I’m holding my own in a staring contest with a Balinese healer. For two minutes now, I’ve been gazing into the spectacled eyes of Djik Dewa, a goateed man in a white t-shirt and blue sarong, while he stares unblinkingly into mine, chanting rapidly. I’m on my back by a small altar in Dewa’s two-story home outside of Ubud, Bali’s ancient healing center (Ubud means “medicine”). Outside, a rice field crackles under a light rain. For the past hour, Dewa has been pinching me (hard!) between my toes, a reflexology thing, and kneading my flesh to coax the Kundalini energy up from the base of my spine through my chakras. Every so often, he motions like he’s pulling stuffing from my body and blowing it out of his hand into the air.
Afterward, Dewa explains that he was cleansing away bad memories to make room for good ones—"too much schedule, schedule, schedule!" My face, he says, looks looser than when I arrived. I swear I can feel light shooting out of my skull. Back at my hotel, gigantic elephant-ear leaves are greener and darting lizards brighter, while the rain plops down in Dolby. Or maybe this lightness of being comes from spending the last five days submitting to almost-daily massages; doing yoga in Xanadu-like gardens; sleeping a deep, jet-lagged slumber under mosquito nets; and ingesting a steady diet of dragon fruit chia bowls and shots of Jamu, the local turmeric-laced elixir concocted by Balinese grandmas and served in tiny bottles to wellness pilgrims. I feel so damn good, it’s like I’ve decamped to the land of the Lotus Eaters, my (schedule-filled) mind sponged clean. No wonder so many tourists never leave.
The Indonesian island of Bali—shaped a bit like a broccoli floret, with tourism concentrated in the stalk—has long lured foreigners, from surfers in the ’70s to Eat Pray Lovers in the mid-aughts, with its jungly interior beauty, volcanic-sand beaches, and incense-filled rituals of Balinese Hinduism. More recently, flocks of digital nomads have settled into the co-working spaces and open-air cafés around beachy, boho-chic Canggu (there's wifi just about everywhere), launching Web-design companies and sustainable fashion labels. But unlike the mythical island of the Odyssey full of lotus-eating lollygaggers, Bali is very much an island of action—as it frankly has to be. With tourism tripling during the past decade—in 2017, 5.7 million visitors flooded this Delaware-size island, home to just over 4 million—new hotels and commercial strips springing up from Uluwatu in the south to Ubud in the center, and traffic often clogging the narrow roads, the jig may soon be up.
A couple of nights earlier, at a dinner thrown by Ludovica Virga, the Italian designer and owner of the fashion boutique House of Mua Mua in Seminyak—a “lazy” beach town when she arrived 16 years ago, its streets now full of flashy shops and no-look pedestrians—I got a load of the stakes. By the pool in her grassy backyard twinkling with fairy lights over a small pool, talk of the previous night’s 6.9 magnitude earthquake on neighboring Lombok ("the biggest I've ever felt here!") turned to the plastic that’s lately been washing up on Bali’s beaches. “When I saw my daughter making sand castles with garbage, that's when I knew I had to do something,” said Ludo, to nods from Valeria Lacerda, a russet-haired Brazilian designer who makes stylish flip-flop alternatives from sustainable water hyacinth reeds under the name Mantis Shoes, and Melati Wijsen, a freakishly poised Dutch-Indonesian 17-year-old, who with her younger sister cofounded the NGO Bye Bye Plastic Bags. The girls have already given three TED talks and persuaded the governor to ban single-use plastic bags (he later reneged on it, but they’re undeterred); in the meantime, Melati explained how their Mountain Mamas project pays women in the hilly, rural north to sew reusable bags, which sell at shiny boutiques around the island, thereby channeling the proceeds back into the villages. “It’s a very scalable project, very copy-paste, so I can take it across Bali and all of Indonesia,” said Melati in the can-do argot of modern entrepreneurship.
Melati and her sister aren’t just precocious teens. They are alums of the Green School, the island’s ground zero for solution-oriented learning. People literally move to Bali to enroll their kids here for a year or a few, while joining a community of like-minded parents, many in the creative and tech fields. (This fall the school even unveiled a co-working space for grown-ups.) With 490 students in pre-K through 12, the Green School was cofounded in 2008 by John Hardy, who made his name and fortune manufacturing high-end jewelry on Bali almost 20 years ago (he sold the company in 2014). Scattered across a forested campus between Canggu and Ubud, the open classrooms are built out of sustainably harvested bamboo bent into soaring, cathedral-like spires and designed by the architecture firm Ibuku, founded by Hardy’s daughter Elora. It’s the kind of place where students conduct R&D at an aquaponics station, and fourth-graders use design thinking to run an egg business out of a chicken coop they built.
I visit on the first back-to-school Friday in August; kids are kicking balls and turning cartwheels on the soccer field while parents catch up excitedly about the summer; by the entrance, more parents jam in a ska band. I talk to Americans Ben and Blair Ripple, who have two girls at the school and who run Big Tree Farms, which sells organic produce to hotels and restaurants; they also export fair-trade products like coconut sugar and cacao products to Whole Foods and Wegmans, connecting traditional farmers to global markets. The couple, who moved here in 1998 and are just back from a year in Burlington, Vermont, remember when the road in front of the school was a foot path dotted with the huts of farmers who climbed the trees to collect nira, a palm sap used as a sweetener, which they'd get drunk off of in the evenings. “It feels so great to be back here—the wildness of it,” says Ben, gesturing to the lush surroundings. “But the problems on Bali have come to a critical head.” Still, the energy of the community here gives him hope, with so many comers working both in and outside the school on sustainable design, regenerative agriculture, and enlightened hospitality, trying to solve issues at the heart of their beloved island's survival. It's like some kind of giant karmic cleanse.
And yet, despite all the rapid development around the island’s main hubs to the south, vast swaths of the landscape remain pretty much undisturbed. Many longtime residents told me that Balinese culture is so tied to traditions of family structure and a ritual-bound religion that it acts as something of a self-preserving mechanism. Drive even 10 minutes north out of Canggu or Ubud and you find yourself in the Bali of 20, even 50 years ago. Village compounds line the roads, their high stone walls enclosing ancestral temples (typically at least three generations live together). Old men sit in the shade of thatched warungs, roadside cafés that serve locally harvested coffee and the spicy fried rice dish nasi goreng. Crowds regularly throng the streets for one of the countless ceremonies that honor everything from trees and animals to birth and cremation—Balinese Hinduism is a mash-up of animism and Buddhism. (Nyepi, the Balinese new year's celebration in March, is an annual day of silence in which the entire island extinguishes its electricity, flights are grounded, and everyone stays home in the dark to encourage the bad spirits to pass over Bali without stopping.) Out here, farmers in sarongs work in tiered rice paddies, whose packed-earth Subak system of irrigation is UNESCO protected. The rhythms are slower. The traffic, mercifully, is practically nonexistent.
As a result of this, Bali often feels like two co-existing yet parallel cultures that intersect peacefully and copacetically, when they do at all. Now, though, some forward-thinking entrepreneurs are trying to bridge the divide, identifying and conserving many of the more unique—and uniquely endangered—aspects of Balinese culture.
Up in Ubud, near the top of the broccoli stem, the Dutch chef Eelke Plasmeijer and his Indonesian partner, Ray Adriansyah, own and operate the restaurant Locavore, which earns a regular slot on the World’s 50 Best. When Eelke and Ray opened it five years ago, after working at the Alila Ubud, the Noma-inspired, local-ingredient-driven approach to cuisine was sweeping Europe. “But here”—where high-end restaurants and hotels all served imported salmon and truffles—“people still tended to value things from far away,” Eelke shouts over his shoulder, as I cling to his torso from the back of his motorbike as we serpentine around traffic. We’re riding a half-hour north of the city through Payangan to where Locavore sources some of its produce. On the farm, we walk through tangerine and soursop groves and along the edges of swampy rice paddies dotted with ducks, the cloud-ringed Mt. Batur volcano in the distance, following a wiry do-rag-wearing Balinese whom everyone calls Boss. Eelke says Boss—his real name is Kasida; he's worked with the duo for a decade—has spent years interviewing village elders about forgotten indigenous ingredients about their usage, bringing that knowledge back to the kitchen. We stop to bite into a starchy-tart salak, or snake fruit, and nibble on a horsehoof leaf, traditionally eaten after spicy food. Boss points out green beans, jackfruit, and kaffir limes used in the coconut-flavored dish called lawar. At one point, a farm worker scales a palm tree to collect nira from high up on the trunk, then boils it in a wok over a fire into palm sugar, which we taste in caramelized chunks from the end of a stick.
Back at Locavore, the hipster-bearded Eelke, and Ray in a "Go Local or Go Home" cap, jump in alongside several young, mainly Indonesian line cooks in the open kitchen. Across its operations—which include pan-Indo spot Nusantara, the sandwich shop Locavore to Go, and the hip cocktail boîte Night Rooster—Locavore now employs a staff of more than 60, who are sponsored in small groups to travel all across the country and bring back culinary inspiration. I dig into the seven-course tasting menu including the likes of barbecued young jackfruit in smoked coconut cream, and sumsum, made from roasted bone marrow in a pandan bone broth, each dish delivered on ceramics hand-crafted in local workshops. The star of the meal is Into the Sawah, or “rice paddy.” It’s created around a small mound of heritage rice from Tegalalang, a mere six miles away, and is flavored with snails from the paddies; a deep-yellow, slow-cooked duck-egg yolk; and frog abon, or floss (baked, dried, and shredded meat); all topped with fern tips and wildflowers. And it's true: I can picture, and then taste, this morning's teeming rice paddy.
It isn't just Bali’s historic foodways that are attracting enterprising outsiders. Gaya Ceramic in Ubud was founded by Italian expats who now work with 100 craftspeople using age-old techniques to hand-throw elegant glazed tableware for clients like Bulgari and Armani/Casa. Fashion brands like Uma and Leopold, started by the Brazilian designer Lara Braga, employ local artisans to produce maxi and wrap dresses using Indonesian Kerawang embroidery and hand beading; each piece can take up to a month to make. These efforts create jobs and preserve cultural traditions. And still, one can’t help but hope that the entrepreneurial zeitgeist empowers a new generation of Balinese to play a larger role in shaping their island’s future.
Meanwhile, as the hotel boom continues, thanks to government deregulation and a seemingly insatiable demand for rooms, the eco-minded Indonesian brand Potato Head, known for its on-the-pulse beach clubs in Bali and Singapore, aims to set a better example. Katamama, its gypset-chic boutique hotel in Seminyak, was built two years ago from 1.8 million bricks handmade in a central Balinese village. “It was a dying trade. But all the old guys who hadn’t lived there since the ’70s came back, and young people too. Now they're getting commissions from all over the world. That's the greatest way we can give back,” says Dan Mitchell, Potato Head’s creative director—a fashion-industry refugee from the U.K. who arrived here four years ago expecting a life of “growing vegetables, meditating, and going to the beach every day.” Sipping a Jamu at the Canggu café Parachute, he says he’s now working long days with Rem Koolhaas’s OMA on the 175-room, zero-waste Potato Head Hotel, made from recycled brick and bioplastics—all crafted by Indonesian artisans and opening in Seminyak next fall. And a new Katamama project is unfolding north of Canggu, in the fields of Tabanan—“old-world Bali,” Dan says—tourism’s next frontier (get there now!). It will be a fully off-the-grid village of 12 sustainably built beach cabins by designers including the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, modeled on traditional open rumah adat dwellings and filled with handmade Indonesian furniture and decor. The surrounding farm will supply the produce. The twist is that the designs will be modular, and can be shipped to be rebuilt anywhere in the world, Dan says. This “neo-nomadic approach will showcase Indonesian craftsmanship in a very modern way.”
If this all sounds kind of highfalutin, it is. “Addressing overtourism requires a deep commitment from the destination—the government, residents, tourism businesses, NGOs, and other stakeholders—to finding long-term, sustainable solutions,” asserts Martha Honey, cofounder of the Center for Responsible Travel, a policy-oriented research group. Design thinking and small-scale permaculture alone won’t turn things around. But they’re a start. And ironically, these good practices give Bali a shot at influencing the dialogue around conscious tourism.
One warm evening, I sit with John and Cynthia Hardy, who have been married for 25 years, sipping wine by the banks of the Ayung River. We’re at Bambu Indah, their enchanting cluster of reclaimed teak houses amid swooping bamboo buildings designed by John's daughter Elora's firm, Ibuku. John deserves credit as the OG standard-bearer for tasteful, scalable sustainability: His spotless former design studio outside Ubud employs some 750 artisans in light-filled workshops, where they create the brand’s signature recycled silver and gold woven-chain jewelry. Cynthia, in a fitted denim shirt and red-checked sarong, has just shown me the grounds, with its kitchen garden, spring-fed swimming pools, and tear-drop-shaped bamboo pod suspended over a rushing river. John, in a rumpled linen shirt, talks about inviting guests to join him on morning trash-collection walks, then deplores the rampant hotel development up and down the river. “It’s just such a sad and brutal thing to do to the most beautiful island in the world,” he says. He’s thinking of starting a sort of anti-hotel for which he’d rent a patch of a rice field from a farmer, or “a little crook in the river with a moon view.” Guests would stay in a little solar-powered tented encampment with a butler and participate in rural life—watching the farmer feed his cows at 5 a.m., say, or bathing in a natural spring, or visiting the temple with the villagers; no cellular or Wi-Fi to distract.
It strikes me that this reverie is a version of what so many of us have come to the Island of the Gods hoping to plug into: the palpable magic of its teeming forests, serene rice terraces, mystical temples—with the occasionally belching volcanoes and rumbling earth as reminders of the precious fragility of everything. Thankfully, these places still exist here. You just have to look for them.
Just then, a young French employee of Kul Kul, their son Orin's permaculture venture (the whole family's in on the green game), stops by to discuss his latest bamboo workshop and snaps us out of our reverie.
"You know, Bali is a flipping vortex of creativity," Cynthia says excitedly after he's gone. "There's something so cool about people being called here to manifest a certain kind of a life." How all this manifesting will eventually affect tourism can't be predicted. The buses and party package tours may keep rolling in. But discerning tourists won't. Already, many wave off Bali in favor of less discovered paradises, like Lombok and Flores, where the lodging is finally worthy of the pristine surroundings.
Ken Kochey, a Canggu resident (and the photographer who shot this story) who rode me around town on his scooter pointing out one new building or another that had suddenly cropped up in a rice paddy, said something that stuck with me: "Bali is the island of yes." Let's just hope those in a position to do so say yes to the right things.
In-the-Know Bali
As crowded as the island gets, you can still locate the kind of special, untrammeled places that have long lured utopia seekers here. I think a well-rounded week would include a couple of days in the laid-back town of Canggu, three or four in the spiritual hub of Ubud (with forays into the countryside), ending on the golden beaches of Uluwatu in the south.
When to Go
Avoid August, period. The Aussies are on winter holiday, and the rest of the developed world is on summer break. Otherwise, Bali’s tropical climate varies by wet season (October to April) and dry (May to September), with temps in the 80s. Everyone says that being present for Nyepi, the Balinese New Year (and the day when all lights are shut off and activity silenced—March 7 in 2019) is life-changing. Supposedly, you have never seen such bright stars.
Getting There and Around
Cathay Pacific flies to Denpasar from the West Coast via Singapore and Hong Kong, and Emirates has routes from the East Coast through Dubai. Once there, taxis are plentiful, and hiring one for a day will barely cost you $50. A motorbike is the fastest way to navigate Bali’s network of two-lane roads; you’ll see kiosks in every town renting scooters for less than $20 a day.
Canggu
Twenty-five minutes (on a good day) up the coast from the bustle of Seminyak, Canggu is a low-key bohemian enclave, a Venice Beach on the Arabian Sea, where surfers haul their boards on motorbikes to Batu Bolong and Echo beaches, and airy cafés fill up with laptop jockeys. (You’ll know you’re still in Bali from the stone temples on the beach and ceremonial offerings in front of every store.) The left break here is beginner friendly, and there are several surf schools right on the beach. If that's not your thing, you can easily fill a day browsing shops like Dream Good for well-made surfwear and Maison Blonde for handmade jewelry, then hit a tantric hatha yoga class at The Practice under a raised bamboo roof, or take a flow session at Desa Seni in a bale surrounded by a flowering garden.
Most restaurants serve food day and night and customers linger just as long. Deus Ex Machina, the brash Australian biker-themed coffee brand and one of the first arrivals five years ago when Canggu was little more than rice field, still draws a crowd. The Slow is a shady café with concrete floors and Nakashima-style wooden tables serving fresh juices and tonics alongside small plates of veg-forward cuisine in the boutique hotel by the same name. Its owner, George Gorrow, is a fashion-industry veteran and flaxen-haired Thor ringer who curates the lobby art gallery and boutique selling his minimalistic streetwear. Try Betelnut Café for a tasty take on the Indonesian staple nasi campur—rice with fish, meat, and veg sides—and gado gado, a salad of steamed vegetables, tofu, and peanut dressing. A 10-minute walk up Batu Bolong brings you to Crate Café, serving vegan-friendly clean cuisine (their Green Brekkie of quinoa, greens, avo, and poached egg will give you superpowers) in a bright industrial space. Over in Badung, Canggu’s eastern flank, Quince Bali is a family-run café with wabi-sabi interiors selling ceramics alongside flat whites, and Parachute, essentially a tented platform overlooking a rice paddy by the pioneering Potato Head team, is stacked with vegetarian entrees and salads. Hit Milk and Madu for raw vegan desserts. In the evenings, the beach clubs come roaring to life. La Brisa looks like a movie-set shipwreck, but my favorite was The Lawn, whose two-story clubhouse and lively pool deck is the place to be at sunset.
If you can’t snag one of the four rooms with en suite pools at The Slow, the hip, tropical-brutalist-style boutique hotel, there’s the sleekly modern new COMO Uma Canggu, with an excellent surfing school and a nice beach club. But I fell for the 21-year-old Hotel Tugu Bali, whose Indonesian owner has filled it with his personal collection of antiques and family heirlooms, including a two-story wooden bale roof in the lobby.
Ubud
Bali’s spiritual heart is set in the forest, an hour northeast of Canggu. Ubud can get clogged with tourists headed for the adjacent Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, all vying for space on the crumbling sidewalks, but the city’s smaller alleys contain worthy gems. Authentic local cuisine can be hard to uncover, but down Raya Ubud, across from Starbucks, Nasi Ayam Betutu Pak Sanur is a four-table nasi campur shop named for its owner, whose chicken cooked five ways is a popular local breakfast. Eelke Plasmeijer and Ray Adriansyah, the chef-owners of Locavore, have made Dewisita Street a destination. On one side is their 38-seat main outpost, which does seven ingredient-driven courses for lunch and dinner. Locavore to Go serves coffee and banh mi; Nusantara, their pan-Indo restaurant, is in a warm, rattan-lined space. (Grab a nightcap at their sultry Night Rooster bar around the corner.) A top stop for modern Indonesian is Hujan Locale, where Brit chef Will Meyrick cooks up bubur manado from Sulawesi and Taliwang-style chicken via Lombok.
Ubud is Bali’s historical center for the arts, and while many traditional makers practice their craft in artist villages outside of town, Ubud contains a few worthy stops. Gaya Ceramics has a gorgeous showroom of elegant painted tableware and a workshop next door. Ikat Batik carries hand-dyed textiles in every shade of indigo. Warung Wayan on Dewisita, owned by a Japanese expat, sells refined versions of Bali’s ubiquitous structured straw bags and well-tailored drawstring pants. Twenty minutes beyond Ubud, you can tour the light-filled jewelry workshop at John Hardy and join artisans for a traditional Balinese lunch (weekdays, by appointment). Nearby, the Green School offers daily tours.
As crowded as Ubud can get, you’re only minutes from dozens of authentic villages and peaceful countryside vistas. I wanted to see Bali’s famous water temple, Tirta Empul, to participate in a ritualistic cleansing in cool, clear water that flows down from Mt. Batur. You can rent a sarong for less than $1 at the temple, and, though crowded, it was a memorable experience. Still, Dan from Potato Head told me about another purification temple, the waterfall at Sebatu, a few miles beyond Tirta Empul, which attracts mainly locals. Gunung Kawi, an impressive temple carved into a tall rock face, reached by climbing down several hundred stone steps, was relatively empty save for locals going about their ceremonies. But I highly recommend you rent a motorbike or bicycle at your hotel and just get lost in the villages, tangerine groves and rice paddies in this area. You won’t come across another tourist.
Ubud has countless choices for hotels and guest houses. The OG of the luxury options is the Four Seasons Resort Bali at Sayan, with a stunning raised terrace overlooking jungle views, 2-bedroom villas with their own lotus-filled pools, a new riverside cooking school that serves babi guling to just a handful of guests at a time, and a super friendly and attentive staff. (They also set up my appointment with healer Djik Dewa, who makes house calls to their peaceful, pond-side spa.) The nearby Mandapa, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve has spacious villas with plunge pools right on the river, set amid a terraced rice field. For a thorough wellness immersion, COMO Shambhala Estate is one of the earth's most exquisite locations, with truly immersive Ayurvedic and cleanse-focused regimens, acres of mossy forest paths, and its own holy water spring. The new Bill Bensley–designed Capella Ubud is a fanciful imagining of a 19th-century explorer’s camp with themed tents like “The Professor” and “The Naturalist” decorated in colorful Ikats and other prints surrounding a large “cistern” pool. And Bambu Indah, John and Cynthia Hardy’s 12-room fantasia by the river, may persuade you to move in for good with its antique Javanese wooden houses and swooping bamboo buildings, not to mention the meditation pod that hangs out over the river.
Uluwatu
If you’re into surfing, this is a must-see: Down at the southern tip of Bali, you’ll have to pass through the tourist ghettos and phalanx of traffic in Nusa Dua and Kuta to reach it. (You cannot miss a drive-by of the near-finished Garuda statue, depicting Vishnu riding the mythological bird, which looms larger than the Statue of Liberty.) Once there, the golden-sand beaches are some of the best on the island, and the huge break at Padang Padang draws the annual Rip Curl surfing competition in July.
Park yourself at the new Six Senses, which recently opened atop an oceanside cliff, with a rigorous wellness program, a kitchen garden with a mushroom hut, and a wide infinity pool that appears to plunge off the edge of the earth. The 1- and 2-bedroom villas decorated in breezy ocean colors have their own plunge pools, and the wellness program here is thorough and customizable.
In the afternoon, catch a taxi to Balangan beach, empty save for surfers paddling out and little warungs where beachgoers sip Bintangs. Then hit Uluwatu temple at sunset (watch out for mischievous monkeys who steal many an iPhone!), where the views of the light fading behind the cliff will be some of the most photogenic of your trip.