Bali Echo Magazine Edition 52

often angered Bapak and lbu by going off with my hippy friends." In 1980 Suwenda won a surfing competition and was awarded three nights' accommodation for himself and his Australian girlfriend at the Bali Beach Hotel. in Sanur. There he was accosted by security guards who thought he was a "gigolo". But as we know now, in reality foreign surfers' presence in Bali boosted the island's accommodation, food, transport and other industries, and many of them were very fit sportspeople, dedicated to the pursuit of good, big waves. Bali's first surfers shared their foreign friends' condition and dedication to surfing, and were in a position to benefit hugelyfrom dealings with them (even if they never calculated upon finding them selves in such a aposition, as with Suwenda: "That aspect of surfing was never important to me. I never thought bout it, because l just enjoyed the life").

Darsana acquired boards in trade with Australian surfers and opened a little surfboard-hire shop in 1974. He now owns the successful "Joe's Surf Shop" on Jalan Pantai Kuta. In the midle 80s Narmada opened a surf shop too. "A little "Shop,"he recalls, "maybe two and a half by three metres. l had two or three second-hand boards, ten locks of wax, five singlets, ten shorts, a few gropes. Surfers from overseas often helped me." Now Narmada owns three "Ulu's" surf shops, while several of his Kuta contemporaries run or are the main shareholders of big foreign surfwear companies such as Quiksilver, Billabong, Da Hui, Volcom, Aloha, MCD and others. Apart from the opportunity to

advance them selves materially,contact with foreign surfers also offered Bali's first surfers exposure to many new ideas/ knowledge about ways of life in other parts of the world such as Australia, USA, Japan, Brazil, France and Spain, and practice of English, Japanese and other languages. As a result, Bali's first surfers became more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than many of their peers. These days the surfers Wayan Sudirka and Ketut Denda live in Japan, Gung

Adi is in Australia and others like Narmada, .Radiasa, Suwenda, Made Kasim, ketut Menda, 'Wayan Gantiyasa and Wayan Pica often travel to Australia and Japan or are married to Australian and Japanese women. Furthermore, foreign surfers were usually very encouraging of the development of a Balinese surfing community.

The late Mike Boyum, who lived in Bali throughout the nineteen-seventies, for instance, often brought surfboards to Bali from the United States and Hawaii, and also ponsored and offered local surfers valuable advice. Another foreign surfer, the Australian Kim Bradley, impressed by the flexible and flowing surfing style that came easily to many Balinese surfers, decided that competition among them would bring about the rapid development of their skills, and so he organised a surfing contest for them in 1979. Bradley, like many surfing visitors to Bali at the time, had been hanging out and eating at Lasi Erawati's Pension on Poppies Lane One. Kempu's husband Rizani Idsa Karnanda was not a surfer himself but had become a good friend of many of them in the cafe. Bradley recalls: "l thought well, if I'm going to do it here, l want to do it with the right infrastructure for Indonesia. Rizani being a university graduate involved in tourism, l thought he'd be a good man to go to for advice on how to make it not just a one-off but a continuous thing. So after me pestering him for months and months What do we do about this, Riz? What do we do about that?' - he's gone Took, okay. You handle the day-to-day running of the thing and I'll take care of the Department of Sport and everything, and we'll set this thing up properly for Indonesia'." On 8 April 1979 the club was officially formed with Rizani as Coordinator and over 60 Balinese surfers - from Kuta (30 surfers), Legian (21), Sanur (10), Uluwatu (5) and Canggu (5) - as members. Its committee included Ketut Nugra, Nyoman

Radiasa,Wayan Sudirka, Wayan Wijana, Nyoman Sadia, Nyoman Jalad, Gde Narmada and Ketut Jadi.

The club held its first contest at Legian Beach, and the presentation ceremony at Banjar Pande Mas (on what is now Jalan Pantai Kuta, by Made's Warung) attracted an enormous crowd of people, among them the Governor of Bali and the national Minister of Sport. "To see the sport

get that recognition by the government was great for us, because it made us proud and it gave our sport and our lifestyle credibility in the eyes of the Indonesian people," Bradley remarks. Since then the club has organized over 120 such events and sent many of its members overseas to compete in and judge surfing contests and participate in surfing and cultural exchanges. In 1985 the club gained its first non-Balinese members, and now it has many, from Sumbawa, Lombok, Java and Sumatra, where related clubs have been set up and contests held as well. Thus, thanks to the activities of Bah's first surfers and some of their foreign friends over the last twenty or so years, surfing's standing in the view of the Indonesian community has advanced drastically and surfing is now the basis of an enormous industry here. Bali's first surfers have become respected members of the community and successful business