Reverse culture shock

The beginning of October saw three friends and I hop on a plane to Bali.

We bunked down at a little motel near the airport overnight and flew in the morning landing just after 2pm local time.

We were met by a driver at the airport. (He'd been sent from our hotel at Nusa Dua but quickly became our tour guide for the duration of the trip.)

My friend saw my name floating in a sea of smiling faces holding up cards announcing all the new entrants to the country. We rushed to the edge of the driver arena and were led through the cacophony out the front of the building to an equally hectic carpark. Komang, our driver quickly reappeared with his van and we were whisked away to our beach resort.

If I had to use two words to sum up the trip and the island of Bali, I think they would have to be "lush cacophony."

Everything is so extra! The traffic teams and weaves around itself like the peristaltic action of a single giant stomach. Frangipani trees grow everywhere dropping scented blossoms like a multi-hued carpet. Locals make little incense offerings every morning to encourage good health, good business and good lives offering smiles everywhere you go. The humid heat embraces you like a lover, frizzing your hair and dampening your skin.

I can see why people arrive there and decide not to go home. There is at once a laziness and a cracking pace about the place. The inhabitants of the island hustle. They have to given the lack of social services we so readily enjoy back in Australia. But they do it in such a way that customers feel like friends, and friends are honoured guests.

It is very rare that the smiles slip and you see the grinding hardship and poverty that many experience. And even when you do, it is endured cheerfully.

I met Dewi, a solo mother like myself who was trying to establish a small tour company to break free of another business where her pay was sporadic at best.

"You can always give your smile," she told me, "that is the one thing you have that is free."

In a few ways, the privilege of myself and my friends felt obscene. Our resort lay beyond two security checkpoints in Nusa Dua and the first always checked our car. It felt like a gated enclave with the real world clamouring, its true heart beating, outside.

We lay around on deck chairs, sunning ourselves and drinking cocktails in the pool when down the road people slept in their market stalls and fed their families from whatever they could extract of our tourist dollars. However, that wealth is necessary, providing jobs.

A couple of our group found the constant haggling exhausting and I must admit there were number of times when I paid the equivalent of twenty dollars for an item when I might have been able to haggle the price down to five. But I figured that if a few people got a little more money than they had anticipated that day, it was far more of a good thing than a bad.

We travelled up to Ubud in the island's foothills and went to the giant swing and the monkey forest. We saw fire dancing at Uluwatu and Burong dancing in Ubud. We drove through Kuta and strolled along the beach at Seminyak. We a seafood dinner serended by the Balinese equivalent of a Mariachi band on Jimbaran beach. And everywhere we went, we were looked after and smiled at.

All too quickly, our nine days were up and we were on our way home.

We touched down through a pall of thick clouds into a drizzling October morning, sending pictures of what now looked like impossibly wide roads to our driver back in Bali.

Coming down off the holiday high occurred quickly. Pretty much as soon as we discovered our car had a flat tire in the deserted long-term carpark.

A bit of elbow grease put us back on the road and eventually got everyone home but it was a slightly gloomy process and I longed for the constant sun of Bali.

It was then that I had the chance to ponder.

There are many places in Melbourne where the stream of constant traffic can be heard day and night but my housemate's home in the hills is not one of them. The quiet was such a contrast! At once oppressive and relaxing.

I know I frequently rely on that quiet to do my writing. However, I found there were many times I wrote in the midst of the chaos in Bali. And what I've noticed is that I've come back full. Full of experiences, new sensations and therefore stories.

As my mind belches these things onto the page, I notice the eucalypts in the garden contrast sharply with the fragrant frangipani of Bali and I miss the way people smile so much and create a bridge between their soul and yours with their insistent communication.

Coming back from a place that operates completely differently from my home makes me pause. It gently forces me to examine that which I view as commonplace, as standard practice and wonder if there are better ways of doing things. Some some things about Bali were truly inconvenient, some overwhelming but others opened my heart and mind, creating this reverse culture shock when I returned home.

I remember returning to the American midwest some years ago. It was a place I'd lived in for several years and as the plane drew near and I heard all the warm, Johny Carson type accents around me, I realised I'd planted a seed in my heart when I left and it had turned into a full-on tree.

I tend to think that happens to me pretty much every place I go. I plant a seed there and the place, the people plant seeds in my heart that grow. They expand to become integral threads in the very fabric of me.

So what will I keep of Bali? I think one thing will be the way people really mean it when they smile. I think I'll adopt some of their hustle, their smiling, insistent salesmanship, the "look at what I have, isn't it wonderful, don't you want it?" And I think every now and then I might burn a little frangipani perfumed incense and call in blessings for myself and everyone I love.