A Balinese Surf Safari : Southern Californians Travel to Bali to Experience the Roaring Majesty of Ulu Watu’s Towering Waves

They had read everything they could about Bali. But nothing prepared the young surfers for 90% humidity, 90-degree temperatures and surfing waves the size of two-story buildings.

And nobody warned them about the cave at Ulu Watu.

Twenty members of a U.S. surfing team from Southern California, including top athletes from Orange County, recently spent two weeks in Bali, Indonesia, as part of an international Friendship Contest with teams from Australia, Bali and New Zealand. They were the first U.S. surfing team to compete in Bali.

The surfers had heard about out-of-the-way surfing spots in Indonesia, but after walking three kilometers through lumpy cow pastures in the tropical sun, they were surprised at Ulu Watu: It had no beach. It had, instead, a rock-infested cave with razor-sharp coral. They would paddle from there into the heaviest rip current they had ever seen.

Despite having some of the world’s finest surfing waves, the Balinese had never organized an international surf contest. Bruce S. Hopping, 73, a well-known patron of the International Surfing Assn. from Laguna Beach, whose Kalos Kagathos Foundation has financially supported trips abroad since 1979, said part of the reason for the three-day competition was to have the Americans and Australians, the two powers in surfing, share their expertise with Balinese officials.

“We’ve taken surfers to Peru, Puerto Rico and Brazil, just to name a few countries,” Hopping said, “but I’ve been trying to arrange a Bali trip since 1982. These trips offer our U.S. surfers a chance to visit non-English speaking countries and learn about someone else’s culture.”

The majority of the surfers, ages 13 to 20, financed their own trips and were selected because of their “surfing talent and intelligence,” said coach Ted Rhumann Jr., an Oceanside aquatics director who coordinated the trip. For example, Bret Leece, 15, of Costa Mesa, is a home-school student with a 4.0-grade point average.

Although the U.S. team placed a disappointing third behind Bali and the Australian team, which came in first, the members’ agenda out of the water made the trip significant. And fun.

During the day, they bartered with Bali’s aggressive vendors and taxi drivers, whose vans are referred to as “beamos.” A beamo driver’s greatest thrill, the surfers learned, is to travel 60 m.p.h. and play chicken with a gravel truck coming in the opposite direction.

They savored spicy curry dishes at local cafes and sampled arak, a pungent, high-octane drink made from fermented rice, which straightens tongues and can power the Queen Mary. At sunset, they explored Bali’s night life, a social potpourri of friendly Balinese and vacationing Australians, Japanese, Norwegians and French.

They also ran into “Willy,” a toothy Balinese with flashy clothes who boasted that he was the country’s best guide and offered adventurers “everything, anything,” for a price.

“What you need, boss man? Huh?” Willy would say. “You tell me, I get. You tell me, it’s yours. We talk. We talk.”

The surfers went native and put bright flowers in their hair, donned colorful sarongs (the principal garment for men and women in Indonesia consisting of a long strip of cloth worn like a skirt) and joined Wayan Mudi, a Hindu priest, who presided during the official “cleansing” of evil spirits from the beach area before the surf contest.

On another occasion, they met Bali’s top hotel industry and government tourism officials and, in a rare meeting, its governor, Ida Bagus Oka.

At the governor’s office, surfers Erik Krammer, 17, of Oceanside, Paul Spencer, 18, of Long Beach and Shay Sanders, 14, of Vista, who represented the team, joined with Hopping and other U.S. team officials, as they sat and answered Oka’s questions about surfing.

As a result, officials from the Bali Surfing Club won vital guarantees from the governor. They included increased government support of surfing, official support to send the first Balinese team ever to next May’s world amateur championships in Japan and, to the delight of tourist officials who attended the meeting, a promise to back Bali’s application to play host for the next world titles in 1994.

M. Rizani Ida Karnanda, a cultural history instructor at nearby Udayana University, who helped organize the surf exchange, was ecstatic.

“Bali owes you a lot. Thank you,” he told the young surfers.

After meeting the governor, Krammer and Spencer agreed that they now had something to tell their grandchildren: “We can tell others we were here, that we had something to do with making Bali an international surfing center. We helped them. We succeeded,” Spencer said.

To cap off the meeting, the governor told the surfers that “when you ever want to come back to Bali, you let me know. Call me. You’ll always have a place to stay.”

His offer: the governor’s mansion.

Bali, the emerald among Indonesia’s archipelago of 13,000 islands, has been a secret among surfing’s international fraternity. Waves spawned in the Indian Ocean are among the world’s finest. Hawaii’s waves are heavily populated, and its surfing areas break best in the winter. Surfing spots along mainland Mexico don’t fire until late August when the big chubascos-- hurricane-like storms--arrive.

Commitment was the key to the Bali trip. Stamina was required simply for the 20-hour flight aboard a Garuda Indonesian Airways commercial jet. The airline is regarded as Indonesia’s finest; the surfers summed up the 10,500-mile trip in one word: “killer.”

The consensus aboard the flight was that if the cramped seating didn’t kill you, the food would.

“I’m never, never going to travel this way again,” said coach Rhumann, who was forced to scrunch his 6-foot-4, 250-pound frame into a chair made for a 5-foot-5 body. Rhumann literally yelped after a stewardess woke him at 4 a.m. and pushed a greenish-looking omelet in front of him.

Bali has at least 24 known surfing areas, ranging from easy, 2- to 4-foot beach breaks at Kuta Beach, to awesome, towering green monsters at Ulu Watu that chew up surfboards and people.

Oceanside surfer Eric Klier got a taste of Ulu’s might when he dropped in on an 8-foot-plus wave and got drilled. Eric came up. His board didn’t.

“I picked up the two biggest pieces of my board afterwards,” Klier said. “But that wave, the power!”

Leece met his match on a Mt. Everest-sized wave at a break known as Airport Lefts, which breaks over a reef near Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport and is reachable only by outrigger. “It was some of the biggest surf I’ve ever been in,” he said.

A teammate, David Buckles, 16, of Laguna Beach High School, saw Leece go down with his board.

“It was barreling all over the place but it was near low tide. I saw the bottom suck out and he just went over,” Buckles said.

Chalk up another surfboard. Score: Bali 2, California surfers 0.

What’s it like to ride down a mountain of water?

Remember that in Bali, like Hawaii, waves are measured from the back. Orange County lifeguards often measure them from the front, or the face of the wave, which is obviously larger. A “small” day of 5- to 6-foot surf at a Bali surf spot such as Ulu Watu, can produce a wave face of 10 to 12 feet.

Another reminder: The coral at Ulu and other Bali spots are stalks; they grow up. Think of deer antlers and you get the picture. One bad wipeout can be as nightmarish as a swipe from Freddy Krueger’s gloved hand.

On July 1, the biggest day there, boat drivers cautioned that waves at Ulu and several reef breaks were 15 to 18 feet. Definitely out of control.

Buckles recalled a bad wipeout on a Bali 7-footer: “I took a late takeoff and the offshore breeze held me up too long. When the wave crashed, so did I. It felt like landing on concrete. It knocked the wind out of me.”

In big surf, the ocean boils. The roar deafens. Offshore winds slap at your back when facing seaward, then slap at your face when you turn around and paddle into a wave.

It’s been said that waves above 10 feet are no longer measured by height but increments of fear. A surfer’s greatest challenge is to overcome the fear and surf relaxed.

Donovan Frankenreiter, a 16-year-old junior at Mission Viejo High School and one of the team’s top surfers, rode one unforgettable wave high up the Fear Scale. The 50-yard ride included a series of spectacular “lip bashes,” a maneuver where the surfer hurtles down the face of a wave and then turns back into it, crashing his surfboard off the breaking wave face or lip.

“It was the third wave of the set,” Frankenreiter said. “I took off and it must have been a 10- to 15-foot face. I came in for the (wave) lip and pulled in the barrel for four seconds and came around the section two times. I faded out, did a bottom turn and came in under the lip. I blasted a few lippers and then it (broke in front of him). There was wave roar, lots of noise. Offshore winds slapping me in the face and it was sucking off the reef. The water was so clear I could see the coral flying past on the bottom of the ocean. It was perfect. I’ll never forget it.”

The U.S. team also included Jenny Gould, Josefina (Hoey) Capps and her brother, Banning Capps, all of Carlsbad; Travis Prentice, San Diego; Jon Cornell, Poway; John Swift, Cardiff; Ailbe McGarry, Cardiff; and Jason Oyler, Malibu.

In addition to Ruhmann, other adults who volunteered their vacation time included Vista High School surfing coach Carolyn Krammer of Oceanside; Ed Rhead of Oceanside, assistant team manager, and Glenn Prentice of San Diego, Oceanside public works director and team judge.

Despite the island’s charm and beauty, Bali is relatively expensive. Its 2.5 million people earn a per-capita income of only $566. Gasoline is about 84 cents a gallon, and within a two-week period, pumps ran dry twice. Salaries for hotel workers average only $50,000 Rupiahs a month, about $28.30.

“Bali is unlike anything I expected,” Leece said. “I thought it was going to be uncivilized, like with thatched roofs. But Kuta Beach hotels were nice. I liked the Bali people.”

Leece and his teammates also enjoyed Balinese jaffles, little grilled sandwiches filled with your choice of meat, cheese or fruit, which are a Bali staple.

Economically, the island needs help, which was part of the reason for bringing a U.S. team, Hopping said. During the trip, the U.S. and New Zealand sponsored a dinner at a local restaurant for members of the Bali Surfing Club. Arrangements were ironed out to send second-hand competition surfboards from Southern California to Bali via Garuda airlines.

Up to now, only a few hundred Balinese have tried surfing, despite the island’s abundance of surfing waves and water sports, said Ketut Menda, 26, president of the 150-member Bali Surfing Club in Kuta Beach.

“In Bali, we only use second-hand boards. We get most of our boards from Australian visitors who surf here, damage their boards and leave them or become friends with us and leave them as gifts,” Menda said.

By U.S. economic standards, Bali surfers are very poor. Most are members of Bali’s middle-class, whose parents own the small retail gift and clothing shops that dot Kuta’s commercial district. To earn lunch money, some Bali surf club members peddle Bali’s postcards. “It’s not like your country where a rich father often buys his son a new surfboard,” Menda said. “Here we can’t get new shoes.”

At 26, Menda is part of Bali’s second generation of surfers. The first generation are those in their 30s and 40s who learned to surf by watching visiting Australians. The goal is to encourage the next generation, those 12 and 13, into competitive surfing with the hope they can become world champions.

Hopping, the U.S. team’s adviser, gave members daily incentive speeches. “I don’t want you to think this whole trip is just to allow you to surf here. You are here to distinguish yourselves and to help the Balinese surfing team and to try and make Bali an international surfing center.”

Those words, perhaps difficult to understand during the trip’s initial stages, sunk in toward the end of the two-week stay.

“I think Bruce has done a heck of a job,” Leece said. “We did help the Balinese and I got to surf some of the best waves of my life. I’ll never forget this trip.”