My story isn't quite as good as Maggs' but I just wanted to share something with you all. My mum was also a regular traveller to Bali and when I was younger I 'didn't get' how she could go back year after year to the same place.
She took a girlfriend with her twice and they had a great time. The two women in their fifties just had a ball, staying in Ubud in a two storey stilt structure with pigs snuffling around on the ground beneath them (many years ago now) and in Candidasa.
My mum also treked miles to get to her sponsored child's village in the north of Bali driving down dirt roads until the car could go no further then getting out and walking miles over volcanic debris to finally get to the village.
However, it is only as an adult that I can appreciate her fly-by-the-seat attitude and her pure joi de vivre (spelling?).
Anyway, this story actually relates to her friendship with the lady that took the trips to Bali with mum. They had been friends forever. They raised their kids together and our families had fun together for over 20 years. Then they had a falling out after a trip to Noosa. Things went strange and they never spoke again.
About seven years passed after that fateful trip to Noosa and Mum died of breast cancer and her friend died early last year of a brain tumour. Upon visiting Jimbaran Bay last year (our sixth trip) I lit two candles in memory of mum and her friend and their lives together in a place that gave them so much friendship. I wanted to reunite them and their friendship in death. Bali is such a special place and so evocative of everything life/death represents to us.
Now I too 'GET IT' and we make our annual pilgrimage to the place that once captured my mother's heart.