The black-and-white chequered cloth can be seen everywhere in Bali. Statues at the Hindu temples, even the mythical snarling ones with fearsome gnashers that guard the gates, are draped in this cloth from the waist down. The figures on village shrines and even the gate piers of luxury hotels are similarly half-dressed.
The pattern of black-and-white squares is a metaphor for the struggle between good and evil, both in the wider world and within all of us. But just as there can be no light without darkness, the overwhelmingly Hindu population of Bali believes that you can never take good Karma for granted; you have to work at it, day after day.
Bali is a spiritual place. Its Hinduism incorporates an animist belief that the spirits of the gods reside in every living thing, including the merak trees, with their flaming red flowers. Offerings for the gods are as likely to be placed at the base of such native trees as on the concrete paving outside shops selling tourist trinkets.
Every house has its own shrine and there is a temple in every village, with the pointed, thatched roofs of its altar pavilion and surrounding shrines protruding above the parapet of a boundary wall. Bali's mother temple is on the slopes of its highest peak, Gunung Agung (3,142m), a sacred volcanic mountain that last erupted in 1963.
Many local people believe that bomb attacks on Bali's tourist resorts in 2002 and 2005 happened because they weren't paying enough attention to the island's Karma. So the black squares in the chequered cloth - outsiders recruited by al-Qaeda - overwhelmed the white ones, and more than 200 lives were lost, mainly Australian.
The Balinese held numerous "cleansing ceremonies" to exorcise these evil events, and perhaps these have restored the tropical island's Karma. Certainly, the UN Climate Change Conference - held in the exclusive Nusa Dua resort - not only passed off peacefully, but even produced a road-map to guide negotiations for the next two years.
The spirit of Bali, about being at one with nature, might have had something to do with it, even sparking the last-minute conversion of US delegation chief Paula Dobriansky, from her well-rehearsed role as the Wicked Witch of the West into the fairy godmother who told Cinderella: "You shall go to the ball."
Neither Dobriansky nor the reptilian Harlan Watson, who did most of the negotiations for the US, would have seen much of the island. They were taken in and out of the Bali Conference Centre at the Westin Hotel in a convoy of dark-windowed vehicles travelling at high speed (for Bali anyway) with armed police motorcycle escorts.
The conference was hectic, with at least 12,000 participants buzzing around, but it made no impact on the island's leisurely pace of life. Shoals of motorbikes, few larger than 125cc, take up much of the road space, but there's no speeding or mad beeping of horns; even a taxi-driver faced with an open road rarely goes faster than 50kph.
The heat was almost unbearable, which I suppose is what you'd expect in a place just 8 degrees south of the Equator. Day after day, the sun beat down mercilessly, raising the temperature to 340C , and because this is the rainy season in Bali, it was also unpleasantly humid, and sometimes wet.
Cu De Ta (yes, it's a little joke) is the island's coolest restaurant, but only in terms of its design and location on the ocean at Seminyak. It's essentially a very large room with no walls, so you end up sweating over dinner, because the temperature drops only seven or eight degrees at night and the humidity (70 per cent plus) stays high.
You can escape by heading for the hills. Up country, north of Bali's sprawling capital, Denpasar, is the artists' town of Ubud, a favourite hangout for backpackers. Further up are the extraordinary rice terraces hewn out of the hillside that provided the memorable photographic backdrop for plenary sessions and press briefings.
One of the best things about Bali is that tourism development has been kept low-rise, so it's not at all like Benidorm or Fuengirola. The traditional rule was that no building on the island could be higher than Pura Besakih, the Hindu mother temple. So when the Ritz Carlton, the Four Seasons and Bvlgari came to Bali, they had to nestle in.
The Ritz Carlton's landscaped grounds at Jimbaran are extraordinarily beautiful and clever design manages to conceal the vast scale (horizontal, not vertical) of its spa. At the Four Seasons and Bvlgari resorts guests all stay in lavishly appointed villas with thatched roofs and outdoor living-rooms, to be pampered at a price.
Curiously, the houses where local people live are less visible. Although there is almost continuous ribbon development in the tourist areas around Denpasar, most street frontages are commercialised by shops of one sort or another, including numerous places repairing motorbikes. Houses are discreetly tucked away at the back.
It's quite unlike our own dear island, where everything is in your face. By complete coincidence, Bali has also been called the Emerald Isle (and we thought we had exclusive rights). But it is more commonly called the Island of the Gods. And given the message implicit in all those black-and-white chequered cloths, that seems quite right.
The Balinese are friendly, smiling and welcoming, in the way we used to be - though there was a surly Indonesian immigration officer who fined me 1.2 million rupiahs (OK, it was only €88.60) when I was leaving last Sunday. My $10 visa, it turned out, was valid for only seven days. But nobody had asked me how long I wanted to stay.