JoAnneh Nagler

It’s four-thirty in the afternoon on the East Coast of Bali and we’re lingering in the late afternoon sun, dangling our feet in the rocky, stone-rimmed infinity pool, just steps away from a black sand beach.  All we’ve done all day long is lounge in the dappled sunlight and read to each other.  Now we’re drinking cocktails made of Arak, a palm based alcohol that our elixir-prone hosts at the Feng Shui hideaway Dancing Dragons Cottages have concocted for our sheer, altered state pleasure.  And between sips and sentences, we’re staring, gloriously mesmerized, up at a vivid-white, luminescent daytime moon.

We were traveling on the internet down-low:  packaged, last-minute, and with a “beach-friendly” sticker price.  I had been longing for something off-track—coastal Lima or an obscure Columbian island I’d heard of while in Honduras—but I had already traipsed my fiancé through the off-season Mexican jungle just months ago, and he decided to put his foot down.  “Hawaii,” he insisted, “simple and easy.”