Surf report – vol. 1
Since this is a surfing trip around the world and not an insect eating trip, we have finally forced ourselves to actually take some photos in the water. One of the worst things about surf trips is that you want to surf all the time, not take photos of surfing. So I strapped the GoPro on my wrist and took a few lips on the head to get this inaugural shot of our surf life here in Puerto Escondido. The waves have been small the last few days – around chest high on the sets. There’s more swell in the forecast and we’ll take the camera out with us more regularly. For our first installment, here is Delphine speeding down the line:
A few Mexican videos
Finally figured out how to compress video files so we could upload them quickly.
Here’s Michael’s reaction to eating his first grasshopper:
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| From oaxaca city |
Xylophone musicians at the Mercado 20 noviembre in Oaxaca:
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| From oaxaca city |
The wedding in the street that we happened upon:
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| From oaxaca city |
A motion-picture crosswalk signal (!) in Oaxaca:
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| From oaxaca city |
A couple of ants scurrying around with flowers on top of them, in Puerto Escondido:
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| From puerto escondido |
First days in Puerto Escondido
After two days in Oaxaca, and a 7-hour winding bus ride through the mountains, we arrived in the surf town of Puerto Escondido.
Puerto’s city center is crowded with small stores and paved roads, but the area where we’re staying is a few kilometers from the center, close to the main surfing point break called La Punta (“The Point”). There are several hostels and restaurants in our area, but it’s not as developed as either the town center, or the main surfing area at Playa Zicatela, where the world-famous shallow, hollow beachbreak is located. The La Punta area is like a small Wild West town, with dusty dirt roads, chickens in the street and dogs lazing in the shade.
The first few days after arriving in Puerto, we stayed in a nice little place called Osa Mariposa.
It’s a hostel (“hostal” in espanol) with individual wooden bungalows, and shared bathrooms and showers. The food was tasty: vegetarian and super fresh. It’s difficult to get anything vegetarian here, apart from just ordering a side of rice and beans (often when you ask for something without meat, the locals will suggest something with fish or chicken).
We take a little communal taxi truck. called a colectivo, into the town center when we need to grocery shop, buy supplies, or use the ATM. It costs 5 pesos per person, and is always a fun adventure to watch the buildings go by and see who else is aboard the colectivo.
We’ve been shopping at the market in town, buying fresh fruit, granola, cheese and grains there. Right beside the market is one of our favorite restaurants, called Las Margaritas, which came as a recommendation from the owner of Osa Mariposa. Las Margaritas has a delicious three-course set lunch for 40 pesos (a little less than $3 US!), with choices that change every day.
We found an awesome apartment with its own kitchen and a lot of space, for the next month. We are set! And very happy…
Oaxaca City
Arriving in Oaxaca, the familiar developing-world smells of car fumes and wood smoke permeated the air. It’s a small city in a valley, surrounded by mountains.
Our taxi from the airport drove through streets full of handpainted signs on colorful concrete walls: blue, orange, yellow, pink:
The streets are full of old-fashioned VW bugs in excellent condition.
I’ve been revelling in the Mexican food — I’m a huge fan. We ate at a market with a bunch of comedores (food stalls). I had a cafe con leche with my chiles rellenos.
We stumbled into the middle of a Mexican wedding (one of several that we happened upon during the same day!).
Michael worked up the courage to eat some chapulines (fried grasshoppers seasoned with chili and lime). Video to come later.
Click the image below for a link to some more photos from Oaxaca; even more to be uploaded when we can get ahold of wifi again!
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| oaxaca city |
Surfing vagabonds
One of the reasons we started this blog is to potentially help other surfers who want to plan a long-term world surf trip. While we were dreaming and researching our options over the last few years, we found a lot of great resources on long-term travel, lifestyle design, sabbaticals and vagabonding, but not much specific to surfing. We had (and still have!) a lot of surfing-related logistical questions on our minds, and couldn’t find much anywhere.
Over time, we hope to post enough information through blog posts and perhaps a separate “resources” page, to help smooth the path for other surfers.
Here are a few links to exploring the stories of several other surfing vagabonds. If these stories don’t get you counting the change under your couch cushions to see how much you can start off with for a long-term surf trip, I don’t know what would.
Peter Troy
Peter Troy was the original surf explorer, setting off in 1963 at the tender age of 25 to travel for three years on his own and scour coasts around the world for undiscovered surf spots. He pioneered (and kept secret) Tamarin Bay, Mauritius and Lagundri, Nias (Indonesia), among other places. He was good at keeping spots hush-hush as well. Peter continued to fit long travel stints in over the following decades. In all, he supposedly visited 150 countries! (Not all of his travels were surf-related.)
The Surfer’s Journal recently published an article in Vol. 20 No. 4, including excerpts on some of Peter’s letters, which have recently been compiled into a book called To the Four Corners of the World. I would love to get my hands on a copy of the book once we’re back from our trip; it definitely looks like something I’d want on my bookshelves.
Daize Shayne Goodwin and Aamion Goodwin
The Goodwins are a pro surfer couple from Hawaii with two kids. They set off this past July (our originally planned departure month as well!) for an 18-month round-the-world trip based mostly on surfing. They have a gorgeous website, a nice photo-filled blog, and beautiful trailer for the film that will eventually result from their trip. They’ll be hitting a few countries we won’t, and vice versa. The Goodwins are traveling with a film production crew, a baby, a toddler, and longboards. I feel tired just thinking about it!
Liz Clark
Liz Clark has been sailing solo for the past six years, living on her boat, fishing, surfing and exploring. She continues to blog from her sailboat. Her story is just incredible and totally inspiring. There’s a great segment about Liz in the surf film Dear and Yonder, and The Surfer’s Journal did a nice feature on her in Vol. 18 No. 5. Here’s a link to an interview with Liz on Korduroy.
We’ll be posting more surf vagabond stories, and hopefully interviews with surfing vagabonds and other inspiring people, in the future.
Do you know of any inspiring surfer vagabonds? Please let us know about them!
Kindle library loans
Kindle just released their ebooks for loan at 11,000 libraries in the U.S.! This is great news for us. We’ve been waiting for this since Amazon announced their intentions last April.
Up to now, library loans had been available in formats compatible with other digital readers (eg. nook, Overdrive), but Kindle was the last holdout. We had received a Kindle from a generous friend who didn’t like the ebook format, and it will be our main source of reading material along our travels. We can get Lonely Planet guidebooks on the Kindle, and we have a New Yorker subscription on the Kindle for when we miss our old home, but we’re both voracious readers and had been wondering what to do about having so much free time during our trip and no access to choice reading materials. We could make do with whatever we find at second-hand bookstores and book swaps on the road, and we also have been downloading a lot of the free, public domain Kindle books, but with so much time to read, it would be a shame not to tackle our to-read lists.
One of our tactics for saving money for this trip was to quit buying books and start using the library for all of our reading. I would estimate this saved us at least $1,200 (not to mention a place to put them in our over-full bookshelves) over the last two years. We are now huge fans of libraries and are even using them in Montreal while we’re here with my dad. With Kindle library loans, we can continue reading as much as we want on the road without spending a cent!
With a Kindle, we are saving space in backpacks as well as money. We’ll be doing a post in the near future about what other stuff is going in our packs (clothes, tech gear, etc.).
Adjusting our sails
I’m not at all religious, but lately the saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” has been coming to mind a lot.
During the planning of this trip, Michael and I had put some thought into what would happen if something went wrong and waylaid our plans. Michael is incredibly optimistic and problem-solving, with a reassuring can-do attitude. Our conclusion was: whatever came up, we would deal with it and get on with our trip as soon as possible.
There are so many things that can affect big plans, and one of them is the serious illness of a family member. Towards the end of May, one month after I posted this quote about adjusting to life’s direction, my dad was diagnosed with a malignant tumor behind his upper jaw.
I was initially devastated. My dad is 74 but physically active and quite healthy. My first reaction was to research and read up on it, so I spent many hours following the initial diagnosis at my dad’s local library. Learning about my dad’s disease helped me feel a little better, if not more in control. I’ve always been afraid of the big C. From what I’ve read, 1/3 of all women and 1/2 of all men will have it at one point in their lives. However, cancer research has come a long way, and survival rates for many cancers are high. The kind of cancer my dad’s got thankfully seems to be slow-growing.The doctors haven’t yet confirmed what the next steps will be, but it’s looking likely that there will be a major surgery to remove the tumor and reconstruct his jaw sometime in August, with a 4- to 6- week recovery period. Examination of the tumor after removal should let us know if my dad needs further treatment.
In a way, it couldn’t have been a better time for my dad to receive this diagnosis. Michael and I had just ended our jobs and were preparing to leave New York. We’ve had the time to come back and forth to Montreal to visit my dad and help him through this stressful period, while prepping to move out of our apartment and New York City. If we were still working right now, we would have the added stress of trying to negotiate time off and cover our rent while we go back and forth for the numerous hospital visits.
We hadn’t planned on spending this much time back in my hometown before our trip; we would have spent about a week here before leaving on a plane to Mexico. Getting the extra quality time with both of my parents has been priceless, despite the intrusion of the big C. Hopefully, when we finally embark on our journey, I’ll have enough of these great memories of laughing, eating, cooking, and hanging out with my dad and my mom to last me through two years of life on the road.
Has anything unplanned ever happened to make you change your course? How did you deal with it?
My first articles!
One of the schemes we’ve dreamed up is to try and write articles related to our interests during our trip. If we can make a little money as we go, great. If not, anything we get published would still be awesome as portfolio pieces and practice for our writing careers. We’d like to eventually do some surf-travel-related writing featuring our photos, for surf and travel publications.
Several weeks ago, I pitched my first article to Bootsnall, one of my go-to websites for great information and advice on long-term backpacking travel. The editor liked my pitch idea and told me to go ahead with it, so here’s the final version which was published on their website:
http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/11-06/five-unexpected-places-to-learn-to-surf.html
Another of my favorite informational/inspirational sites is Briefcase To Backpack. Sherry Ott and Michaela Potter, two of the masterminds behind the site, are super cool women who have found ways to base their lives around long-term travel. Their goal is to get a career break on every resume, through their website and their Meet Plan Go events. We attended their inaugural Meet Plan Go event in New York and found it incredibly helpful. I had the honor of contributing an article about our search for health insurance, to Briefcase To Backpack:
http://b2b.meetplango.com/2011/06/travel-health-insurance/
I’m enjoying writing and hope my lucky streak will continue to grow. With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, I may just have a new career path!
River surfing
Michael and I have been in Montreal over the last few days visiting my dad. We’ve been tempted to check out the surfing conditions on the St. Lawrence, which we’ve done twice before, but decided to keep the trip family-oriented this time. We also didn’t bring our boards or wetsuits.
These Canada geese have good technique. We’ll study up and take a shot at river surfing next time we’re back.
Intentio
I love it when you come across a creative work that expresses exactly what you feel, better than you even knew it could be expressed:
Surfing Round The World 