Surfing
Photographer Andrew Shield takes us deep into the Sumatran jungle in Indonesia, as he and his motley crew attempt to surf and document the famed Seven Ghosts
I’ve travelled to a lot of different parts of coastal Indonesia,” says Andrew Shield, the man behind the lens of the journey you’re about to embark on. “The culture is very different to what we’re used to in the West. You get to see some weird stuff.”
And this trip, with Chippa Wilson and Tai Graham in tow, was no exception. Sent on a trip by the Indonesian Government to promote tourism, Andrew, Chippa, Tai and some of Indonesia’s best surfers set out on a trip deep into the Sumatran jungle. And they weren’t chasing just another swell, not just another wave – they were headed out to find and conquer the Bono.
“This trip to inland Sumatra was the first time I’ve experienced ‘rural’ Indonesia,” continues Andrew. “It was strange and very foreign. The local people at the time were capitalising on a boom in Bird Nest farming. Everywhere we looked the landscape was dotted with medieval-style rectangular towers. The towers were built to encourage birds to nest. Local people even went to the trouble of playing recorded bird sounds to lure the birds in. Once they’d found the towers, the birds would then make nests in the towers out of their spit. The weirdest part of the whole thing was the bird nests were then gathered to sell to the Chinese, who eat them. Bird Spit is apparently a delicacy in China.”
The waves they were chasing were no less strange than the bird spit industry. On large tides, a tidal bore runs through a stretch of wide river many kilometres inland from the Indian Ocean coastline in Sumatra. Over time the wave has formed different sections, each breaking in their own style and mood. These sections are best known as the “Seven Ghosts”, where they stack up into a perfect left lineup – a vision you’d expect to see on a perfect point break, not in a river kilometres from sea.
“The River is about a four hour drive from the inland City of Pekanbaru, in Central Sumatra,” Andrew explains. “The locals in the village where we stayed subsist mainly through bird nest farming, though I’ve heard that there has been a sharp decline in recent years in that industry. The local lifestyle seemed similar to Indonesian life in coastal villages, except for one main difference. On a few days each month, most months of the year, the tidal bore comes through and their village is completely flooded for a few hours – which is only a minor inconvenience, as all the houses are built on metre-high stilts. It just means that if you’re using a car or motorbike, you’re stuck for a few hours – and you better hope it’s above the high water mark. During these hours it’s much easier to just paddle a canoe down the streets to get around, and fortunately for locals the timing of the flood is predictable down to the minute.
“The place had a carnival atmosphere when the tide came in, dozens of kids playing in the flooded streets and everyone smiling and laughing at our team paddling the streets on SUPs. When the water would subside, life would return to normal. Traffic noise would resume, we’d see people walking rather than paddling, and all the goats and dogs and cats climb down from their dry perches.”
As for the wave, most sections are quite full and don’t allow for any high performance surfing – but when the wave hits shallow sandbars near the side of the river, it forms perfect, rippable waves.
“The tidal bore happens for three or four consecutive days on the biggest tides of the year,” says Andrew. “The trick is to learn where the best sections are and try to be there the following day. On this particular trip we had a lot of boats and jetskis, so if you fell the boats could pick you up and race you back up ahead of the bore again. However, the river runs through some remote Sumatran jungle and we saw lots of crocodile tracks on the riverbanks… which made for some good incentive not to fall!"
