Everything flows, everything changes.

In the beginning, was G-Land. Almost literally for the Javan people who believed this jungled eastern tip of Java was the first place in the creation of the world. In symmetry with some Australian Dreamtime stories, animals here are believed to be the embodiment of their ancestors. In surf mythology Grajagan is almost equally foundational. In the last twelve months, not one but two separate books have been devoted to the discovery and development of G-Land and its jungle camps. Fifteen years had elapsed since my last visit to the spot and when my oldest mate offered up an Afterpay-type sponno deal I gleefully accepted. I was keen to see what had changed in the post-mobile phone era as modernity steam-rolled across Indonesia.

The first change is an indisputable benefit. A 15-metre full cabin, deep vee fibreglass with four 200hp yamaha's got us the thirty or so miles across the Bali Strait from Tuban to Plengkung in just over two hours. Unlike the overland-ferry-overland-Grajagan village river crossing which left you feeling like a sack of potatoes which had been pummeled by a baseball bat, we arrived as fresh as daisies. Ready for an immediate paddle-out. As were the other members of our boat.

Those members revealed a stark change in the human diversity visiting G-Land. In 2008, the camps were full of Aussies and Americans - a fair whack from Hawaii - plus a smattering of South Americans and the very odd Euro. This time the accents were thicker and more ungulate, even if the skin was fair and the hair was blonde. Russians dominated. At least 50% of the boat was Russian, a handful of Aussies, and a big contingent of Argentinians, along with a French trio.

No change to the jungle walk past the camps and dilapidated fishing huts nestled in a tangled grove of bamboo. The keyhole between Kongs and Fan Palms seemed less keyholey, but we made the paddle-out into groomed 4-6 foot Fan Palms before drifting down to the Ledge/Money Trees. I looked around at my mate: “Where the fuck is everyone?”

There was nothing but space and water and sunlight and a sparse scattering of human beings in the lineup.

All our new comrades were nowhere to be seen: Constantin from a village outside St Petersburg; Olga from Moscow; 'Hero' from Volgograd, along with the others who filled up the boat. All marked absent.

We found out later that while we had turned left and walked up to the keyhole, they had gone the other way down to Tiger Tracks and 20-20's. Thus, the rumours of Russians dominating the camps and packing out the “beginner” waves turned out to be largely true.

No change to the wave itself. The top of the reef is shiftier and softer. Peaks, wedges, and walls all reveal themselves if you can find a take-off. Further down the line it gets faster, hollower, and more sectiony. Contra the great mythology surrounding it, it's far from a perfect wave. More a series of sections as great swell lines from the Indian Ocean interact with the massive karst reef complex. Finding the take-off is tricky, a tapered wall is not a guarantee. You have to feint and jab and roll the dice many times to find an open one. It's no Cloudbreak. This is one reason I have no qualms about writing about it: the wave itself will always regulate its numbers, especially as adult learners become dominant in numbers across Indonesia. It's just not a good wave to learn to surf on and even for the competent it's a constant challenge.

Guy's Surfari Maps

The distortion of space and time I remembered from my last visit remained intact. It was shocking how quickly you untether from the human realm on the most densely populated Island on Earth next to one of the world's busiest tourist destinations. Walking past the camps you find yourself quickly alone walking the sharp single track across ancient raised reef. It's not kind to barefeet. Nor is the long walk out and back in across the reef. I've never been able to make peace with booties but I took my colleagues Stu's advice and bought a pair of folding booties along for the trip. I only wore them once or twice before passing them onto a WA fifo worker. [Editor's Note: Untuk apa?] That put me back in the realm of long, meditative walks in across the reef. With care and attention you could traverse the multitude of ecological niches without too much damage to foot or reef. Lightfootedness was a key to slipping away from the sharp spikes of urchin enclaves before the spikes snapped off.

Cuts were inevitable. Borrowing from Balinese/Hindu customs I made a small microbiological offering to the bacteria of the littoral zone asking for a simple bargain: don't go ham on me and I won't smash you with antibiotics. It seemed to work. I could feel the cuts and flaps of skin catching on the blanket at night, but nothing blew up.

Along with the change in human diversity I noticed a change in biodiversity. Mostly for the better. Birds were abundant and judging from the breadth of birdsong many species were inhabiting the lowland jungle. Only the pied hornbill (Anthracoceros albirostris) stood out enough for me to identify. Prey species were more conspicuous. The Javan deer (Rusa timorensis) grazed freely on forest edges. Herds of Eurasian wild pigs (Sus scrofa) wandered in the jungle undergrowth. Old World and Colobine monkeys were abundant, mostly long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascularis) and less commonly the black (with ranga babies) Javan Lutung (Trachypithecus auratus). With such abundant prey, sightings of the Javan Leopard (Panthera pardus) in both the 'black panther' and spotted form have become more common. Several mornings I woke with the first bird song and selecting a stout stick walked the jungle road hoping for a sighting. At one point a startled herd of pigs ran out of the jungle as if fleeing a big cat, but no sighting of the cat was forthcoming.

Even the coral reef communities, especially up towards the keyhole, seemed in reasonable shape. Abundances of brain and branching corals seemed in good health. A multitude of turtles, mostly greens, shared the lineup with us. Plastic pollution, of course, was horrendous. WSL with its much vaunted greenwashing at G-Land last year made no difference, in fact, with the amount of contest livery and junk they left behind, they made it worse. Concrete pilings from the now deceased judging tower with rebar poking out at crazy angles sit halfway in at the end of Moneys. We won't judge too harshly there. Nature is structure agnostic and already the pilings have been colonised by a multitude of marine invertebrates.

Our founding documents - Morning of the Earth and Tracks for example - fuel a self-conception for surfers as being guardians of an environment they are intimately connected with. By and large that self-conception is a mirage. We are as much a part of environmental destruction as any other group of humans on Earth - maybe moreso with our extravagant tastes for travel and petro-chemical toys. The surf camps built on the edge of the jungle at Plengkung offer a more optimistic vision of how it could be. Yet even that is not without a certain degree of dark irony.

The G-Land jungle camps are largely a result of the vision of Mike Boyum. After reading the Jack McCoy-Ritter history of G-Land it's impossible to escape the conclusion that Boyum was a vile scumbag who thought nothing of ripping off his mates, then ratting on them to put them in prison for long stretches. Yet reality demands we accept there was something inherently good and pure in his vision of surf camps in the jungle which would, in effect, serve as surf monasteries existing in harmony with nature.

The author skates across water the most mesmeric shade of blue (Joyos)

The opening days of 4-6 foot surf were perfect warm ups for the big days that were to come. My preparation of surfing 1-2 foot waves at The Pass with my kids left me a little short when it came to hollow left-hand reef surf. The days were long and the nights were longer. My mate was going through a rough patch. Marital breakdown. He was up in the night, pacing, sitting outside smoking Indonesian cigarettes, sometimes until first light. Life leaves no-one unscathed. Surf travel when young is about adventure and exploration, a complete letting go. As you get older, problems become stickier, the consequences of falling short more acute. Even Kelly Slater, when referencing his own family and personal issues admitted, “sometimes you go surfing and forget about it and you don’t think about it. Surfing becomes that drug that covers it up for a while.” To be a respected surfer in a respected surf community was what my mate wanted. But what if that ain't enough? Like our environmental self-deception we are not disposed to count the costs of a hard-core surfing life. Romanticising it creates a much easier pill to swallow.

Forecasting has changed in the last fifteen years. The accuracy now, especially for the Indian Ocean basin, is astounding. A full week out from the arrival of a major swell, Craig Brokensha wrote: “Large, consistent, long-period S/SW groundswell building late Wednesday, peaking Thursday to 8-10ft range across exposed breaks”. Close to note perfect. The only discrepancy was in the strength of the trades, which came in at close to full dry season strength on the big days.

There were nerves, intimidation, fear as the swell filled in. I spent a long time watching from the Speedies tower. Walking back to the room to suit up I watched an epic battle between rival troops of macaques. The battleground was the heli-pad, for reasons unknown. The two sides squared up in the bamboo groves with copious shrieking before the growling and snarling alpha males ran into the centre of the pad, which precipitated all of the combatants charging the pad. Multiple attacks of the males finally climaxed in the beaten troop fleeing back to the bamboo while the victorious male howled and danced with teeth bared, before casually walking to the nearest female, lifting her tail, and copulating.

I took a 6'6” Desert Storm out as the swell began to fully pump. Bombing at the Pad, throttling tubes down into Speedies. A boatload of Balinese pros and expats had arrived. A frothing, ruthless, relentless feeding frenzy ensued, the equal in intensity to the monkey battle I had just witnessed. My mate managed to find a couple in the chaos. For an hour I zigged and zagged and got nothing, but far from despondency, the most delicious and intoxicating sense of freedom overcame me. To be here in the jungle at G-Land, able to paddle-out while vast sections of the world were immiserated seemed an almost obscene luxury. Freedom is nothing if not the freedom to retreat, and like a humiliated simian I retreated to the relative security, safety and peace of 8 foot Money Trees.

The sense of being untethered from the human realm had been shown to be nothing but a brief illusion. The Balinese surfers had taken over, primarily with skill and intent. They caused me to reflect on our Indonesian neighbours. We tend not to give them much thought. Our relationship with Indonesia is ill-formed. Lacking in depth and complexity. We burn their illegal fishing boats, they execute our drug smugglers. We're remarkably incurious. We see the locals as ciphers, cooking our meals, transporting our boards and bodies across island straits. Mostly as functionaries of our surf desires, forgetting they have dreams and aspirations of their own.

'Pedro' at the camp, is a Javan who said he was pushed out of Bali in the COVID period by local forces. He now works for a pittance sweeping paths. He tells me the fishing boats, mostly traditional pirogues with the double outrigger set-up, have been killing it the last few years, catching lobster planula to sell to Taiwanese lobster farms. The sheer fecundity of the Java Trench and Indonesian Through-Flow is almost impossible to conceive.

The lights of the numerous fishing boats at night strike a cheery note, like sparkling Christmas lights. Other elements of our relationship with Jawa Timur (East Java) are less positive. The Bali bombers Amrozi and his brother Muklas were from Tenggulun, East Java, and learnt their severe form of Wahhabism from religious schools in the area. Any visitor to areas of Indonesia outside Bali will recall stern gazes and uncomfortable vibes as they are assessed as takfir (unbelievers) by those hard-core adherents to the strongest and most severe elements of Islam.

We scarcely credit the Indonesian principle of Pancasila, which mandates religious freedom and plurality, with keeping the moderate form of all religions in the ascendancy. Extremism, by and large, has been sidelined.

The tower view as Steve crouches through a Speedies barrel - sequence continued below (Joyos)

The next day was bigger. In the morning mist my mate and I watched an endless 10 foot set (twenty waves?) bombard the reef. I'd like to say we were fresh and ready, all yoga-ed up like the Russians who performed a daily group ritual on the sunset deck. Hungover from copious Bintangs is closer to the truth. Coughing after too many Indonesian cigarettes. At least we had migrated to the slightly milder Sampoerna's. Eight years (Cloudbreak 2015) since I had last packed left tubes of any size, girth, and consequence. I had one advantage. A 7'6” Desert Storm I packed in a last minute spasm of quiver anxiety as the reality of the forecast dawned. A 7'6” sitting in the rack also removes the possibility of excuses due to quiver inadequacy. Damn. I briefly thought about hiding the board in the bush and claim a monkey stole it. I couldn't take that froth fest on again. What to do?

There was one small window of opportunity my mate had identified. As the tide dropped, the crowd thinned out rapidly. The camera boats left and the lineup became more spacious, albeit rapidly increasing in danger as the already shallow reef became even shallower.

I held off. The tide peaked. Four years since I had ridden a wave on the 7'6”. I probably should have paddled it out, even at The Pass. Too late for second guessing now. It was still a froth-fest but the extra size from yesterday had reduced more of the aspiring crowd to spectators. It took a while to catch a wave. Two ten-footers on the head. Then two more. Like a heavy crest to trough wipeout at the Cobra the day before, the punishment was a great ally. Mentally, it filled me with confidence. I could still take a hit.

A moderate set pushed in a little wider, I was able to scramble deep, into space and stroke into it. Hard trades meant I was half way down the face before I could take bearings. There was a second to decide whether to commit to the Speedies section. And then the wave was sucking and lurching and what felt like a large, thick lip was throwing over me. It felt like the whole wave was sucking dry so I went low. It was the wrong line. I travelled with an insane view but the 7'6” was not going to break that low line. The lip pounded down on me and drove me deep. I foetaled up and waited for the harsh thud of reef. Two, three, four violent rotations. The impact never came. I could see the dude in the camera boat gesturing at me - was I alright? I offered a weak thumbs up and slow paddled down and out. Thought I was done. Sat there for ten minutes.

When I looked around again, the camera boats were gone. I could see people paddling in across the reef. This was the small window of opportunity I'd identified. Back in the lineup, there was space galore. Room to pick and choose. I didn't have to wait long. A smaller set, with a wide swinging wall, unencumbered by any aspiring rider. I whipped it and dropped down, again a brief moment to decide to commit. It threw over. This time, the low line was correct.

James Joyce once described a night sky as a “heaven tree of stars hung with night blue fruit”. This tube was equally beautiful. It was glowing blue inside, streaked with lines of pale white from a previous wave. The reef was perfectly visible below, like a buckled set of train tracks rising sharply upwards towards some undisclosed terminus which would, in the very near future, bring the ride to a shuddering halt.

A horrifying urge to jump off as I saw the reef and thought 'you're too deep' was somehow squashed. A moment of pure luxurious joy followed as I sensed the wave slowing enough for an untouched exit. I could have pulled in again, to ever shallower reef, but the sensation of banking a clean make was so overwhelming I simply straightened out.

It's fun, and appropriate to realise, that no-one gives a fuck about your best ride. That you could sit afterwards and smoke a clovey, listening to the croak and groan of bamboo, the gentle whoosh of straw brooms sweeping paths. Sitting in a gentle euphoria and letting it all wash through to where it belongs. Back to nothingness, to memory. The jungle endures its myriad forms, at least for now.

Everything flows, everything changes.

// STEVE SHEARER