巴厘岛"安宁日"全岛停摆，一个瑞士游客照样出门，拍了视频发上网。他被判了一年。

Start with one day, because there is very little like it in the world.

Bali is an island in Indonesia, full of tourists all year round.

But one day a year, the whole island stops.

That day is called Nyepi, and it usually falls in March.

The rules for Nyepi do not quite sound real when you say them out loud.

No going out, no lights, no noise, no work.

No cars on the street, nobody on the beach, shops shut.

Rarer still is this one: the airport closes.

For a whole day, not a single plane lands and not a single plane leaves.

The internet is switched off too.

These rules do not separate locals from foreigners; if you are here on holiday, you also stay where you are staying.

The island has a traditional patrol that walks the streets that day, watching for anyone out and about.

Why do it this way?

It is a day of Balinese Hinduism.

Put simply: set aside a whole day, let the outside go quiet, and let people return to their own minds.

An island walked over by tens of thousands of tourists every day picks one day a year and shuts itself.

On Nyepi this March, one person did not comply.

His name is Zgraggen, twenty-six, from Switzerland, staying at a villa in Legian.

That day he walked out of the villa and all the way to the beach.

Walking out is not the part that matters most.

What matters most is that he filmed as he walked, and then posted the video to Instagram.

In it he smiles at the camera, calls the tradition "crazy", and adds an obscenity.

People on the island saw those videos; and from there it stopped being "a tourist broke a rule".

A great many Balinese were furious.

What they meant was roughly: you are allowed not to understand us, but you should not make a joke of it and send it to the whole world.

Someone called the police, and officers went to the villa in Legian and brought him out.

The case opened in June, and on the twentieth of August the court in Denpasar delivered its verdict.

One year, in prison.

The basis is Indonesia’s new criminal code, on a charge relating to offending religion.

The judge wrote: what the defendant did offended the Balinese people, hurt their faith and provoked public outrage.

His own account in court was: that day he was hungry and frustrated, and had not fully understood the rules.

He said: I deeply regret what I did, and I apologise to the Balinese people.

That account sounds understandable enough.

But the court found one detail, and it is that detail that makes "I did not understand" collapse.

Before he posted those videos, the villa staff had explicitly told him: today you cannot go out.

He was told, then he went out, then he filmed it and posted it.

Of those three steps, it is the last one the verdict actually lands on.

Walking out of a villa is one person’s business;

filming it and posting it is speaking to an entire island.

So — is a year too heavy?

This is being argued fiercely online, and both sides have a case.

One side says: a year in prison for not knowing a rule is far too much.

The other says: he did know — he was told and did it anyway, and mocked it in front of everyone.

I am not going to settle it for either side; I only want to keep hold of what that day actually is.

A whole island, several million people, agreeing together to go quiet on the same day.

Nobody forces them. They want to.

In the world as it is now, anything that can make several million people go quiet for a whole day has become very rare.

Think about it:

When you arrive somewhere new, do you find out the rules first?