More than ever, the island’s resorts are making a priority of cultural relevance, promising unique entrée into Balinese art and architecture, music and dance, cuisine, traditional medicine, and social and religious life. The best hotels actually come close to providing it, granting guests a room with a view, but also a viewpoint: a compelling vantage on Bali itself. At the Four Seasons Bali at Sayan, near Ubud, one can spend the day with local farmers, learning firsthand about Bali’s ingenious subak irrigation system and even planting rice. The three resorts run by the Komaneka group—owned by the Neka family, whose patriarch founded Ubud’s Neka Art Museum—all showcase eclectic collections of contemporary Balinese art; the latest and most lavish property, Komaneka at Bisma, is a veritable gallery unto itself. These days one can have one’s karma cleansed, learn kite-making and Balinese dance, or be healed by a djamoe medicine man, often without leaving the premises. Along with cold towels and glasses of chilled juice, your hotel will bring Bali to you. It’s easy to be skeptical. Who looks to a hotel for a genuine cultural experience? Travelers have forever wrung their hands over The Authenticity Question, from Kona to Kathmandu—but particularly so in Bali, where tourism and tradition have had a long, strange, symbiotic relationship. (For a most incisive critique, seek out French anthropologist Michel Picard’s 1996 study, Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture.) So this is not a novel complaint. But neither is it really a complaint at all. One of the great singularities of this island—and one of the great thrills of traveling here—is the thin line between the sacred and the mundane, between the genuine and the disingenuous. If such a line even exists.
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or a look at Bali’s next frontier, we ventured out to the southwestern coast, where Alila Hotels & Resorts opened its newest hotel on the island, the Alila Villas Soori. Set between green rice fields and a black-sand beach, the location is stunning, and if it feels a bit sleepy that’s precisely the intention. Seminyak’s trendy boutiques are just 40 minutes away—gods and traffic willing—yet this corner of Bali is still disarmingly quiet. (There’s a reason why many expats are relocating here.) The Soori’s trump card is its proximity to Tanah Lot, Bali’s most dramatically situated temple, poised on a rocky headland that becomes an island at high tide. At sunset the site is overrun by tour buses, but Alila guests can easily reach Tanah Lot in the morning before the crowds arrive. Sparsely populated the southwest may be, but like all of Bali it brims with activity. Biking down one rural lane we came upon an artisan village devoted to the making of terra-cotta roof tiles. The air was suffused with woodsmoke from makeshift kilns; every resident was coated in a layer of fine red dust. The village was inarguably poor, yet each house was surrounded by the most intricately hewn stone wall,
protecting the most gracefully realized temple and a shrine whose artfulness was breathtaking. This is where we have to talk about the sheer sensory overload of Bali. There is simply more stuff per square meter on this island than in the entirety of Hong Kong or Manhattan: carved Garuda statues and ornamental gates, kettle gongs and suling flutes, masks and totems and effigies shaded by parasols and wrapped in checkered poleng cloths. Nearly all of it is beautiful to behold. In the West we keep our art ensconced in museums, our idolatry sequestered in churches; in Bali, devotional arts and crafts are everywhere you look, spilling onto the sidewalk. Even the gutters are strewn with frangipani petals from yesterday’s canang, prayer offerings in banana-leaf baskets. Which is why Bali alternately enthralls and flummoxes foreign travelers. Without frames or labels to organize the visible world, a visitor is easily overwhelmed; at the end of the day your eyes—all three of them—are exhausted. Outside a temple you’ll stop to admire the singular grace of a Ganesh sculpture, then down the street you’ll pass a yard full of 200 identical ones for sale. And just as it’s difficult to tell whether that teak dining table is an antique or was simply left out in the rain for six weeks, so is it hard to delineate art from artifice. “But what’s real?” one’s inner skeptic cries. “What should I be looking at?” In Bali there is no easy answer, or the answer is, “Everything is real; look at everything.” “Look at everything” could be the motto of the Hotel Tugu Bali, located on a tranquil beach in Canggu, not far from Tanah Lot. Owned by Anhar Setjadibrata, a Javanese art collector, the 22-suite Tugu touts a connection to “the art, soul and romance of Indonesia.” Setjadibrata’s daughter Lucienne, who manages the hotel, explains that her father built the place after her mother demanded he “find someplace to store all this art and get it out of the house.” Certainly the Tugu feels more like a reliquary than a hotel. The public rooms are chockablock with Indonesian objets— stone carvings; shadow puppets; musical instruments—and every vertical surface sports a canvas or print or tapestry. It’s a fabulous place, in the true sense of the word: a vivid fantasia as rich as the tropical landscape, and just as uncontainable. Indeed, the Tugu is a microcosm of Bali itself: one wishes some magical docent would appear to explain it all.
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t Tanah Lot Temple, I struck up a conversation
with a French-Indonesian shaman who used to be a banker. Or maybe it was the reverse—I couldn’t keep track. He spoke in abstractions. The guy looked as if he not only lived outside the box but was no longer capable of even describing a box. For all I knew he was worth US$40 million. Bali is full of successful, formerly Type A businesspeople who moved here, saw the light and, as a friend put it, “let the island become them.” Even corporate hoteliers take on an » 123