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The art of doing nothing in Bali

BALI — It’s a real First World Problem when you have to go back to school to learn how to live. As a stereotypical nerve-frazzled journalist with eyebags like open manholes and a raging caffeine addiction, I was just the kind of person who needed to enroll in the School Of Life programme at Tembok, Bali’s Spa Village Resort — a curriculum of yoga, meditation, healthy meals and spa treatments specially designed to help harried urbanites de-stress, detox and de-zombiefy.

BALI — It’s a real First World Problem when you have to go back to school to learn how to live. As a stereotypical nerve-frazzled journalist with eyebags like open manholes and a raging caffeine addiction, I was just the kind of person who needed to enroll in the School Of Life programme at Tembok, Bali’s Spa Village Resort — a curriculum of yoga, meditation, healthy meals and spa treatments specially designed to help harried urbanites de-stress, detox and de-zombiefy.

On the other hand, I also had a sense of trepidation about getting away from it all. For starters, the only thing I knew about yoga was how to spell it. My idea of strenuous physical activity is riding the MRT standing up. And before I filled in the form the resort sent me, which would help them customise my itinerary, I had never even thought about my bowels, much less how often I moved them. What was I in for?

CURRICULUM VITALITY

School started pleasantly enough, with an airport pickup in a car equipped with cucumber salad and lemon water in a flask. After a scenic three-hour drive, I arrived at the resort in the north of Bali and was greeted with a footbath and neck massage. Then the blow fell: Wi-Fi confiscation. All of the resort’s rooms were deviously disconnected.

The next morning’s first lesson soon took my mind off the pain with more pain: Hatha yoga at the ungodly hour of 7am. I am the sort of “hangry” person who can’t do anything before breakfast, so while I was contorting my body into the Resting Cat position, I was really thinking of Double-glazed Pig strips.

At breakfast, however, I was to discover that the recommended School Of Life menu consisted not of bacon and eggs but of something called “Activated Bircher Muesli”. It may look like horse-chewed food but it actually tasted very good. Also on the timetable was a healthy-cooking class by the chef, in which we made fruit smoothies with cashew milk; craft lesson is whipping up our own natural body scrubs from ginger, cloves and rice, and a Creativity Walk on the pebbly, black-sand beach, during which we looked for rocks and other castaway objects and made “art” out of them. You know, because one man’s trash is another man’s hippie dream.

As for night activities, it was a bout of weightless star gazing — on a floating mattress, in the swimming pool. Stars are persona non grata in the metropolis but here, they vied to crowd one another out of the night sky. Softly rocked by tiny ripples, with the lullaby of the waves crashing onto the beach, I was beginning to succeed in suppressing distracting thoughts (“Starlight navigation? Don’t have Google maps meh?”) and relaxing my synapses. A gentle snore escaped. I’d found my best subject in School.

ALMA MATER

Of course, it would take a lot more than four days for the School Of Life to reform a recalcitrant delinquent like me. But really, one could get used to the rigours of school: The poolside cabanas; the nightly herbal flower baths drawn in one’s own room; the daily spas of mud wraps, scrubs and three-point detoxifying massages; the excursion to the nearby waterfall … even if I snuck off often to use Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby and feast on babi guling. It must also be said that Spa Village Resort has other factors going for it: It’s cosy and peaceful (read: remote), no kids under 16 are allowed, and its executive chef, Martin Buchele, still manages to turn out healthy and delicious Indon-fusion meals like red rice nasi goreng and the best eggplant and chicken salad I’ve ever tasted — while fending off the advances of single, female Eat Pray Love fans.

So maybe I didn’t graduate summa cum laude. But hey, I emerged, glowing with organic coconut water-induced good health.

 

This trip was made possible by YTL Hotels.

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