Indonesia 2001

Back in 2001 I was lucky enough to find myself on Panaitan island located in between Java and Sumatra. This island a beautiful home to some well-known surf breaks such as Napalm, Apocalypse, One Palm and quite a few more.

So a couple of mates called me up:

‘Hey Ev, trip on’,

‘ok where?’,

‘Indo’

‘Say no more, let’s go.’

Fortunately I had been working in Indonesia at the time so had a bit of coin to spare for this trip which ended up being a trip of a life time. The trip requiring nothing more than a boat, surf and a couple of mates.

We met up in Jakarta and had to motor six hours overnight to drive to our destination which was the surf break of Napalm and wow! When we woke up in the morning and laid our eyes on it we could not believe it.

I think we surfed four times a day and had it to ourselves the whole time.

Surfing, fishing, eating plus beer…the famous Bintangs. There were some feral campers already there, a couple of Americans shooting a video called The Ombok. I didn’t think they were surfing that great but our cook on our boat (also American) said they were surfing switch stance and getting deep barrels.

The anak krakatau volcano was smoking at the time we were there so our Captain wanted to sail past it on the way back to Jakarta. He was planning to get some sunset shots of us all standing on the boat with the volcano going off in the background.

When we got there we had some time before light went down so we decided we wanted to climb it in between it firing. Up we went!

I had a digital film camera and was really keen to get some footage.

Halfway up we all stopped as we were hearing some deep rumbles underneath us. I turned the camera on and started filming. Looking through the screen of the camera I saw a massive plume of smoke and rocks shooing towards the sky.

We had timed the eruptions to be every two hours but this one was more like one hour after the previous one.

I freaked out as did the others, and started running back down the volcano. I was filming while running and holding the camera backwards the whole way down.

When we finally stopped there were rocks rolling towards us and some had launched over our heads and landed in the water peppering the boat

Dodgy as!! Once back on the boat the Captain was pissed right off that we had missed the sunset shots but we were just feeling lucky to be alive I think!

This was September 2001 when when the 9/11 attacks on America were going on and we had no idea at all until we hit land.

A pivotal time in the world and a time I will never forget.