Bali's first surfers find comfort and joy among the waves

Bali's first surfers find comfort and joy among the waves

By Alex Leonard

KUTA, Bali (JP): Bump into Gde Narmada and he's sure to be
surfing, on his way to see how the waves are or taking his young
son down to Kuta Beach to teach him a few things about surfing
and always with a look of contentment or delight on his face, his
enthusiasm obvious and infectious.

Born the son of a poor farmer in Tianyar, East Bali, Gde
Narmada moved to Kuta in the early l970s at the age of fourteen.
There he made friends with foreign surfers, who let him try to
ride their surfboards.

Surfing fascinated Narmada, and he started surfing regularly
with his Kuta friend Made Joe. "Joe used to lend me his board,"
he recalled. "The two of us would go the beach with one board and
take it in turns to surf."

He remembered surfers were all good friends back then, and it
was easy to get waves because there were so few of them.

They got so many waves we wanted to vomit! All day, from
the moment they opened their eyes until it was too dark to see
anything.

Thus, along with other young Balinese men like Wayan Budi,
Nyoman Suardana, Ketut Jadi, Wayan Sudirka, Nyoman Radiasa, Gus
Gina and Agung Adi, Narmada and Darsana became some of Bali's
first surfers.

From one point of view those young men's attraction to surfing
seems strange, since for Balinese and many other Indonesians the
sea was traditionally a dangerous, spiritually-charged and impure
place.

But from another point of view it seems natural, since Kuta is
a fishing village whose people were always close to the beach and
the sea, and local kids knew a form of surfing even before
foreigners brought surfboards to Bali in 1970.

"We called it serup (Balinese for 'slip')," recalled Made Joe,
adding that another way of saying it is nyosor umbak (ride the
edge of a wave).

"We lay on bits of wood and caught already-broken waves to
shore. We also used parts from the fishing boats that lined Kuta
Beach, then the lengths of bamboo attached to the sides of the
boats, the pangantang. So we could understand the new surfing of
foreigners."

Bali's first surfers didn't have it easy, since for a long
time the Indonesian authorities and many Indonesian people
equated foreign surfers with hippies, in their view amoral
slackers and drug-users, their presence corrupting of Bali and
its people.

As Wayan Suwenda remembered: "The hippies didn't wear shirts
and their hair was long, and our parents didn't like us to
associate with them. I often angered Bapak (father) and Ibu
(mother) by going off with my hippy friends."

In 1980, Suwenda won a surfing competition and was awarded
three nights' accommodation for him and his Australian girlfriend
at the Bali Beach Hotel in Sanur. There he was accosted by
security guards, who thought him a gigolo.

But in reality, the 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
hugely from their dealings with them (even if they never
calculated upon finding themselves in a position such as
Suwenda's: "That aspect of surfing was never important to me. I
never thought about it, because I just enjoyed the life".)

Also, through contact with surfing friends from Australia, the
USA, Japan, Brazil, France and Spain, Bali's first surfers became
more cosmopolitan than many of their peers, learning about other
ways of life in other parts of the world, being exposed to many
new ideas and gaining a command of English, Japanese and
other languages.

Now, thanks to the activities of Bali'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 enormously and surfing is now the basis of a huge
industry here.

Bali's first surfers have become respected members of the
community and successful businessmen who are able to attract
investment from all over Indonesia and the rest of the world, to
employ hundreds of people and to support promising young local
surfers.

Many too are involved in the running of the Bali Surfing
Association and the Indonesian National Surfing Association,
which together have held over 120 surfing-related events since
1979.

The depth and complexity of their relationship with surfing
does not escape these Balinese men.

As Wayan Gantiasa points out, "surfing has brought me so
much. It has taken me to Japan, Hawaii, Australia. Because of it I have
money, a house and car, a shop."

He added he can support his family. "And I am happy
surfing. I surf every day. After taking my two children to school
in the morning I surf till midday. Then I take my children home,
rest, eat and go surfing again in the evening if I feel like it.
Surfing is what I do in life."

For Wayan Suwenda, surfing bears an almost religious
significance: "As surfers we learn love of nature and get a
special sense of what it is to live."

For him, surfing is so special that he says: "I've had waves
engraved on the stones of my place of prayer in my house".

And Gde Narmada, now aged forty-five, husband and father of
three, has come to regard surfing as something like a physical
and spiritual necessity: "Surfing is one of the most important
things of all to me. The sea gives me something special. If I go
to the sea, see it, swim in it, surf in it, I receive so much! If
don't see the sea I don't have a complete day. I can get dizzy
and nervous. But if I do, then it doesn't matter what's going on
in the world. I think that as long as I'm alive I will remain
this way. I think I will always live to surf and surf to live."