Adeng-adeng is a traditional Balinese mantra meaning ‘slowly’. It’s a phrase you don’t often hear these days on an island with more than 11.100 accommodations listed on Booking.com and 70.000 hotel rooms (Horwath HTL). People say that Bali is spoiled, and for years, the search has been on for a ‘new Bali’ – even a ridiculously concerted effort was declared to build ‘ten new Bali’. But the Bali never really disappeared; it’s just been forgotten.

Long before ‘sustainability’, ‘community’, ‘artisanship’, and ‘local culture’, became the global travel buzzwords in recent years, Balinese people established their own way to preserve their culture and nature while welcoming new influences from the outside world in a sustainable way—socially and environmentally. The Balinese culture is so tied to traditions of family structure and a ritual-bound religion that it naturally acts as something of a hospitality style of its own.

As a result of this, Bali often feels like two co-existing yet parallel cultures that intersect peacefully, when they do at all. Now, it is more important than ever to bridge the divide by identifying and conserving many of the more unique and uniquely endangered aspects of Balinese hospitality culture: family-style interactions, craftsmanship and culture-driven development, collaboration and communal services, all wrapped with geo-cultural and environmental sensitivity. surroundings, not hotels.