Having travelled to Bali in August 1971, playing the grommet for the filming of ‘Morning of the Earth’, I was blessed to surf Uluwatu as an undiscovered jewel. The unusual visual surrounds, the people and their customs, the sounds, the commanding reef system, and the waves it sculpted combined to create a multi-sensory environment that this wide-eyed, 15-year-old surfer from the Northern Beaches of Sydney found alien, slightly confronting, completely enveloping; but also really exciting. Returning to the relatively inconsistent, mostly sand-bottomed surfing options of Sydney, few days went by where I didn’t flash back through that very special time, hoping I’d return to the Island of the Gods.

Time warp to 1973, now working for Tracks magazine, the opportunity arose to escape the city with photographer, Frank Pithers, for a couple of weeks between monthly Tracks deadlines. Once again, the trip coincided with the dry season and constant offshore winds. Stepping off the plane at Denpasar airport, walking across the tarmac to the terminal, haggling with the bemo drivers and booking into our losmen felt pleasingly familiar, a far cry from the seemingly chaotic arrival of the previous trip when no-one really knew what to expect.

Not a lot had changed. There were no nightclubs and few resorts; the owners of family-run losmens still swept the hard dirt paths between the rooms with handmade brooms and left thick glasses of muddy Bali coffee, and bananas, outside each door at breakfast. Refrigeration techniques remained frozen in time. Thick, block ice was delivered each morning via cart or bemo and hacked off gradually using the short machetes the Balinese utilised for everything from clearing growth to dicing papaya, bananas and pineapple for a fruit salad. The smaller pieces of ice came in handy and were typically plonked into warm glasses of ...