Travel Book Review ~ A House in Bali by Colin McPhee

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Before I travel, I get obsessed about the place I’m going to and try to read a few books to give me a taste of what’s to come, or at least build a sense of culture or feel before landing there. A little cultural heads up before plunging into the real thing. Reading this book before travelling to Bali proved to be more fruitful than I would have expected. The fact that it was written about seventy years before I got there made it quite other wordly. I also have a slight addiction to travel writing before visas, restrictions and globalisation killed off the unique experience of travel, which this book also greatly fulfilled.

After hearing a gamelan recording, the Canadian author ventured around the world to record the music of the island of Bali and invented a method of music notation to write his own Balinese style compositions. He records more than just the musical styles – the customs, lifestyle, food and religious beliefs are spread throughout the experiences of musical discovery. There are wonderful studies of the people that assist McPhee on his musical mission, and their acceptance of him in their lives.

On our trip to Bali in 2009, we stayed at the site of the original house (Sayan Terrace Resort, a big thumbs up by us and Lonely Planet) in Sayan, outside Ubud, which gave you a small idea of what the writer would have experienced. The original house itself is gone, but there is still a sense of what he experienced when you stare at the river valley in the quiet of the evening. The thought of him travelling down from the mountains to Kuta and getting some locals to build him a hut on the beach was almost too much to take in a “I wish it was still like that’ kind of way.

This book makes either an easy introduction to Bali or a wonderful read post travel. It rewards with its charm, partly a product of the time of writing, but also from the spirit of adventure and passion of the author to take himself outside of the western world he knew and plunge into a fantastic strange culture. And isn’t that why we all travel?

Incidentally, if you do happen to stay at the Sayan Terrace resort make sure you have a ‘Sayan Campur’ for dinner across the road, it was one of the best meals we had in Indonesia. Note this warung is in somebody’s backyard with no signs, the hotel staff will cheerfully point it out, they eat there too…

How about this passage describing Kuta seventy years ago....

"Kuta, where I now went very often to pitch my tent for several days, was a small fishing village on the south coast, all sunshine and coral. Even the little temples were made of blocks of coral, and in the daytime, as the sunlight filtered through the palms, the village lay bathed in the tenderest gold and green.

The beach stretched in a wide crescent, and at low tide you could drive a car for miles along the wet sand. Here in the later afternoon after a swim, I would stroll with Duras or Lebah, looking for pools among the few scattered rocks for sea anemones, or picking up shells, tawny bishop's mitres, Venus combs or shining porcelain olivias. Along the edge of the beach stood a row of tentlike shelters to shade the fisherman's praus from the sun, and for some months I had been thinking of building a hut in this fashion near by, where I could come from time to time as a change from the hills."

 Click here to see if we have a copy in stock.