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 7Up lemonade and Bintang beer.
Of course, Frank and I spent a lot of time at Ulu. With no reliable swell reports and tides that fluctuate dramatically, it was hit and miss on the runs up the Bukit. We scored a medium sized swell that served up perfect Racetrack and a bigger day when the Outside Corner did its thing. There were very few surfers around, no warungs, a couple of Balinese hanging in the cave with warm soft drinks and little packets of roasted peanuts. The cave was the only refuge from the sun and to do a true surf check we still had climb up the bamboo ladder and sit there, cooking like freshly-laid bitumen to work out what the tide and swell was doing.
I was taking novice/experimental photos with an old Nikon that Albe Falzon had gifted me so I could dabble in my interest of backlight and mood. Wandering around at dead low tide on the reef, attempting to be arty, these kids started following me, keeping a polite distance. They were there to do what their parents had taught them… tending fish traps and collecting shellfish. I was still an oddity to them and the idea of riding surfboards or posing for a photo wasn’t within their understanding. However, the purposeful silence of these diminutive locals and their absolute confidence in such an expansive, potentially dangerous backyard, filled me with a sense of admiration for their knowledge of every inch of an ecosystem, which I revered and knew very little of.
As our trip neared its end there was one last push of swell to send us on our way, back to our relative urban existence in Australia. Surfed out, with the tide draining out towards sunset, we prepared to climb the bamboo ladder, before hiking to the road to link with our Kuta-bound bemo. Taking a quick look at the last set we would see for the day, I raised the Nikon to catch a line rifling through the Racetrack section, a stirring reminder of the forces that had brought us here and what we’d miss.
