Big Trip Day 194: Surf Idiot Summer
Hey friends!
You last saw us in Bali, where we parted ways with my parents and launched off into our surf era. Since then, we’ve been up and down the coast of West Sumbawa (with a detour to Lombok, and one all the way to Kuala Lumpur for a visa run) so it’s hard to even know where to begin!
For lack of a better plan, I’m going to take you on a tour of it all geographically — starting in the south of Sumbawa, where we kicked off what we’ve been affectionately calling Surf Idiot Summer.
We arrived in the South at the end of May. The region goes by different names and major landmarks depending on who you talk to. For locals, the big city is Maluk, and the key landmark is the gold mine. The mine is a massive open pit tucked into the mountains, formerly owned by Americans and currently owned by a much-less-celebrated Indonesian-Chinese conglomerate. The mine is its own universe, with an international school, private housing compounds, helicopter pilots, and an often-whispered-about golf course for the higher-ups.
The Sumbawa locals aren’t going golfing, but the mine still provides — it infuses huge numbers of decent-paying jobs into the region. Nearly all the cars in the south are owned by the mine; at restaurants and cafes, expensive by average Indonesian standards, the clientele was often a 50/50 mix of surfers and miners, the latter always recognizable by their white-and-yellow striped work shirts and steel-toed boots.
So that’s the mine landscape. But for surfers, South Sumbawa is anchored around the city of Sekongkang and its neighboring surf breaks: Yo-yos, Tropicals, and Supersuck — or “Supers,” when described by Australians who often fly in for a swell-specific strike mission to surf that wave. Supersuck is the big prize (more on this later,) but Yo-yos is the regional namesake.
Our friend Spencer, one of the other English volunteers from our surf era on Nias, recommended we come check out Yo-yos and put us in touch with a local guy named Indra. Spear fisherman, generous user of expletives, Hindu on a Muslim island, and overall legend, Indra was our fixer and main contact in the South, and we stayed at a bungalow on his property for over a month. Our house was one bedroom with woven bamboo walls and a shared kitchen, and was in an enviable location: one minute walk to the gold sand beach, five minutes to our favorite little coffee shack, and 15 minutes to the surf at Yo-yos. Of all our houses, this was an especially good one!
We ate at least one meal a day at Lisa’s Garden, staffed by a crew of passionately ambivalent locals, but consistently serving awesome Western and Indonesian food at reasonable prices. And in between falafel wraps and smoothie bowls at Lisa’s, we surfed! We arrived in the middle of a massive run of swell, which meant two things: Justin was surfing the most serious, expert-level waves of his life, and I was struggling to surf at all.
A quick interlude for the non-surfers amongst our subscriber list (hello, almost everyone!) — understanding a little about how surfing works will help our lives for the past few months make sense, so here’s a crash course:
Being a good surfer is about how you move on the board, but it’s also about the place you decide to surf, and the specific wave you choose to paddle for. And just as important as all that is the swell — the energy rolling across the ocean towards the specific spot where you’re floating in the sea! Thanks to modern technology, we have forecasting apps and weather models to study to help us know what to anticipate at a given surf spot, which helps us decide where to surf every day, but the models only take you so far. Sometimes, you’ve gotta just go to the beach and look at it.
Regardless of the swell, every wave has its own personality and its own skill level. Beginner waves are usually slow moving and slow breaking, easier to paddle into and more forgiving of mistakes. More advanced waves will be faster breaking, and have a steeper face, which makes them super fun to surf, but more difficult to “make,” or surf successfully. And in Indonesia, advanced waves also often have sharp coral reef lurking just under the shallow water, ready to exact their toll on any surfer whose confidence outweighs their skill.
There are not a lot of beginner waves in South Sumbawa, and with the huge swell that lasted three freaking weeks, I kept finding myself out of luck. Instead of surfing, I joked, I was Sea Turtle Watching, or Trash Collecting (to be fair, I did pick up a lot of floating trash.) After a few weeks of this, and a growing sense of frustration that I was never going to be good at surfing ever, Justin encouraged me to get some expert help. I signed up for a week of surf coaching on Lombok, the neighboring island, at a spot that described itself as “surf boot camp, but fun.” And while I bopped off to Lombok (via taxi, public ferry, and another taxi) Justin tried his hand at Supers.
Supers is hardcore. It’s a tough wave to get in the right conditions, but when it’s working, it produces a perfect barrel — a fast-moving tube of water that the best surfers can ride into for a few seconds of glory. But as the Aussies say, “sometimes you gotta pay to play;” more often than not, people walked back onto the beach bleeding from reef scrapes when they failed to make it out of the barrel of their wave, and we saw more than one snapped board. One surfer returned to the beach with the entire seat of his boardshorts ripped out, which I think qualifies as an especially humbling run-in with the sea.
Supers is also the only place we’ve surfed where people wear helmets. I asked Justin if I should buy him one while I was in Lombok, and he responded (wisely, I think): “If a helmet is required, I probably shouldn’t be surfing here anyways.” To be clear, he did still surf Supersuck... just not too many times, and with great caution, of course (sorry Nancy!!) Here’s a video of the wave in action to give you an idea of the scene.
Meanwhile on Lombok, surf camp was indeed a surf boot camp, but fun! It was strange to be apart from Justin for a full week when we’ve been with each other 24 hours a day for... well, eight months now, but it was good for me to learn new skills on my own. I was in Kuta, Lombok, a formerly sleepy fishing village that is now a tremendously crowded surf town. The crowds mean will never surf there again, but the coaching really unlocked new stuff for me, and I came back to Sumbawa with a fresh optimism, a list of skills to work on, and two new recently-repaired dings in my board from dropping it on a rock-filled parking lot (nice.)
After Justin and I reunited on Sumbawa, we started to think about where to head next. Yo-yos was great in a lot of ways, but it was hard to build a community there. It’s a transient spot; no one stayed for long, and there was a strong culture of strike missions, people coming in for a few days for the swell and then disappearing again. Plus, even after surf camp I could only kind of surf the waves there, and Justin was getting a little tired of taking his life into his hands every time he paddled out. So when we started to hear whispers of a different spot further north — a wave appropriately and unimaginatively called Northern Rights (it’s a wave that breaks right, and it’s in the north) — we decided to go exploring.
Northern Rights is one of the seven named waves of Kertasari, a village tucked among mangroves and lined with seaweed farms just a few hours north of Yo-yos. And the short version is this: we found it. The thing we’ve been waiting for. Kertasari is our Barbie Dream House.
Uncrowded waves, friendly people, good food, a nice place to stay, a sense of community with folks who aren’t leaving in 48 hours, a viable internet connection, waves we can both surf. The weather is always perfect, the water is crystal clear, and we’re having the time of our lives. Yesterday I saw a manta ray literally leap out of the sea a hundred yards in front of me. Kertasari is it. We’ve been here since early July and we never want to leave.
We’ve made real friends here: Tommy, the American history teacher who seems to live in a world without time, always four hours late but in an excellent mood. Isi and Bim, our German friends, who are at the end of a two year cycling trip and will be here all summer, surfing the same waves as us and always smiling. Jitse, the fierce and charming owner of our current hotel, who speaks perfect Bahasa and seems to know everyone in the city of Taliwang. And Andi, the local owner of our first homestay, whose version of small talk is Whatsapping me “where are you miss?” at peculiar intervals, but who invited us to a party in the village just because.
We love it here. And we also know that it can’t stay this way forever. Most of West Sumbawa feels like it’s on the brink of major changes, but Kertasari especially.
Every slice of sand and cow pasture is for sale. Other foreigners who’ve bought land in Kertasari talk about 4x ROIs in a matter of years. Our former host Andi asked us if we wanted to buy land like he was offering us a sandwich: “You want to buy land? Oh, think about it, it’s a good price!” Explaining that we live approximately 24 hours away by plane does little to dull the enthusiasm. Truthfully, it probably is a sensible investment, but it kind of grosses us out.
The way I see it, you buy land in a remote and beautiful surfing hamlet in Indonesia for two reasons: you’re either making a cold-blooded, vaguely colonial investment, or you’re chasing a fantasy. The first reason is at least practical: foreigners buy land on the cheap from locals, build a villa, rent it out on Airbnb, get a nice fat return, and have a dope place to stay on their own vacations. The second reason is more like chasing the dream: you come here, surf perfect empty waves, and buy land here so you can have that experience forever.
But the thing is, no experience lasts forever. These waves will not stay empty. We’re only a few hours from Lombok, which is only a few hours from Bali, and everyone’s looking for the next special place. Even in the time we’ve been here we’ve seen changes. I’m writing this newsletter from the front porch of our current digs, a truly magical bungalow on the hill above one of our favorite waves, located in a hotel that literally opened last week. We are the first guests in this room; we had to stay someplace else for a night or two because they hadn’t finished building it. The hotel is now fully booked.
Down on the beach, every plot of land that touches the sand is owned by foreigners. A much-maligned Russian hotel owner in the village has started construction on 15 villas and a studio hotel (despite his infamous lack of appropriate sewer infrastructure for any of those buildings, including his current business.) The locals seem excited, but we fear they aren’t getting their due. The hotels are all foreign owned, every single one, and the Kertasari locals struggle to identify what it is that foreigners actually want. There are only two places to buy food in the village, and when they’re out of rice and chicken (which is often) we spend our rupiah at the foreign-owned hotel restaurants. There’s no produce market or laundry in town, and none of the locally owned homestays have internet or toilet paper.
But one of the special things about being here now is that the locals — while baffled by foreign preferences — are actually excited to have us here. They’re as curious about us as we are about them. People are friendly, eager to practice their limited English and patient with our equally limited Bahasa, and delighted to find us patronizing their shop or the fried chicken stand in the village (we’re there a lot, honestly.) We were invited to a “dance culture ceremony” that turned out to be a sunat, a Muslim celebration of a boy’s circumcision. There was a massive card game tournament, free food, and karaoke! Another day, we joined our current host Jitse on a tour of a local unregulated gold mine, where the miner in charge led us down deep, jackhammered tunnels and explained their air compressor system using nothing but enthusiasm and hand gestures. And when we went to the local water buffalo races (footage of the actual day we attended here) it was announced via loudspeaker that the tourists had been invited to give it a go! We declined, but it’s nice to be included.
We have three more weeks in Kertasari. We’re taking the words of our favorite Buddhist teacher, Gil Fronsdal, to heart, and enjoying the sensations while they last. We don’t need to own a piece of this place; instead, we’re celebrating our time here, when the waves are still uncrowded, the people are still friendly, and the circumcision party invitations flow freely.
Thanks to all of you for continuing to read the Big Trip Diaries, and for not forgetting about us while we’re away. We’ll see you on the other side of Surf Idiot Summer!
Love,
Dory & Justin