Sick waves and sick head

From golden sunsets silhouetted by scrambling monkeys on temples, to bat ridden caves at the mouth of classic surf, Bali has it all. I must say that I feel like I've been a little unfortunate in my first week here in this paradisaical place, coming down with a pretty vicious cold. Sleeping has been a nightmare and I've been pretty bed-bound since it hit me just two days after my arrival here. If that wasn't enough, on the first day that I went out into the water, I managed to scrape a couple of big holes into my toes and trying to heal them up has been a real nightmare. I had this problem when I was up in Lennox Head back in Australia too and it pretty much stopped me from going in. Luckily the surf hit on the first few days and then it was game over for a fortnight. Just about enough time to fix 'em up! Here, however, it's been my cold that has stopped me from going in but now that its just a little on the mend, I went back in this morning for an early paddle and the wounds opened up again. Not nice. I got to be in there for about 2 hours and then the pain was just too much. The surf was pretty good though. This mornings venture was out to a break called Green Bowl on the southern most tip of the island in a place called Bali Cliff. I met a cool Brazilian guy from the hostel and we decided that the swell might be good today, so we got up at 5.30 a.m. The drive was about 20 to 30 minutes. When we parked our bikes, a man called Nyuman said he'd watch them for us, so we gave him our bags with everything in it pretty much. There was also one car there with four surfers round it getting ready to rumble. Two Africans, a Brazillian and an Indonesian local. We went to the top of the cliff but couldn't see much surf. By the time we'd got back, the four guys had pretty much geared up and started their way down to the break. We'd decided to go anyway so when the Indonesian chap came up and asked us what it was like, we just shrugged a little. At this he smiled and said "maybe you should go to Sarangan then! I saw it this morning and it was rocking!" Kind of realizing that he didn't want us to go into the water, we all laughed it off. They headed off and we got into our gear. It was good to have a couple of people go in before us as we didn't really know the break. We got to the top of the cliff and the trek down was a very long one. Half way down, we saw them going in through a rip and decided we'd follow them in and then when the we glanced through a break in the trees we could see what initially we hadn't spotted. At the end of the end of the rip, on either side, were gorgeous lefts and rights, glistening from the newly born sun. It took a little while to get out as we had to tread over quite a bit of reef but once we were out, it was pretty plain sailing. We were there not five minutes and somewhat mysteriously, there were only two of the four guys out there. When we finally got to the peak, the Indonesian gestured over to the remaining guy, saying that he was going back in for a quick bit. It seemed like the Indonesian was probably a guide for the others and when two of them bailed, he went back for them. Eventually the last one followed. Confronted with hollow, powerful and slightly messy 7 foot waves, they might not have been too keen on getting splattered and we saw them all heading back up the cliff. It was a shame for the one guy remaining and the guide but I guess the other two just weren't experienced enough. This basically just left myself and Gil out there. He's a pretty competent surfer and really pumped in on a few of them. I myself managed to picked up a couple of reasonable ones but got pounded pretty bad by a few of the following sets! The good thing was I could just paddle about 20 metres to the left and get back into the rip and out again. Unfortunately, my toes really started to hurt after a couple of hours and that was gonna have to be it. My last wave was a rare left though. The break is predominantly a right but this left was sick. It picked me up and I glided right into the pit, managed a quick cut at the bottom and then half way up the face on the other side before I had to bail with the whole thing collapsing behind me. Definitely my highlighting rush of Bali waves so far. After that, we picked up our gear and even tho we had to endure a little bit of hassling from some old Balinese women trying to sell us necklaces, we left happy and headed back home for some well earned brekky!