That first night in Bali, still jangled and discombobulated from two days and nights in the air, from New York, through Tokyo, to Jakarta and then here, I wandered out onto the beach at dead of night, and a figure appeared, smiling, and asked if I'd like "jig-jig" or some carnal services I couldn't follow. I woke up often in the dark, fitful and scratchy, mosquitoes whining all around, and when I went out again at dawn, I found I had landed up on a pockmarked lane, with psychedelic paintings hanging from storefronts, and demon masks fringed with human hair, and a few long-hairs slumped among the bushes, deadened by the magic they'd eaten or smoked.

I sat on the beach, that first day at sunset, and watched bare-chested boys frolicking among the reddening waves, and snake-armed masseuses packing away their charms, as in some Gauguin fantasy. A girl came over and sat down beside me. "I saw two flowers in my dream last night, and one of them was you," she said. "I put that flower in my hair." She wasn't beautiful, and I could hardly see her face for the sarongs she was carrying on her head, and the night that was falling around us. But I followed her, and followed her down the beach, and into the dark, till I could see nothing but the whites of her eyes and her teeth.

We walked along the buzzing lanes, dogs howling on every side. She took me to a night-market, a movie and then, again, into the whirring back streets, where, in memory, I can see her eyes burning. I remember her sobbing, I remember her panting, and laughing when least I expected it.

In the nights that ensued, we went deep into the interior, through magic forests and small towns, into candlelit guesthouses at midnight. We walked on a beach where couples walk under a huge full moon. She laughed as I unbuttoned my shirt, and dug her nails into my arm.

All the best journeys, I have always felt, are like love affairs, not least because they turn you inside out and leave you within a darkness where you can't tell right from left or good from bad. And all love affairs are like journeys, deep into a foreign country, where you can't read the signs, and you don't know the language and you are drawn into a wilderness alive with mystery and possibility, and the knowledge -- certain knowledge -- that who you were is irretrievable.

But in Bali, the whole spell is heightened and intensified, as in some charged re-creation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," where queens fall in love with asses, and young men lose their heads. In Bali, lovers sit all night with the image of their devotion in a coconut-lamp, or catch unwilling souls with moon coins and magic potions made from a serpent's saliva mixed with an infant's tears.

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