Читать книгу Empire in Waves. A Political History of Surfing онлайн

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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