Bali: I learn to slow down and enjoy the thick jungle, rugged peaks and quiet of the island

I race up the jagged steps cut into a steep cliff face and grip on to the scattered bamboo branches that poke out from the thick mass of the surrounding jungle. At the top, I land at the hotel restaurant in an open plan wooden bale, a traditional wooden building that overlooks a dense forest shrouded in a heavy mist. The sky looks like it will burst at any moment. In the distance, you can just about make out the rugged peak of Mount Batukaru.

I’m out of breath.

“We like to remind people to slow down when they come here,” says the waiter who takes me to my seat. “The steps won’t tire you if you take your time.”

Slow down? It’s advice that I needed to take at the start of 2024. I was in Bali earlier this year for a long-awaited honeymoon – delayed first because of the world shutting down, and then for another two years because of the situation we found ourselves in after it opened back up again.

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My husband and I had thought 2019 was a big year for us – we had crowdfunded, built and then opened a new space for our business in Dublin 8. We got married there six weeks later in a wave of exhaustion and happiness. Then in early 2020, my father-in-law died and we landed in Dublin Airport on the way home from the funeral in the UK to the news that the country was going into lockdown.

Since then, pandemic has become a dirty word. I catch myself from starting sentences with “Well, during Covid ...” for fear of boring anyone. But for people running small businesses that time was more than just a series of lockdowns, it was followed by the most almighty hangover that has been almost impossible to shake.

There was a point when I felt I had limitless energy. While every new announcement was a shock, it was also a challenge to be met head-on. We can’t host an exhibition? Put the exhibition in the windows. No people inside? Let’s put a restaurant in the car park spaces. There were hot sauces made in huge pots and hampers packed on our diningroom table, and date night boxes so we could keep our chef in work. Writing was saved for crafting reassuring emails to our team and impassioned letters to TDs. Survival mode kicked in and the rest of life was put on hold.

Within that dark time, there was a sense of joy and a newfound community that I had never felt before. We built art installations, hosted outdoor book launches, won an award for our outdoor dining, had the best-loved grocery for a minute, and became a destination in our neighbourhood. We survived.

Then someone turned the lights on in early 2022 and we found ourselves wide-eyed and alone, looking around at stacks of cardboard boxes and rusting railings of our car park restaurant, wondering what had just happened. The anticipated summer of love following the world opening up became even more uncertain than what had come before as the world grappled with the outbreak of war in Ukraine and a cost-of-living crisis.

The term “fight or flight” wove itself into everyday conversations. Social media started targeting me with adverts for exercises that could help me tackle the impact of cortisol on my body. Physical anxiety became real and every morning started with my brain searching through its list for the thing to worry about that day.

When I bump into fellow business owners, we share war stories. We all look like we’ve been dragged through a bush backwards, despite how we come across online: confident, sure-footed. In private, we all think we are alone – in the decisions we made at a time when no one knew what would happen one day to the next. We keep looking backward wondering why we even stayed open at all.

The two years since have been like the peeling of an onion, removing the layers built up through our own creativity and the necessity to just keep going, to get back to what and who and why and how.

There is something about the air in Bali – it is more than that hot gush of air when you get off a plane that signals holiday time. The predominantly Hindu island is unique in the majority Muslim collection of islands that make up Indonesia. The people are renowned for their charm, welcome and sense of humour. Incense burns outside of homes and businesses, and the gentle hum of chants and bells of ceremonies drift across the wind.

We fly into the island’s capital Denpasar. From there up the western coast stretches the heaving resort of Kuta and the more luxurious Seminyak, popular with Australians for whom Bali is their version of the Canary Islands. The further up the coast you go, the calmer it gets, into the coastal village of Canggu where surfers and yogis sip perfect flat whites in Melbourne-style cafes.

We rent a small apartment near there. It’s low season on the island so we’re alone in a lot of the places we visit. We sleep, we eat, we bob around the sea. We walk around our neighbourhood, under tangled webs of electricity wires and broken pavements, past street food sellers selling plastic bags filled with fragrant, steaming soups. We order nasi goreng and beef rendang served with spicy sambals that get delivered by boys on mopeds.

I fight an internal battle with myself that we should be doing more. We aren’t ticking things off a list. I’ve forgotten how to stop.

We talk a lot about what has happened.

There are tours across the island advertised as “Instagram tours”, where you are whistle-stopped to perfectly placed backdrops for social media: swings that fly out across rice paddy fields, waterfalls that create the perfect photo frame and underwater scenes where coral sparkles and colourful fish dance around you. We decide to make our own path and begin to explore.

Our boat out to the islands is delayed. Impatience creeps in as we sit on the packed ferry. But we’re not in a rush. The last ticket holders finally come running down the pier – a couple with a small dog and half-drunk bottles of beer. They’ve been up all night. They flop into their seats, feet up on the deck. Carefree.

Nusa Lembongan is one of a trio of smaller islands off the south coast of Bali. These islands are less developed and there are few cars in the village that we land in. It curves in a thin strip along the white sandy beach. The crystal clear waters lap gently at the moored boats. We take a boat out snorkelling, floating on the top of the water as giant manta rays glide below us, silent and otherworldly.

The spiritual and creative centre of the island is Ubud. Driving inland from the coast, local artisans line the road with their crafts – colourful ceramics, wood-carved masks and giant stone sculptures. The town was immortalised in Elizabeth Gilbert’s book and film Eat, Pray, Love where the character played by Julia Roberts travels and eats her way around three countries, before finding herself again with the help of a Balinese guru and a passionate love affair.

Ubud has developed a lot since that book was published in 2006. It has become a haven for digital nomads who escape the noise and expense of their lives in cities around the world. They swap crushing commutes and unaffordable rents for a slower, more manageable pace of life. With them has come high-concept restaurants and traffic. But the soul and magic of Ubud remains intact.

We stay in a hotel outside of the village called Tanah Gajah – it’s in the former summer house of Hadiprana, the founder of Indonesia’s first art gallery. The hotel sits near the 9th century Goa Gajah or Elephant Cave and ornate sculptures of elephants dot the entranceway. In a yoga class in a pagoda overlooking a pond on the grounds, the teacher tells me to breathe as he presses me deeper into a stretch. The rich vibrations of the sound of a gong wash over me.

Further north, the traffic gives way to thick jungle and rugged peaks with ancient and intricate rice paddy terraces cut into them. Here the peace and quiet of the island is undisturbed. In a temple, I’m welcomed by a group of older women who sit in the shade of the pagoda. They give me flowers and incense to make my own offering. I don’t pray, but I do here.

In Buahan, our bedroom is in a small, but perfectly structured, hut that is hooked into the edge of a cliff. The open-air room looks out across the vast valley beneath. There is no sound other than the creak of the trees and the flutter of birds. A tropical rainstorm comes and we sit still. The roaring sound of the rain cocoons us and the world stops for a moment.

We begin to talk about what the future might hold. For the first time in four years we feel like we might be able to look ahead at what’s possible, instead of back at what we think we could and should have done.

While we’re away there’s a slew of restaurants and cafes closures announced across Ireland. These are much-loved, popular businesses that simply can’t shoulder the soaring costs of running a business, the increase in the VAT rate for hospitality and the upcoming un-warehousing of Covid tax debt. It feels like this tsunami of closures that we had all seen coming finally catches the attention of the media. “I can’t believe they could close,” “But they were doing so well,” are the common cries.

It sounds like the Government might start paying attention to what we’ve been living through for the past two years. We get a glimmer of hope that there might be some reprieve for the hangover of that word that we don’t speak of any more.

We stop, breathe deeply, and return home. Ready to go again.

Rosie Gogan-Keogh is a writer and business owner from Dublin.