Meeting Wayan From Elizabeth Gilbert’s "Eat Pray Love"

The book Eat, Pray, Love topped the New York Times bestseller list for a year. Author Elizabeth Gilbert writes of her quest to “find herself” after a devastating divorce. She spends four months in Italy eating fabulous food, four months in India meditating in an ashram, and four months in Bali finding love and contentment. I read Eat, Pray, Love just before my trip to Bali.

Wayan was my favorite character in the book. She is the owner of a small healing shop and restaurant in the city of Ubud. Elizabeth Gilbert is cycling through Ubud and falls and injures her knee. She goes to the store to buy an ointment to heal her wound and she ends up befriending Wayan and her cute and irrepressible daughter, Tutti. Wayan has left an abusive husband and she finds it difficult to survive on her own, as divorce carries a strong stigma in Balinese culture. Wayan is often forced to move her business from one rental site to another and thus has trouble keeping enough established clients to be financially successful. Elizabeth Gilbert appeals to American friends to donate money to buy Wayan her own store. It doesn’t take long for Gilbert to raise $18,000. Before leaving Bali, Gilbert sees Wayan set up in a two-story mortgage-free building.

Wayan’s store is not hard to find. Gilbert’s book says it’s a few doors down from the Ubud Post Office and that’s exactly where my friend Kathy and I found it. The hand-painted sign out front invited us to get a massage, learn Balinese dance, buy medicinal plants, eat a healthy vitamin lunch, or cure ourselves of any ailment. Huge pots in the front yard of the store contained various herbs such as ginseng, jasmine, and aloe vera. Each pot had a sign saying which diseases that particular plant could help cure.

We wander inside. The restaurant had three tables. Wayan greeted us and, after ushering us to the only available table, he asked if we had come to eat or to be healed. We told her we were hungry after a morning of wandering the shops and galleries of Ubud, so she and her assistant started bringing food to our table. They grated turmeric and mixed it with ginger, honey, and water to make a delicious juice. They brought us three types of seaweed, each with a different flavor. We had unique spiced melon and tomato served on banana leaves. We had rice and salad. As each dish arrived at the table, Wayan would tell us if it was good for the stomach, the kidneys, the heart, or the love life.

Wayan said that for just a little extra cost we could have a healthy body check at the end of the meal, but she was very busy when we finished eating doing body checks for a group of French women sitting at another table. I noticed that one of them had a French copy of Eat, Pray, Love stuffed in her bag. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Since Kathy and I knew that our husbands would already be waiting for us at our hotel, we decided to leave. We say goodbye to Wayan.

One of the things I like to do every time I travel is read a book set in the country I’m visiting. It makes the place come alive for me. I don’t always get a chance to step into the pages of books and meet one of the characters I’ve read about. Happily I was able to do that in Bali.