Ya comenzo uno de los campeonatos de surf mas esperado del año, el Volcom Pipeline Pro 2013 que se desarrolla en Hawaii, donde están participando tres grandes surfistas peruanos Cristóbal de Col, Gabriel Villaran y Miguel Tudela
Riding the Waves of Peru North Shore
Fruit
vendors and restaurants along the Pan-American Highway in Máncora, a northern
Peru surfing destination.
The only thing
missing, it seemed, were tourists. Despite having monster swells on par with
those that hit Hawaii’s legendary northern shores, Peru isn’t known as a surfing
destination, except perhaps by a small band of jet-setting surfers for whom no
wave is beyond reach.
That is, unless you
happen to be one of the approximately 28 million inhabitants of Peru, South
America’s third-largest country in area. Then you know very well that surfing
has swept the nation recently in a pop cultural frenzy. On the wide boulevards
of Lima, billboards are covered with the fresh-faced ranks of Peruvian surfers
endorsing cellphones, beer and soft drinks. Surfing contests are all the rage.
And to the south, where the waves are even bigger, physical attributes like
pumped-up lungs, buff shoulders and sun-bleached hair seem to be bred into the
local DNA.
And now, as Peru
rides a tourism wave propelled by a strong economy and favorable exchange rates
for bargain-minded Americans, it is poised to become the new “it” spot on the
international surfing circuit. After all, Peru has 1,500 miles of rugged
coastline dotted with countless breakers, from pristine beaches tucked around
Lima to unexplored pockets up north where some waves are said to last more than
a mile. And unlike Malibu, Hawaii’s northern shores and other well-known places,
many of Peru’s best surfing spots are often nearly empty.
With so much to
explore, surfing has muscled in on soccer and the culinary arts to become an
unlikely symbol of national hope. Much of the current craze can be traced back
to 24-year-old Sofía Mulanovich, a Peruvian who won the World Surfing
Championship title in Hawaii in 2004 — a contest dominated by Australians and
Americans. And if the ranks of teenagers who frolic their spare hours away in
the swell have any say, surfing in Peru will only get bigger.
That’s true up and
down Peru’s coast, whether it’s a small town like Chicama in the country’s
north, famous for its super-long waves, or around the busy capital of Lima,
where the sometimes polluted breaks are teeming with surfers from dusk till
dawn. But the epicenter of the neo-surf scene is undoubtedly in Punta Hermosa, a
summer beach community about 30 miles south of Lima, where surfing is virtually
a religion.
The hourlong drive
to Punta Hermosa provides a sobering look at the arid and impoverished landscape
in this part of the country: brown hills devoid of vegetation and pocked with
sad clusters of wooden shanties. The town itself doesn’t look like much — dusty
concrete houses painted in bright greens, blues and reds in the hills below the
four-lane Pan-American Highway. But the fuss is clear when you finally arrive at
the beach: curling waves fan out in all directions like Neptune’s block party.
chicama-malabrigo
Each break point
presents a different challenge. There’s Kon Tiki, which offers untamed waves so
massive that it takes a strong arm even to paddle out to it; La Isla, where
homegrown pros like Ms. Mulanovich and Gabriel Villarán can often be found; and
Pico Alto, a brawny break with swells that can range up to 25 feet high.
ON a recent Saturday
afternoon, the Copa Barena Professional Circuit surf competition was taking
place in Punta Rocas, one of the most popular beaches in the area. The scene at
the amateur competition resembled a South American version of Malibu, but
wilder. Barena, a Honduran beer being introduced in Peru, had erected giant
inflatable bottles that were flapping like Michelin men in the wind. A stoner
reggae band drowned out the announcers. And waiters in baseball hats weaved
through an obstacle course of sun chairs with plates of calamari and cans of
Inca Kola, a yellow soda spiked with caffeine-laden guaraná fruit.
The surf champ Ms.
Mulanovich, who is known as “la gringa” because of her fair skin and blond
streaked hair, sat with an entourage near the judge’s perch as she watched her
younger brother, Matias, whiz over the lip and down the face of a meaty charging
barrel.
“Peru is the best
preparation for a pro surfer because there are so many different varieties of
breaks and conditions,” said Ms. Mulanovich, who grew up in Punta Hermosa and
recently bought a rock-star grade condo nearby with panoramic views of five surf
breaks. “It’s much less crowded than in Hawaii and California, and even on the
smallest day of the year it’s never flat.”
When her brother
paddled in, the group piled into a caravan of S.U.V.’s and drove five minutes
down the highway to San Bartolo for a teenage girl competition. It was sponsored
by the cellphone company Movistar. “It’s like this all summer,” Ms. Mulanovich
said. “Everybody wants to be a surf star now.”
