The Other Side of the Gate

Hello Walkers— I am writing this from Tbilisi, with August still on my mind. Most of it was spent in Bali, working remotely and moving slowly across the island: Balangan in the south, then Candi Dasa in the east, Canggu, and finally Ubud, with a twenty-hour layover in Chengdu on the way back to Rome. I arrived with a walker’s habits and discovered that Bali does not want to be walked. Outside the hotel in Candi Dasa there were almost no sidewalks, and where one existed it had given up long ago. The road belonged to scooters, trucks, and dogs. For someone who uses a twenty-kilometer walk as a way of thinking, this is a strange kind of confinement. So I stopped trying to walk the island and started looking at what it kept putting in front of me—doors and gates—those gorgeous, majestic doors and gates picked from illustrated fantasy books set in a parallel universe. On the drive from Candi Dasa to Canggu we stopped at the water palaces of Taman Ujung and Tirta Gangga, the temple at…