Travel intelligence – Letter from India – March 2001

Actually changed my mind – Bali

I am told I am on Prospero’s Isle where the scent of the cempak flower is said to ease the pains of the world, where frangipani blooms rain down as harbingers of a storm, where even the poverty is wrapped in shiny banana leaves.

But I can’t see it for the golf buggies. I am drowning among rich Americans with floppy skin and taut Japanese honeymoon couples who treat my morning yoga by the sea as a cabaret act, as if my profound navel introspections are all part of the show: earlybird yoga fun, along with PJ’s on the beach serving bona fide pizza and cappuccinos that fluff just so, even in 97% humidity. My god, I’m 34 years old but I feel as if I have been time-warped forward into a retirement pod circa 2045. In my dogged determination to avoid buggy-life I walk with defiance, only to find that I am constantly and very politely being asked by Balinese bandanna-wearing buggy drivers if madam could please get out of the way.  They whisk past with yet another tidy honeymoon couple, giggling in their state of vacuum-sealed hedonism, en route from a cempak flower bliss massage at the spa to the sunset speed walk on the beach—well, the bit that has been raked clean of the flotsam and jetsam of reality. So, I must check myself mid-rant because they are after all seeing the Bali Strait, the real sea, and they were being rubbed down with the intoxicating scent of native flowers. But this is a paradise-mirage created by financially elite tourism. Paradise, the euphemism for all things Balinese, is not a native state for the island, they do not even have a word for it in their language. It is as imported at the beach buggies.

Those of us who feel dehumanised by pod life in a self-contained resort have to accept that there are thousands of black Amex card-holders who have a desire, no a need, to be able to drink the same cappuccino and experience the same reception welcome whether they are in Birmingham, Bogota or Jimbaran Bay, Bali. In response the anti-golf buggy activists will argue that to be utterly insulated from the indigenous charms of your chosen holiday destination is equivalent to a slow mental death. Why travel half way across the world to a place where cock-fighting is still legal, where a matriarchal society creates a well-run sense of island life in spite of Indonesia’s political instability, and the corruption of tourist seduction, where you can stay in a former royal summer palace for £10 a night, if you are only going to expose yourself to the potential drama of the asparagus in the ‘garden fresh’ salad being tinned rather than newly plucked from said garden?

The anti-buggy activists are a pretty smart crowd. They reckon that if you are going to spend approximately £500 a night in order to buy into phoney- paradise then you should at least get a sense of privacy, of suspension in a place that flirts with perfection, a place where the blackness of your credit card can rub out the starkness of reality rather than requiring you to look left and right as you step out of your £500 a night villa for fear of being knocked down by a speeding buggy.
If this gilded isolation is what you desire there is a house in the middle of padi fields near Ubud, the old art and craft town of the island, now one of the tourist bellissima crappattino capitals of the world in the folksy artisan department. The house certainly does not have very much to do with reality, unless swimming up and down your own private pool looking out at the people working in the padi fields counts, unless being able to hear the local cockerels at vocal war whilst being slathered down in cempak oil qualifies, unless going to sleep to the sounds of the local village ho-downing for the Hindu festival of the week applies.

So why is it that this poor little resort-offended creature will happily loll at Amandari while huffing and puffing about the hermetically sealed state of the Four Season’s resort at Jimbaran Bay? For my taste it is because the Aman group as a whole has managed to achieve what other chains miss, it never tries to remove you from where you are whether it be Bali, Thailand or the après ski among the fondue eaters.

On a sodden Sunday morning I was led down the valley under a waxed umbrella, along the river and into the villages beyond. We scrambled over slippery bridges and among bamboo plantations right into the essence of Bali, only to slipped back into the surreal bubble under a balé at the valley end. Breakfast had been laid, out of the rain under the cover of a cock-fighting pit. I sat on cushions, watching the village people in their sampan hats taking their bullocks to graze, while a butler poured thick coffee and presented pain au chocolat of the quality that make a girl’s pants fall off. I do not know what the bullock herders thought of me, and there will always be a disquiet in me at the juxtaposition of sampans in the rain next to pain au chocolat on white linen. It is simply that I would rather that scene than the golf buggy dodging show.

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts: www.fshr.com
Aman Resorts: www.amanresorts.com