THE SOUTH TO SIAN JOURNALS – CHAPTER 4

Post volcano-playground dirt bike session in the Balinese mountains, our crew wore a thick layer of dust. We’d been bouncing around in the Land Rover for over a month and I think a slight reprieve from the road was in order. Plus, we all needed a good rinse off in the ocean. Canggu’s Deus Temple Of Enthusiasm drew us in. It’s unnerving how nice a proper bed can feel after sleeping in tents and on Warung floors. Once we’d rested up and satisfied our long dreamt of hunger cravings, we put the bikes and car in for a tune up and decided to sample the area’s waves of lesser consequence. In West Bali, much of the surf is over a sand bottom or relatively flat reef. Small peaks run up and down the beach and crowds are low. It was an opportunity for us to test-ride the different boards on the roof and work with the Temple shapers on a few more in the bay. We ran into our Californian friend Jared Mell, who’d been hunting the peaks for a couple of weeks and he let us in on his secret banks. In the water, Jared is the kind of guy whose enthusiasm is contagious. He’s also got that “you never know what’s coming next” surfing style: one minute he’s laying back in a tube on his backhand – the next he’s doing the same thing riding forehand. We had a chance to get out on our longboards and even a few sessions body surfing. There’s a wedge there that people consider to be too big on proper swells, but for us it’s the perfect body surfing bowl. It was true that we eventually swapped the dust in our hair for a thick mat of sand.