Mornings

My mornings have a pretty standard routine- I wake up, make coffee & breakfast, and hit the road in the dark in order to get at least a half an hour of waves to myself before the rest of the world wakes up. Well, not really to myself, usually “Pommy Pete” (who would be called “Limey Pete” back in the states, i.e. he’s from the UK) beats me by 5 minutes, and oftentimes Marcy & Melinda, my surf instructors, are in the water at that time too.

The drive over is the only time of the day where I have to bundle up with a long underwear shirt in order to keep warm. It’s so chilly that many dogs are asleep in the middle of the road where the pavement retains the sun warmth. If I see locals on their mopeds they’re ordinarily wearing what I would consider to be a ski jacket.

The most beautiful part of the drive is when I cross over two valleys of rice fields. Due to the planting cycles, the moon & stars right now are reflected in the flooded terraces, and luckily very few lights are on in the houses to detract from the effect. It's impossible to capture during the pre-dawn, but I got a good shot of what it looks like at sunset
In Bali it takes about 2-3 tries to pave a smooth road through rice fields, the first go results in massive potholes where the road sinks on the sides into the mud. It’s a double disaster when the road is on a hill, as the mud underneath is quite unstable. Therefore, the hairiest part of my drive is the incline up the 1st valley wall. It’s quite a steep hill (see how graded the rice terraces are in the photo?) and you would need to keep your speed to get up it if it didn’t have any massive potholes: But as you can (sort of) see from the picture above, it does have massive potholes. The contrast on my camera doesn’t capture it, but a few of them are about a foot deep. So this is the path you must take up it, in the dark:
I consider it my warmup for surfing…