FIRST-CLASS FERAL
Bad Odors and Great Rides On the Indonesian Frontier

It's amazing how many quality waves are still lost amongst the world's archipeligos. In Indo, finding them just takes a good map, some gumption, and enough rupiah to hire a skiff for the day. After a fitful night's sleep propped up on a crate of beer, nothing felt better to Daniel Thomson than ripping into his first turn of the morning.

“She’s such a cute little girl, but her legs are absolutely ravaged by mosquitoes,” he described when he came back to the boat for our first aid box. On our group’s first foray onto the outlying jungle the girl trotted ahead as our guide, eventually leading us to the most enlightening surf discovery of the adventure.

It felt like somewhere lost in time, a utopic beachhead with a cool, fresh water creek running down from the jungle—warm, blue ocean, living reef, endless lines of swell, and nary a thumbprint of man besides the village back beyond the trees and the small girl with a bandaged foot standing by our side. We huddled on the beach under a coconut-less cluster of palms and watched set after perfect set detonate across the shallow inside reef. “It’s like Off The Wall on mushrooms, man,” muttered Brandon.

“That setup down the way looks more like The Box,” noted Micah. Kinetic energy and salt mist waltzed in the offshore breeze. Down to a bottle of water and green banana for breakfast, we sipped and peeled and continued to spectate. There was no reason to rush, as with The Beachy, there wasn’t a surfer to be seen for miles. All the hours in transit, the sleepless nights, the noodles, the calamity onboard the Vagina, all for this.

“We’ve found it,” smiled Conley to everybody else, soaking in the sun’s rays. You don’t get to say that when you pull up to Lance’s Right or Macaroni’s. The promise of perfection is never as rewarding as the pursuit. What’s the lesson learned when your dinner’s served on fine, white linen and you have to sign a waiver before you get on board? This was visceral—the dirt under our fingernails told us so.

Finally, we surfed. The waves were every bit as good as they looked and, for the rest of the week, we dodged snakes in the jungle grass and continued to ride the wave, forgetting to even name it. But with pleasure comes pain, and the scariest moment of the trip arrived when Daniel went over the falls and got shelfed on dry reef. Landing squarely on his tailbone, he was temporarily rendered a quadriplegic for a moment, helplessly floating in the impact zone. He regained feeling quickly and was washed in through a keyhole in the reef where he was carried to the beach and laid flat on his back in the hard, low tide sand.

“I’ll be all right; I’ll be all right,” he insisted, gritting his teeth. “This could be really bad,” muttered a concerned Micah.