Traveling to Bali felt entirely safe to me. Aboard a new Singapore Airlines jet 40,000 feet above the Pacific, I felt safe. I felt safe in the airport in Denpasar, the capital, even though security was practically invisible. I felt safe wandering the beach at Jimbaran Bay, alone, after 10 p.m. I felt safe cruising around the tacky tourist town of Kuta, past the nightclubs that terrorists bombed on October 12, 2002, killing 202 people. I felt safe on September 20, the day of Indonesia's presidential runoff election. I felt safe rafting the Class II–IV Ayung River. I felt safe when offered a ride to my hotel by a Balinese guy at the Putra Bar, in Ubud.

Here's where I didn't feel safe: in my Volvo, driving to the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before my journey even started. The source of my anxiety was intellectual, not instinctual.

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I suddenly remembered that driving an interstate is far more dangerous than flying, which unnerved me. And at the last minute I was questioning why, with a world of other options, I'd chosen to visit a place where terrorists had struck—and could strike again. The State Department persists in recommending that Americans defer nonessential travel to predominantly Muslim Indonesia. Though these warnings are mostly in response to the recurring threat of violence in the rest of the archipelago, and not in Bali—a mainly Hindu enclave that, at least before 2002, was considered out of harm's way—the fact remains that this island was dragged unwillingly onto the world stage by the nightclub bombings. (Bali was, however, spared from the tsunami that devastated the western end of Indonesia.)

So this is what it means to travel to paradise—when paradise has an asterisk. Bali, that most graceful, gentle, stylish, and spiritual of islands, has climbed back up the lists of top global destinations, yet it can provoke unwelcome fear. The taint lingers even as tourists return—particularly Australians, who favor Bali as an easy getaway, though their country suffered the greatest number of casualties at Kuta Beach.

Among the 1.22 million visitors to the island in the first ten months of 2004—a rebound from the 815,000 who visited in the same period in 2003—was an Aussie family I met on their way to raft the Ayung River. Mom, Dad, and two preteens were back for the first time since 2002, when their annual vacation to Bali nearly coincided with the tragedy. (They departed the island on the day of the attack.) They had hesitated before returning, considering other places—but it's Bali that they love.