Travel stories: "Learning" to surf on the wrong beach in Bali

It took me a long time to get there but I now love surfing. Depending on where I am going to I will often take advantage of the "sports equipment" baggage fee that is a standard rate regardless of how much it weighs. It's one of the few reasonable fees that airlines have and I have to presume this is because all the people who run the world play golf.

One day while traveling in Bali, a friend of mine suggested that we sign up for a surf course since that is one of the many things that Bali is known for. I was not involved in the decision process so my friend did the research himself and decided on Uluwatu, which is a place on the island of Bali.

Little did I know at the time, but this was a terrible place for someone that has never surfed before.

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This is a dream come true for experienced surfers and would be a wonderful place for me to visit now that I have many years of surf experience under my belt. It was a TERRIBLE choice for someone that had never surfed at all in this life before though.

The waves are relatively consistent there but honestly, they are too large and too powerful for someone that hasn't even mastered the ability to even stand up on a board at all. What ended up happening to me was I would first experienced great difficulty simply getting out to the break, and then once I was there I would, as you would expect, join the wave at the wrong point. This would result in me getting rolled in what I can only describe as a "washing machine" type of experience. There were multiple times that I thought I was going to drown.

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Now I never saw anything as big as the image above while I was there but let me tell you this: If you get to a beach, whether you are there to surf or not, and you see waves like this... stay out of the water. Combine this tidal influences with the near complete lack of any sort of lifeguards and this is a recipe for disaster.

I didn't successfully catch a single wave that day and at one point I actually ended up having the fins slam into my shin while I was being rolled and it cut the hell out of me. Now as it turns out, my cut that didn't need stiches wasn't really that bad and I got off easy. It did end my day though as well as my desire to surf in Bali and to a lessor degree, any sort of faith I had in the intelligence of my friend.

Fins on a surfboard can injure the absolute hell out of you and while I am not going to post them here because they are too gruesome go ahead and do an image search for "surfboard fin injury" and then prepare yourself for the gore. These parts of the surfboard are sharp intentionally,.... they need to be and you are not supposed to make contact with them at any time. I suppose given the correct trajectory and force, they could kill you or someone around you.

The surfing school really should not have allowed us to go out in these waters but like a lot of things in developing or poorer countries, if you are willing to pay for it, they will do whatever you ask them to do. A real surf school interested in teaching us would have advised that we go to a different location such as Kuta Beach, which is where we ended up learning properly a week later.

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At a beach like this the idea is to train you to be able to stand up. You aren't going to be carving or doing tubes but the opportunity for you to hurt the hell out of yourself is almost zero.

I love surfing but it took me a long time to get there. If you have never been surfing and want to learn I strongly suggest you first take on waves that look so small that they look kind of stupid, perhaps even unsurfable. I promise you, it is much more difficult than you think and simply standing up is much more difficult than it appears from the shore.

Don't make the mistake that I made. I was lucky that it didn't end up being a very expensive experience for me because not only could have I landed myself in the hospital, but I could have broken one of their boards and these things cost a lot of money!