Mourning of the Earth

I climb off my push bike at Bemo Corner and stare down Jalan Legian. For the first time in the 15 years I’ve been stumbling to Indonesia, before the full moon rave parties and sealed roads to every wave on the Bukit Peninsula, doubtless since Jim Banks was a wide-eyed teen Bronzed Aussie, there are to be seen no cheeky grommets keen to imitate my accent, no conspiratorially whispering ganja salesmen, no laughing Gudang Garam or Mentos hawkers, no Maduran whores beckoning in shadow, no mothers clasping babies and silently reaching out for coins, no bakso carts with ringing bells, no lurching drunks, or traffic snarls, or honking bikes, or familiar movements of any kind.

It is midnight, the beginning of the seventh day since two terrorist bombs tore a chasm, literally and spiritually, in the heart of this surf-spawned metropolis by the sea. Asia’s most famous street, walled shoulder to shoulder with shops, restaurants and bars stretching north through Legian and Seminyak as far as the eye can peer, is desolate. Inconceivably desolate. I close my eyes. Yet the only sound is the near imperceptible breeze whispering through the tiga kancuh trees that line the empty footpaths. In more ways than can be measured, Kuta is this night a ghost town.
I begin to walk. The slap of thongs on bitumen echoes back harshly. I bend, and catch movement in my periphery. Beneath a shop awning, several figures sit facing the road, watching me. Some nod, or attempt to smile. By their distinctive front-knotted headpieces and chequered sarongs, I can tell these men are members of the local banjar (council). They are sentinels, armed with walkie-talkies and a grimness that such an outrage will not happen again, not on their watch. I nod back, like the banjar, not wishing to disturb the strangely beautiful stillness of this night with the ugly pettiness of words.

Barefoot, I walk on, past the narrow entrance to Poppies Lane I, and more groups of squatting banjar, all discreetly, strategically placed, often alternating with similar sized groups of armed polisi. Despite the arse-protective political and media hysteria urging westerners to bunker in their hotels and flee Bali post haste, I have never felt safer in Indonesia than I do now. Or more...loved. Or such stillness.
I walk on, passing boarded windows and ever more buckled roller doors. Glass fragments sparkle in the street and waxing moon light. To my right, polisi and news trucks clog the car park of the New Bounty, all lit up, yet still closed like most of Bali’s major nightspots. Wreaths weaved with brilliant flowers, handmade and natural, line the gutters and sealed-up storefronts in increasing density. Yellow police tape and 20 metre linen sheets dangle along both footpaths, scrawled with messages of support and condolence. And anger: “Fuck you terroris cunts!” Ahead, the very road itself appears to blaze.

Yet as I pass Poppies Lane II, still clogged high with debris, I realise the fire is no more than several hundred orange candle flowers speckling the road. Several locals kneel and pray in ceremonial garb, or stand with bowed heads before the hill of wreaths and single flowers piled several feet high outside the gutted remnants of The Aloha Shop. Beyond this point, the road is taped off and guarded by an even larger throng of polisi. Ground zero.

The English language contains several hundred thousand words, every one utterly incapable of describing the heinous magnitude of the carnage wrought by the 150kg ammonium nitrate bomb loaded with fuel oil and packed into a road-blocking bemo amongst such a crush of people. I struggle to reconcile this rubble-strewn vision of Hell with the image of mates’ beaming faces psyching for ‘a huge Saturday night’ at legendary Aussie bar, the Sari Club, or perhaps across the road, at the more cosmopolitan Paddies: Asia’s social twin towers. They will never be rebuilt; not on this island of spirits.
Two middle-aged westerners approach the polisi line, clutching each other for support. Their eyes roam across the floodlit rubble that was the Sari, across the obscene crater in the road to the melted black skeleton that was Paddies, searching for meaning where there is no meaning. Tears slowly blossom in their eyes, burst, and wend down well-worn lines; and not for the first time, well up in mine as well. From the small crowd, even from the polisi, palpable empathy flows. Emotion in the eyes cannot be faked, nor tears from the soul. Whatever trace of resentment the Balinese Hindus and the local Muslim minority who eke out an existence on the streets may have felt towards Australians over East Timor is now as much rubble as our national fantasies of immune isolation. The tolerant, beautiful Balinese especially, are as much victims of this atrocity as the Aussies, Javanese and partying citizens from a dozen other countries who were torn to shreds, burnt beyond recognition or ‘fortunate’ to survive with injuries that will scar or disable for life. They will never forget; nor must we.

Next morning, local superstars Riz and Betet pick me up for a run to Canggu, Bali’s most rippable right reef. Escaping Kuta is a guilty pleasure, but surfers are ever-opportunistic dogs. The Left is pumping, while Canggu itself pulses with four to six feet sets. I stay in the water until my shoulders ache, until my soul and sinuses have been at least partially cleansed. The crowd maxes at around ten, remarkable for Canggu. Yet more remarkable is the vibe. Despite the presence of surfers from several different nations, I am snaked only once, and the offending Balinese guy paddles straight back to me and apologises as if he has committed a great crime. When I hoot a Brazilian who pulls in backside, he paddles back out and...hugs me! For this day, at least, the facade falls from all our constructions of race, rivalry and nationhood, and we are left but brothers and sisters, with the same naked human fears and passions.

Though the rains are yet to arrive, the Angin Tenggara trade wind shifted ninety degrees around late September to a wet season southwesterly, meaning wave action had also swung to Bali’s east side. The week before the bombing, there were at least 40 surfers at Nusa Dua every day. The day after, there were four, including a big tattooed guy who’d narrowly escaped Paddies by climbing over the back fence to avoid the stampede to the front entrance, and who sat on his board sobbing and shaking like a little girl. As for Ulu’s, according to Betet, only a few locals were onto the early morning sessions. More than anything else, Indonesia’s surf remains the same. It is immaterial to the waves that roll across the Indian Ocean whether there are humans to celebrate their reef climax or not.

Australian surfers dug the foundations for tourism in Indonesia, for all the Sari Clubs. Once certain developmental points were passed, the motel chains came, and the budget travelers, and the celebrating footballers, and the Japanese and Taiwanese package tourists, both of whom outnumbered Aussies in the first half of 2002 for the first time ever. Yet these latter waves of arrivals have the least reason to return now, and surfers the most. If there are only handfuls of tourists, there need be no nightclubs. And though the huge night out in Bali has become an institution, even a rite of passage for many young Aussies, do surfers really need all that? Dancing and drinking are fine and fun expressions of individual freedom, but is that why Jim Banks, or Alby Falzon, or Steve Cooney first came to Bali?

I believe if we flee, if surfers jettison moral responsibility, if we tear the baby from our breast, abandon Bali to economic ruin, and Megawati’s moderate Indonesia to the extremists who didn’t even have the guts to die themselves while smashing every tenet in their sacred Koran, if we allow these epitomes of evil to violate our hearts and reforge our decisions against our will, then shall we have lost, and terror won?

Fuck you terrorists. I know whose hearts are stronger.

[There were further bomb attacks at Jimbaran and Kuta on October 1st 2005, where suicide bombers were responsible for the deaths of 20 people.]

First published in Waves magazine, December 2002