There are places you visit, and then there are places that enter you. Places that do not just become memories in a photo album or pins on a map, but settle into your body, your thoughts, and your dream of how life could be lived. For me, Bali was such a place.

I was there on three occasions. Three times I stepped off the plane with the feeling that I was moving closer to something I could never fully describe. Three times I left the island with reluctance, almost as if I was being torn away from something I was not yet finished with. And every time I departed, it felt as though a part of me stayed behind.

It may sound romantic, almost exaggerated, but that is how it was. Bali never became just a destination for me. It became an inner place. An image of how life might be lived when it is not completely torn apart by stress, over-organization, and the relentless Western obsession with control, speed, and constant expansion.

What I encountered there was something I found hard to let go of. I remember the people as grounded, present, and kind in a way that did not feel artificial. There was a calmness in the way they moved through life, as if they still remained in contact with the earth beneath their feet. Not only literally, but existentially. They seemed to know who they were in relation to the place, to family, to tradition, and to life itself.

That is what has stayed with me most. Not only the palms, the warmth, or the green terraces climbing the hillsides. Not only the scents, the colors, and the humid light of morning. But the feeling of belonging. The feeling that life had not yet been completely severed from its roots.

In Bali I experienced something I have rarely experienced anywhere else: that the everyday and the sacred still seemed to live side by side. Small offerings of flowers and incense. Ceremonies that did not feel staged for visitors but seemed to truly matter to those performing them. A culture in which beauty did not appear to be a luxury item, but part of existence itself. Where a piece of cloth, a gesture, a flower in the hair, or a carved wooden mask still carried meaning.

I remember how deeply it moved me that there was a society where people still did not seem entirely disconnected from nature. The rice, the water, the labor, the village community, the rhythm between work and ritual — it all seemed connected. As if life had not yet been cut into the separate compartments we have grown used to: work over here, private life over there, spirituality in one corner, consumption in another, identity somewhere else. In Bali, I felt a kind of wholeness.

Perhaps that is why I wanted to live there. Because I sensed there was something on that island I had longed for without fully having the words for it. Something simpler, yet also deeper. Something that was not about owning more, achieving more, or being seen more, but about living in a more rooted way.

I think many people have a place like that. A place where, for a brief moment, they catch a glimpse of a possible life. Not a perfect life, but a truer one. Bali became that place for me.

But the difficult thing about certain places is that they do not simply change. They are consumed.

Today I feel that I will never return. That decision does not come from indifference. On the contrary. It comes from love. And perhaps from grief. Because what I experienced there then no longer exists in the same way. The Bali that took a piece of my soul is gone, or at least pushed so far aside that I can no longer reach it.

It is not that I believe Bali was once some flawless paradise island. Of course there were contradictions, poverty, hardship, complexity, and all the things that are always present wherever people live their lives. I am not naive. But there was still a feeling there that was strong and real. A sense of human scale. Of cultural depth. Of presence.

That feeling has, as I see it, become harder and harder to reconcile with as Bali has turned into a product.

What once drew people there was precisely what could not be mass-produced: the stillness, the dignity, the living traditions, the spiritual presence, the closeness to a simple life. But once the world noticed it, it also began to feed on it. Piece by piece. As so often happens when something beautiful acquires market value.

In the end, the place risks becoming a backdrop for other people’s longing. A place where people travel to consume authenticity rather than encounter it. Where the genuine is pressured into becoming part of the experience economy. Where paradise becomes content. Where what once lived from within begins to be shaped by what the visitor wants to see, feel, and post.

And that is where I can no longer reconcile myself.

Not because people travel. I myself love to discover new places, new horizons, new contexts. Travel itself is not the enemy. On the contrary, it can make us more open, more humble, and more alive. But there is a point where travel turns into exploitation, and where the soul of a place begins to be pushed aside by demand.

For me, Bali has become a symbol of exactly that. Of how something living and organic can slowly be transformed into a brand. Of how a place that once carried its own rhythm is forced to adapt to a global audience carrying cameras, consumer desire, and spiritual hunger in quick, marketable form.

It pains me to say this, because the island meant so much to me. But perhaps that is precisely why I must say it. There are loves you should not return to. Not because they meant nothing, but because you do not want to watch them reduced.

I do not want to come back to something that only reminds me of what I once loved. I do not want to stand in a place where my memory of Bali collides with what remains. I do not want to force a feeling that belonged to another time, another island, another stage of my life, and perhaps also another stage in the life of the island itself.

Because it is also true that we ourselves change. I am not the same person today as I was when I first came to Bali. I carry different experiences, different sorrows, different insights. I see the world with different eyes. Perhaps that too is why I feel so strongly that some places must be allowed to remain inner landscapes rather than new bookings.

Memory has a value of its own. It is not always cowardice to choose not to return. Sometimes it is, on the contrary, a form of respect. You allow what was to remain whole. You let a place keep its dignity within you, instead of demanding that it deliver the same feeling once again.

Perhaps that is the most painful part of loving a place: understanding that you do not own any right to it, not even to your own memory of it. Time moves on. People come and go. Economies reshape landscapes. Cultures are pressured, negotiated, adapted, and forced to survive in different ways. What once felt untouched becomes visible, the visible becomes desirable, and the desirable is eventually reshaped.

Bali is far from alone in this. We see it all over the world. Places that once carried their own logic are forced to bend to another. The logic of global tourism. The digital logic. The restless logic. And along the way, the most delicate things are often the first to disappear: silence, integrity, people’s unspoken everyday life, the unsellable.

Perhaps that is why Bali still hurts inside me. Because the island became more than a destination. It became proof that another rhythm of life was actually possible. That people could still live close to ceremony, close to the earth, close to work, and close to one another. When that image begins to crack, the sorrow becomes greater than ordinary nostalgia. Then it is no longer only about a place having changed. It is about something you once believed in, in the world itself, becoming harder to believe in.

And yet the love remains.

I still love the Bali I once encountered. I love it in memory, in the scents I can still call back, in the colors that remain somewhere behind my eyes, in the feeling of walking through a morning that had not yet become a product. I love the people I met there, their kindness, their warmth, their calm. I love the image of an island where life’s small gestures still carried weight.

But the strange thing is that life sometimes gives us new places when we thought certain feelings were lost forever.

For me, Bansko became such a place.

Not because Bansko is Bali. Not because mountains resemble the sea, or because Bulgaria carries the same culture, colors, or rhythm as the Indonesian island. But the feeling I once found on the beach in Bali — that inner stillness, presence, and rootedness — I found again in another way in Bansko. Where Bali gave me the horizon of the sea, Bansko gave me the weight of the mountains. Where Bali carried warmth, humidity, and tropical light, Bansko gave me clear air, silence, and closeness to the seriousness of nature.

It was not the place itself that was the same. It was what it awakened in me.

In Bali I felt the tempo inside me slow down. I moved closer to myself, closer to something simple and true. And in Bansko, something similar happened. There, at the foot of the mountains, I once again found a feeling of not merely being somewhere, but of belonging to something greater than everyday life. As if part of what I had lost in the world could still be found, even if in another form.

Perhaps that is why I can carry the sorrow of Bali without completely breaking under it. Because even though the island I once loved has changed into something I can no longer reconcile with, life has shown me that the soul sometimes recognizes itself in new places. Not as copies of what once was, but as new rooms for the same longing.

Bali took a piece of my soul.
Bansko helped me recover another.

And perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps not everything needs to be revisited. Perhaps sometimes it is enough to admit that a place changed you, and that another place later in life gently helped you understand why. Perhaps it is not always betrayal to move on. Perhaps that too is a form of love.

I will continue to travel. I will continue to seek new horizons, new feelings, and new encounters with the world. That desire is still alive in me. But Bali will always be something else. Not a place I merely visited, but a place that lived inside me. And Bansko became the place where I understood that certain feelings do not die — they simply change landscapes.

And that is exactly why I will never return to Bali.

Because what I loved no longer exists out there in the same way.

But the feeling it awakened in me still lives on.
Now also among the mountains of Bansko.