I arrive at the Indonesian bengkel, or mechanic workshop, with a long list of repairs.
Brighter front lights, new chain and front and rear sprockets. Plugging the oil leak where the tacho cable has snapped off. Tightening the idle screw so it doesn’t stall in traffic. Muffling that roaring look- at-me exhaust. A lot to prepare before this four-month solo motorbike trip across the entire eastern Indonesian archipelago.
The mechanic, Agung, wrestles it inside the small workshop up the top of the Bingin hill. He jacks it up on a stand, his friend, Putu, watching and squatting and smoking in the back of the workshop.
Putu doesn’t work here. It’s his day off, he says, and he’s just come to hang out at his friend’s workshop. For Putu and Agung, like many Indonesian people, there is no real demarcation between work and leisure.
“It’s important to be happy and enjoy every moment,” says Putu.
“Why do you have to put that aside when you’re at work”
Agung is originally from Lombok, he says, and has been in Bali for the past seven years. He moved here for work and new experience, an Indonesian concept known as merantau, or to wander. He sends much of his salary back to his wife and kids back home in Praya, Lombok, and returns usually once per year for family events or religious holidays.
“As an Indonesian it is difficult for us to visit foreign countries, and the salary and opportunities in the village is very small. So we move around within our own country.”
Agung removes a split-pin and unbolts the two axle nuts. Putu belts the axle out with a wrench, and the sprocket with all its worn teeth clatters down onto the floor. Agung holds up the new sprocket to the old one.
“Salah ini, bos ku!” yells Agung
Wrong part, boss.
Things are usually pretty easy in Indonesia. Hungry at 3am? It’s almost guaranteed there will be a warung open within 100 metres of you. Run out of fuel? Last time I did, two Indonesians stopped and were back with a plastic bottle of petrol before I had the chance to finish a cigarette. They even refused payment for it.
Only, when things aren’t easy, they’re usually very, very difficult. And right now, I have this sinking inhibition that this is going to be one of those occasions.
Agung squats down the back with Putu and calls two parts’ shops. An hour later, we’re still squatting, waiting on a response from them. Jam karet, says Agung. Rubber time, measured not in minutes or hours but cigarettes and cups of coffee.
You must accept that this is how things work in Indonesia. Everything takes time. The moment you hurry and try to force things you’re swimming against tide, battling the natural order of flow, and everything that can go wrong will go wrong.
While we wait, an Australian customer drops off a leaf blower. Agung examines the machine. He removes the spark plug and checks the coil, and when he sees there is spark he starts stripping it down, unbolting the carburettor and fuel pump. Agung can’t quite understand what the machine is for. Blowing leaves? He is shocked. Why doesn’t he just use a broom? And where the hell is he going to buy a replacement for the busted fuel pump?
Right here, in this broken leaf blower, a collision of two worlds: Australia with its pride in machinery and individual ownership, Indonesia, with its beautiful way of making do with what you’ve got and enjoying the process along the way.
After two hours, or two cups of coffee and five cigarettes, Agung calls his boss, who says he can get the part.
Why the hell didn’t we try that first?
He tells me to transfer him the money and an extra fee for delivery and that he’ll be there soon. With a little bit of patience, a smile, and some cash in your wallet there is no problem too intractable in Indonesia.
Riding down the hill, and on the streets outside every Balinese home stands a penjor, a big looping bamboo pole adorned with yellow and white cloth and coconut and sugarcane leaves. It’s Hari Raya Galungan today, a Balinese Hindu celebration. Each one of these penjor stand as a monument to the victory of truth in its ongoing battle against evil.
At the temple Pura Desa, the penjor stand seven metres tall. Pecalang, tradi- tional village police, stand at the car park entrance in their udeng headwear and black vests and chequered black and white sarongs, two-way radios and keris daggers tied to their waists. Balinese men and women and children in traditional dress amble up and down the temple steps, some of the women carrying cane baskets on their heads, filled with offerings and incense.
Keep riding, down to the bottom of the hill, and a different kind of ceremony is taking place. Bali, a festival of hedonism with all these young and honey-skinned international people, eating, drinking, surfing, cavorting.
Bali is a place where people come to distract themselves, or so says the sticker on the rear windscreen of the Toyota Kijang: I DON’T NEED THERAPY, I JUST NEED TO GO TO BALI. Some of them never leave, choosing to drift through the good life in their own kind of version of Peter Pan’s Neverland.
You can usually pick the ones who have been here a while. The post-COVID ex-pat is no longer that leathery old cynic in a Bintang singlet, but the gorgeous yoga teacher in activewear. The spiritual healer n a long flowy dress carrying a street dog with a collar slapped on it in the footwell of her N-Max scooter. The fit young bloke in designer sunglasses and a linen shirt and leather sandals, working from his laptop in the cafe.
Out the front of one of these cafes, Aris, the Sumban parking attendant, is shuffling motorbikes around the car park. Today, says Aris, it is the third week of the month and things are getting tight. Most of his monthly three-million rupiah ($300AUD) salary has already gone into paying rent for the boarding-house room he shares with his wife and a 25kg bag of rice, and the money he sends back to Sumba helps his parents look after his son and improve their home. Now, there’s just a little left for food and petrol. And of course, cigarettes; an Indo man will go without food before he goes without smokes.
Aris knows the humility of the struggle and he’s happy to be here. After all, it could always be better, it could always be worse. Like that first job on a construction site, mixing cement and carting materials, breaking his body for 30K rupiah ($3AUD) per day. Like the floor of the room in that first boarding house he shared with four friends, sleeping and cooking together to stretch out his monthly 300K ($30AUD) salary with a cleaning service in Denpasar.
“That job was actually good though,” he says. “We were working in a hotel, and in the kitchen they couldn’t keep the bread for longer than a day. After 11 at night, we could go and take a bag. I used to load up a huge sack and bring it home and share it with all my friends. That one was a good job. Never went hungry at that one,” he smiles.
Then there was the squidding boat he worked for a year in the waters off Maluku, fishing at night, eating only instant noodles and fish, showering with shampoo and seawater. Still, the salary was alright, says Aris; 600k per month, and it helped him save some money to buy a motorbike, find a wife, and put himself through the month- long security course to get this job here as security.
He chose this area because this is a tourist area and sometimes here you just get lucky. Usually, it happens on the 7pm-7am night shift. Last month, one Friday at 4am a drunken tourist stumbled out from a nearby club and vomited all over the car park he was guarding. Aris went to help him and grabbed a hose to start cleaning up the mess.
“Sorry! Sorry!” said the tourist, opening up his wallet and gifting Aris a 100k rupiah note.
“100k!” says Aris. “I couldn’t believe it. Do it again, I thought. Drink more water. Again!”
I tell Aris about my upcoming journey to eastern Indonesia and ask him what it’s like back at home there in Sumba.
“It’s primitive. There isn’t a lot of education there. In my village, we don’t have power or lights. If you camp in the village you need to bring everything yourself. A own. tent or hammock. Water, rice, tinned food. You cook outside on the open fire. The people will welcome you, but you have to be prepared.”
Keep riding, across the Padang Padang bridge and into the disappearing jungle of Uluwatu, nail guns and angle grinders drowning out the gamelan and gongs. The road lined with cafes and restaurants and villas and wellness centres, nary a local warung in sight. Walking into Uluwatu car park, there goes another sunburned European with booties and rash guard and mini- Mal tucked clumsily under arm. Another surfer, stretching, wearing a Gath helmet and flotation vest and eight-foot gun under his arm, never mind that the waves are only a touch over head-high.
On the really big days, when the Uluwatu Bombie breaks way outside, Jim Banks can see the lineup littered with some of these surfers from the back veranda of his house. In the past 15 years he’s watched quietly as its grown more chaotic and competitive. He’s seen much of that change spread across the archipelago and its world-class waves, some of which he played a role in pioneering.
2023 is Jim’s 46th season in Indonesia. He first arrived in 1977 as naïve youth rising the ranks of a nascent professional surfing circuit. Four years later, he won the Bali Om Pro at Uluwatu. He took his trophy and turned his back on competition and”the emptiness of winning”, instead spending the next four decades exploring the archipelago and getting tubed, often on his own.
“Looking back, it was probably the most committed surf exploration ever under- taken by an individual. I dedicated myself to mapping out the whole coast, really exploring it from top to bottom,” he says.
“I just wanted to get barrelled. Everything revolved around getting barrelled. And the more remote the wave, the more barrels I got, the more focused I could be. Surfing alone is completely pure. There is absolute and total focus on the surf. No distractions. Back then, Indonesia was a pretty good place for that.”
I show Jim the freshly cleaned and serviced bike, ask him for a few cryptic hints, pointers in the right direction. He’s taciturn, more in a humble way than cynical, tight-lipped.
“There are still quality uncrowded waves out there under the radar. Some of them are pretty fickle. But there’s still some if you really want them. You know, you can still go somewhere and surf by yourself if you really want to,” he says.
Jim agrees to shape me a board for the trip. I ask for a 6’1 twin fin, just a little all- rounder to complement the 6’9 Phil Myers 10-channel single fin tube-shooter. Jim decides to shape me a 6’5 twin keel. I watch as he shapes the board from his factory in Kerobokan, running a piece of fine wire- mesh screening over the beaked nose, the rails and the pintail.
“I actually don’t like twin fins,” he says. “I find they lack drive and control, and a lot of people put channels in the bottom of them to try and compensate for that. One thing a lot of people don’t understand is that the twin keel is an entirely different board to a twin fin. The thing with the keel is that all the driving stability comes from the length of the fin base. These have a 13-inch fin base, and actually give you more fin base than a standard thruster.”
He flips the board over in the stand, holding it up for a moment to squint down the strangle line and examining the curves in its deep double concave vee bottom.
“You could look at this and say, ‘well that’s a concave vee. People were making them back in the 70s. Which is a valid argument. Call it a concave vee, but it doesn’t surf like one. There is something going on here that is a bit more profound,” he says.
“We’ve all been surfing concave boards for so long. As I started developing this bottom contour, one of the things I realised is that concaves are actually very unfriendly. They’re sticky, slower, tend to sit flat and lock you into a particular arc.
“When I married the Vee with the concave, I found I had such a huge bandwidth of options in what turn I wanted to do off the top. This all goes against conventional wisdom, but as far as I’m concerned this bottom contour coupled with the twin-keel is the biggest breakthrough in my boards for the past 25 years.”
Jim messages me a week later to tell me the board is ready. There it is, on the day bed on his wooden veranda, wrapped in bubblewrap, sprayed purple with white pinstripes running down the sides. He watches as I strap it to the surf rack on the side of my bike and wishes me a good trip.
