And the Gods Say No

UK DJ Thomas Bullock is performing this Sunday (8 April) at our latest "Weekender" party, a collaboration between VICE and Potato Head Beach Club, in Bali. Tom was at our last party as well, before heading off to Bali for what was supposed to be a holiday spent surfing some of the island's best spots. But at Uluwatu, everything that could go wrong… did.

Pretty and threatening both at the same time, Uluwatu is one of those names that, through a tidy balance of sound and rhythm, gives you the feeling that you’ve heard it before. Even when you haven’t. That you’re familiar with it. Even when you’re not. Which is how things can be in Ulu. It’s not a place that you know, as such. Though, I have to say that during the first long day that I spent there, I never not once felt like it did not know me.

Uluwatu is the mothership of the Balinese "mother temples." It’s comprised of an Escher-like warren of stairs, tunnels, caves and ledges, and a very famous surf spot all carved out, perched upon or running before a row of dramatic 91-meter-tall bone-white cliffs at the highest point of the Southern-most tip of Bali. I went there to surf and got my ass served to me by such a mind boggling list of events that the firmly established belief that it is home to a host of powerful spirits took on a new gravitas. This is what happened.

First wave. Cut off by a woman who could have been Keith Richards and who could have been smoking when she crowed, "I’ll drop in on you, ya little shit-weasel!"

Second wave. I break my nose. I had misjudged how fast everything was moving out there in the line-up and the waves sucked up from rising bumps to ripping curls in moments. I was therefore caught out in front of one and drilled beneath its surface. When I surfaced, I took the board to the face (the leash was too short—rental problems).

It took a while to realize the consequences of what had just happened. That I was covered in blood, for one. I had heard the gristly crunch on impact and tasted something familiar but it was the look on other peoples' faces as I paddled back out that indicated there might be serious trouble. Recoiling, paling. Someone mentioned tiger sharks and I turned and started paddling with great focus for the shore.

Now, simply entering and exiting the water at Ulu is a mission unto itself. Getting in, one descends into the heart of the Earth itself, climbing down through caverns and caves past bizarre bazars to an underworld where, through the bright blue mouth of a sea-filled cave you paddle furiously. Popping out into the big wide world comes as a surprise. It’s all open sea. There’s no sandy beach at Ulu. No bathers or families, that sort of thing. Just lots of sky and a massive horizon. It feels more like sailing. You’re cut off entirely from the land. Getting out there, I had managed. But now I was coming back in. At least this time I had my board.

So, I'm sat there in a make-shift cafe wedged into a crevice above the sea, ice packed onto my face when a billowing wall of freak-black storm-clouds roll across a sea that was, only moments before, bright and glistening.

But I will not be deterred. Time has seemingly stopped along with all reason and this small-town-English-boy will ride Ulu no matter what! I stand, smacking my skull into a wooden beam, crouch in eye-watering pain and proceed to smack my board against a post—the first ding of the day. Someone says, that’s not very lucky.

Back in the line-up and I’m about to discover what real trouble is all about. Again, I mistime everything and I’m suddenly caught beneath a surfer who is about to descend a screaming green tunnel of wave. I feel certain I will be skewered and, abandoning hope and my board, I dive below. Not clear how, but our leashes become entwined and as he is dragged one way by the explosive wave, I am driven another, deeper under the sea. The rubber cables tied around our ankles are stretched and stretched until… boof… the thing snaps.

Meanwhile, that storm has been making its way in and what had been formidable head-high pounders where now double-overhead pulverizers. The force and speed of what was happening around me, the colors and the sounds, it was enough to take your breath away. I wanted to laugh. I felt emotional. I was, I can see now, slightly hysterical.

Faces appear around me. “Are you OK ?” A gallant young Ozzie is taking command. Yes, I say. “Are you a strong swimmer?” Yes, I answer. But how on earth to get back to land ? I’m a quarter of a mile out from a wall of, well, walls. Turns out, how to get back depended on whether I wanted to try and find my (rental) board. Which I did want to do. Because, despite everything that had happened so far, I still felt quite good. I still felt like I should be there surfing Uluwatu. Though 45 minutes spent picking my way along volcanic rock crawling with crabs trying to dodge the incoming waves to the sound of a jeering crowd, did start to diminish that feeling somewhat.

And but yes, the woe was not yet complete. The lessons not over. Just for good measure, incredibly, climbing the stone stairs back up to the headlands, I am electrocuted ! A split wire and a wet step. But still ! What kind of mad torment is this ? I soldier on.

Back in the carpark, the other side of the walk-of-shame, and my scooter won’t start. Then it does, but the lights have stopped working. I’ve made too much of an ass out of myself already; there’s no asking for help or even any hanging around. I set off. Night falls. I lose my bearings. It grows pitch-black. I am lost.

Now, admittedly, a lot can go wrong when you’re playing around with 2 meter planks in 3 meter waves. Especially when there’s a bunch of other people doing the same. But it's unusual for so many calamities to befall a single surfer in one day.

The feeling that I was being steered, then repelled, like a wrong-headed magnet, out of the water, back to the land, up to the bike and out of there, was something that I have to admit to. Honestly? It felt just like I was being smacked on the ear by a kind—but unamused—teacher. It felt like I was never going to get seriously hurt but at the same time, that I was never going to get to stay.

Bali, we know, is famous for its spiritual inhabitants and their unique and elaborate ceremonies. But why is that? Are the Balinese different to everyone else? Somehow more sensitive to the metaphysical or more prone to magical thinking? What if all their ceremonies and offerings were not so much to honor the gods as to placate the spirits? To keep some kind of order? The Balinese national cloth, the black and white and grey checked fabric that we see tied about trees and altars, rocks and temple-gates, symbolizes the good (white), the bad (black) and the place where we should exist in between, the grey area of life. It’s understood that the world is made up of both benevolent and malign forces and furthermore, that we need to keep them in balance. This is what the offerings, laid out every day all day, are for - to pacify the dark with the light. To maintain the grey.

Ulu first entered my psyche via Morning of the Earth—a dreamy 70’s surf flick shot there on 16mm that is noteworthy in part for how little surfing is actually in it. I used to watch it mainly for the long dark sequences of strange rituals in the caverns and caves of Uluwatu. Entering those same caves myself some years later, was an eery experience. It felt easy to imagine pre-historic folk braving the place and getting all kinds of ceremonial. Back in the 16th century, brahmins bringing Hindu beliefs from Java hoped to harness the energies of these pagan ceremonial sites by building six pura segara or "sea temples" directly on top of them. Each one visible from the last, these temples would build an unbreakable chain of spiritual protection for the island, culminating with the most powerful at Uluwatu.

And who are we to think otherwise ? We, meaning bules from the West, have, after all, been visiting Bali only for a fraction of the time that they, over millennia, have tracked and navigated the behavior of their island. I wonder if there will come a time when it’s not only intuitively understood and creatively and poetically expressed locally, but also empirically established by Western science, that these energies do exist at Ulu and elsewhere.

During the sixties, a Cambridge scientist named James Lovelock developed an hypothesis called Gaia theory that asserts I suggest that this is what’s happening when we stumble upon the scientifically inexplicable and the weird goes bonkers and it’s too hard to tell, as it was that day at Ulu, the difference between chance and destiny, mistake or accident, superstition and fact, It’s the earth, Gaia, taking care of herself in some enormous yet myriad way.

Can we allow for such a prospect in our thinking? Can we allow not to? I say, accept the unknown. Give in to the urge and make offerings. Let go to an intuition. It may be just what our planet needs right now. And quite possibly, what it is asking for.