There’s only one world, but it looks different from the other side, but it doesn’t.

Bali is a sensory smorgasbord. For the eyes: birds and flowers, the beach, the trees. The elaborate carvings and outrageous, wonderful architectural ornamentation. For the ears, wind and waves, geckos (who make a noise like “gecko, gecko”), again the birds. And on and on. 

Now add people, and you start to tip into sensory overload. Burkas and bikinis side by side, pink tourists like me in all our overfed grandeur, hotel staff who play their china-doll roles to eerie perfection, beach vendors with radiant but toothless grins. Expat surfers living their “simple life” dream. Regular people for whom simplicity is truly simple, since they’re living with next to nothing. 

Keep adding: the smells and sounds of frying onions and burning brush and motor scooters. Add tennis thump-whack and swimming pool squeal-splash. Add a pile of trash right outside the carved walls, and three people to pick through it. Add 300 who truly need the leftover food and the blown-out flip flops. And even more who need the electricity I’m using for full strength wi-fi reception and wafts of Kenny G all the way at the edge of the resort.  

Now add the heady but vertiginous feeling of being a millionaire in Rupiah, no, a billionaire. I spent a Trumpian 100,000 on a chili dog just now. It’s a glorious place all on its own, and it’s certainly glorious to be one of Us ver here, a visitor from a different world. 

But it’s not a different world. I know the smoke I smell is at least part rain forest, and I know some of these people will die young for lack of medicine and sanitation. Bali, like every tropical paradise in today’s world, a world made so much smaller by jets and standardized electric outlets, is tinged with the complexities and inequalities and contradictions that we can’t – shouldn’t , mustn’t – avoid. 

So, back to today: blender drinks and sunshine, and thank the lucky stars to have been born me, from my world. Tomorrow: try to earn the CO2 I released to get here. Put on my big fat nerd hat and explain electronic health data sharing to a phalanx of Asian officials. Hopefully I’ll convince them (or at least their NGO benefactors who will be listening from the back row) to let us share some more of what we have, what we know, and help make the world a little smaller.