Sarah Manley

Probably not many people can say that they bought an international airline ticket to Bali, Indonesia in a state of blissful ignorance towards the island’s mythic image as a timeless and exotic Eastern paradise. A place just waiting for Western visitors to lose themselves along the white sand beaches of Sanur and rediscover their true selves across the expansive rice terraces rising along the Southern volcanic slopes.

But I did.

All I knew about this island as my best friend and I finalized our flight information in a delirious, admittedly ill-informed and adventurous moment three months ago from his bedroom in California was that it was humid, probably had some vegetarian food I’d never had before, and that people played gamelan there. We had had the privilege of playing gamelan, or Indonesian percussive music, at our elite pseudo-public four year University which, by the way, we had just graduated from, knowledgably endowed but still novice to the world and its wiles.