Oh, the Places We've Been

“IF THERE WERE A THAI WITNESS-PROTECTION PROGRAM FOR NATURAL LANDSCAPES AND UNAFFECTED LOCALS, IT WOULD BE SET ON THE SHORES OF TRANG.”
Christopher R. Cox
in “Natural Selection,” December 2009

BALI, INDONESIA

“There are certain places that we keep, in our hearts or imaginations, as shrines of a kind, or inner talismans; protective deities, you could say, that watch over some of our better and more private hopes. Bali is close to the center of any such inner topography, a place that has long been a byword for all we would not expect to find in the real world. I remember, from the first of my several trips there, feeling as if I’d walked into a canvas (by Gauguin, perhaps): the bare-shouldered old ladies in their sumptuous silks walking to the temple in the early light; the boys with gorgeous smiles, white flowers tucked behind their ears; the angel-eyed infants taken to be such vessels of purity that they were not even allowed to touch the ground. There were 30,000 temples, I heard on that first trip, on an island barely one-sixth the size of Taiwan; every house had a shrine and most people were dancers or artists or