We came here to leave it all behind

The journey took longer than we planned, but we finally made it to Bali. From a purely logistical standpoint, the credit (and the blame) goes to Philippine Airlines, which rebuffed my hostile takeover bid by serving me a dodgy chicken satay. My lawyers are looking into the matter, but based on my limited knowledge of aviation law, doing someone dirty isn’t actionable.

No matter.

We are in Bali!

See👇

Seminyak beach

On our first morning in Bali, Christina and I tried to remember the last time we went abroad. I thought it was Amsterdam. Christina thought it was our trip to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

“It was definitely before the pandemic,” I said.

“Technically, we were in Canadian waters on our Alaskan cruise,” Christina said.

That was true. When we went to Alaska in June, we also went to Canada. But what we were actually trying to recall was the last time we felt that feeling you get when you leave it all behind. For some reason, Mexico counts on that score, but Canada doesn’t. Don’t ask me why; I don’t make the rules.

One of the joys of traveling abroad is that you get to leave your country behind for a time. In fact, the farther you go from home, the more you find yourself out of synch with the mothership. I consider that asynchrony a joy because, frankly, sometimes you just need a break. Maybe that’s why we chose Bali. It’s so far away from the U.S. that you can’t help but drop out of the daily dramas that occupy America’s attention.

By way of example, the Indonesian man who drove us from the airport to our hotel didn’t ask about inflation, or the upcoming election, or the shit-show at Twitter. Instead, we talked about the rain, Hindu temples, Bali’s popularity with the TikTok crowd, and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. The conversation was a delight, even if far too much praise was heaped on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Hanging out by the pool, I eavesdropped on a French family. I don’t speak French, but I’m sure they weren’t talking about free speech, guns, or the culture wars. I’d like to think they were talking about Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Breathless, because I like to think that cinema is the essential subject for all French people. But that’s probably wishful thinking on my part. Regardless, the experience was delightful, even if it was indecipherable.

When we got massages, nobody spoke at all. That was also a delight, but in a different way. For the first time in a long time—for seventy-five blissful minutes—I didn’t think about America, or my life, or anything at all. For the first time since the last time we went abroad—wherever it was that we went—I felt as though I had left it all behind, in the best possible sense of that phrase.

Like Arnold, we’ll be back one day. But for now, we are in Bali. And now that we’re finally here, it feels as though we’re beginning to unplug from what we know and plug into something new.