Surfing Bali

By Dave Hitchins

Uluwatu, Bali

The first thing you notice about Bali is the smell. It hits you in the face when leave the mad arrivals hall. Hot, tropical and foreign - a thousand different flowers; diesel fumes; rotting rubbish and the smell of your armpits after a long flight, all mixed together. I'm not sure Chanel will be marketing that fragrance any time soon.

The taxi driver from the airport will rip you off - you haven't got a choice. I'm not sure how they all get in on the scam but the taxi trip is going to cost you double what every other trip is going to cost you. It's not much in dollars or pounds or Euros, so you just have to accept it.

We were there early in the season, the beginning of April, before the south-easterly trade winds had kicked in. It is the hottest time of the year, even hotter for someone who has spent the past few months in New Zealand.We didn't really know where to go, so we headed to Kuta - dirty, crowded, noisy Kuta. It lived up to its reputation. We eventually found a hotel and I headed for the beach, excited to get my first glimpse of Indonesian perfection. I battled my way down the bustling warren of side streets, saying 'sorry, no thanks' about a thousand times to the myriad of street traders. I eventually made it to the seafront, and was faced with a staggering sight - I blinked in the afternoon sun - but it was still there - a mountain of rubbish! Plastic bottles, plastic packets, the broken plastic detritus of western consumer culture all piled up on an Indonesian beach. And the surf was flat and onshore. My heart sank.

I managed a day and a half in Kuta - Rach quite liked it, she was in shopping heaven. We walked for miles, fondling bracelets, sunglasses, perfume - all the genuine article we were assured. I put up with it but I had that feeling in my gut, that nervous twitch that the surfer in you will recognise. The feeling that somewhere on this island waves were breaking and I was missing out!

I got some advice in the surf shops, mainly from the guy that I bought a very pretty nearly new 6'8" semi-gun from. He was very talkative after I handed over the wad of cash. Don't think boards are cheap in Indo - they are not! South Africa is still the best place to buy boards that I have ever been. Anyway - he told me that we were in between seasons at the moment and that the best waves were still to be had on the east coast that was off-shore in the westerly winds that were still hanging on. He advised that we head across there for a few days and then down to the famous wave grounds of the Bukit peninsula when the dry season easterlies kicked in properly.

We headed to the east coast of the island and stayed in creaky old hotel overlooking the famous but fickle break of Sanur. We arrived in the dark and amazingly, the next morning when I looked out the hotel window, there were lines peeling down the reef, head high, clean and uncrowded. I was on it with my new 6'8"

Like every Indo first timer I had read all the websites, all the advice in all the books and had brought reef booties all the way from home. It was a mistake. I read somewhere that Occy tried deck grip only once and gave it up because he "missed his board". I wasn't even sure if I had a board. The booties filled up with water, they were way too thick to offer any feeling at all, and most important I was the only person wearing them and felt like a complete knob. It didn't matter as the waves seemed to switch off with the tide, from four foot to nothing in about twenty minutes. Not a very good start to the dream part of the trip. I hung around a bit longer, bobbing around and admiring the coral, and then went to find Rach. A few hours later, the wave started breaking again, but this time the crowds came too - almost all local and very competitive. I scraped for my share and got a couple of good ones, relaxing a bit once I realised that the coral wasn't as shallow as it looked and feeling much better on my 6'2" and with no booties. I wasn't pulling in though.

We stayed a couple more days and the swell dropped off a bit. There was no wind at all and it was unbelievably hot. My eyes got sore and bloodshot and I kept out of the sun. It was time to move on. We were considering going down to the South East tip of the Bukit Peninsula, which pulls in the most swell by far and works in wet season conditions that still seemed to be hanging on. But then on the last morning we woke up to a cooling on-shore wind and a building swell, so we decided to leave Bali.

That sounds a bit drastic but we just headed across to Nusa Lebongan - a little island about an hour and a half boat ride from Bali's East coast. We had been told that it was far mellower than Bali and had a few different breaks that worked in different winds. It was great - just what we needed. The three main breaks are Shipwrecks (every country seems to have one) Playgrounds and Lacerations. We stayed just in front of Shipwrecks, which is a right on the edge of a reef passage that breaks against the swell. Do you know what I mean? It doesn't run down the reef like places like G-Land; Uluwatu or Desert Point, but wraps around and breaks back towards the channel, lots of cut backs and off the tops rather than break-neck speed and barrel sections. It wasn't world class but was a swell magnet and was surfable every day except when it got a bit maxed out, but then Lacerations started to break, so that was Ok.

I don't really like being negative about places - usually if something crap happens then I just won't write about it, but I think I will make an exception here. It seems that Shipwrecks pulls swell when most of Bali is flat, so what you get is foreigners, usually Japanese, hiring boats and doing day trips from Bali. That is all very well but when they hire the boats, the boat skipper's buddies all catch a free lift, so you might be sitting out at Shipwrecks on a mellow afternoon with nine or ten others who are staying on the island and a boat pulls up with six tourists and ten more Bali locals who act like complete wave hogs - taking all the set waves and snaking everyone, the Japanese clients included. Occasionally they might block for a client on a smaller wave - they will take off on your inside, shout you down, then pull out further down so that one of the clients can get a short ride on the end section. How frustrating is that. All I can say is that if you hire a boat to go to Nusa Lebongan, make sure that you get it to yourself - you will get far more waves and won't alienate the island locals who suffer along with everyone else.

We had some great waves at all three spots, but it wasn't world class and I kept talking to guys who had come from Uluwatu with stories of stand up barrels and two hundred yard rides. It was time to move on.

Rachel loves me and wants me to be happy and all, but at the end of the day she is not the surf obsessive. She likes the beach and (thankfully) is very happy to spend hours sunning herself with a good book - but there are limits. Indonesia is a good place for exploring limits. To cut a long story short, we spent the next week in Bali's interior. We saw rice fields, beautiful temples, astounding sunsets, but not a single wave. That left ten days on the Bukit Peninsula, where I was given Carte Blanche to surf my bollocks off!

I'm not going to bore you with a blow by blow account of the dreamy days at Dreamland; the glassy express trains at Balangan or the 'balls in your throat' barrels at Uluwatu. It was sometimes crowded, it was painful bouncing off the reef, but from a surfing perspective it was the best ten days of my life, which pretty much makes it the best ten days of my life full stop.

One still evening I was out at Padang Padang. It wasn't big enough to break properly and suck in every gung-ho tube master on the island, but every ten minutes or so a head-high set would come through that would be enough to satisfy the handful of guys that were riding the end section, the section where there is absolutely no option but to pull into the perfect tube that throws mechanically on every wave.

Between sets I chewed the fat with a couple of New Zealanders; a mad Peruvian and a couple of Aussie bodyboarders. At one stage we got buzzed by a dugong. It scared the crap out me. It surfaced a few yards away with a huge upwelling of water. It obviously wasn't a shark but my brain just couldn't comprehend what it could be. Its funny looking back at it now, but I think I know what a heart attack feels like.

So that was Bali. I did everything I wanted to do. After a slow start it surpassed my sky-high expectations. By the end I was surfing the best I have ever done. I was as thin and fit as I was when I was twenty. I had to buy a pair of replacement boardies as the weight dropped off. But sitting here at home - 150 miles from the nearest surfable wave - I can't help thinking that maybe I didn't make the most of it, there were a couple of take offs I backed off from, maybe I should have hussled harder at Uluwatu. Maybe that week of culture could have been spent at G-land instead.

I will have to go back...

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