Time Magazine: Bali’s Travel Boom

The following excerpt is from the article:

“The idea behind these offerings is not to knock off a checklist of the people and places the writer visited, but to partake — however briefly — in her progress. “It really did feel like Liz was helping us experience some of the same spiritual growth she did,” says Halle Eavelyn, co-founder of Las Vegas-based Spirit Quest Tours, which led its first six-day Eat, Pray, Love Bali trip at the end of May. Eavelyn, who testifies to turning overnight from atheist to believer, offers, with her husband, “life-changing luxury travel.” The island, she says, is “where the culmination of Liz’s flowering happened, so we skipped right to the end of the book.” Of the 15 participants in May’s tour — aged 29 to 78, and all but two of them women — most describe undergoing “shifts.” One lady finally began to confront her husband’s death. Another, an insomniac, slept soundly for the first time in over a decade.

Mornings, the group would share in meditation sessions, learn from local guides to pray in full sarong, jot thoughts in journals; an evening might be spent bathing with hundreds of pilgrims in the holy springs that feed a stone temple pool; at lunch, authentic pizza with the America-sick Balinese musician who once road-tripped with Gilbert across the entire island. And on either side of their activities Eavelyn read caringly selected passages from the book, “an awakening tool,” off a brand new iPad. The tour costs $3,000 with airfare, but spotlights a site that doesn’t even require getting off the ground. Says Eavelyn: “I want to take people to a place inside themselves.”

Read the full article here.