Searching for the Dreamland

John Milton, Paradise Lost Bk 1. 1667

Laurie McGinness on Bali, Surfing World magazine, 1978.

Bali – what’s a surfer supposed to make of it these days? The signals are confusing. From what I can pick up, two radically different reputations mask its realities and if, like me, you’ve never even been there, it’s hard to know what to expect. On the one hand there’s the Bali cliché: the ‘Island of the Gods’, a land of exotic scents and magical ceremonies. Its people are gentle, welcoming, guided by karma and always seeking harmony and balance. And its shores are so well endowed with groomed, perfectly barrelling waves that, for a surfer, Bali is as close to an Earthly paradise as you’ll ever find. In short, it’s a place that any sensible surfer should have a relationship with. And most do.

Then there’s the other angle: Bali is a has-been, overrun, sold-out, tourist trap. It developed too fast and is crowded out with surfers, backpackers, smug expats living the dream and regulars too cool for school. Its mellow spiritualism is tainted by loud western hedonism, many of its people are being exploited or infected with greed while at government level, corruption and criminality are rife and operating on a vast, uncontrollable scale. Don’t even mention terrorism. In terms of surf, it has good waves, yes, but not as good as its neighbours’, and these days they’re crowded to the point of comedy, or for many, tragedy. It ain’t what it used to be, and all that. In short, any sensible surfer will avoid Bali these days and look elsewhere for their Earthly paradise, because it sure as hell isn’t there anymore.

Here’s my friend Sparrow, a long-term, hard-core, ground-level Kiwi traveller, who echoes the thoughts of many I know:
“Bali has become hideous in my eyes – not just for surfing, it’s also all the associated mainstreamers who’ve bought into the whole idea of that lifestyle and actually bought apartments, pet dogs, bars and all the other crap that goes with.

I’ve seen the ongoing progress about every two years for the past two decades and I think there’s been more development in the last four or five than in the previous 15…and it’s really just the beginning. It amazes me that people would actually want to live in Bali, unless they’re either a sheep or a developer, which are what many people there seem to be.
This view is cynical, I know, but a month or two ago I saw the polar opposite end of the spectrum – two weeks of perfect waves with just me and a mate. It was actually the least crowded Indo I’ve ever come across for such high quality waves over a prolonged period. It’s not the only place like that either.

I could, of course, just harden the f--k up and go hop in the water every day and deal with the crowds. Of course, I’d get plenty of waves by doing my time, being in the right place in the right conditions etc. etc. But why bother, when there’s so many empty places on the planet?”

Before I leave for Bali, this is one of my problems. I’ve never even been there and already I know too much. As the trip approached the two opposing visions battled it out in my mind.

“Aw, it’s going to be shit,” I’m thinking. “A crowded theme park,” versus the blessed-out view: “mmm Bali…I can smell the incense already…massages, mangos and sweet coffee…barrels, as far as the eye can see.”

In reality, I wasn’t that fazed by the bad rep. In fact, I was thrilled by the fantasy take on Bali and absolutely over the moon to be going there, surfwise. I couldn’t wait to surf Uluwatu; I had cold sweats about Padang Padang; I’d become intrigued by Bingin’s short, sharp barrels, frothing for Impossibles (looks makeable to me), tripping on Dreamland and hungry to check Airport Rights, Canggu’s reefs, Keramas and anything else on the east coast that offered a windless window. Surf thoughts alone had me dribbling over the guidebook. Of course, this actually makes me a total kook. Everyone has been to Bali and here am I, a surfer of some 25-plus years, a surf mag editor for 14 years and I’m so late for a party that, word is, it’s hardly worth turning up to at all. But here’s me, pissing my pants with excitement about going to Bali for the very first time. Mea kooka.

We finally arrive and my friend JC Pierce and I find ourselves standing at the carousel in Denpasar airport late one night in June, tired, curious and expectant. The excitement has only grown. My mixed-up mind has hardened. I’ve made a decision to ignore all negative press, take whatever comes and look at the positives. So the garish surf-hostel posters and surf-school posters and surf-everything posters that greeted us in the arrivals hall were mere amusement, and the fact that I was perhaps the 10 millionth surfer ever to stand at the carousel waiting for my surfboards was neither here nor there. JC, of course, had been here before – twice actually, but not since 1984 when he was a sponsored pro based out of Florida. Back then pros didn’t just rock up at Denpasar and get chauffeured to the Quik mansion like I assume they do now. Those were the days of unpaved roads along Kuta Beach, home-stays with families, and long walks down to the ladder at Uluwatu. Like me, JC was curious about what we’d find here, but unlike me, he knew what was coming.

Uloooos!

The forecast promised an 8ft swell in two days time. Until then we’d have to make do with whatever the Indian Ocean threw at us, which suited me fine. We’d landed on our feet with a spacious room in Puri Uluwatu, a hotel on the hill above Uluwatu’s main peak. The room had a small lawn out back with a stone shrine of carved gods and ornate monsters. Offerings made of banana leaf and filled with flowers and spicy incense were scattered all around. From the shrine we could see paradise, or that’s how it seemed on that first dawn as we stared down the valley at The Peak.
We could see trails of whitewater wisping across wave faces in the semi dark, so we grabbed boards and headed down the valley via steep steps through trees filled with silent monkeys giving us surly looks. At the foot of the stairs we reached the warungs, little businesses with open decks out front that overlook the break. This is where the world congregates and a hierarchy of Balinese entrepreneurs slice some of it off while its here. The bamboo and wood structures that JC remembers are made of concrete now and they’ve multiplied and diversified into t-shirt stalls, kitchens, bars, massage areas, ding-repair dens and photo shops. And the famous wooden ladder that descends into Uluwatu’s cave is now a cast concrete stairway, though it’s no less dramatic, especially for a first-time kook like me.

Apart from the guidebook guidance I didn’t really know much about Uluwatu’s waves. I knew there were several of them along the stretch of coast that marks the tip of the Bukit Peninsula, one being Temples, further up towards the tip from where we were, but the rest were all a kind of blur of lefthanders. Beyond that most of my knowledge of the place came from two classic films, Morning of The Earth by Albe Falzon and David Elfick, and Tubular Swells, by Jack McCoy and Dick Hoole.

These are timeless films, beautifully made, but both are from an era long, long passed. The best I could glean was that Ulus had good waves, yes, but they were somehow not that noteworthy anymore.

Surfing in Bali started in Kuta around 1936, but it wasn’t until the late sixties that American servicemen started sniffing the coast out and finding new places, maybe even Uluwatu. The break’s genesis moment comes with Morning of the Earth in 1971, which shows young Australian Steve Cooney and older Hawaiian guy, Rusty Miller, riding the first waves at Ulus. Albe Falzon describes the discovery thus:
“We stayed in Kuta on arrival. It was just a small coastal village at the time. Dirt roads, topless old women leading pigs around on a lead, chickens everywhere, very few losmens, no tourists – just a few German hippies hanging out on the beach.

“As far as we know, we were the first surfers to venture out on the Bukit. When the surf was flat at Kuta one day, we went out to the temple overlooking Uluwatu – not exactly overlooking the break – up the reef a bit. It was pretty flat on the reef so we walked along the headland to the corner of Uluwatu and to our amazement there was small, 2-3ft surf wrapping around the headland. It looked perfect. The water was really clear – it just looked like a dream place to surf. A few days later when the surf kicked in at Kuta, we thought maybe there’d be some good surf out at Ulus. To our surprise, when we arrived it was around 8ft and pumping.”
Falzon and crew were followed by others of the underground, like Gerry Lopez, Jeff Hakman, Jack McCoy and Dick Hoole, who in turn were followed by a few more of their ilk, and then others of their ilk, and so it slowly spread. Gradually, Bali, and Uluwatu in particular, became known among the small global brotherhood, as a tangible paradise, not a mythical island like Santosha, but a real life surf nirvana with a backdrop of exotica that defied belief or comprehension.
“For the first few years Ulu was all I could imagine perfect surf could be,” says Gerry Lopez who, come summer when the Pipeline shut off, had eyes for no other … even after Grajagan was discovered. “Bill Boyum yelled down from the cliff when he got back from the first time to G-Land, ‘This isn’t even a surf spot!’ He’s lucky we were down on the beach because we would have stoned him.
“But later, even once we got set up to comfortably campaign G-Land – that’s where we’d be during the full and new moon tide periods – but we’d still return and surf Ulu on the in-between tides.” Bali offered the likes of Lopez a new universe of waves, culture and spirituality to explore and an everyday existence beyond compare.

Here’s Australian writer Laurie McGinness again, talking about the later ’70s, when Ulus was already widely known among the surfing fraternity:
“At the time Bali really was the end of the search for many of us. We knew that better waves like G-Land and Nias existed, but we also knew that, for variety, lack of crowds and consistency, Bali at that time was as good as it was ever going to get. If you can imagine arriving at Uluwatu on a perfect morning, looking down the length of the Bukit and knowing that you were the only surfers in the whole area, or riding an outrigger out to perfect empty Nusa Dua; they were our everyday experiences.”

Stepping down into the cave that first morning, it felt like I was tasting the magic. I’d only been in Bali for 10 hours but so far it felt like the dream come true. I waded in and paddled-out on an exiting surge, noting how sharp the cave’s walls look and not to mess with this place at higher tides. I paddled for the light and soon rounded a big rock at the entrance then found myself rushing down coast in a current that totally owned me. A few metres away, just across a shallow shelf, deep blue walls hurled over themselves and throttled down the reef, growing all the way. As I paddled and drifted and duck-dived, waiting for a lull, I saw sights that gave me shivers of joy, and fear. No one told me it was this good. I slid out back and wandered across a broad plain of water, watching peaks rear up, arc and race along ruler-straight zip lines in the near, the middle and the far, far distance.

A crew of guys was scattered widely and peaks rose up outside and in on the ledge. The outside waves heaped themselves into deep blue mountaintops, rolled and thundered in, while inside, the slightly smaller swells held off until the last moment, chucking when they hit the shelf. All the waves looked thick and fast, and as they ran down the line, they grew.
“It’s a proper wave,” I thought to myself. “And if the 8ft swell is coming in two days time, what’s this?”

In all the pep talks about Bali I’d had, everyone said Uluwatu was “a great wave”, but none went much further than that. People rarely rave about it, so while I’d read the guidebooks and got the gist, I wasn’t really ready for all this…detail. The thickness – the volume of water in every wave – was more than I’d imagined. My 6’4” Wade Tokoro barrel-chaser felt small. I felt small.

It’s hard to imagine how Steve Cooney must have felt in 1971, 15 years-old paddling-out here for the first time and taking-off backhand on one of those growers, before anyone had ever even tried it. Even Lopez and his Hawaiian crew couldn’t ignore the power.

“Ulu was intense,” Lopez says. “We were all alone out there. Except for a few fishermen and reef gatherers, it was just us...me, Jeff and Jack. Sometimes some of the few other surfers in Bali would come and that was very welcome because the energy, isolation and relentlessness of the place was pretty overwhelming.”

Forty-odd years later, in a time when the whole surfing world has been there and done that, a time when teams of lifeguards watch from the cliff, bars pump music and photographers with 600mm lenses capture high-speed sequences of every wave ridden, the place still feels big and full of power. Whatever else has changed, the reef and the waves and the brutal currents and the magnificent setting haven’t.

We surf until the water is greeny turquoise and the sun is high. It is an exhilarating first surf. Speed is the main sensation – speed and wonder at its beauty and power. As the blood sugar levels deplete, I enter a state of blissed-out delight. My board’s a little thin for the occasion, but aside from that, there’s not a thing wrong with the world. I’m living the Bali fantasy. I’m fresh off the plane and I’ve woken up in the dream I was told didn’t exist anymore.

The line-up had started off virtually empty but gradually fills. The crowd ranges from kids to old boys, mostly Australian and none of them looking too impressed with the magnificence around them. The crowd tightens as the tide changes, and wedging peaks appear (really wedging. I never knew Ulus had such kick-ass little bounce). I surf on, even enjoying the range of characters, and the skills of some of these Aussie tube-hounds. But the energy’s changing.
Soon little flashes of negative electricity start sizzling through the crowd. There’s some scowling and muttering going on, and some drop-ins and snaking. I pull back from a wave again to make way for a Brazilian guy who’d snaked me, again, and who I knew was too deep, again. I turned and faced a set, the first wave already rearing further out than me, then paddled for the edge of the whitewater. Just as I got there an Aussie guy who’d been getting more than his share of barrels swung late to drop in, right above me. He saw me, bailed and his board met mine somewhere in the soup. His was dinged pretty badly, but mine was fine. I felt for the guy – forced to paddle in when the Peak was on fire. Then he paddled up and showed me the damage and it turned out he wanted to blame me, though he clearly knew he’d screwed up and caused the whole thing. He huffed and puffed and paddled off cursing.

Suddenly I felt angry. I looked around and realised I was surrounded by maybe 50 people, all waiting for the same thing I was. It was a magic, beautiful, powerful thing we were waiting for, a little hit of the magic wave-bong. But at that moment it felt sordid. I felt more like a junky queuing for a methadone prescription, somewhere in Australia.

This may have been the blood sugar reaching dangerously low levels and shorting out my positive chi or something, but whatever it was I suddenly wanted out. I didn’t love it anymore. I wasn’t in the Bali Uluwatu surf nirvana fantasy anymore. I was sensing the flipside. Retreat and recuperation seemed like the best thing to do.

This was the right move, and the right tactic for our week at Ulus. Ignore all negatives. Seek only the positives. We surfed Uluwatu every day from then on, usually several times, always returning in a state of bliss. Turned out the 8ft swell had arrived two days early, so it dropped from Day Two onwards, but not by much. All week we gorged on thick, fast barrels, and for most of that time stayed firmly planted on the upside of the Bali dream. The bullshit was out there, but we wilfully ignored it and just surfed the wave. She is an interesting, many-mooded beauty, easy to fall in love with if you can block out the 50-plus other blokes she’s flirting with at the same time.

I asked Lopez what happened to his relationship with Uluwatu, when and why it lost its lustre. Interestingly he didn’t say, “Aw it just got too crowded”. He said that, but with a twist, touching on the role of the beholder in the equation:
“Uluwatu was, is and always will be a world-class surf break. [But] as the years went by and the crowds increased, something changed. Later on when I thought about it, I reckoned it had to do with a loss of freedom. The high tide peak at Ulu is a shifty devil and when I had the line-up to myself, I was free to roam and chase down those scattered peaks. The low tide inside Racetrack had one easy take-off and with more than a couple of people there, it became congested. Each time I returned, I found the wave less satisfying as my movement in the line-up was increasingly restricted by more and more people. Somehow, it seemed, the magic was gone. I’ve often thought about what it was that changed and the only answer I could come up with...was me, and something in my mind. The place hasn’t lost any of its magic, I just lost the ability to feel it.”

Mega’s World

Mega Semahdi reckons he’ll be a priest by the time he’s 50, but until then he’s happy being a pro surfer. “Varuna is our god of the sea,” says the diminutive 21-year-old Rusty rider as he sits in his Bingin heartland surrounded by his posse, empty beer bottles on the table, in-jokes flying, a guitar and a couple of adopted foreigners who’ve joined this friendly, but high-end inner circle of the Bingin beachboy brotherhood. “Varuna is a good god, but he also gets angry,” says Mega. “As surfers we know all about that.” Sounds like he’ll make a good preacher, I think.

In all respects the scene resembles any similar brotherhood of locals anywhere in the surfing world, except that among this group there’s one red-hot, highly paid sponsored rider and a number of others soon-to-be. Also, because they’re Balinese, talking seriously about being a priest later in life and discussing the moods of the gods that surround you while downing some beers and boisterously shit-talking the afternoon away, isn’t unusual. These days it’s entirely normal.
Mega is a Bukit Peninsula kid turned pro and as such he’s the direct descendent, in the family tree of surfing in Bali, of Steve Cooney, Rusty Miller, Gerry Lopez, Jeff Hakman et al. He’s the inevitable outcome, if such a thing can exist, of the influx of surf into his island home back in the early ’70s. Between then and now, two generations of Balinese kids have grown sea legs and become surfers. The first generation is made up of the few who dared join the foreigners playing in Varuna’s domain. After them came more brave souls, and talent borne of unlimited daily perfection. Eventually Indonesian surfing started appearing on the global surf radar with the exploits of the half-Chinese, half-Balinese goofy-foot, Rizal Tanjung. Rizal became a household name and part of the inner-sanctum of Hawaiian and top pro surfers. As his fame and wealth grew he always offered a helping hand to young Indonesian up-and-comers, so that they too might lift themselves out of poverty and into the healthy funding stream of the ever-growing Balinese surf industry.

Mega takes home a good cheque from his sponsors every month – as much for his everyday surfing as for contest wins, although over the years he’s won a Pro Junior at Kuta Reef, Rookie of the Year award in the Indonesian Surfing Circuit tour and taken a 3rd at the big annual Rip Curl Padang Padang contest. He’s a slim, featherweight guy, but he’s no slouch in the big barrels of the Bukit. “I think there may be a god of big barrels, too,” he tells me.

Mega looks at his future as being entirely bound up with surfing, at least until he’s 50 and he becomes a priest. “As long as I can surf every day,” he says of his next couple of decades, “I’ll be happy.” His father, once a farmer and then a self-educated lawyer, has always supported his son’s surfing even though for him such a life seems strange, culturally. For Mega’s grandparents, it’s virtually impossible to get their heads around. In their lifetimes, Bali has transformed beyond imagination, although like true balance-seeking Balinese, they do not judge Mega. He tells me he feels he has the support of everyone important in his life.

I offer Mega a beer and he says, “No, thanks.” His uncle, who taught him how to surf when he was about 10 years-old and hangs with the crew and gently watches over his 21 year-old nephew, sidles up to me and asks, “Please, don’t buy another round. He doesn’t really drink and I don’t want him to get tempted.”

Mega doesn’t look like he needs a drink, dipping into the banter with familiar ease, chucking in one-liners that crack the crew up, strumming on the guitar a little and looking out over his beloved Bingin. This is his domain. Their domain – backpackers, surf tourists, sea gods and all. His smile never fades. Right now, in my mind, Mega is Balinese surfing. Young, strong, comfortably part of the global surf culture, but still culturally distinct, cashed-up, taboo-breaking, but respectful of the elders and the spirits and oh yes, surfing as good as the best of the avant garde aerial generation of today.

Jaded travellers may be ‘over’ Bali, but these Balinese surfers seem to be living in some other version of Bali and loving their life. Who can argue with that?

Detourism

We surfed Ulus every day, but made a couple of instructive day trips. Not far, mind you – with our tiny mopeds and so little time, it seemed that Keramas – a couple of hours of hard, dangerous driving up to the northeast coast – was off the menu. So was Canggu and anywhere much further afield than Kuta. But we had to hit Kuta.

By the time we arrived in the late afternoon, the golden sun was dipping towards the emerald waves of Kuta’s seemingly limitless Halfway beach. The day felt nearly done but people, mopeds, cars, buses and bemos buzzed at swarming speed along the main road behind the beach. JC and I wandered onto the sand, glanced admiringly at the miles and miles of emerald walls and bright white manes with an offshore wind pulling them back. It wasn’t like checking a surf spot. This didn’t feel like somewhere I wanted to paddle out, though plenty of the waves looked plenty hollow and plenty makeable. It felt like a holiday beach, a really, really crowded mass tourism vacation beach, with semi-close-out barrels as a backdrop.

We were drawn to the street chaos so we found a cool drink and a perch where we could watch the world go by. It was enough to remind me that it’s not just surfing that has changed Bali. Of course, surfing’s just a sideshow, albeit one of the key attractions that makes this place marketably ‘cool’. Kuta is everything touristic. It’s backpacker, package tour, mainstream tourist heaven. A major world attraction. A place that every just-out-of-school kid will inevitably go to, like Phuket or Goa, but also a headline holiday for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Malaysian and other oriental group tours, and of course the mainstream Australian cheap getaway crowd. Oh, and don’t forget the Indonesians from all over the archipelago who also come as tourists.

In amongst the crowd are the Balinese and Javanese hustlers who rent bikes, boards and cheap accommodation, sell sweets, beer, t-shirts, drugs, “dick bongs” and cigarettes, and organise parties, full-moon raves and girls that may be guys for guys too drunk to spot the difference. Here they all were. Like the warungs at Ulus, multiplied to a mass-market level.

We sat and sipped our beers. The traffic – human, two-wheeled and four-wheeled – was thick, the noise a continuous cacophony of horns and tingling Asian dance tunes. The swarms of mopeds never abated. Busloads of Chinese tourists passed by, rental cars, delivery vans, surf tour wagons and local buses with bored Balinese commuters heading home from school or work. In amongst them, occasionally, sat old men on mopeds in traditional dress, sedately abiding the traffic jam and lunatic crowds of beachified youth. They looked like they’ve been coming down this road forever, since back when it was a dirt track through the trees.

A group of teenagers dressed in black and all with bleached hair, lounged on the wall nearby looking semi-menacing but not, because you could see they all had the same logo on their shirts and were obviously not scary biker punks, but were actually just the Asian teenage pop version of biker punks, leafleting for a club. Fat white girls in slim bikinis and stumbling young Australian scamps wobbled past with beer cans and sloping grins. In the time it took to down a slow beer and a pack of peanuts, we saw a million people pass by, most of them semi-naked and sunburnt. We heard French, German, English, American, Spanish, Portuguese, Australian (‘mayte, mayte, mayte, mayte’) and all kinds of unknown Asian languages. We were the only still creatures in a hurricane of holiday fun. And then we were done. We’d seen enough. Kuta, in all its beautiful vulgarity. Done that.
We laughed in wonder and pulled out, back to Ulus, which felt like a quiet, lazy oasis.

On another afternoon we wandered down the Bukit Peninsular by bike determined to surf somewhere else. Bingin was small and crowded, Impossibles looked fun, but a long walk for a bunch of waves that always end up nailing you. It seemed like an unnecessary way to bait the sea god or the god of reef cuts.

We snooped over at Dreamland, which looked dreamy, but still too full, tide-wise. So we killed time and explored some more, but pretty soon ended up back at Dreamland, tempted by the clifftop view of its magnificent walls wafting in across the green-gold sea. We decided to get in, sure that as the tide pulled out it would start sucking on the reef and barrelling off in both directions. We paddled out and surfed with patience and expectant joy, making the best of the flat surfaces and lips that never quite threw. After an hour or so the doubts had well and truly set in. JC was chatting with an older Australian guy, a regular, it seemed. “Does it get hollow out here on the lower tide?” he asked.
“Nah, mayte, this is as good as it gets. It’s just a shit wave.”
We made our way in through hundreds of Chinese holidaymakers nearly drowning in the shorebreak. They were staying in the nuclear bunker of a hotel building, owned by one of Suharto’s sons, concreted into the cliff above.
We left feeling foolish. With the whole Bukit and beyond available and accessible to us, and barrels as far as the eye could see – literally – we’d chosen just about the only shit wave on Bali.

But at least we had Uluwatu to retreat to, and these diversions confirmed our journey’s most valuable lesson: the surfer’s dreamland doesn’t exist, and yet it is a real place.

First published in The Surfer’s Path Issue 81 December, 2010