The book Eat, Pray, Love topped the New York Times Best Seller list for one year. Author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her search 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 fulfillment. I read Eat, Pray, Love just before my trip to Bali.

Wayan was my favorite character in the book. He owns a small healing shop and restaurant in the city of Ubud. Elizabeth Gilbert is cycling through Ubud and falls, injuring her knee. She goes to the store to buy ointment to heal her wound and she ends up befriending Wayan and his irrepressible cute daughter Tutti. Wayan has left an abusive husband and is having a hard time surviving on her own, as divorce carries a strong stigma in Balinese culture. Wayan is often forced to move his business from one rental site to another and therefore has trouble maintaining enough established customers to be financially successful. Elizabeth Gilbert calls on American friends to donate money to buy Wayan her own store. It doesn’t take long for Gilbert to come up with $18,000. Before leaving Bali, Gilbert sees Wayan settled in a mortgage-free two-story building.

It’s not hard to find Wayan’s store. 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 in front invited us to get a massage, learn Balinese dance, buy medicinal plants, eat a healthy vitamin lunch or get cured of any ailment. Huge pots in the store’s front yard contained various herbs such as ginseng, jasmine, and aloe vera. Each pot had a sign saying what 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 began bringing food to our table. They grated the 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 uniquely 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, kidneys, heart, or love life.

Wayan said that for only a small additional cost we could have a healthy body check at the end of the meal, but she was very busy by the time we finished eating doing body checks for a group of French women sitting at another table. I noticed one of them had a French copy of Eat, Pray, Love tucked into 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 whenever I travel is to read a book set in the country I’m visiting. It makes the place come alive for me. I don’t always get the 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.