[ MENTAWAI LAND GRAB ]
[ Tim Winton Interview ][ Strong Current ]
[ Nat Young's Dream ]
[ The Tao of Mick Fanning ]
[ Tackling Gorillas in Peru ]
[ NORTH SHORE TRADE SHOW/ SHARE HOUSE/REALITY TV WEBCAST ]
[ HIGH SURF INTRODUCTION ]
[ GORDON MERCHANT INTERVIEW ]
[ THE SCIENCE OF THE SUPERBANK ]
[ BEN AIPA ]
[ HAPPY ACCIDENT ]
[ FLOATING ]
[ ALBE FALZON INTERVIEW ]
[ FULL MOON IN THE MENTAWAIS ]
[ JAMIIE MITCHELL ]
[ THE HUMAN BONFIRE ]
[ GEOFF McCOY PROFILE ]
[ WHERE TO FROM HERE? ]
[ AUSTRALIA DAY WITH HERRO ]
[ THE WEBBER BROTHERS ]
[ ROBBIE PAGE ]
[ RIP CURL PRO PREVIEW ]
SURFING THE FAULT LINE
Land Resorts versus Surf Charters in the Battle for Exclusive Wave Rights
By Tim Baker
Lance’s Rights looked like Sunset Beach — 12- to 15-foot bombs exploding on the outside reef and a small, gung-ho crew towing and paddling into cavernous tubes so outrageous it looked like some crazy surf cartoon fantasy.
Meanwhile, on land, the recently opened Katiet Villas surf resort was suffering a less happy, but no less dramatic fate — the mega-swell, new moon and king tide combining to decimate their once immaculate beachfront. We awoke to waves literally lapping at our doors, large logs rolling around in the shorebreak and a small river running through the resort. I joked we’d been upgraded to water bungalows, though no one was doing much laughing.
Just the day before, two warring white men had sat down with lawyers and police at this very resort in an attempt to thrash out the disputed land title to this prized beachfront site. Less than 24 hours later, the ocean had very nearly wiped it off the map, like a scolding parent declaring, “Well, if you can’t play nicely, then none of you shall have it.”
I’d come to this exquisite Indonesian island chain to report on how the recent outbreak of land-based surf resorts would affect this remote region, where once only surf charter boats had freely plied their trade. The charter boats stand accused of not generating enough direct benefits for the islands and their people, and the Mentawai Government is desperate for the investment and infrastructure land resorts promise to bring. There is talk of exclusive wave rights being awarded to resorts and rumblings from boat skippers afraid they’ll be shut out of the business they helped pioneer.
Padang, in Western Sumatra, the base for the Mentawai surf charter industry, looks distinctly wealthier, cleaner and better organized than when I first came here ten years ago. They have a flash new air-conditioned airport and streamlined processing through immigration and customs. Presumably, surfing has played some small part in this growing prosperity, with around 3,000 surfers passing through each year and 40-odd charter boats and now five land resorts regularly restocking in the port town.
At my hotel, I keep bumping into friendly locals who insist we’ve met before and encourage me to book a boat charter or at least buy a T-shirt. One of them, Anton, can even arrange a local boat for me to buy or have one built for a mere $20,000 in nearby Sibolga. I could even start my own charter business, he suggests. No wonder there are so many boats out in the islands.
UN AND THE MMTA
Once safely through the lobby, I find my way to the offices of the newly-formed Mentawai Marine Tourism Association, on the first floor of the four-star Bumiminang Hotel. The MMTA’s chairman, Anom Suheri, known as Un, is a former trekking guide with 20-years experience in tourism, a partner in the Kandui Resort and a first generation Mentawai surfer. “We have three assets in the Mentawais: good waves, natural environment and not too crowded, and we have to protect these assets,” Un tells me seriously. “If it gets too crowded people will stop coming.”
To this end, the Mentawai government has awarded five marine tourism licenses, and the “Big Five,” as they’ve become known, now form the membership of the MMTA. Each license holder is obliged to develop land-based accommodation and run between two and six charter boats, with a total carrying capacity of no more than 50 guests. Boat operators have been sent scurrying to register with one of the five license holders, somewhat reluctantly, or risk being shutdown. Thus, with a maximum of 30 boats and 250 passengers, plus five resorts with an average of 12 surfers each, it all adds up to around 300 visiting surfers in the islands at any one time.
Un envisions a “grand design” for surf tourism in the Mentawais, with a range of resorts for various budgets — though generally “high-end” tourism — and regulation of surf breaks. It’s in no one’s interest, he argues, to have six charter boats regularly clogging the most popular spots. “The government has authority up to four miles from the beach,” he says, “so they are legally able to regulate surf breaks. The MMTA is to give input to the government on how to regulate.” With the five voting members of the MMTA all resort owners or developers, it’s not hard to see the balance of power shifting from boats to land resorts.
Un’s concerned about the damage to reefs caused by anchors, and wants to see mooring buoys throughout the islands. “But who pays?” he asks. The Mentawai government wants to eliminate illegal logging and bomb fishing, says Un, but must come up with alternative sources of income for the impoverished locals. “Tourism is I think the best option. At Kandui, we have almost 40 workers, the economy is already growing up around the village.”
Un wants to see the whole surf charter industry based out in the islands, with a marina, airport and tourism hub where guests fly in and out, and boats restock and refuel; basically, moving the whole surf charter base from Padang, on the Sumatran mainland, out to the islands, 100 miles offshore.
KANDUI
We motor through the night by charter boat out to the islands, transfer to local longboats at a dawn and cruise through mangroves to the wharf of the Kandui Resort. The crew behind Kandui are a bunch of surfers who worked in the charter business and saw the opportunity to fund a lifestyle. Led by Jordan Heuer, a strapping naturalfooter from the Big Island, they’ve fashioned a reasonable replica of every surfer’s childhood tropic surf fantasy. There are seven local-style bungalows, or “umas” as they’re known, nestled among the coconut trees, a central dining hall, office and staff quarters. It’s low-key, tasteful and comfortable, with air con and smart furnishings. There’s wireless Internet, wide-screen TV, ice-cold beer and you can strum the old nylon-string guitar Jack Johnson left behind as a gift to the staff.
Playgrounds on a solid swell is an amazing spectacle, with a world-class wave seemingly around every corner. Ferried about in longboats, we all gorge happily, sharing the waves with two or three charter boats and the clientele from Wave Park, the original land resort in the Mentawais, located just around the corner from Kandui. Even with 20-odd surfers in the water and long waits between sets, everyone minds their manners and the vibe is generally friendly.
The local staff seem happy and surf stoked. When bartender Margi shuffles down the beach between shifts for a surf out front at Four Bobs, with his boardies hanging halfway down his ass and his Calvin Klein’s peeping out the top, he could easily be a young surf punk from Huntington or Coolangatta. Surf culture has taken root here, tiny groms zapping all over the reforms that roll into Playgrounds’ more protected reefs on cast-off boards, and flitting between breaks in dug out canoes with outboard motors.
Out the back of the resort, a narrow wooden walkway – the “Tsunami Bridge” — winds its way through mangrove swamps to a small hill at the center of the island, refuge in the event of another earthquake or tsunami. All the resorts have their own contingencies in the event of such an emergency — for good reason. The massive earthquake that triggered the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and aftershocks, left the tectonic plates west of the Mentawais delicately poised. Another major quake, whether it’s in two weeks or 20 years, is only a matter of time.
But, then, you could fall under a bus tomorrow, right?
WAVE PARK
I paddle in from a fun session at barreling, overhead Hideaway to check out the Wave Park Resort, in the crook of a sweeping crescent beach. Owner Christie Carter, a hard-charging New Zealander, has been out here since 1998 and opened for business seven years ago. He’d been sailing through Asia when he stumbled upon the Playgrounds region and decided he couldn’t leave. “I surfed Kandui at 6 to 8 feet and it blew my mind,” he recalls. “I didn’t know waves like that existed.” Christie returned home, sold everything he owned, quit his job and returned to the Mentawais to set about creating Wave Park, in partnership with a local family.
Wave Park is clean and comfortable, if a little more basic than Kandui, with shared bunk accommodation, solar hot water and a well-appointed dining hall and games room. Christie has plans for more upscale bungalow accommodations, which will be built next year. “A lot of people come here with a kind of question hanging over their hearts,” he tells me, “and by the time they leave they have the answer. They’ve had some time and distance to get some perspective on it.”
Christie remains dubious about the MMTA and questions why others have been awarded licenses without developing any land accommodation, while he’s been here longer than any of them. He’s been granted an “associate membership” of the MMTA, but says he’s taken a big step back from all the Padang politics, wanting only to be left in peace to run his business.
ALOITA
I hitch a ride on one of the fast boats from the Aloita resort one afternoon with a group of guests who’ve been surfing in the Playgrounds area. Aloita is the most upscale of the new resorts, catering to divers as much as surfers, and the most central, close to the airport at Rokot and the Mentawai capital, Tuapajet. It took 120 Javanese workers six months to build its smart, white, cement bungalows, wooden walkways and plush central dining hall and bar area. There’s a fully equipped dive center, air conditioning, indoor and outdoor showers, private courtyards and day spa. Their clientele are a mixed bunch – Brazilians, Italians and several couples, including a pair of well-heeled, NorCal hippies. Dave, with his long hair, thick dreads and bushy beard, has been coming to the Mentawais for 10 years and harbors deep concerns for its future. “It’s getting harder to live like an Indian,” he tells me over dinner. Land deals are going down all over these islands, he says, including one well-intentioned but large scale scheme to build “green villages” throughout the Mentawais, with solar and wind power and eco-everything, selling villas off the plans at $100,000 a pop. “The new Maldives,” is the phrase I keep hearing, delivered sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes with alarm.
I share a room with Matt, a preacher from California, living in Estonia (in the former Soviet Union) and surfing occasionally in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. He also happens to be an investor in the Macaronis surf resort and arrived in Padang to check out his investment, only to learn it was closed for refurbishment. Owner Mark Loughran, a former chef from Tasmania, had hoped to introduce a seaplane service to transport guests out from Padang this year. When the deal fell through three weeks before the season, Mark decided to spend the year improving the resort and resolving transport issues — transferring early guests, like Matt, to other nearby resorts.
The next day, I organize a local longboat to Tuapajet, the capital of the Mentawais, to see if I can rustle up any government officials to interview, and then on to Katiet Villas, at Lance’s Rights, further south. Just as I am preparing to leave, a government entourage arrives at Aloita by speedboat, including the head of tourism, Zulkarlin, and the Bupati, or governor, Edison Saeleubaja. I introduce myself and they appear not entirely thrilled about meeting a foreign journalist. “Tell the good news about the Mentawais,” the Bupati instructs me, sternly. “Not the investors fighting each other.”
Zulkarlin agrees to grant a short interview. “The MMTA is a system the government is making for surfers to limit numbers. Surfing is not mass tourism,” he begins, reassuringly. “The association is to give assistance to the government.”
While surf-tourism will be limited to 30 boats and five license holders for the time being, he foresees 60 mainstream tourist resorts throughout the Mentawais within 10 years. He already has another 10 investors wishing to build resorts. He envisages five or six locations where exclusive wave rights for the main breaks will be given to land resorts. He hopes to see a new airport on Siberut and already has a Singapore investor surveying locations. He wants to see direct flights from Singapore, with their own customs and immigration processing in the Mentawais. He is keen to host an international surfing contest and asks if I can help organize it. He makes me promise to send him some surfing magazines.
The gentle pace of change I’d observed thus far seems like only a portent of what might be around the corner, a ripple before the tsunami.
ESCAPE FROM RESORTWORLD
The third time our outboard coughs, splutters and conks out, I start to get concerned. The boatman — furiously smoking clove ciggies right next to six drums of diesel fuel — only grins, throws me a thumbs up sign, rips the cover off the motor and goes to work. As we finally chug out of the harbor en route to Katiet, the wind in my hair, the sun shining, the resort giving way to jungle coast, I find myself feeling exceedingly good about leaving the confines of Resort World — suddenly, the freewheeling traveler stepping boldly out into the blue yonder. My good cheer is short-lived, though, as storm clouds gather, the wind whips up and we are soon grimacing through a torrential downpour that reduces visibility to 20 or 30 meters. I look to my crew for some reassurance, but they are grim-faced, huddled against the deluge, perhaps wondering what absurd lengths these strange whiteys with their odd-shaped luggage are prepared to go to in their quest for waves.
Approximately 30 minutes of this freewheeling traveler nonsense seems to have satisfied my sense of adventure. I glance about the boat – there are no lifejackets, the boatmen speak no English, I speak almost no Indonesia, and I have no idea where we are. The pitching journey through the storm takes hours. Finally, a familiar distant point of land comes into view and the driver grins through the rain, “Katiet.” I’ve never been so relieved to see six charter boats anchored off a break.
KATIET VILLAS
As our longboat slides ashore, the first person I see is Hussein, the old local who took in Lance Knight, the Aussie skipper who discovered this wave more than 15 years ago. Hussein is still renting rooms to visiting surfers, remembers me from my last visit with Lance and greets me warmly.
The resort is a large, high-walled compound with four low-set villas, private plunge pools, tidy gardens, smart outdoor furniture and a large open-air bar/restaurant. Within minutes, I’m checked into my comfortable, air-conditioned room and stroking out to fun, overhead Lance’s. There’s a small, mellow crowd that thins out as the sun sinks and the boats pull anchor to find a sheltered mooring for the night.
This is one advantage to staying on land at Katiet — you might get the first and last half hour of light to yourself as the boats make their way to and from their overnight moorings. At the bar, manager Adam Bray informs me it’s roast night. Benny, the local chef, has been given an Australian cookbook and an Indonesian/English dictionary, and painstakingly translates the recipes, then does his best to make them look exactly like the photos in the book.
Adam and his brothers Martin and Haydon, the nucleus behind Katiet Villas, hail from Sydney’s northern beaches. With their Indonesian partner, they have acquired about 30 parcels of land in the islands — what Adam terms “land banking” — as they attempt to spearhead the full-scale tourist development of the Mentawais. They have flown the Bupati and the Head of Tourism to Singapore, and ushered them into the boardrooms of large public companies promising to build massive, modern tourism infrastructure in the islands: airports, marinas, hotels. Once this infrastructure is in place, Adam predicts, the big developers from Singapore will move in and start knocking up holiday villas for the Asian market.
In contrast, a whole different type of development is taking place in the village itself. Pat Hickey is a New Zealand surfer and Surf Aid volunteer with a background in building, environmental design and permaculture. He’s building a model house for the locals to emulate, raised off the ground for better ventilation and hygiene, and to avoid flooding. It’s the latest in Surf Aid’s multi-pronged approach to improving life for the people of the Mentawais, one of their “Seven Programs for Lasting Change.” Pat’s staying with Hussein for six months, immersing himself in village life and charging the point when it turns on. He’s got no air con, no fine dining or private plunge pool. “The nights are the hardest,” he tells me, “just lying under your mosquito net sweating.”
I have to say, no one seems too concerned about the malaria risk at any of the resorts. Staff stroll about in boardshorts at night, convinced that a regime of regular fogging (spraying insecticides) and eliminating stagnant water where mosquitoes breed has effectively managed the problem. The work of Surf Aid, too, distributing thousands of mosquito nets to the locals, has greatly reduced the incidence of malaria. Still, caution is advised.
I enjoy a couple of pleasant days at Katiet, but all eyes are on the approaching red blob on the WAMs indicating major swell, as a deep low dominates the Indian Ocean. When the Point eventually comes to life — six to eight feet and funneling down the reef in gaping, drainpipe barrels — there is little competition for set waves and no crowding issues.
On land, there’s drama of a different kind unfolding. Rick Cameron, the Australian boat owner and would-be developer who tried to master plan surf tourism in the Mentawais back in the late ’90s, claims he still has land leases throughout the islands and is contesting the Bray’s claim to this site. He arrives by boat with bamboo poles and corrugated iron, planning to build a fence in front of the resort in his latest attempt to reclaim the land. He has his lawyer and police in tow and he and Adam hold a grim conference for most of the afternoon in an effort to settle their differences, while the Point is going completely bananas. The Brays hotly deny Cameron’s claims, insisting they have legal title to the site. But property rights are a new and slippery concept in these islands, where a wad of rupiah in the right hands can sway the legal process. They eventually shake hands on a verbal agreement and Cameron agrees not to erect his fence. Cameron later claims he is to be made a 50-percent partner in the business. Adam says he agreed only to further mediation to resolve the matter.
The swell roars all night and I awake in the morning to waves lapping at our door, the beach awash with a wild shorebreak, and Lance’s roaring like a Hawaiian outer reef. Adam informs us that the resort is to be shut down and guests evacuated. The timing is uncanny. Some locals believe Cameron has put a curse on the place. Hussein says he told the resort owners not to clear vegetation from the frontal dunes and they are paying the price now — the beach being torn away with each crashing wave. Phil MacDonald and a few of his mates are aboard the charter boat Barrenjoey and her skipper John McGroder is towing them into massive peaks way outside the normal break. With two more days of this swell and king tide predicted, I wonder how much will be left of the resort to fight over.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
What must these locals think, I ponder, as we make the trek out through the flooded village of Katiet? 15 years ago, most of them had never seen surfers. First, there were a few random travelers, then luxury charter boats bobbing off their islands, now resorts landing in their midst and developers fighting over their beaches. How will this cultural collision play out?
The MMTA and Mentawai government are treating 2007 as a transition year. They’ve culled the charter fleet from 44 to 30 boats, but those with existing bookings will be allowed to honour them. They are assessing crowd management options, so boat operators are working hard to all get along and avoid over-bearing regulation. In reality, the legal right for resorts to claim exclusivity of waves within 1000 metres of their resorts already exists, under the Mentawai government’s “Perda 16” tourism laws passed in 2002. But in practice no one has been game to enforce it.
And more land resorts are on the way. Aussie charter operator Darryl Robinson has one planned for Rags Rights, a local businessman named Bangun has the license for another on Pitjat Island, near Scarecrows, and Rick Cameron remains adamant he will develop a resort at E-Bay in the Playgrounds region — even while he’s busy contesting land claims at Kaitet, Pit Stops and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, conservation groups want to see the Mentawais declared a marine reserve — “the Galapagos of surfing” — where the fragile environment and culture are respected and preserved amidst a low-impact eco-tourism industry. The largest Mentawai island, Siberut, is already designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve due to its unique rainforest flora and fauna. And local activists see surf tourism as a clear ally in the fight to protect the forests from logging.
Surfing’s tough lesson here may be to accept that the Mentawai people have every right to utilize their wave resources whichever way best serves them, regardless of outside interests. Afterall, we can leave and go home. They live here.
I’ve got a plane to catch myself, as the ocean rages. I take one last look at the throbbing Lance’s lineup, and the Barrenjoey crew merrily towing into the biggest Indonesian swell in five years. The ocean’s come up with its own crowd management strategy today, and no one’s fighting over the right to ride these waves. Least of all me. We have to hike a couple of kilometers through the village to find somewhere safe to board the speedboat, for the 45 minute trip to the airstrip. As we drag our luggage through swirling tide surges, local children splash in puddles chuckling at this strange procession of whiteys. “Resort no good,” one cheeky lad teases. With rising sea levels, I wonder how long any of this place will stay above water – new Maldives indeed.
One way or another, big changes are afoot in this precious and precarious slice of the surfing world. Whether those changes are ultimately shaped by man, or forces much, much greater, remains to be seen.