By Phil Jarratt
I KNOW that sometimes in Noosa we throw our hands in the air in exasperation at council decisions on land use and bizarre zonings and the like, but for the most part there is some kind of logic in play. And, in terms of the bigger picture, our town planning has, for decades now, been world’s best practice.
This week’s column comes to you from a village a few thousand kilometres north west of Noosa where such is not the case, a place where planning is a concept whose time is yet to come, where land zoning is a form of currency, where roads are opened and closed and allowed to rot at the whims of feuding landlords, where there are dozens of sturdy concrete bridges that lead nowhere.
The urban sprawl along Bali’s south west coast has been heading north at the rate of about a couple of hundred rice paddies a year for more than 30 years, but the village where we have been staying a couple of times a year for nearly a decade now has been the developers’ stumbling block, separated from its neighbour villages by fast-flowing creeks and rivers, and bordered by a government-gazetted “green corridor” that runs inland from the coast to the outskirts of the city of Tabanan, through some of South Bali’s most pleasant agricultural landscapes.
The green corridor was compromised almost from the start, with Bali’s trickle-down management of assets guaranteeing that money would change hands and buildings would pop up in fields of green.
But even now, we can ride our pushbikes 10 minutes from the compound and be surrounded by terrain not dissimilar to the island of the gods I fell in love with 43 years ago, where the tinkle of cowbells and the laughter of children can be heard rather than the now standard soundtrack of jackhammers and doof-doof.
Still, every visit we monitor the level of construction in our neighbourhood and wonder how long it can last. And every visit we have to re-examine our priorities.
From where we live, I have several easy options for my morning surf.
I can putter on my scooter two minutes to the end of the beach road where there are two good lefts and a right that like a medium swell and a high tide. On a lower tide and a bigger swell, I can ride the scooter five minutes in the other direction, across a bridge and along a winding coastal route to two more reef and sand A-frames that will hold up to double overhead, which is quite enough for an old bloke, on any tide.
For the past few years landholders on the southern side of the bridge have been playing silly buggers with public access, illegally blocking off one track after another, but the local surfing community has always found a way around these obstacles. Until now.
On my first morning back last week I rode across the bridge at first light, down the temple track and into an impenetrable brick wall.
I rode its length twice but there was no way around.
I parked the bike and walked 20 minutes along the beach for my surf.
No big deal, I suppose, but a 40-minute round trip carrying a longboard isn’t particularly my idea of fun.
It’s like walking from First Point to Granite and back, every day.
There is another way, but it involves doing a huge loop on major roads, which is also not my idea of fun.
Conversely, my inconvenience is slowing the degeneration of the village I love into another Kuta or Seminyak.
There are no nightclubs here, and without coastal access there won’t be for some time. Maybe never.
In the meantime, I’m looking for a secret bridge. This might sound silly, but I’ve already found two.
The problem is that neither of them go anywhere.
Villa developers on the other side have lined the right pockets and built their monstrosities on public access routes.
But I’m not giving up!
Vale Murph le Surf
JUST before the silly season began in earnest we had word from France of the passing of our dear friend Francois Lartigau, after a courageous battle with cancer.
Francois, known to many around the world as “Murph the Surf”, and to others as “Fritz”, was one of French surfing’s most colourful characters, a fine artist, clothing designer, raconteur and bon vivant, as well as having a national title under his belt.
Murph and his older brother Jean-Marie grew up in Biarritz in the 1960s and had a virtual stranglehold on French surfing in the latter part of that decade, Jean-Marie winning the senior titles, Murph the juniors.
Murph went travelling in the early ‘70s so I missed him when I spent the summer of ’73 on the Basque Coast, but I caught up with him at Burleigh Heads during the famous 23-day swell of 1975, and we have been friends ever since.
In the early 2000s, Murph and I worked together at Quiksilver Europe, surfed Guethary or Bidart at lunchtime most days, and raised merry hell together in the beachfront bars.
When I turned 50 he presented me with a large, very clever and cheerfully obscene rendition of me as a crusty dinosaur. I still have it and will cherish it forever.
A couple of nights before he died, Murph and I traded goodbye texts. He’d made his peace and was ready to go surf those perfect lefts on the other side. Another good man down.
