The first time I set foot in Bali, a lifetime ago, in 1984, I knew the place was just too good to be true. For $5 a night I had a whole cottage of my own in a tropical garden, to which a beautiful girl brought fresh fruit and tea every morning, with rice fields just across the lane. A golden, palmy beach was five minutes walk away, and in the hills not far away was a never-ending pageant of cremations, ceremonies and silk-clad women walking to their temples. Either this should cost $500 a night, I decided, or there must be some shadow to it; Paradise rarely comes without an asterisk.

For the only time in all my years of traveling, I was right, on both counts. Nowadays it does cost $500, or $1,000—or $1,400—to get a piece of the Balinese dream I savored; and bombings in 2002 and then in 2005 have reminded everyone of what paradise, or at least tourist success, brings in its wake. If you seek to entice foreigners carrying open wallets, as Bali has done, you also bring in outsiders carrying hidden explosives; and if you really believe the Hindu island in the middle of Islamic Indonesia is a newfound Garden, you have to remember that Eden was most famous for its snakes.

The development of Paradise—what is good for it versus what is good for the eager foreigner—has been the central theme of Bali ever since the first Westerners began to settle down there eighty years ago. If the first impulse of every arriving newcomer was to declare he’d landed in Paradise, the second was to decide that Paradise would be lost as soon as the next newcomer arrived. By 1930, Hickman Powell was publishing a book on Bali called The Last Paradise, and within a decade the great Mexican artist, Miguel Covarrubias, author of the defining Island of Bali, was writing, ” ‘Isn’t Bali spoiled’ is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler from Bali—meaning, is the island overrun by tourists, and are the Balinese all wearing shorts?”

In time, the famously bare-chested local maidens who had attracted the attention of the world were covering up, even as the latest arrivals from Marseilles or Düsseldorf were stripping off. More than anywhere in the world, including Tahiti or Tibet, Bali became a parable of what happens when any place notable for its innocence of the world gets discovered by the world: nowadays the visitor driving in from the airport sees an unbroken Malled City of massage parlors, Vegas-worthy karaoke parlors, MTV bars offering “Costume Dancers” and scruffy surfers’ shacks and shops selling “No Money, No Honey” T-shirts. Escape up into the hills, and the cultural centers of Ubud, and you will be greeted by used kimono stores, Brahma Kumari’s World Spiritual University and so many Coach and Dolce & Gabbana outlets that you realize that you really must have arrived in Osaka.

Yet look closer, as you always should do in Bali, and see what it has that the islands of the Gulf of Siam or the beaches of the Philippines do not. The darkness was chattering around me when I stepped out of my exquisite villa in Amandari my first morning in Bali this summer, and the key to my room, as in no other place I visited, depicted a weird lion-headed dog from the other world. Down the road, later in the day, women in their finest silks were walking, with a straight-backed majesty, home from the temple, large baskets on their heads, and disappearing off into the dark. After nightfall, all I could hear was the gamelan, jangled and insistent, clanking from the cluster of houses across the valley in the night.

The beauty of Bali is precisely the elusiveness of Bali, and the fact that most of what is happening, in the air, the soil, around you, is taking place in a language you can’t decipher. To this day, foreigners I met began telling me of the ghosts they’d seen beside—or even inside—their beds, and one recalled how she’d had a seizure here. On my first trip to the island, I fell under the spell (quite literally, I now think) of a local girl, and then had a different kind of spell cast on me when I wanted to say goodbye (I couldn’t move for several days). I bought an owl mask to take back home, and as soon as I put it on the wall of my apartment in Manhattan, the darkness became so intense that I had to yank the mask down and put it where I’d never see it again.

It is the shadows that endure in Bali, at least here and there, and that remind us of how much in the place is out of reach, and charged. Locals still pray, after all, at a temple within the Hyatt Hotel, and the five-star resorts built along the previously neglected strip of Nusa Dua have temples all around them. There is said to be one room in the Grand Bali Beach Hotel that is reserved for a goddess (and when a fire gutted the place in 1993, only that room survived).

My first evening on Bali on my most recent trip to the island, my fifth, a group of local experts told me of the wild dreams and witches they’d encountered in the place. The one Balinese among us said nothing and smiled enigmatically, as if merely amused. Then he told us how when he went to Australia “I saw this figure by my bed, a little one. He was trying to pull me away.” Later, as he drove me back to Amandari through the dark, he spoke of a “black magic” healer down the road who had just cured his brother of a stroke, the same stroke that had doctors at the hospital throwing up their hands. He began speaking of “left-handed tantra” and the ancestors who were everywhere, why his Australian wife could not hang her laundry higher than the temple.

As he dropped me at my hotel, he said that the one book I should read on Bali was called Bali: Sekala and Niskala. It means, he said, The Seen and the Unseen. What it really meant was that everything I could see in Bali—all those “Osama Can’t Surf” t-shirts and new oceanfront villas—didn’t really have anything to do with what was going on at all.

Pico Iyer, June 2007