[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

As I wander Bali for the next few days, I can't stop thinking about the pink lotus incident, how bending down to pick up that flower inaugurated a flood of emotional introspection. On my last day here, I stop into a restaurant and have an iced coffee and, as I've been doing a lot of lately, pull out my notebook within which I've been trying to figure it out. This is some of what I've jotted down so far:

Even one's own fear, when looked at with compassion, can be something to embrace, like a crying child.

Borghes describes a dream of Dante's where he awakens feeling as though he's both discovered and lost something infinite. I feel a bit like that, too.

What is my true fear? To be exposed as a fraud? To lose all self control? The respect of others? To reveal something shameful to others that I don't know I'm exposing.

It was like the galaxy had aligned itself, through an act of cosmic timing, to have the cat and the flower come together. And I had to travel a far ways to reach it. It was a matter of shedding layers of the regular life that over time desensitizes you to the world around you.

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

Madai and I study the tourist map and decide our next stop will be a place marked as "The Monkey Temple." It is in Ubud, in the midst of a forest overrun with monkeys.

As we make our way, I find myself growing giddy, like a kid. One thinks one has hung out with monkeys because one has seen so much of them on TV and in movies. Wearing diapers. Dropping flowerpots on people's heads. Sitting in the passenger seats of mac trucks and pulling on that steam whistle. But to actually be in their presence is both mesmerizing and nightmarish. They flit around like human-faced squirrels and, seeing them for the first time in person, they strike me as being as improbable a creation as a unicorn, perhaps even more improbable because, when you think about it – one horn instead of two? It almost makes more sense. But beings who look like us but have tails that they can use to swing from trees? To see it feels like a lucid dream.

No matter our language, English, French, Balinese, we can all appreciate monkeys. Clowns of the forest! Unless of course they're biting into your nose like the dough ball on a pizza pie. And this is a possibility I cannot help feeling acutely in my groin. In fact, each time I take some video, I feel the possibility of slipping into Youtube memehood. Holding out a chunk of banana one minute, having a monkey scrape away at my face like a Lucky 7 scratch card, the next.

When I go back to the car, I find Madai sitting with some other drivers, feeding monkeys and laughing. Except for the feces-pitching and constant threat of unexpected violence, how much better would it be to always have monkeys around? Especially if like Madai, you do not fear them.

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

Is it possible to avoid the snare of Bali's cheap drink, massages, great food and beaches to hit the countryside and visit temples? It seems like it'd take some will power. But as indicated in earlier installments, I come from educational film stock. Not amusement park ride stock so, not to brag or anything, but I think I can handle it.

I approach one of the stands on the street that advertises tour guides. For not very much money at all, I'm told I can rent a car with a driver who would take me around all day, from morning until night, showing me rice fields, volcanoes, farms, villages and temples. I ask if I can get a driver who speaks English and they assure me I can. But then the next day, they send me Madai.

Madai can only speak about a dozen words of English but with them, he does a great job of expressing regret for being 15 minutes tardy. He's in his early 20s and has a very sympathetic face that he's able to make even more sympathetic by crinkling his brow in a universal show of "what can you do?"

I get into the back of his minivan, feeling like a visiting dignitary. About a half hour into the trip, Madai speaks for the first time. He stops the car and points at a billboard. He mimes snapping a photograph and then points at me.

It appears to be an advertisement for a restaurant. Not wanting to hurt his feelings, I take a picture of it.

During our road trip, many of our conversations go like this: after seeing men on the street wearing festive looking paper party hats, I ask Madai why this is.

"For wood," he says.

"Wood?" I ask. "To carry wood on their heads?" I tap the top of my head.

"Wood. Wood."

"Wood?"

"No! Not wood. God."

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

I will give travel this: it gives us an excuse. It allows us to get away with things we never could back home. In Bali I can have beer with my breakfast. I can take three baths during the day. I can spend a great deal of mid afternoon time staring at a tree and thinking about trees without the risk of running into an old friend from high school or an ex-girlfriend's father who always suspected I was a flake. Travel is permission to be absurd, to play, to make believe, to see that all things are make-believe. With its technicolored currency, Balinese rupees seem like the money in a 1960s LSD-inspired board game. It seems like the kind of money Ringo would use to buy magic seeds in "The Yellow Submarine." By which I mean to say that we are reminded in travel that even the things we take most seriously, that we see as irrefutable metaphysical bottom lines, are relative. When we travel, we look at ourselves differently in the mirror. We talk to ourselves differently in the shower. We dream differently. What does it mean to dream upside down, on the other side of the Earth?

It is with these thoughts in mind that I decide to explore Bali's nightlife. I should here say that I am not the type. My "going out" shirt makes me feel like I'm wearing a sandwich board that reads "What's the use?" and bassy dance music makes me feel like I'm locked in a Polo cologne saturated car trunk. But partying is serious business in Bali. And partying means getting F'd up. Magic mushrooms are legal and bars have banners hanging outside that say things like, "All you can drink 100 k" which is about ten US dollars. And there's "sexy partying," too. In a horrible place called "Double D" there's a huge poster on the wall with a quote from Michael Jordan, "Playing every games [sic] like it's your last." And just below it, a man approaches trying to sell me Viagra. He calls me brother as the song "Ice, Ice Baby" blares from ceiling speakers.

The streets of Bali seem to throb with bass. It's the kind of thing that normally sends a "Retreat! Retreat!" message to my brain. When I think about all the things that bassy dance music has kept me from – the women I might have met, the pants I could have bought in stores I was too terrified to enter – it just seems unfair. Not tonight, though. I won't let it.

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

Because they're so cheap and good, I find myself wandering from massage to massage. I walk out of one and right into the next, like I'm trick-or-treating. In the Balinese style of massage, the masseuse gets up on the small of your back and rides you like a horse – a nice horse that has worked hard in the field all day and has earned his massage. And where as in Canada, I am viewed as pasty, here my whiteness is celebrated.

"My, how white you are, Mr. Jonathan," they say after I've returned from an entire day sweating like a rotisserie chicken in the sun. And they are right. But rather than seeing me as some old white whale of a man in a Coen Brothers film, they see me as a delicate white flower – mid-'70s David Bowie.

I'm halfway through probably the worst massage I've ever gotten by one of the prettiest women I've ever been undressed in front of, a woman named Sara, when she stops all together and starts telling me her romantic troubles, the story of a British man who broke her heart. She's been waiting for him to come back to Bali for going on two years. He sends her gifts in the mail, like the necklace she's wearing.

"I don't care about money," she says. "I care about love."

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

Perhaps it is some fluke of Balinese grammar. Perhaps the words for "lonely" and "alone" are the same. But the hotel staff keeps asking me, "traveling lonely?" and I say, "Yes."

"No friends?" they continue, just to make sure.

"No," I say, feeling my nose being rubbed in it. "No friends."

In my short time here, I've already learned that the Balinese are really sweet. Despite the surge in tourism – often a loud, drinky, druggy kind of tourism – they've retained their basic niceness. But if this wasn't the case, why, I'd think they were sticking it to me.

"Oh no," they say, making a frowny face. "You are traveling lonely, Mr. Jonathan."

That's another thing. They call me "Mr. Jonathan." Respectfully, like I own a schmata factory. Like I'm Mr. T's brother.

I walk out of the hotel and onto the street. The sun is bright, the air warm, and I am filled with nausea. Not the hangover kind but the French Existential kind. As always, on my first day of travel, I can't help thinking of the city I come from, Montreal, empty of me and it makes me feel dead there. Because in the streets and buildings of Montreal, I no longer exist.

On the sidewalks are freshly laid out offerings. They are called Canang Sari and everyone seems to make them. While most of Indonesia is Muslim, Bali is predominantly Hindu, and offerings are made three times a day. The ones I see are made up of little baskets filled with rice, crackers, flowers and even cigarettes. It is later explained to me that these offerings are made in thanks, in celebration, of life's abundance – as opposed to being made in fear like, say, Jessica Lang being turned over to an adenoidal ape in "King Kong." Later in the day, I will see these offerings run through with tire tracks and flattened by people's feet. And in the days to come, I will even see these sacrificial flowers clogging bar room bathroom sinks. (Another neat thing about Bali are the bathroom surprises. I've already seen multi-colored urinal stones and above them, at eye level, aquariums.) But right now, the sacrifices are bright like children's book drawings.

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

It's the first time I've ever traveled business class and getting on ahead of economy feels strange. I am now one of those guys I've always hated. Seated at the front of the plane as the second-classers trudge by, grunting and depleted, I'm tempted to call out, "I was once like you." But instead, I sip my sparkling wine and fiddle with my screen remote. A remote. Because God forbid you should have to reach the extra 10 inches to touch the actual screen like a peasant.

One in a long list of reasons I don't travel well is turbulence. Each tiny bump feels like I'm being pinched awake to the fact I'll one day die. If not on this flight, some day. The whole voyage, in fact, becomes a meditation on death. And not just theoretical death but painful, visceral, smashed-against-a-mountain-balls-protruding-through-my-eye-sockets death. When I land, I am always sweaty – the book I'm reading often looking like it's been dropped in a bathtub – but I also feel a bit reborn, and grateful.

The beauty of business class, though, is the way they ply you with drinks, and drinks make me brave. And philosophical.

"We all must die one day," I think, as though I am a South American colonel.

[read earlier parts of "In Bali With Baggage" here]

My ambivalence about travel probably began in childhood with our family's summer road trips. They just weren't fun. Except for the time my father had to pull into a Frontier Town parking lot to urinate and possibly weep in a locked toilet stall, we never stopped any place good. We just drove along, wanting to make good time, our colons clenched as we force-fed ourselves boiled eggs and scorching cans of no-name soda.

At 8, there was the trip to Maine, significant for being the first time I ever consciously realized I would one day die. It was while standing at the cashier's mint dish in a seafood restaurant and seeing the lobsters piled in the tank awaiting their death when this magnificent, horrible leap occurred: we were all awaiting our death. And no matter how big our tank, at the end of the day it was still a tank. If only we'd stayed home, I remember thinking, this might never have occurred to me.

At 9, there was a trip to Toronto where my uncle took me to the zoo. He bought me cotton candy and stood me on top of the fence caging in the lambs and it was there that I cried out, "This is the best day of my life." No sooner than I'd said it, I was fretting over my phoney line reading. What 9-year-old frets over a line reading? I did – because I was lying. I found the look and texture of cotton candy unwholesome (like a circus clown's pubis) and the smell of animals when uncooked, unpardonable. I just thought it was the kind of thing that kids said, that adults needed to hear.

For guys like me, men who soldier through life with their chins glued to their chests, men who have never stopped to smell a single rose once, what is the point of travel? Travel insurance, shots, $15 sandwiches at the airport that usually involve cheddar jack. Feh.

And let me be clear: I do not say "feh" with pride. I don't even know if such a thing is even possible. I dribble my puny feh into the world shamefully, from the side of my mouth. You know how Whitman had that mighty Yawp? Well my feh's the opposite of that. Why don't I "get" travel while so many just can't seem to get enough of the stuff? I know that to travel is to learn and learning is what being alive is all about. And you shouldn't question being alive. Who questions being alive?

And yet.

For men of a certain temperament – high-strung types who feel safest when caged like veal – travel is a distraction from keeping their eye on the prize. And what prize is that? Getting work done. Keeping things on course. Cooking dinner at a reasonable hour so they can eat early enough and be done with the dishes early enough so they can make lunch for work the next day and not have to do it in the morning so they can catch a bus early enough to get to work early enough so they can get home early enough to make dinner at a reasonable hour.

After a long season of non-stop work, having all but transformed into a half man, half desk centaur-like creature, I am going to Bali to unwind.

And whereas some people in my place would be thinking about bathing suits and beach reads, I am thinking about travel-related illness. Typhoid. Tetanus. All the sicknesses of the rainbow – and spiders, too. According to the Internet, there are lots of poisonous ones in Indonesia. And unlike Peter Parker who was made into a unitarded Uber-Mensch, I see my spider bite as more of a prolonged hospital stay kind of thing, where much to the disgust of the staff, my coward's death would unfold.

Clutching my Canadian health insurance documentation with one hand and the hem of the nurse's smock with the other, I'd whisper through tears and mucus, "Please don't leave me."

While there might not be much I can do about spider bites, I can do my best to safeguard against sickness, so I go see my childhood friend, Jackie, now a doctor, for shots of everything I can.

"Load me up," I say, seated on the doctor's table, my sleeve rolled up.

"Stop flinching," Dr. Jackie says. She's having fun, trying to make me squirm by brandishing the hypodermic like Riff in Westside Story with a shiv.

After much stagecraft, she pokes it in and I keep cool. I'm a scaredy-cat, but I'm also proud.

On the way home, I find myself wondering whether there were any other shots I should have gotten. Measles? Lupus? I see myself at the Bali General in the throes of a fever delirium.

"I'm phobic about needles," I'd say to my nurse, all death bed confessional.

"This isn't a needle," she'd say. "It's a turkey baster. I'm basting you a turkey for Canadian Thanksgiving."

"Has it been cooked through and through," I'd ask. "I'm equally phobic about salmonella."

I make a mental note to pack Valium.

[Flickr image via Ephemeral Scraps]