasn’t entirely buying it.
“Yeah, but you said you were happy with your job. And it sounds like you’re totally in love with your boyfriend—you don’t even look at other guys. And you live with him in a cute apartment. Seriously, why did you decide to leave for an entire year?”
I should have known the answer, or else why had I traded my 401(k) plan for credit card debt, my closet for a backpack, and my bed with the man I loved for a different cot every night? Amanda wanted to jump-start her travel-writing career, and Jen was escaping a relationship with the wrong man. Me, I was in it solely for the adventure. Or so I’d told myself.
I’m free, I repeated my mantra, pedaling faster still. Stephany couldn’t travel for a year because she was tied to her husband. Nyoman would never be able to go on a bike ride in the middle of the day, because she had a job to do and a baby to care for. I was tied to no one. I was free. And I was alone.
I heard Elan’s voice echo in my head as my tires turned over pebbles in the road. “I’ll miss you, Hol.” I remembered how happy I’d been, laughing as he spun me around in the snow on that Boston sidewalk. I thought about how safe I’d felt on those nights when we’d fall into our bed but stay up talking until the sky turned from black to gray. I pictured the way he’d helped me slip into my loaded backpack for the first time and then watched me from above on our patio as I climbed into a cab on my way to the airport to begin my journey.
Then, quicker than a lightning bolt shooting across the clouds, I didn’t want to be free anymore. I didn’t want to travel through my life alone.
Swish, swish, the sound of the pedals slicing through the air undercut the sound of the rain pelting the ground.
I’d picked up so much speed that I’d finally stopped pedaling and put on the brakes, sending my bike into a near tailspin. Along with drinking the water and flashing expensive electronics in public, biking rural roads in a rainstorm sans map was probably listed as a Lonely Planet warning about what not to do when traveling.
Before my bike could sail into a ditch-turned-river, I regained my balance. At the same moment, a sliver of sunlight cracked through the clouds. The rice paddies were iridescent, rhinestonelike raindrops studding the greenery as if the spirits had taken a BeDazzler to the landscape.
I slowed enough to put one foot on the ground and then turned back in the direction from which I’d come.
