Rice paddies, Tabanan regency.

1. Out on the street, you rip your favourite shirt: disaster? No! there’s a tailor within 100 yards, who’ll whip it off you, let you wait in the change room and stitch it up, better than new, for $1, in five minutes. 
2. Run out of petrol in the middle of the street? Someone will sell you an old Absolut Vodka bottle of petrol for a buck, and nobody’ll scream while you refill the car, which has stopped in the middle of the street.
3. A happy, friendly, competent nanny costs $6 an hour, leaving you free to nip down to the spa for a:
4. $20 facial, $10 pedicure, $20 hour-long massage.
5. Kangkung: water spinach lightly cooked with sliced garlic and chilli. Alone, worth the trip to Bali.
6. Year-round warmth. It may rain occasionally, but even the rain is warm. 
7. Easy visas: you pays your $20 at the door, you gets in. No queuing for six weeks with the chance of getting rejected (hello, India, China?) Remembering the 150,000Rp departure tax is a bit of a pain, but there are plenty of people to remind you. 
8. Juice-tastic breakfasts: mango, watermelon, papaya, mint, all with a
   healthy dose of ginger. Pure goodness, right from first light.

Alila Villas Soori.

9. Pools. Is it physically possible to rent a Balinese hotel room/villa without a pool? Well, yes, I guess if you are staying in a losmen (the super, super cheap Indonesian digs which can comprise just a single bed and a squattie loo). Otherwise, bring on the daily swim!
10. Find your style: you can do swank, you can do budget. You can do whatever you want on the island, from Bulgari to backpacker.

A happy gong player in a cremation ceremony, Tabanan.

We were pottering through the loveliest little village in west Bali when suddenly the street was blocked by a procession of about 100 people.

The procession was led by women in beautiful costumes bearing offerings, men playing gong (gamelan), a stick bearer and lots of folk walking behind them.

It was a pretty procession, and I wound down the window of my car and took plenty of pretty photographs. Everyone smiled and waved, happy to be snapped.

The procession finally finished and we started on our way again, and I asked Nata, my guide, what the occasion was.

“It was a cremation ceremony,” he explained.

But they all seemed so happy!

A schoolgirl from Jakarta stopped and asked me if she could take a photo of me for her English school project. No worries, I said. Her friends jumped in the photo, and so did their teacher, and the photographer snapped away with everyone’s cameras.

“Indonesians from Jakarta and other parts of the country like to come here to see the tourists,” explained my guide, Nata. “They go down to Kuta beach to photograph them and tell their friends back at home they met a foreigner.”

“What, in all their bikinis and Bintang beer t-shirts?” I asked. We giggled. Then a bloke walked past: bald, fat, grey goatee, a scrawl of tatts on both calves and a singlet that read: ‘Give me head until I’m dead: Bali’. I did not take a photo.