Solo travel and relationships are perhaps two of life’s most transformative experiences.
Each is like a mirror, reflecting the deepest and most hidden parts of you back to yourself. For the past six months, I have found myself simultaneously in both of these situations.
I met Giovanna while visiting Perth for a funeral just a few weeks before departing on this trip (the old travellers romance, eh; book a trip and you’re almost guaranteed to meet someone). For the past six months, she has visited at least once a month; sometimes flying after work on Friday, then taking the red-eye express home on Sunday night, sleeping an extra few hours in the airport lounge before driving back to the office.
I guess she really likes me, hey.
I do too. And for me, Giovanna has also been a divine compass, pointing me back in a direction I was deliberately heading away from. It is because of her I am thinking seriously about returning to Perth: a place with a history that terrifies me. Family breakdown and ice addiction and violence and juvenile detention. To return there is to return to memories of that.
I’ve had plenty of time to think about that out here alone on the road though. Sure, moving away from Perth has given me time and space to grow away from who I once was and helped me find a sense of home within myself.
But if I keep this up, am I running away?
Is surfing and travel just becoming the same escape that drugs once offered me?
All the Indonesian people I meet keep asking me, why are you alone? Where are your friends? Where are your family? Don’t you want to be close to the people you love?
And, yeah. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is time to turn back and head home after eight years away. To rebuild and pursue relationships, and create new, happy memories over the top of all those dark ones.
I ride back across this island to catch up with Webby for one last surf before we head our separate ways. Things are a little frosty between us; we’re both used to running on our own, uncompromised programs. We can both be stubborn, single-minded, and that has worn down on each other.
“Well, I guess that’s it,” says Webby. “We probably won’t see each other again. Cheers for the adventure. It’s one I won’t forget in a hurry.”
As I watch Webby ride off, I can’t help but feel a sense of guilt. I haven’t really done a lot to accommodate him. In all honesty, I’ve been a bit of a selfish prick, so totally engrossed in my own journey I haven’t really considered him at all.
Before I have the chance to say anything to him, though, he’s gone, hurrying to get to the international airport two islands to the west before his visa expires. At least he’s learned from his last mistake, I guess.
I leave a few days later and arrive at the port to find there are no more boats. Not this week, nor the next. A jetty pylon has collapsed, a port official tells me, and there will be no more ferries until it can be repaired. Could be months, he says. To get to the next island west, I’ll have to ride back across this island to another port, then take two overnight ferries and ride for two days, with additional waiting time almost guaranteed.
What should be an overnight journey blows out to a week. Finally, on the next island west, I’m riding through a large regional city at night when I notice a Pizza Hut. It’s been months since I’ve eaten any kind of western food and I double back. But at a set of traffic lights, a man beside me gestures for me to pull off the side of the road with him. This is Indonesia; I feel safe, and he’s smiling, so I oblige.
Anwar works as a civil servant in the government tourism office and speaks good English. He insists I come with him to drop food to his parents, then stay at his house with him and his wife. I kind of just wanted a quiet night, eating pizza and resting alone in the hotel room, but he will not accept no for an answer.
At his house, he and his irate wife sleep in separate rooms and he has filled the gaps in the walls with a mosaic of empty Gudang Garam packets. We stay up late, drinking coffee and smoking and talking of the upcoming Indonesian elections. In the morning, he brings me to his office. He greets his boss and introduces me to him, before going to buy us coffee. We sit with his colleagues in a tiled hut, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
“Here, all we have to do is sign in and show our face for an hour,” says Anwar. There is nothing for us to do. The government’s eyes are shut. They don’t invest in projects. Yeah, it is a good salary – four million rupiah ($400 AUD) a month. But I dream of creating a homestay on the beach with a restaurant and live music and tourists from all around the world like you. But we don’t know how. So we just go on like this.”
Anwar parades me around to his colleagues like a kind of token, or trophy. One by one, I answer their questions. Each round reads almost as a script and beyond the friendliness and curiosity there are no grounds for connection. We occupy polar realities, and while I am fortunate enough to have experienced theirs, they will never understand mine. After months of this, I am exhausted. I long to be back with my own people.
Back on the road, and I pull off the highway to rest for a few days at a place where I’ve heard there is a wave. I find a room to rent beside a noisy bus port. Inside, the Louis Vuitton logos printed on the pillowcase are the only hint of luxury; it is just a mattress and a fan on a concrete floor, a squat toilet, and a well and bucket outside for a shower.
My neighbour, Min, is a primary school teacher posted to this remote coastal village. It’s not bad here, he tells me: the salary is alright, it’s safe, and people are friendly. But he longs to be home with his family. He asks me, what about yours? Don’t you wish you were back at home with them?
In the morning, I make a short ride down to a long, right-hand reef pass just beyond a sheltered boat harbour. There are a collection of small fishing shacks along the beach , where women sell noodles and coffee and cigarettes. In a hut beside one of the shacks, a man sits tying fishing rigs. He gestures for me to come and join him.
“Ahh, Australia,” Anton says, after asking where I’m from.
“Is it true you get a salary in prison there? I had a friend who was caught fishing illegally in Australian waters. They locked him up for a year. He says he was getting 20,000 rupiah per day! At the end of his sentence, he deliberately got in trouble again and stayed for another year. He came back rich!” he laughs.
As a fisherman, Anton understands some of the vagaries of this wave: the optimal seasons and winds and tides. Utilising his instruction, I surf here alone for the next three days. On the fourth day, I notice something bobbing around on the inside. It is too big to be a turtle, too brown to be a piece of rubbish. I’m stunned to see an Indonesian surfer. He is about my age, riding a waterlogged 5’7, holding between his teeth a legrope with no ankle strap.
Ependi began surfing here aged 15 on a board left by a travelling surfer, he says. He splashed about in the closeout beach break on the end section, before graduating to the reef break out the back. He’s worked in Bali as a surf guide, and as an Indonesian surfer, is sandwiched between the conflicting desires of locals and visitors. As a local he wants to bring tourist dollars into this tiny corn farming and fishing village. But as a surfer, he doesn’t want it to become crowded.
“It’s good there aren’t too many surfers here. But for the fisherman and their families, it would bring money if people came here. I empathise with both sides.”
Now, Ependi makes a living by mining gold illegally in a clandestine shaft he and three friends have drilled down to 50m with an excavator and a jackhammer. He brings me to it. Beside the shaft is an air compressor and a pulley system made from an old wheelbarrow wheel and 125cc motorcycle motor.
“This is our lifeline,” he says. “It is hard to breathe down there sometimes. We use the compressor to fill up old ice bags with air and send them down.”
While Ependi could find legitimate employment at a licenced gold mine nearby, the appeal of illegal mining to many Indonesians lies in its freedom and potential to find their own fortune, he says.
“If I go to work there, the average salary is two million rupiah per month ($200AUD). It’s barely enough. A few months ago, my wife crashed her motorbike. How can I ever buy her a new one with that salary? And to spend a month at a time, away working? I’ll miss ever getting to see my son grow up. Here, I can work when I want, and I can take home all the profits for myself too.”
On the flipside, death is always lurking in the shadows, says Ependi. A few weeks ago, one of his mates died while working the mine late at night. Reluctant to call the authorities, the men had to lift their friend out and return him to his family.
“We told him not to go down, but he insisted. He was working with a light at the bottom of the shaft, and he couldn’t see up. A rock fell and killed him. We found him dead down there the following day. We had to strap him to a board and lift him out using the pulley, so that he could be given a proper burial,” he says.
“My wife, she worries sometimes, but I tell her not to be afraid. I’m not afraid, because if I die, maybe that’s my fate. Maybe it is supposed to be. Perhaps that is just the plan that God has for me.”
On an onshore afternoon Ependi takes me to an illegal cockfight. We arrive at a field, where one-hundred people are gathered beneath a tent of tarpaulin and bamboo poles.
Known as tajen, cockfighting has long been an important cultural ritual for the Balinese. Known as Tubuh Rah, or pouring blood, it was historically performed at mecaru, or purification ceremonies as a ritual to expel evil spirits. Here, it is a celebration of gambling and bloodshed.
On one side of the tent, 20 men sit cross legged around a mat, rolled bank notes tossed onto a grid of various numbered and coloured shapes. A wiry man with bulging eyeballs and a gurning jaw rolls a set of dice. On the other side, 80 men are gathered around a circular bamboo enclosure. We push our way in through the crowd, the men staring and shouting at me and my camera.
“He’s with me, he’s safe!” yells Ependi.
Inside the enclosure, two men stroke their roosters. Another man opens a black leather case, which contains four, five-inch spurs, known as taji. Traditionally, these spurs are sharpened only at eclipses and during a dark moon and cannot be seen by women. But here, it doesn’t matter, says Ependi.
“This is not Bali,” he says. “There, it’s cultural. Here’s it’s just entertainment. Something to gamble on.”
A Balinese referee calls furiously for more bets. Pink 100,000 rupiah notes are thrust at him from every direction. The crowd break into a wild-eyed Kecak chant, the arm of every man extended and quivering. Silence falls. The energy of a hundred men, fixed on the centre of the ring: then a screaming chorus of “ADU! ADU!”, and a squawking and beating of wings, violent fluttering, drowned groans, cheering, bank notes divided among the crowd. A man pulls his dead bird from the ring. He cuts off the leg and hands it to the victor, and lobs the rest of the bird out into the field.
On my fifth day, the swell arrives lined-up and thick, easily double overhead. At first light the different sections of the reef are disjointed, the reef exposed and dry. But as the tide fills in, they begin to connect. Waves reel 200 metres along the reef, the end section occasionally going square over a shallow slab of reef.
It looks spectacular from shore but from the water it is shifty, frustrating; the take-off spot always moving just a little outside or inside or down the line. But you see, that’s the thing with Indo. It’s either really crowded or really fickle, and at least here there is no one out but me and Ependi. He hoots as I pull into a handful of rifling tubes, squeaking out just before the closeout on a couple.
The following morning, the swell has disappeared almost completely. I pack my belongings and shut the door on my room and wish Ependi goodbye. I watch the white lines whizzing past beneath me, knowing that each one now is finite, numbered, and edging me just a little bit closer to the end of the road. Hopefully, at the end of it, there is a place I can find home..
