Bali

The island rests on a chain of volcanoes running east to west. Agung, at over three thousand metres, closes the horizon of the eastern half; Batur, lower, sits in a caldera with a lake at its floor. This relief explains the rest: rain falls on the heights, water runs down, and villages have shared its use for centuries. That sharing has a name, subak — a network of canals, weirs and water temples run by the farmers themselves, inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2012. The terraces photographed at Jatiluwih or around Ubud are therefore not scenery: they are the plots of an irrigation system still in service. The coasts have little in common. In the south, the Bukit peninsula drops in limestone cliffs onto narrow coves, and that is where the resorts and the traffic concentrate. Moving west, Canggu and Seminyak line up dark volcanic sand where the Indian Ocean swell arrives unobstructed. In the east, around Amed and Candidasa, the sea is calmer, the villages smaller, and the bottom drops quickly enough for diving straight from shore. In the north, the Lovina coast faces the Bali Sea, without swell, with black sand beaches almost empty on weekdays. The interior is another country. Ubud, an hour and a half from the airport, sits on a plateau cut by gorges and rivers, surrounded by rice fields and workshops — woodcarving, silverwork, painting — that have long supplied the whole island. Further east, the Sidemen valley runs down below Agung, with almost no hotels and terraces that change colour with the rice cycle. In the mountains, around Munduk and the Bratan and Tamblingan lakes, altitude brings the temperature down several degrees: coffee and cloves grow there, and mornings are often in mist. What strikes you first, though, is not the landscape but the place held by ritual. Bali is the only majority-Hindu island in a country that is not, and it shows at every hour: canang sari, small offerings of flowers and rice on a palm leaf, are set out before houses, shops and scooters each morning. Every family has a temple in its courtyard, every village has three, and ceremonies close roads without warning. Once a year, at Nyepi, the whole island stops: no traffic, no lights after dark, and the airport itself shuts for twenty-four hours. You stay here in an architecture that does not enclose. The traditional Balinese house is a courtyard ringed by separate pavilions — you cross the garden to go to bed — and recent villas keep the principle: open volumes, grey volcanic stone, dark timber, and often an alang-alang thatch roof. It is a way of living that assumes the climate rather than shutting it out, and that is what sets it apart: you do not close a Balinese house, you walk through it.