June 2013. It was my first time going from Bali to Gili Trawangan, and I was living my Eat, Pray, Love fantasy. But the story really started a couple of days earlier, on the sulphur-choked rim of Mount Ijen in East Java. That’s where I met Martin, a Dutch traveller, at the worst possible moment.

I’d just answered nature’s call on the side of the volcano—one of those moments of desperation that is miserable in the instant, hilarious in hindsight. Thankfully, I was properly equipped with all the necessary sanitary equipment. To this day, it’s still one of the most unique places I’ve answered the call.

We laughed about it, and the absurdity seemed to bond us instantly. By the time we hiked back down from Ijen’s crater—legs burning, sulphur stinging our lungs—we’d decided to travel on together. As it happens, I had made fast friends.

Temples, Incense, and Accidental Travel Companions

Bali greeted us like a fever dream—thick heat pressing against skin, motorbikes buzzing past like hornets on caffeine, and the constant perfume of incense drifting from shrines at every corner. I’d wanted to come here since I was a teenager, when a photo in some travel magazine etched its way into my imagination: terraces of green rice fields, a temple rising in mist. To finally arrive felt surreal, like stepping into a postcard I’d been carrying in my head for years.

Martin and I weren’t alone for long. On the road we crossed paths with Gioia and Pinar, two German travellers who, like us, were chasing the idea of Bali they’d built in their minds. In the strange mathematics of backpacking, strangers become companions with almost no effort. One shared taxi ride, one temple visit, and suddenly we were a unit of four.

Together we roamed the island: the sprawling courtyards of Besakih Temple, where staircases seemed to stretch all the way into the clouds; tiny roadside shrines draped in yellow cloth; banyan trees whose roots clutched the earth like old hands. The air was always vibrating. With prayer chants, with motorbike engines, with cicadas.

The days blurred into a humid rhythm: sweat pooling under backpacks, the sharp tang of sambal with street food, the relief of fresh coconuts cracked open on the side of the road. We laughed about nothing. We talked about home, about what “home” even meant. And we stopped whenever something caught our attention, which was often. Because in Bali, everything catches your attention.

Those days weren’t spectacular in the Instagram sense—no bungee jumping, no perfect photos—but they carved themselves into memory precisely because they felt full. Full of light, sound, and the fleeting intimacy of accidental travel companions.

Cat-Watching on Mushrooms (My Gili T Experience)

The natural next stop was from Bali to Gili Trawangan, a tiny island off the coast of Lombok surrounded by turquoise water. Backpackers call it paradise, but it’s the kind of paradise where you’re never more than ten feet away from a half-broken bicycle or someone trying to sell you bracelets.

It was here that I decided to try magic mushrooms for only the second time. The plan had been noble: all four of us—me, Martin, Gioia, and Pinar—would lean into the experience together. At the last second, though, my companions bailed. Too nervous. Too cautious. Too smart, probably.

Which left me. Alone.

So I bought my portion, ate it, and wandered into the public food market just as the evening was turning neon. Long rows of food stalls flickered under buzzing lights, each table covered in grilled fish, sticky rice, and sweating bottles of Bintang beer. I sat down at a plastic table and tried to act like a normal human being. Inside my head, though, normality had already evacuated the premises.

Then I noticed the cat.

A scruffy, stank-eyed island cat had parked itself next to me, watching me with the patience of a monk. Within minutes, the cat became my entire world. Its tail moved in slow-motion waves, hypnotic, like it was orchestrating the universe with each flick. I lost track of the food, of my friends, of the market itself. I was simply a man, and a cat, locked into some cosmic staring contest while vendors shouted, tourists stumbled past, and smoke from the grills turned the air into a cloud.

I think I ordered fish. I think I ate some of it. Or maybe I just watched the cat eat scraps under the table and convinced myself it was me. Hard to say.

The evening, in practical terms, was ruined. No bonding trip, no wild shared experience, just me sitting in a haze of light, trying to keep it together while a cat dismantled my entire sense of reality.

Looking back now, though, it’s hilarious. Not because it was fun (it wasn’t), but because it was so spectacularly not the mystical journey I had pictured. Instead, my grand secondary initiation into psychedelics was just me, sweaty and confused, sitting in a crowded market, spiritually outmatched by a cat.

Naked, Afraid, and on the Toilet: My First Earthquake

Two days after the mushroom misadventure, Gili Trawangan delivered a reminder that paradise comes with fine print. I’d been drinking too much the night before, and my stomach was staging a full-scale revolt. So there I was, naked, sweating, locked in combat with bad bevvies and questionable seafood, when the floor beneath me shifted.

At first, I thought it was me—just the room spinning in punishment for my sins. But then the walls groaned. Shampoo bottles rattled. A mirror shivered. I looked out the bathroom window just in time to see another building across the lane swaying like a drunk trying to make it home.

That’s when it hit me: not alcohol. An earthquake.

What followed was pure survival instinct. I finished my business in a record-breaking three seconds flat, grabbed the nearest towel, and bolted outside barefoot into the morning air. The ground roared like a subway train passing just under the surface, except there was no subway. Only sand, sea, and a very unstable patch of earth.

It turned out to be a 5.2 magnitude quake, shallow and centred right beneath the Gilis. Later reports said 5,000 houses were damaged, 49 people injured. But in that moment, it was just me and the planet, both of us shaking for very different reasons.

And the terror didn’t end when the main quake did. Aftershocks peppered the day, each one a sinister little reminder that the island could shrug again at any time. I remember sitting on the beach hours later, every nerve on edge, scanning the horizon like I’d be able to see an earthquake coming. It didn’t help that I had only JUST watched the Naomi Watts film The Impossible about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. It was unforgettable.

Goodbyes on an Island That Wouldn’t Sit Still

After the quake, it felt like the island had shaken something loose in me too. The adrenaline had burned off, leaving only a strange clarity: it was time to move on. My trip was ending, my ticket home waiting.

I said goodbye to Martin, Gioia, and Pinar the way travellers always do. With hugs that last just a little too long, and vague promises about meeting again somewhere in the world. Maybe Berlin, maybe Amsterdam, maybe one day. But we all knew, in that unspoken way, that this was the end of our small constellation together.

Two days later, after my trip from Bali to Gili Trawangan, I was back on a plane to Canada. I watched the turquoise of the Gilis fade into cloud cover. The six months I had spent wandering across Asia collapsed into a blur of airports, bus stations, shared meals, and half-remembered hostels. But somehow, it was these few days—Bali’s incense haze, the laughter over bad roadside meals, a mushroom trip hijacked by a cat, and an earthquake that shook me naked out of the bathroom—that rose above the rest.

We never crossed paths again (though I have had the occasional DM with Martin over the years), but the memory of those days has outlasted so many other things. Travel has a way of giving you moments that are both fleeting and permanent at once. You share your life completely with strangers for a handful of days, then scatter back into the world, leaving only the stories behind.

And for me, those stories—ridiculous, terrifying, and unforgettable—are what still anchor Bali and Gili Trawangan in my mind.