The first thing my wife says when we get off the plane in Bali is: “God, I love that smell.” She said this the last time we were here, in 2015, so I know that it’s not some made-up thing. And she says this as we are disembarking, when we are within spitting distance of the plane’s hulking, soot-smeared turbines, when really all we should be able to smell is avgas and the person who was sitting beside us for seven hours.
But no, there it is, that signature Bali smell, a full-body olfactory embrace of incense, clove cigarettes, over-ripe fruit and flowers, laced with motorbike exhaust, rotting vegetable matter and cooking smoke. It’s quite a smell. So much of a smell, in fact, that even I, who has absolutely no sense of smell, can smell it.
Or think I can. I first went to Bali in 1985, as a 16-year-old, with my parents. Back then, I was obsessed with three things: one, the idea of perfect surf, which there was; two, the potential for marijuana growing wild, as I had been told by a mate at school; and three, cheap music.
Records were still expensive at home, but in the tourist centres of Kuta and Legian there were shops selling cheap bootleg cassette tapes. For the price of one album in Sydney I could buy an entire archive of music, everything I’d ever dreamt of, at a fraction of the price. There was also, to the callow orientalist in me, the sense that Bali, with its pre-dawn mists and inscrutable gods, was a portal to the mystical East.
I told myself that I wou.
