Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Decades after Uluwatu was first surfed, when surfers were jacked to their computers and a lot faster with their credit cards, the sport developed a swarming reaction to the latest perfect-wave discovery. One week after a 2006 contest webcast from an incredible never-before-seen Mexican pointbreak, no less than a 100 surfers flew in to catch the next good swell. Reaction times were slower in the 1970s. Nearly a year passed from the time Falzon shot Uluwatu until he debuted 

—with the break, and Bali itself, remaining unidentified—and 

 didn’t publish its first Uluwatu feature until late 1974, at which point a “crowded” day still meant a dozen people in the water.

Even with a faster rollout, though, surfers likely wouldn't have flooded in right away. For Americans, it was an expensive, three-stop, 24-hour flight. Indonesia was the first Asian country to make a real impression on the sport, and that also took some getting used to. Less-adventurous surfers were weeded out by the language barrier and some cultural oddities—teeth-filing, for example, and public cremations. Even the surf press took time to come around. An early 

 article on Bali was titled “Evil Waters,” and it luxuriated in talk about sharks, running sores, earthquakes, and dangerously shallow reefs.

Still, from 1971 forward, surf tourism went up annually, and by mid-decade Bali had become the destination of choice among the world’s best: Nat Young and Wayne Lynch visited early, followed by Terry Fitzgerald, and Gerry Lopez was on record as saying he’d gotten the “ride of his career” at Uluwatu. New breaks were also discovered, including Padang-Padang: just one mile down the coast, it was a shorter wave than Uluwatu, but threw a tube that at times resembled Pipeline.

Few surfers, at this time, thought beyond Bali. Few tourists of any kind did, for that matter. Bali was just one of nearly three dozen provinces in the Republic of Indonesia, but for all practical purposes it was a country unto itself. The rest of Indonesia was Muslim majority. The Balinese practiced a homegrown version of Hindu. To the Western world, Bali meant flaming sunsets over golden beaches, postcards of bare-breasted native women, and touring dance troops. Indonesia by and large meant Java, which in turn meant hardcore Third World urban poverty in Jakarta, coup attempts, student riots, Communist purges, and a stone-faced dictator in sunglasses and a military dress uniform.

More to the point, for surfers: the international airport at Denpasar was a short drive from Kuta, Uluwatu had been labeled “the best wave on the planet,” and there were another six or eight high-quality breaks to surf on the Bukit alone. Bali was exotic and friendly, and everything—

 rentals, bemo rides, Bintang beer, magic mushroom omelets, hour-long “happy ending” massages—was incredibly cheap. Why explore further?

Because for some tiny but insatiable percent of visiting surfers, the thought of all that flawless empty Indonesian surf was unbearable.

The first off-Bali surf ventures took place in the early 1970s, before 

 began proselytizing on behalf of Uluwatu, and were focused on nearby Java. As is the case with many such exploratory efforts off distant shores, there is no settled record as to who was first on the scene. The most-often told story, however, begins in the summer of 1972, when a wandering trust-funded Southern California surfer named Bob Laverty, while flying over the Plengkung jungle on the southern tip of Java, looked down to see long rows of whitewater spoking into the far end of a huge bay. After landing in Bali, where he’d been living for the past few months, Laverty thought about what it would take to access those waves. Pioneering Uluwatu had been a fairly easy jaunt from Kuta Beach. Getting to this place, located on the tip of a jungle peninsula, would be a lot more involved.

Laverty bought a British Admiralty coastal map of Java and located the bay where he’d seen the waves. Then he talked to Bill and Mike Boyum, the footloose sons of a navy fighter pilot and both members of the small but growing community of Kuta-based American expat surfers. Laverty unrolled the map and pointed. Were they up for a real adventure? It was just 60 miles, he explained, from Kuta, across the Bali Strait, to the bay. Maybe they could hire a boat, Laverty mused. The Boyum brothers shook their heads; a sea journey with no confirmed docking point was nuts. The overland route was four times as long and dangerous enough—driving in Indonesia was done at high speeds and close quarters—and it would likely involve some beachfront bushwhacking. But it was the only choice for a recon mission. Mike thought it over and passed. Bill was in.

Laverty and Boyum left early in the morning. Each had a new Suzuki trail bike, a backpack full of water and food, and a strapped-on surfboard hanging like a guitar off one shoulder. An armed guard at the Bali Strait frowned at their boards, and momentarily dropped his hand to his revolver, but they smiled and nodded and rolled slowly aboard the waiting ferry. They were aiming for a fishing village called Grajagan, at the far end of the bay, and arrived just as the midafternoon 

 call to prayer was wailing out from the mosque. An hour later, each surfer wheeled his bike onto a dugout fishing boat hired on the spot to take them across a lagoon, which left them on a jungle-edged beachfront about ten miles from the long point Laverty had seen from the plane. The hard-packed sand was perfect for their fat-tire bikes, and they gunned down the coast, shouting as a pack of flamingos winged off to their left, then cursing as the beach gave way to a slippery bank of dried broken coral shards.

It was now late afternoon. They were close enough to see whorls of spray coming off the waves, probably two miles away. After pushing the bikes into the foliage, they continued on foot; when the coral beach turned into soft, powdery sand, too deep to walk through at a decent clip, they moved into the shadowed edge of the jungle. It was slow going. The sun went down, and they hadn’t even covered half the remaining distance. Finally, in pitch-black darkness, hoping they were close to the break but not entirely sure, they groped their way onto the beach, exhausted, and fell asleep.

Boyum and Laverty woke up the following morning, gritty and sore, and looked out to sea. The wavescape before them was on a different level altogether than Uluwatu—which had already changed their conception of expanded-terrain surf breaks. Sets rolled in from the far side of a low headland, so there was no telling exactly where the lineup began, but they were looking at something like a mile’s worth of hollow, double-overhead lefts. Like Uluwatu, the wave didn’t peel down uniformly from one end of the reef to the other, but instead divided itself into two or three overlapping sections, with the longest, hollowest, shallowest portion at the end. It was thicker and more powerful than Uluwatu. Just as well-shaped, but with a certain rawness—almost like the North Shore. There were no Uluwatu-like cliffs to worry about, which was a small relief, and no rocks sticking up anywhere along the reef, which for the moment looked to be fairly well-submerged beneath the morning high tide. Laverty and Boyum paddled out to a likely-looking spot more or less in the middle of the lineup. “And for three days,” Boyum later wrote, “we surfed our brains out.”

They called the spot “G-Land,” which was easier to say than Grajagan. They spent two more nights on the beach and had nothing to do between surf sessions except keep their red-rimmed and slightly hypnotized gaze focused on the endless march of waves. On the third day, sunburned and low on water, they walked slowly back down the point, pulled their motorcycles out of the jungle fringe, and retraced their path back to Kuta.

It was a rushed, underplanned adventure that could have gone disastrously wrong. Malaria, reef cuts, road accidents, heatstroke—nothing touched them, and over dinner with friends that first night back in Bali, Laverty and Boyum planned a return visit. It didn’t happen, at least not for Laverty. Two weeks later he had an epileptic seizure while surfing Uluwatu and drowned.

What happened next at Grajagan was in its own way more audacious than that first helter-skelter visit. The Boyum brothers purchased a 24-foot Radon fishing boat, which got them from Bali to G-Land in just a few hours. It also doubled as a floating campsite. Finding a safe harbor, though, was a problem. Now and then—and without warning, as there were no reliable surf reports for the area—a swell would get big enough to churn through the anchorage zone. It was Mike Boyum, thinking bigger, who had the idea of a jungle-surrounded treehouse camp in front of the break. Not only would a camp be safer and more comfortable, it would free up the Radon to serve as a Bali-based supply boat.

Boyum was that rarest of New Age gypsies, able to fast all weekend and sit in full lotus indefinitely, then turn around and skillfully wheel and deal with businessmen and politicos. The Plengkung jungle was part of a national forest reserve, which meant the surf camp had to be fully permitted, and Boyum threw himself into the project. Bribes were made—Boyum at one point removed a gold Rolex from his own wrist and slipped it onto the wrist of a high-ranking official seated across from him, holding eye contact the entire time—setbacks were overcome, and before the year was out all the authorizations were in place. In mid-1974, the Boyum brothers and a select few other Kuta-based surfers, along with some hired Javanese, finished building a 15' x 15', thatched-roof, bamboo-sided treehouse. Panthers and leopards lived in the jungle, and huge tiger prints were occasionally seen on the beach, even though the fabled Javan tiger was supposedly extinct. Snakes aside, raising the treehouse 20-feet off the ground meant everybody slept a little easier. Near the base of the tree was a mess hall of sorts, consisting of two or three single-burner LPG stoves, some Igloo ice chests, and a 50-pound sack of brown rice.

For three years, the only surfers at G-Land were the Boyum brothers and a few hand-picked guests, including Gerry Lopez and a hot Australian goofyfooter named Peter McCabe. Hundreds, thousands of seconds were spent inside the tube. Intricacies having to do with tide, swell direction, wind and lineups were worked on. Progress came quickly. There were no distractions. When the surf was medium-sized, and the tide was in, making the waves a bit less critical, Lopez and McCabe rode together in what Lopez called their Blue Angels act, weaving and crisscrossing their way down the reef.

In 1977, Boyum registered the camp as the Blambangan Surfing Club, and began taking week-long reservations: ten surfers at a time, $200 a person, with an additional transportation fee from Bali. Lopez touted the break in surf magazine interviews and articles (“G-Land has been so good to us all these years, there’s really no reason to go anywhere else”), and the price went up quickly. By 1982, a ten-day package cost $1,000—although camp amenities by that time included bedding, towels, fresh-water showers, and unlimited cold beer.

G-Land at that point was transformed from the world’s best secret spot to the world’s first pay-to-play surf break. It was another hardcore surf entity turning commercial—just as Lightning Bolt had, two years earlier. Initially, the G-Land operation didn’t seem to have a downside. It was a remote, dangerous break, and there was safety in numbers. Furthermore, the guys who signed up were dedicated surfers from around the world and appreciative of the experience. But the consequences were predictable. Once Boyum's camp proved itself as a moneymaker, other surfer-entrepreneurs bribed the right officials, two more camps opened, and eventually there were up to a hundred surfers at a time cycling through the lineup.

Lopez eventually had second thoughts about his part in G-Land’s development. “It was the perfect setup there for a few years,” he said, two decades after his first visit. “It was our surfing monastery. We never should have told anyone.”

 included both Padang-Padang and Grajagan on their 1981 list of the ten best waves in the world. The magazine went on to note that “this strand of volcanic islands [now] represents the ultimate in surfing adventure.” By this time, Indonesia had inspired a gold-rush mentality, as surfers fanned out by boat, car, ferry, bemo, motorcycle, and foot across 2,500 miles of pristine Indonesian coastline, from West Timor to the furthest reaches of Sumatra. New perfect-wave discoveries turned up almost by the month: One Palm, Scar Reef, Lagundri Bay, Desert Point, Shipwrecks. People learned to quit describing any particular break as the “best wave in the world,” as they had with Uluwatu—there were still too many unsurveyed island groups, too much unexamined coastline. Logic said there was a finite number of Indonesian surf breaks. But year after year, decade after decade, incredible new spots kept turning up.

Indonesia reshaped surf travel. Surfers now wanted to maximize their wave haul. There would always be an honored place at the table for Naughton-Peterson-style adventurers, where the journey itself, more than the destination, is the thing. But the backpack-and-bedroll, 

type of surf trip was falling out of favor. Most surfers instead wanted to do it like Gerry Lopez—and who better to model yourself after than the coolest tuberider alive? Jet off to Denpasar and points beyond and roost for two or three weeks directly in front of a dream wave. Sure, maybe dip you toe into the local culture if the surf goes flat. But the object now, as Grajagan pioneer Bill Boyum himself had put it, was to “surf your brains out.”

On the other hand, Indonesia seemed to have a softening effect on the Australian surfing character. G-Land aside, much of the surf pioneering in this corner of the world was done by Aussies, and as Sydney surf journalist Nick Carroll pointed out, they were getting more out of the experience than long, hot, empty waves. “There’s the small matter of our Soul,” Carroll wrote.

Australian surfers have always defined themselves by competition; it’s an area of the sport in which we’ve always felt comfortable and relaxed, and competition successes, from Midget Farrelly on down the line, have been our way of stamping our presence on the wider surfing world. But there was another side to our surfing culture; some part of us that in order to survive needed the sunsets of Grajagan, the croaking of geckos, the malaria tablets and ulcered reef cuts . . . needed the mad tales of adventurers who returned from God knows where up the island chain with scars bigger than any tattoo and diseases they never quite got over and no boards left because they’d broken and washed away. This was the road less traveled. This is where Australia’s surfing soul was nurtured and grown to something more.

No single surfer embodied this better than Jim Banks, a cheerful goofyfooter from Cronulla who turned pro as a teenager in 1978, and three years later won a world tour event at Uluwatu. The next season, still holding down a top-20 ranking but tired of the “dismal waves” featured at most pro contests, Banks dropped off the tour and began spending months at a time searching out the longest, hollowest Indonesian waves. By doing so, he went from respected world circuit journeyman to tuberiding legend and soul-surfing icon—a bit like Gerry Lopez, if Lopez were Aussie, blond, and friendly to one and all. Banks did yoga and talked often about higher consciousness, but he also had the common touch. Recalling the après-surf mood after his best-ever day of surf, at Desert Point with two friends and a boat, Banks said, “We were all fucked, totally exhausted, completely stuffed. We actually could not surf any longer. So we lay there on the deck and smoked a bunch of hash, ate rum-laced chocolate cake, and just watched these perfect, pumping, mindless twenty-wave sets roll in with nobody in the water.”

Just as Indonesia changed surfing, so too did surfing change Indonesia. By the mid-1970s, surf tourism was big enough to support a small Uluwatu-based service economy of board-carriers, food vendors, and masseuses. More surfers also meant new restaurants and hostels in Kuta Beach; by 1974, there was even a surf shop. A village with dirt roads and no electricity when Alby Falzon and his crew showed up to film 

, Kuta grew to become what one surf journalist described as the “Asian Tijuana”—a loud, international, neon-lit, traffic-choked, Bintang-sticky grid of bars, restaurants, nightclubs, souvenir shops, and massage parlors, with surfers booked in by the thousands. Bali, in addition to remaining a popular surf destination itself, also became a staging and supply zone for journeys along the island chain. Either way, the local economy profited greatly.

For their part, the Balinese slowly but steadily embraced surfing and integrated it into their culture, which was a remarkable shift in itself. Unlike the island-hopping Polynesians, the Balinese had no real taste for voyaging. The ocean in general was regarded as a fearsome place, alive with demons and monsters. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the first surfers paddled into the spirit-plagued waters off the Bukit and returned for the most part unharmed, it was assumed that the visitors had a different arrangement with the gods. For the Balinese themselves, as surf writer Leonard Lueras put it, the idea of recreation in the sea was “a bit like playing soccer in a cemetery."

Gede Narmada, a fourteen-year-old farmer’s son, was nervous just standing on the beach at Kuta for the first time in 1969. Two years later a visiting Queenslander saw Narmada watching the surf and offered to push him into a wave, but Narmada refused. Another two years passed before he was able to screw up the courage to paddle out for the first time, then two more before he was confident enough to surf the Bukit. All of the early Balinese surfers went through the same drawn-out process. “When I first saw a surfboard,” Ketut Menda, another Balinese original, recalled, “I was scared, and asking myself, ‘What is this for?’ I followed the surfers to the beach, and saw them floating on the water, and to me it just looked crazy.” But Menda, like Narmada, couldn’t resist. He was a Uluwatu board-carrier and surfing novitiate under Gerry Lopez and Peter McCabe, and eventually became known as the godfather of Balinese surfing.

Bali’s 2,000-year-old belief system was never going to be toppled by an imported form of play. But once it became clear that local surfers weren’t being pulled to a watery death by fanged creatures – that they were in fact running home babbling with excitement – some accommodation had to be made. Perhaps, mothers and fathers told themselves, hopefully, surfers had some extra bit of magical power that kept them from harm. Or maybe they just amused Ratu Kidul, the shape-shifting Queen of the Southern Sea who controls the waves. In any event, once acclimated to the sport, the Balinese were quick to view surfing as a great art. By the mid-1970s, balletically posed wave-riders were turning up in “daily life” Batuan school ink paintings, along with the usual cast of merchants, farmers, animals, gods, and spirits. The sea monsters were still there, too, as grusome as ever, popping up out of the silver-blue ocean with pulled-back lips and bulging eyes. Yet the surfers rode calmly on.

A balance in all things – especially between good and evil – has long been a philosophical cornerstone in Bali and across Indonesia. Surfing performed a small but worthy service by helping to extend the idea of balance out to the nearshore waters.

To surfers in the early '70s, Indonesia meant Java, which in turn meant Third World urban poverty in Jakarta, coup attempts, student riots, Communist purges, and a stone-faced dictator in sunglasses and a military dress uniform.

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

At Play in the Fields of Allah

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