Padang + Jed Smith = Living obscenely.
It was a week of obscene living that took me from giant Desert Point to classic Padang Padang and finally to one of the hidden gems of the global arts and literature circuit – the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali.
First, the swell: an absolute thumper, 20 feet at 16 seconds, bigger than anything that’s hit this part of the world in seven years. To Desert Point! Late monday night, we aim our scooters at the harbour and make for the midnight ferry to Lombok. But alas! I blow a tire on the highway and almost die. We sleep in our board bags waiting for the mechanic to open and, come sun-up, press on. We arrive at the fabled left reef the following afternoon and meet with a team of misfits – Ryan Burch, Jared Mell, Harrison Roache, Joel Fitzgerald (son of Terry) and Bryce Young (son of Nat). They’ve made their way here on behalf of a wacky venture where they plan to ride an assortment of asymmetrical twin-fins, five-fin bonzers, voluminous quads and self-shaped single fins on an outlandishly large swell. It’s ten to twelve-foot and cross-shore. After watching Joel Fitz burst an ear drum trying to punch through a giant chandelier, I call the trip a bust and head back to Bali.
Drive – ferry – drive – thunderstorm – sleep in a roadside shack – drive, and I’m back. The swell is still mega and the legendary Padang Padang is doing its thing. I’m eager to try out the 1994 Rodney Dahlberg I bought from a German tourist for $50 in a Byron Bay carpark (the deal included a leg rope valued at $50 and as I was leaving, he handed me a free bar of wax, putting me up approximately $3.50 for the transaction), and what better place than an unpredictable eight to ten foot Padang lurching horrendously over the inside bowl?
The beach is swimming with chest-beating He-men types, including my favorite: the buff middle-aged guy with his gleaming 7’0 pintail who converses loudly on the beach about the conditions while making hand gestures of a curling wave. Padang beach is quite a distance from Padang the wave, and these men know that a show of bravado on the sand will count for more among the general public than anything they accomplish on the reef, where the figures getting immensely pitted are largely indiscernible from one another. I catch three waves, get soooo pitted, brah, wupah! and, in that moment of inflated self worth that follows the sickest of pits, I send fleeting glances of disgust toward the middle-aged buff men who’d failed to catch a single wave. For, of course, I am man and they are less than man.
To the Writers and Readers Festival! If ever there were an equalizer to the scene at Padang, this is it. In this, its tenth year, the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival has forged itself a place among the world’s premiere intellectual events. Nestled among the rice paddies, temples and severe neo-colonial exploitation of Bali’s cultural hub, the festival brings Pulitzer and Booker Prize Winners, Nobel laureates, freedom fighters, musicians, refugees and leading human rights advocates to our favorite surf island. Past guests include Nick Cave (Birthday Party, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, The Ass and The Angel), Jeffrey Eugenides (Virgin Suicides, Middlesex) and the former East Timorese prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Jose Ramos Horta. To give you a condensed version of the five day festival and the brain pretzels I walked away with, here is a quick list of the four things that rocked my world:
Michael Leunig: This guy will be largely unknown to American readers, but he’s worth getting to know. He is regarded as one of Australia’s most influential thinkers, which is pretty crazy given he grew up in a tiny industrial town on the outskirts of Melbourne and spends his days living on an isolated farm. Leunig is famous for his cartoons (called Leunig) in which he takes the world to task with a profound yet very simple humanist approach. He also hates jet-skis, as do I.
