"I spin my bicycle high up into the hills and across the acres of rice terraces north of Ubud ... I pass men and women and children and chickens and dogs … all, in their own way, busy working, but none so busy that they couldn't stop to greet me."
Doesn't that sounds like the ideal way to get to know the authentic Bali, away from the hectic beach resorts beloved of the Aussie backpacker brigade? Now imagine Julia Roberts doing it - with film crew in tow.
The Hollywood star has been in Bali filming her role as Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the words quoted at the top of this story, in the film of her bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. In this epic saga of heroic self-obsession, the unhappy Gilbert travels to Italy and India, but it is on Bali that she discovers the key to her best, happiest self. The island's faith healers, yoga teachers and single men (yes, she finds love) are standing by for an onslaught of visitors when the film comes out.
With the book as my guide, I decided to get in ahead of the crowds, going inland to Ubud to catch the special vibe of pragmatic and cheerful spirituality Gilbert had identified in this bustling town. I even ride a bike through the paddy fields. Given the amiable chaos of Balinese traffic, abuzz with motorbikes often bearing whole families - dad at the helm, mum at the back, kids wedged in between them and the baby in pride of place on the handlebars - I take the precaution of booking with Banyan Tree Cycling Tours, which has devised a three-hour route from Kintamani in the north that is more or less traffic-free and 90% downhill. It also provides a guide to cycle with you and two back-up vehicles.
We see iridescent kingfishers flashing through the jungly forest, then freewheel past the terraced rice paddies. In the villages, which all resemble each other with their walled family compounds, the temples and streets of this enthusiastically Hindu island are decorated with yellow silk parasols, flowers and offerings. Life in the compounds is gently industrious, the whole family deftly making bamboo baskets when not in the rice fields. And on these quiet byways the bicycle is the ideal transport, if you can manage to steer round the stray dogs and plastic sheets of drying rice with one hand, while waving back to all the children who wave at you.
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Back in town, about £2.50 bought a slap-up lunch in Babi Guling, downtown Ubud, where the English version of the chalked-up menu offered "Special Suckling Pig, Different Suckling Pig, Suckling Pig Meat, Skin". Leaving our shoes at the door, we passed the slab where one of the seven roasted piglets (maximum age four months) the management serves every day was laid out. As we lowered ourselves onto cushions, hugger-mugger with our fellow diners, the porkers were carved up and the meat served in baskets with rice, crispy skin, crunchy chitterlings and black pudding, plus some zingy greens with coconut. The sherbety white flesh of a fresh mangosteen from a bowl on the table made the perfect dessert.
Twenty minutes' drive from the centre of town, the Ubud Hanging Gardens is rather more sophisticated. The hotel's 38 villas with private pools perch in succulent tropical gardens on the side of a steep valley. On the other side is a temple, illuminated at night to make the perfect backdrop for cocktails - passion-fruit pina colada, anyone? - and delectable Asian fusion dinners. The hotel's staff are endlessly helpful, arranging excursions and recommending the best art, textile, basket and jewellery shops (surprisingly hard to locate among endless emporia selling generic Asia-tat).
You can even kid yourself you're following a Gilbert-style journey to inner wholeness with treatments in the spa and sessions in the yoga pavilion above the babbling stream at the valley bottom.
But true Gilbert fans will want to commune with Wayan Nuriasi. Disappointingly, the fourth-generation healer (age? "Secret") has no discernible special aura, and a brisk and distracted manner. Patients trickle into her Ubud shop/consulting room, where she treats them with Indonesian herbs and ayurvedic and Chinese medicines. This all happens in full view of anyone who's hanging around, so I was able to witness a succession of young westerners turning up for treatments, though they all appeared exceptionally healthy already.
Nuriasi looks at a young Canadian's palms and tells her she has "gastritis" and to lay off lemons. She also begins to tell her fortune, before saying, "if you want a complete reading, it's $25". The patient sees her destiny: "I need to go to the ATM machine."
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As she slaps wet leaves over one girl's neck, doles out pills and herbs to another, and helps her assistant massage a lime round the head of an Aussie chap with a blocked ear drum, she regales us with her recommendations for western women's "stress" problems, which involve a banana and are not really for publication in a family newspaper. It's a far cry from the GP surgery as we know it. Still, Gilbert claims she cured her cystitis. I wonder how Roberts will play that scene.
Audley Travel can arrange six nights at the beachfront Jimbaran Puri Bali and five nights at Ubud Hanging Gardens,B&B, from £2,285pp, including three massages per person, guided tours and international flights. 01993 838 110, audleytravel.com