Before the morning of the earth, was the season of the scammers. In these excerpts from his new book, Bali Heaven and Hell, Phil Jarratt takes us back to Bali’s pioneer surfing era.

By the early months of 1970, being on the jet route had already started to make some differences in Bali. The trickle of hippies on the overland trail between Europe and Australia who managed to find their way to Bali had become a stream, and many of them gravitated towards the cheapest place where you could enjoy an idyllic beach life—Kuta.

After endless months dodging bullets in the frontlines while covering the Vietnam War for the Honolulu Advertiser, young photojournalist Leonard Lueras thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he pulled his battered Surfboards Hawaii log out of the back of a bemo and surveyed Kuta Beach for the first time. Lueras had lugged the heavy board overland from Jakarta, and he was ecstatic to wash the dust of the road off it and himself in the empty beach breaks. He checked into Losmen Kompiang and went off for dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where he immediately ran into the Australian surf adventurer Peter Troy.

Lueras recalls: ‘Kuta was just this really nice little place, a sleepy fishing village, with lanes where you walked through coconut forests. No phones, no electricity. It was just kerosene lamps and these weird ceremonies at night and you’d just kind of wander around in disbelief.’

Another group of young people, mostly American but with a few Australians and Europeans in the mix, had started to take up residence on a semi-permanent basis. Most of these men were surfers, and many went by a mysterious alias, like twenty-two-year-old ‘Abdul’, who rocked into Kuta in late 1970 with $100,000 in cash burning a hole in his pocket.

Born Warren Anderson in Laguna Beach, California in 1948, Abdul had dropped out of school to become a stoner surfer, hanging out on the beaches of southern Orange County, subsisting by getting a stash of weed on credit from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love hippie crime syndicate up in Laguna Canyon, smoking half and selling the rest to his surfing buddies. Looking to improve his lot in life, he ramped up his selling and was soon in trouble with the law. Facing three to five years, he invested some of his dope profit and had the Brotherhood set him up with a full set of false ID through the Weather Underground in Los Angeles. The Weathermen advocated ending the war in Vietnam by creating violent mayhem at home, so they were pretty good at getting wanted men out of the country. With a birth certificate from Ohio, a driver’s licence from Nevada and a draft card, he presented himself at the Federal Building in LA and walked out with a passport bearing the name James Robert Monroe.

Abdul had enough money for a one-way ticket to India with $2000 left over. He knew people who were running scams with Nepalese hashish so he figured he’d do the same: ‘I used to make dog cages out of plywood and in the middle part of the ply I’d put the hash in. I could fit about 12 to 15 pounds in one cage. I’d send them off with little Lhasa Apso dogs [Tibetan terriers] by clipper cargo and they’d arrive in the States within 24 hours. It wasn’t big money, maybe $20,000 a crate, but the dope was like $20 a kilo in the government shop in Kathmandu. I put together a few loads in a year or so, then came to Bali.’

There was a cool scene developing in Kuta and Abdul fit right into it. He was ‘flamboyant, goofy and so bold’, fellow scammer Mike Ritter recalled. ‘With his long, wild hair and dark-olive skin, he stood out from the others.’

The ‘others’ included Californian Bob Laverty and an intense and bug-eyed young man named Mike Boyum. Abdul recalled: ‘A lot of these people are dead now. We were just a bunch of young guys with very chequered pasts. No one had a job, no income that you could talk about, except Laverty who was an heir to the Thriftimart drug store chain.’

But the most intriguing of the Kuta cronies was Boyum, a military brat who was born in Key West, Florida in 1946, but spent his childhood moving from base to base along the eastern seaboard as his father developed into one of the navy’s top pilots. Boyum and his brother, Bill, five years younger, started surfing in the early 1960s, but Mike was more into sailing and soon dropped out of George Washington University to explore the Pacific and beyond.

Boyum had been living in Kuta for six months or more when Abdul arrived in 1970 and the two soon met. They surfed the beach breaks together, and sometimes Kuta Reef up near the airport, and hung out at Boyum’s rented house on Jalan Pantai, where Boyum introduced Abdul to his newfound passions, durian fruit and magic mushrooms. The foul-smelling, cheesy durian that he bought each morning at Zenik’s warung was definitely an acquired taste, but its dietary properties were positive. Boyum claimed the same properties for the wild hallucinogenic mushrooms that popped up in cow turds all over South Bali every time it rained, and ingested them by the dozens, mainly as soup or as a smoothie. The benefit was a mind-bending stone that often lasted for days. Boyum rarely went a day without them, but unlike most users, he was energised by them to a frightening degree, often surfing huge waves way beyond his capabilities while off his head.

You would have expected the two men to have an immediate bond, but Abdul loathed Boyum from the outset. ‘He was just an asshole from day one. Nobody outside of the few people he sucked up to really liked him. He wasn’t cool. [In Kuta] we were all brothers and he wasn’t. We were all doing something outside the law but Boyum was the most inept of us all. These days he has this image of some super smuggler, but he was a fucking idiot. In the end he was playing both sides. If he didn’t like you he called the DEA.’

                                                                                                  *****

Over the summer of 1971–72, although Albert Falzon’s Morning of the Earth was still a few weeks away from its theatrical release, the Australian surfing cognoscenti was fast becoming aware that it contained some revelations about the wave potential of Bali. One of the first centres of this growing intelligence was in the unlikely setting of an old boatshed at Palm Beach, on Sydney’s northern beaches peninsula, where underground surfboard craftsmen Glynn Ritchie, David Chidgey and Mitchell Rae had set up Outer Island Surfboards. The rumours circulating about Falzon’s discovery of a new break at the tip of the island consolidated what they’d previously heard from Russell Hughes, and they made plans to down tools and go after securing seventeen-year-old Rae a passport for his first overseas trip.

Rae still remembers arriving in Bali for the first time: ‘I will always have that vision. No traffic, no tourists, a raw coral track leading down to perfect waves. Three restaurants and a couple of warungs. I just walked round with a giant shit-eating grin on my face the whole time. It was a surfer’s Disneyland, it had everything I treasured, in abundance. No crowds, offshore winds every day, consistent swell.’

They settled into a cheap losmen near the beach and a routine of surfing Kuta Reef and the Kuta beach breaks all day, every day. ‘We knew about Uluwatu, of course,’ Rae says, ‘But the swell was consistent and we had perfect waves to ourselves every day, so there was no need to explore.’ The three amigos were surfing the reef alone one afternoon, high on Chidgey’s acid, when ‘this enormous canoe comes out from the beach at Kartika Plaza, with a figure all in white in the middle of it, wearing a panama hat, straight out of a Bogart movie. It was Miki Dora.’

Random sightings of the legendary Malibu surfer and international con man were not that unusual in the early 1970s. He would show up out of nowhere and disappear just as mysteriously. Sometimes he would shun contact, other times he would ooze charm. Rae recalls the latter: ‘He’s slowly off with the white suit and the dark glasses while we watched between sets, and over the side with his board, wearing white boardshorts, of course. We surfed for a while and got him talking and he lived up to the legend. He told us we should come over and surf this perfect right-hander he was surfing alone in front of the Bali Beach Hotel at Sanur. He was friendly and fabulous, living large, having fun.’

Chidgey had a plan to cover the expenses for the trip, as he always did. In their final days in Bali, he put Rae on the back of his bike and rode into Denpasar. They pulled up in front of the Adiasa Hotel and Mitchell followed Chidgey up a flight of stairs and into a shabby sitting room, where the teenager was somewhat shocked to be joined momentarily by a group of army officers.

‘What’s goin’ on, Chidge?’ he asked.

‘Just smile, I’ll handle it,’ Chidge responded.

The soldiers seemed friendly enough. They slammed a 5-pound bag of Sumatran heads down on a table and sat around it while Chidgey counted out the rupiah. Back at the losmen, Chidgey pulled out his tool bag and some resin and they systematically chambered out their surfboards, packed the weed into the cavities and glassed over them.

Mitchell Rae had smoked his first joint at thirteen and had been surfing on acid for at least two years, so he was an old hand at recreational drugs. Still, he’d never crossed international borders as a mule before, so Chidgey sent him through the airport formalities first, so that he could keep an eye on him—or perhaps do a runner if things went pear-shaped. The happy-go-lucky kid just smiled and sauntered through at both ends, and they were soon ripping their boards apart in Chidgey’s Avalon garage to uncover the booty.

So that was Bali. Too easy.

Abdul, Boyum and Rae all ended up doing time for drug offences. Laverty suffered an epileptic seizure in the surf at Uluwatu and died in 1972, Boyum died mysteriously at Cloud Nine in the Philippines in the late 1980s. Abdul lives a quiet life in Bali these days, Rae is a frequent visitor when not making beautiful surfboards at his mid-North Coast base.

Bali Heaven and Hell, by Phil Jarratt (Hardie Grant, $29.95) is available at all good book stores and on-line at backbeach.net.au

(Homepage photo. Uluwatu the way it was by Dick Hoole)