Road to Santosha

The Kevin and Craig Show

Hippie Trail Gold

At Play in the Fields of Allah

Career Move

Grand Prix Dream

Follow the Money

Big in Japan

Rabbit's Big Adventure

Shaun Tomson's Tunnel Vision

South Africa in Black and White

Mark Richards, Gentleman Killer

Two Fins, More Wins

The Divine Miss M

The Fortune Seekers

Details of the Kevin Naughton-Craig Peterson adventures—the single-fin boards, the mustaches, the endless procession of surf-rack-equipped Volkswagens—would all soon be pinned like butterflies in the display case of 1970s surfing. Naughton and Peterson continued to travel in years to come, but they seemed to accept their assigned place in the cultural timeline. Their first retrospective article, as if on cue, was published in 1980. The spirit of surf exploration, meanwhile, just grew stronger.

In the mid-'70s, just as the Naughton-Peterson stories were becoming popular, surfers everywhere were becoming familiar with Uluwatu, a glistening temple-fronted break located on the southwest corner of Bali. Uluwatu was a great find, but it turned out to be just the first link in a 2,500-mile-long chain of discoveries that would be forged for decades to come. Indonesia would in fact reveal itself to be the world’s longest and richest wave zone.

Australian surfers did most of the exploratory work up and down the Indonesian coast. Denpasar, Bali’s capital city, was a relatively easy five-hour flight from Sydney—closer than Hawaii was to California. Bali had been the default starting point for anyone visiting Indonesia since the 1930s, when wealthy Europeans, along with a few Americans—the same linen-wearing society crowd found at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore—began to gather on the hillside artist colony of Ubud to sip 

, watch the silk-wrapped native dancers, and listen to chiming, trance-inducing gamelan music. There was some interest in the coast, too, and a Los Angeles expat named Robert Koke opened the Kuta Beach Hotel in 1936; Koke soon imported two plank-style boards from Waikiki and encouraged his guests to try “surf shooting” in front of the hotel.

By the end of the 1960s, Kuta was the southeast terminus for the Euro-Asian “hippie trail” (one of the “three K” destinations, along with Kabul and Katmandu), and the first surfers were already trickling in from Australia. Even for the experienced traveler, Bali was overwhelmingly exotic. Palm-sized baskets of flowers and incense were laid out daily, everywhere, by the thousands, on front steps, sidewalks, street corners, and countertops. Terraced rice fields covered the hills like multi-acre pieces of Art Deco emerald jewelry. The light, even at midday, had a filtered softness, and the air was perfumed with frangipani and tuberose, wood smoke, incense, and clove cigarettes. Ten thousand stonework temples covered the island, many of them huge and ornate and covered in fanged, grinning, pop-eyed demons.

Kuta Beach was fronted by some nice sandbar waves, along with a left-breaking reef, and early visiting hippie-surfers—most of them heading to Peshawar, Goa, or Istanbul—were content to rent thatched-roof beachfront 

, spend a few rupiah on imported Thai Stick, and wander into the Kuta shorebreak once or twice a day to catch a few waves and cool off. The first hardcore surfer to arrive was likely Russell Hughes of Queensland. Traveling through Europe in 1969, one year after placing third in the World Championships, Hughes decided on a whim to fly from London to Bali. He stayed at Kuta, and traveled a few miles across the isthmus to Sanur, another blossoming tourist village. Hughes would have certainly taken notice of the cliff-fronted Bukit Peninsula, immediately south of Kuta and Sanur, dangling off the end of the island like a pendant and ripe with surfing possibilities. Metaphysically, however, the Bukit was on the wrong side of the tracks. As every Balinese knew, the friendly gods lived in the mountains, while demons and monsters lived in the sea—especially around the Bukit, which was nearly surrounded by water.

Hughes rode some fine waves at Kuta and Sanur during his month-long visit. He also spied enough fringing whitewater off in the distance to convince him that the A-grade breaks were yet to be found. After returning to Australia, he quietly told a few others, including filmmaker and publisher Bob Evans, who flew in with a small crew of surfers for a two-week visit in August 1971 but didn’t explore much beyond Kuta.

 shoot, arrived in Bali with his own group of surfers. A New Age early adopter, Falzon wanted to round out his movie with some as-yet-unseen breaks and maybe add a dash of Eastern mysticism. His travel companions included Rusty Miller, a former top-ranked surfer from California, and 14-year-old New South Wales juniors division champion Steve Cooney. Flying over the Bukit, headed for Denpasar, all three surfers went goggle-eyed as they pressed against the windows and watched a cascading series of left-breaking reef waves funnel along the northwestern edge of the peninsula.

The Kuta surf was enough to keep everyone happy for the first week or so. Then Falzon hired a bemo and ventured by himself out to the peninsula, aiming for a cliff-top temple called Uluwatu. Leaving the temple grounds and walking a short distance to the west, he tracked a small but gorgeous little wave as it wound off toward Kuta. This was the spot. Two days later, early in the afternoon, Falzon and Cooney and a few others loaded boards and camera equipment into a bemo (it's unclear today if Miller was or was not present among those present that first day), and with the help of some puzzled but agreeable local villagers made their way down a winding mile-long dirt trail that connected the Uluwatu temple road to the coast.

Arriving at the cliff top, their first view of the surf was heart-stopping: a blue panorama of six-to-ten-foot lefts, spread across a wave field so big that you had to swivel your head to take it all in. The surf here didn’t peel off uniformly from start to finish. After watching for a few minutes, it became obvious that there were at least three breaks shingled together: the uppermost peeled off nicely before shutting down into a middle section, which in turn eventually spilled into the longest, fastest, hollowest part of the break, conveniently located just below where everyone was standing.

Everybody stood and watched, wonderstruck—and slightly freaked out. The nearshore reef spread out in dark patterns just below the water surface with no clear channel to the lineup, and the whitewater noise ricocheted off the cliffs and seemed to vector in from every direction at once. The only way to the beach was down a small cliff and through a cave. In a sequence that in large part would come to define 

, Cooney and Miller are seen picking their way carefully across the nearshore reef, waiting to paddle out, as powerful sun-kissed waves explode in the distance. Cooney then takes off on a double-overhead wave and glides down the line for a hundred yards. Miller follows on a bigger one and goes even further. “That day was absolutely magic,” Miller later said. “We went up there and found this wave, surfed it, didn’t get hurt, didn’t smash up our boards—this was before leashes—and later on we all just felt that the gods really were with us.”

Falzon and his crew spent the better part of a month camped at Uluwatu, in the upper reaches of the cave, returning to Kuta occasionally to shower off and resupply. The surf never dropped below four feet, and got as big as twelve feet. Variations in tide and swell would alter the wave’s character, but the overall quality varied only slightly. Because Miller had spent several winters on the North Shore, he was the first person to sense the magnitude of what they’d discovered. Not in terms of just this one new break, but all of Indonesia.

True, Hawaii had more size and power, but the North Pacific surf was often rough. A winter swell on its way to the North Shore is often crossed by one or more additional swells, making the waves uneven, and Pacific tradewinds along the Tropic of Cancer can blow hard enough to fray the water surface. Even with the wind and crossed-up swells, there’s nearly always something exciting to ride on the North Shore. But days can pass by during the winter season—weeks, even—before conditions get smooth and clean.

The Indonesian surf is different. Waves here mostly originate from weather systems born in what mariners have long referred to as the Roaring Forties—a storm-friendly corridor of the Indian Ocean located between latitudes 40˚S and 50˚S. Because the Indian Ocean is less than half the size of the Pacific, a swell rolling toward the equator is less likely to be crossed by other swells. And because Indonesia is closer to the equator than Hawaii, the wind is generally much calmer. Finally, for reasons having to do in part with Indonesia being geologically older than Hawaii, the reefs are longer and better foiled than Hawaii’s reefs.

What did this mean to surfers? To a degree not seen anywhere else in the world, Indonesian waves are smooth, finished, and well-ordered, in addition to being big and powerful. It was just a matter of time before Indonesia replaced Hawaii as the world’s ultimate surfing destination.

The Bukit Peninsula dangled like a pendant, glittering, off the end of Bali. But metaphysically it was on the wrong side of the tracks. Every Balinese knew the friendly gods lived in the mountains, while demons lived in the sea. In their view, surfing, as one writer put it, “was a bit like playing soccer in a cemetery."

Chapter: 6

The Fortune Seekers

Hippie Trail Gold

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