The line up of grinning, life-sized robotic images instead of immigration officers at Bali’s airport welcoming us with manic enthusiasm on Monday turned out to be a mirage. The passport scanning machines were brand new but not working, forcing most travellers into queues manned by very few officers.
This mechanical malfunction was after Indonesian e-visas and-e arrival cards had made the process both easier and more complicated. Indonesia requires pointless ‘captcha’ codes to be deciphered by visitors, but Indian e-arrival formalities are still more difficult to complete on a computer screen because a balloon unhelpfully obscures the code.
Meanwhile, in Europe this summer chaotic immigration queues even led to some flights taking off without several passengers caught in the snarl of bureaucratic overreach. If this dystopian travel experience is a forerunner of human-supervised artificial intelligence, we should all worry.
And, there is the rub. Online bookings may nowadays require just a few clicks, but tourist destinations are frequently overwhelmed by tourists searching for Instagrammable moments.
The Bali I first encountered was two decades ago when I rushed to the island after a terrorist bombing on Kuta beach and in Jimbaran Bay to write an article criticizing warnings by Western governments not to travel to Bali. Now, it is the congestion at popular destinations that I worry about, starting with airport immigration queues.
I am guilty of considering myself a traveller while maintaining that “the other fellow is a tourist,” as the late novelist Evelyn Waugh observed. Today, visitors from different countries make Bali or Florence feel like its attractions are under siege from a non-violent infantry toting selfie sticks and marching behind tour guides with colourful flags.
As far back as 1988, in a collection of essays titled Holidays from Hell, American humourist P.J. O’Rourke complained about just about every nationality abroad, starting with his own to “peevish Swiss, smelly Norwegian backpackers yodelling in restaurants” to Japanese who travelled in large groups and Germans by the hotel poolside.
Almost 20 years ago, I published a collection of travel essays that celebrated the fact that overseas travel could be enjoyed by tens of millions of travellers from Asia and argued that burdensome visa regimes needed to catch up.
The world of travel is thankfully more egalitarian now, but I paradoxically travel much less. My memories of visiting places such as Kerala’s backwaters or taking rowing lessons, gondola-style standing up, in Venice decades ago are crowded out by visions of throngs at these destinations.
Covid brain fog for me was unusual: the two lockdowns in India as well as government-mandated extreme social distancing felt akin to solitary confinement. I felt cut off from friends elsewhere in India and around the world while becoming inoculated against wanderlust.
I am now the very opposite of the adventurous traveller I once posed as. Gone are the days of jumping on a plane to Dakar in Senegal to listen to its incredible posse of singers from Youssou N’Dour to Orchestra Baobab in concerts that sometimes lasted till 5am. No more do I travel to Beijing or Bali as I once did, or for literary festivals. Instead, I enjoy travel most when seeing friends instead of sightseeing.
The bizarre effect is to feel more deeply connected to places than I did before. On this visit to Bali, I stayed first with friends in a made-for-movies minimalist villa in Cemagi.
I arrived, after a two-hour drive from the airport through clogged roads reminiscent of Bengaluru, to a lunch that felt like a reunion with them and other friends. I arrived at another friend’s home in Bali to find almost every dinner over the week was a different event, one of which was a conservation project to save fireflies.
This week, I attended the memorial in Ubud of a Malaysian friend and renowned gallerist and bon vivant, done largely according to local customs. His partner of more than three decades left the event’s organization, lunch included, to his staff because, as he self-deprecatingly explained, his partner handled this sort of thing.
Instead of the void, one felt the presence of his partner on an occasion that included Balinese dance and a traditional gamelan mini-orchestra. Youngsters gave tributes to a favourite gay uncle who had mentored them. Hundreds of solitary marigolds hung from trees in a rock garden he had designed. Simple offerings of frangipani and bougainvillea were in lacquered trays that resembled crowns.
Beryl de Zoete, who published a book on Balinese dance in 1938, wrote that even then, when Charlie Chaplin and other Hollywood stars visited the island, there were people who said “Bali was too spoiled to be worth a visit.” Her rebuttal was forceful. “Bali is neither a last nor a lost paradise,” but home to people “who have a great sense of humour and a great sense of style where their own traditions are concerned.”
At a memorial that combined sumptuous colour in a seemingly effortless ritual of remembrance and celebration, those words rang true some 90 years later.
The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.