“You’re Lucky If You Get Packet Noodles Out There. Everyone Got Sick. But It Was Worth It.”

“I haven’t had a day in the past few months where I feel normal,” says Kai Hing.

Break a limb, tear a muscle, rip your sphincter in half, and the fix is usually pretty simple: realign, rest, recover. But hit your head hard enough, and the instructions change. You’ve got a strange road back to recovery, which will mess with your thoughts, your mood, your vision, your entire sense of reality. 

“I was surfing in Canggu and did an air, fell, and slapped my head on the flats,” says Kai, describing the injury that’s shadowed him most of the year. “Then the next three waves landed on me, which was probably a good thing, because the adrenaline got me swimming. When I finally made it to the beach, I was just trying to find Surfers Bar, because that’s where my stuff was, but I couldn’t work out how to get there. I ended up at the wrong end of the beach, spinning out, confused, and just started throwing up everywhere.”

When Kai returned to Australia, he was hit with days of silence, confusion about where he was, and inexplicable bouts of tears, while the weight of needing to get back to work hung over him.

“I ended up having to check myself into a hospital in Ballina,” remembers Kai. “After that, I couldn’t get out of bed for a month.” 

What eventually got him standing up, and got him to where he is now — still not fully recovered, still battling bouts of confusion and dizziness — was advice from a friend: get on the oxygen program. Daily breathing exercises, and though he chuckles with a hint of embarrassment, a commitment to Wim Hof.

Still, Kai didn’t surf for months. Aside from a few soft-top sessions on small days at home, his return to the water came filming for the project we’re here to discuss — Bakso 900 — on the right featured midway through the clip. Not exactly a delicate reintroduction, and one that, in hindsight, he now admits might not have been the smartest move.

“It definitely didn’t help, going on that fucking trip,” Kai laughs. “Leading up to it, I could barely catch a wave at home. Then I saw a swell heading for that place, and I couldn’t resist. When I was there, adrenaline took over, but a lot of those waves are closeouts, and every time I fell, I was slapping my head again.”

Kai offers no hints about the location, but makes it clear that if you’re going, you’d better be ready to rough it.

“Out there, you’re lucky if you get some packet noodles,” he says. “There’s nothing around. The whole crew got pretty sick. But it’s worth it when you put in the effort and get to surf away from everyone else.”

And that’s just one lonely outpost. Bakso 900 opens with a fast, sling-shot left wedge that Kai appears to be surfing completely alone. 

“I was on a boat trip with Craig [Anderson] and Banksy [Jim banks], and we just came across that wave,” says Kai. “We were just having lunch, and Banksy paddled out. You can’t really see the wave properly from the back, so we were just like ‘Oh, Banksy’s just solo scoring a little two foot left.’  And then he comes back in and says, ‘Boys, it’s fucking 6-foot and cooking.‘”

Kai was intrigued. He lined up the next swell and went back, and that’s the session that kicks off Bakso 900.

“It’s a real tricky wave,” he says. “Fucking powerful. You’ve gotta work pretty hard for it.” 

The final section, filmed at Desert Point, nearly didn’t happen. Their ride, a car bottoming out on the infamous road into Deserts, was useless, so Kai, Ozzie Wright, and Noah Collins had to hoof it up and over the hill, boards in hand. When they finally got there, famished and fried, they were greeted by a jarring visual dichotomy: perfect tubes in the background, and in the foreground, a blonde man yelling at a camera, vlogging. It was none other than Jacob Szekely.

“It was a full sensory overload,” says Kai. “Ozzie paddled straight out and was already getting barreled, and there I was, stuck on the sand with Zeke. But, I ended up having a nice little moment with him, and I ended up being like, ‘Dude, I fucking love you.’”

Kai’s edit, completely his own after two years of wrestling with Premiere Pro — guided by Toby Cregan and Wade Carrol — marks his first offering for Afends. With a new sticker, he seems motivated, maybe even a little hungry.

“I’m just really, really hyped to be surfing,” says Kai.

Watch Bakso 900 above.