Bali is many singular things.
Bali is stray dogs, offerings, waves, traffic, motorbikes, warungs, suckling pig, smoked duck, Aussies, surfers, a grace, dignity, and gentleness that make you question the singular strengths of all these things, and how woven together, they become a rare moment of rugged serenity.
At first you kind of hate it, because nothing about the traffic suggest paradise. The main arteries that link up to Seminyak from your sleepy surf village, Canggu, are few in between (in fact, there is really just one going north and one going east, passing Pepitos, the big grocery store catering to local expats with cheese and granola).
We made the mistake of making a grocery run on the first day to stock up our Airbnb, and in turn, Bali sucked us in and spat us out with fumes and bumpy roads. In a daze, and stocked with milk, juice, and donut snacks from the market, I swore to take smaller routes on the way back, and found them cutting cross villas and rice fields. The road would curve up and down and narrow suddenly. No lights except the moon, and other headlights crossing in front, behind, and past, existed. So it was in these wayward roads and shortcuts that I found a touch of nostalgia, when I used to ride my bike in the darkness of Nankai U or to Big Auntie's in Heping District in the nineties.
There were other ways in Bali that reminded me of the way things were, or the way things are supposed to be. They collided in the form, as Ken playfully puts it, "Eat Eat Love." Nothing, not work, not phone, stopped in the way of eating our way through Bali. Yet the most memorable moment perhaps still lived in the scratched out "pray," when, pummeled by a wave, you grab fiercely onto your surfboard, hull your heavy body back on the wax board, and saw at the far end of the beach a Hindu ceremonial procession marked by Gamelan music. That was it. The image and moment will live in your mind's eye forever. So will the first time surfing, the first time paddling out to the waves, to the sun, with such purpose, and such gravity.
The magnitude of mother nature has never dawned until one experiences surfing, and there it will, staring at you in the eye, carrying you, and in the next instant, throwing you. Surfers write about the waves they love as a ferocious, beautiful woman. I can see why now. At 14 you went to Hawai'i for the first time and came back with surf fever (even though you didn't learn to surf then) via plastering walls with pages of blue from Surf mags,. At 28 you learned to surf, but more importantly, you learned what happens after the surf, and that is, the sitting. In Canggu beach ("Our Fort Tilden," he joked), we sat on the parking lot steps during sunset after two hour surf sessions and do nothing except sit. The occasional stray dog with his feral eyes would pass by and meditate on the moment with us, and that was it. That was our Bali, and nothing was better than everything.