Over the past week, I've had the honor to attend a lifetime long friend's wedding in the Island of the Gods - Bali! I had no idea what to expect when I agreed to go. All I had in mind was that I was to be there for her on her special day. After everyone left when the wedding ended, I took a couple of days to explore the island by myself. Never did I imagine that I would experience such different Bali's:
There was the Paradise Bali.
The one with the beautiful and elegant wedding, with its opaque blue infinity pools, elegant contemporary simpleness, with dimly lit candle lights and soft dreamy music. The one with smooth black sand beaches and its perfect waves, laying under the equatorial sun with a glass of cocktail on a colorful beanbag chair. The one designed and constructed to live up to the paradise behind-the-desk people dream of having their vacation of a lifetime.
Then there was the Backpacker Bali.
The one with unpaved streets, roosters running wild, with its scattered temples of intrinsic stone carvings, its prayers and sacred offerings and traditional dancing. And I don't mean just its distinctive Hindu culture, there were also the Muslim villages and everything else "Indonesian". The one with its mountainous landscapes, godly volcanoes and reflective lakes, its lush jungles and its fisherman coasts.
Just for fun, I wanted to compare the pictures of my two very different journeys throughout this dynamic island set so uniquely in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago. It's just so interesting to see how different it gets once you leave the Paradise Bali in the south and head towards the Backpackers Bali everywhere else!
