Phil Jarratt - Bali: Heaven and Hell: Heaven and Hell

To Jackie, who has shared the adventure of Bali,
and in memory of Rennie Ellis,
who was our spiritual barometer.

Contents

The distractions of Western capitalism have reached critical mass. We need to pull in the reins and heal Balis wounded, overcrowded, over-developed, over-polluted soul. Its up to the surfers. It always has been. There is no place on earth where surfers are more powerful within the overall community than Bali. We must come together and start throwing punches at the problems. Now that is a powerful dream.

Stephen Palmer, surfer

Despite its many layers of crowded confusion, its mysterious worlds within worlds, its dog-shit-spattered footpaths, clogged streets and odious drains, Bali has always had a therapeutic effect on my soul, right from the beginning when most of the above did not yet apply, to the present day, when all this and much more is sadly true.

It started like this.

In early 1974 I came home from London nursing a broken heart. Although the special girl had said shed wait for me while I had the mandatory years working holiday in Europe, she hadnt. Her dad, who liked me better than the other guy, fronted the cash for the flight home so that I could try to win her back, but it ended in tears when I caught her in bed with my rival. In a rage, I took a pair of scissors from the kitchen and cut into neat bits the Carnaby Street dresses Id bought her with my last weeks wages in London, then stormed out of the flat and never saw her again.

I took a job on a Sydney newspaper, but then Albert Falzon, the seriously cool filmmaker of Morning of the Earth and the publisher of Tracksin other words, an absolute god in the surfing world to which I aspiredphoned and asked if he could buy me lunch. At some fancy city bistro Falzon offered me the editorship of Tracks, then the most exciting youth publication in Australia. I was over the moon. Within a few weeks Id quit the city job, thrown away my tie and moved into a rented house overlooking Whale Beach, just a hop, step and jump away from the magazines office.

Then Albe dropped a clanger. Yes, he still wanted me to edit Tracks, but next year, not this year. Hed forgotten that in 1972 at the world surfing championships in San Diego, hed offered the job to a Rolling Stone writer named John Grissim, and now Grissim was on his way to take him up on it. Hed pay me a retainer to hang around and write the odd article, but Id have to find other work.

I was hanging gloomily around the Tracks office one day when other work walked through the door in the form of a loud, jovial, chain-smoking fellow who was introduced to me as the Mexican. David Mexican Sumpter had just made a surf movie called On Any Morning and he wanted me to go on the road with him to promote it. He said: You can write a funny story and my whole life is one big funny story, so it shouldnt be too difficult. He was delighted when I used my contacts at the newspaper I had so recently departed to get them to run a feature article titled, Surfie filmmaker lives on dog food and yoghurt to finance new movie.

The Mex and I hit the road up and down the coast, with him gluing posters all over towns while I chatted up the local papers and radio stations. His personal hygiene was highly questionable, but he was a funny man with a good heart and we did good business. After the Melbourne premiere he handed me $250 in cash and advised me to give it all to a photographer named Rennie Ellis, who was a partner in a company called Bali Easyrider Travel Service. You need to go to Bali, the Mex said. Clear your head of all that girlie nonsense and get some perfect waves all to yourself.

I visited Ellis at his Prahran office, thus beginning a friendship for life, and he said he could squeeze me onto a Rip Curl trip, leaving in a few days. With the return airline ticket, three weeks bed and breakfast and a motorbike thrown in, it cost $49 more than Mexican had paid me, but I was in.

I knew a littlevery littleabout Bali. In our last year of school, a surf-chick girlfriend had told me she was going there as soon as wed finished our final exams, probably to live. I was dumbstruck. She gave me an impossibly exotic address where I could write to her: Poste Restante, Denpasar, Bali. A few years later we hooked up again in London and she told me about the huts in the jungle next to the perfect waves, the gorgeous, friendly people and the fragrant aroma of frangipanis, satay sauce and clove cigarettes. Albe Falzon had also told me stories about the mystical aura of the place and the incredible waves that he had found on the lonely Bukit Peninsula, and Mexican Sumpter had filmed around Kuta Beach with Nat Young and Wayne Lynch, and he, too, had some wonderful tales.

I still vividly recall the excitement as the plane broke through the clouds on descent and we saw glistening waves breaking along the coastal cliffs to the south and to either side of the runway. And then smelling that intoxicating mix Id heard about as soon as we disembarked and hit the tarmac, followed by the craziness of the tiny terminal, and waiting forever for our surfboards to appear, and the pandemonium outside as the porters and bemo drivers hustled for our buck. I loved it immediately. My ex, my now-you-see-it-now-you-dont editors job and my whole shitty year in Sydney dissolved into ancient history. This was now; this was Bali.

We sat in the back of a three-wheeled bemo, facing each other on benches on either side, our boards and bags stacked down the middle. I peered through the small barred window at the driver in the cabin, surrounded by garish ornaments hung from the rear-vision mirror and roof, jabbering away to his offsider in the passenger seat, one eye occasionally on the narrow sealed section of road, his hand never far away from the horn.

Our unofficial tour leader was Brian Singer, the co-founder of Rip Curl Surfboards and Wetsuits, a new company running out of Torquay, Victoria, near the famous Bells Beach. Brian had been to Bali for the first time the previous year, so he knew the ropes, and this year hed brought along some of his employees and some of Torquays better young surfers. When we arrived at Kodja Inn, not far from the beach on Jalan Pantai, the first thing the Torquay surfers did was unpack their boards and start waxing the decks and fastening cords to fibreglass loops on the tail that they would then attach to their legs by means of an adhesive strip.

By contrast, no unpacking of my single board was necessary. It had travelled naked, a solitary FRAGILE sticker pasted to its bottom. The previous year, in my first international travels, I had surfed all over France, Spain, Portugal and Cornwall, but I had never seen a board bag or a leg rope. After we had all enjoyed a warm-up surf in the friendly beach-break waves at the end of the track, Brian Singer took me aside and suggested that since the swell appeared to be rising and we might surf the sensational new reef-break discovery, Uluwatu, in the morning, it would be advisable for me to use a leash so that I wouldnt smash my only board on the reef.

But I havent got one of those thingies, I protested.

A rovings loop, he supplied. After dinner Ill take you over the way to meet a guy who should be able to fix that for you.

We watched the sun set over Kuta Beach, drinking the local Bintang beer purchased from a pretty girl in a sarong who seemed to glide along the sand with an ice bucket balanced on her head, then we walked up the dusty beach track to the night fish markets where we sat on benches and ate whole fish with our fingers, washing it down with more Bintang. The entire meal cost less than a dollar. Everything cost less than a dollar!