TRISTES TROPIQUES

“Hello, my friend, you need sarong? Taxi? Hashish? I give you good price!”

The offers, polite but aggressive, followed us everywhere we wandered around Bali last week, from the motorbike-choked streets of Kuta to the near-deserted sands of Gili Air to the overgrown interior of Lombok. We had come to Bali to escape the incessant noise of South Korea, searching for the much-touted beaches backed by rice terraces and birdsong.

And we found them...but so had hordes of Bintang-guzzling Australian surfers, their biceps the size of tree trunks, drawing the peddlers of Pringles and hash like ants to a picnic. It wasn’t until our last night, when we decided to splurge on a stay at one of the many immaculate resorts, that we realized the key to our peace and quiet was the walls keeping out the hawkers--and Bali along with them.

Perhaps appropriately, I was reading Tristes Tropiques, a book by the anthropologist and self-proclaimed travel hater Claude Levi-Strauss. In 1955 he wrote of his journeys, “Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty-towns are spreading across Africa...what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history?”