were young men looking for waves, most often in relatively untouristed destinations, and they relished their cultural exchanges along the way. The discoveries were undoubtedly important to them, but “the search”—as the wetsuit and apparel maker Rip Curl later designated an influential advertising campaign—was just as significant. These were essentially backpackers with boards, seeking out those quieter parts of the planet where they might be alone—or close to it—with the locals and the ocean. And like their backpacker counterparts, wandering surfers were, as Peter Troy put it, “always trying to enter the life of [those] locals.”8
Troy’s early travels are illustrative. He began his global jaunt in 1963 by ship, making his way across the Indian Ocean and through the Mediterranean on his way to the British motherland. It might seem natural that a white Australian would begin his excursion in Europe, though Troy was there not to imbibe the art and architecture of Florence or the café culture of Paris. It is not that “culture” did not interest the Australian. It did. After passing through the Red Sea, for instance, he ventured inland to explore the antiquities of Egypt, and he wrote home about the magnificent paintings he saw in Europe an cities such as Seville.9 But Troy was traveling the world to surf, and the principal culture he sought was not the high culture of the Grand Tour but the subculture of modern surfing. He began his European adventure in the Channel Islands, finding surprisingly good waves in Jersey. While there, he saved an Italian waiter from a near drowning, which earned him notice in the English press, and he took surfboard orders from the locals and offered wave-riding lessons.10 From the United Kingdom he left for France, where he entered an international contest just hours after disembarking in Biarritz. Despite his exhaustion, he won. Troy, a recently arrived and still traveling Australian, was pronounced the Europe an surfing champion.11
The young Victorian then made his way to Spain and Portugal. He rode small waves in San Sebastián with traveling companion Rennie Ellis, a fellow Australian and an agent for Severson’s Surfer magazine, and he scored solid surf at the Portuguese beach of Guincho.12 The locals were impressed. “Amazed spectators stared at us from the beach,” Ellis reported in Australia’s Surfing World. “Afterwards a local approached us and in halting English and raptured tones he told us that until then he had thought Christ was the only person who could walk on the water.”13 The Spanish and Portuguese—both at that time living under right-wing dictatorships—struck Troy for different reasons. In Spain “the people generally were lethargic, apparently not politically minded, poor[,] and mostly unkempt in appearance.” But the Portuguese “were very anti-communist (and didn’t dare speak their own views on politics and government to a fellow countryman in fear that he may be a secret agent of a rival party—we heard of many so-called stories to back these accusations), hard working, industrious[,] and of a general western world standard.”14 There was little doubt which country he viewed more favorably. But Troy intended to see far more than the Europe an Atlantic. Together with Ellis, he volunteered aboard an Indonesian-made ketch that took the two Australians to the Americas.
Along the way the yacht would stop in Morocco, Madeira, the Canary Islands (where Troy found “the best surfing conditions outside Biarritz”), and several places in the Caribbean.15 When Troy reached Florida, he was quickly adopted by Miami’s “surfing fraternity”—a term he applied to his fellow surfers worldwide—which showed him around the city and introduced him to the Florida waves.16 Desperate to make it to California, he found work as a driver, delivering a vehicle across the United States to Los Angeles, from where he immediately boarded a flight to Hawai‘i. He did so, he wrote to his parents, “with visions in my mind of the lei clad Hawaiian girls in costume and the balmy weather of this romantic island group blessed with the best climate of any place in the world and the venue for the International and World surfing Championships at Makaha—my dream of a lifetime almost now in reality—in fact, no turning back even if I wanted to.”17
Troy was not able to compete at Makaha; the start of the contest was moved up because of favorable wave conditions, and Troy arrived too late. He did, however, get to surf the warm Hawaiian waters, though a couple of unfortunate wipeouts at Pipeline and Sunset Beach left him with a badly lacerated face and coral abrasions on the shoulder, back, right foot, and elbow.18 From Hawai‘i he would be going to Peru, but Troy first took a return detour to California—a state whose wealth and technology amazed him. The day the Australian spent viewing the ostentatious lifestyle of Los Angeles’s rich and famous was “one of the most eye[-]opening days I have yet had the fortune to live.”19 But California was intended as a mere stopover. Traveling through Mexico by automobile and train, Troy departed from Mexico City with a friend for Lima. In the Peruvian capital, he proceeded to the coastal district of Miraflores, the heart of the Peruvian surf community, which had a long history. As far back as 3000 BCE, indigenous fishermen in Peru were riding waves on bundled reeds now called caballitos (little horses). However, the country’s modern surfing history dates only to the 1920s, when a number of Peruvians took to riding homemade boards on the beaches of Barranco, a popular community along the Lima coast. Then, in 1939, Carlos Dogny, a wealthy sugarcane heir, returned from a trip to Hawai‘i, where he had learned to surf, bringing with him a board he was given by Duke Kahanamoku. At Miraflores in 1942, Dogny founded Club Waikiki.20
Club Waikiki served as the center of the Peruvian surf community. It was here that Troy discovered the contingency of surf culture: what was sometimes considered a disreputable activity in Australia or the United States could be a marker of wealth and privilege in portions of the Third World. The club was invitation only and restricted to two hundred members, each of whom paid a substantial entrance fee (approximately $1,200 in 1964) followed by monthly dues. The beachfront grounds were extravagant. They contained a squash court, two pelota courts, a shuffleboard court, workout facilities, a heated pool, dining facilities with jacket-and bow-tie-clad waiters serving four-course meals, a bar, a marble dance floor, and staff to wax and carry one’s surfboard to and from the water. Troy found this arrangement difficult to take. A “native laborer” would have to work twenty-five hours to earn the cost of his lunch, he wrote, as “per head of population” Peru had, according to Troy, “the second lowest standard of living in the civilized world.” “[T]o eat at the Club Waikiki with a hundred hungry Indians looking down on you” from the hilltop above required “some mental adjustment,” he confessed. Still, “[w]hen in Peru do as the idle, wealthy, aristocratic Peruvians do!” he wrote home.21 And he did. His existence was certainly not as ostentatious as that of one member, a thirty-two-year-old bachelor who owned three Jaguars and a helicopter, the latter of which he would use to go surfing during the lunch hour.22 But neither was it modest. In Peru, surfing was an elite sport. Troy did not bat an eye, for instance, when, with the 1965 World Surfing Championships held in Lima, the president of the country received a delegation of visiting competitors at the Government Palace.23
If Club Waikiki awoke Troy to the elitism of Peruvian surf culture, Rio de Janeiro introduced him to the frenetic surf energy of Latin America’s largest nation. He arrived in Brazil in late May 1964, just weeks after the Brazilian armed forces overthrew, with American support, the democratically elected government of João Goulart. Troy had come far from his white-collar Australian roots. “[D]ressed in jeans, tattered shirt, locally made riding boots [ . . . ], long blonde [sic] hair, unshaven, suntanned, humping a bed-roll and cloth hammock and food sack, I cut quite a figure,” he wrote his parents from the bush.24 Troy unwittingly became a minor celebrity after riding the waves of Rio’s world-famous coast. He appeared on the front page of Brazilian newspapers, was interviewed for Brazilian television, and was consulted by the Brazilian lifesaving ser vices. Troy undertook his Latin American travels at a time when military rule was becoming firmly ensconced across the continent. Just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Latin America in 1964 was deeply enmeshed in the Cold War. In Brazil, Troy expressed no interest in politics—at least he did not comment on the military regime in his letters home—but in Paraguay, where he traveled briefly after leaving São Paulo, Troy was impressed. The country was then living under the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship. Stroessner came to power in 1954 following a military coup d’état, and he ruled the corrupt
