Bali - Indonesia

How could I come home for Christmas (from living in London) without stopping off in Bali? As part of my pledge to visit Indo every birth-year for the rest of my life, I moved my flights around to give a week stopover in Singapore, then Air Asia return to Denpasar. Jack is living and working in Singapore now so we had a day there to muck around then the Surfari was back on!

Unfortunately December isn't prime time for surf due to both wind and swell but we had fun anyway. It's a great place to visit regardless but we kicked around Kuta for a bit, did some awesome diving (one the best dives I've ever done) and heading down the Bukit Peninsula in the hope of at least some small waves. We stayed at Balangan and got a few fairly grovelly surfs in but the best surf was 3 foot, slightly wobbly Uluwatu! Having never surfed Ulus before it was a good experience to check out the break including the cool paddle out through the cave. Not sure I'd want to try getting back here on a big day but very keen to surf the Bukit again in swell season. Props to Nicolas, a Spanish guy we met and became friends with, who paddled out at Uluwatu for his second surf ever and successfully caught a couple of waves!

So a short but sweet trip and lots of fun. Some of the best parts of visiting Indo are there despite the lack of surf - zooming around on motorbikes, tasty food, random weirdness you'd never see in the Western world and of course the wonderful Balinese people! Good times, I'll be back...

Surfing in Scotland...

The Surfari continues! After a month around Europe (France, Holland and Turkey) and some job hunting in London I headed up to Scotland to visit Jack at his family home just east of Edinburgh. Given that our families have been friends for almost 30 years it's sort of my second family home too which is a nice thing to have when you're on the other side of the planet!

When Jack was back a couple of years ago he'd done some detective work to suss out the surf spots in the area and discovered there are quite a few bone fide surf spots albeit not particularly consistent (especially in summer). Anyway, Jack had been checking the surf forecasts since he'd been back but there'd not been any swell until I arrived. Hehehe.

We found waves but the first surf wasn't the most pleasant experience! Apart from our diminished surf fitness/agility it was bloody freezing! The water was about 12 degrees and despite all the claims of Scottish people swimming at the beach, etc it was too cold for us. Icey is a word that comes to mind. So, straight to the local surf shop and a 5mm wetty each (plus booties) and we were at least sorted for summer surfing in Scotland. Winter is 6mm wetties, booties, gloves, hood and a warm car (preferably a van - nearly every surfer drives a VW Transporter) in which to get changed. The best surf is in the middle of winter and snow on the ground isn't uncommon.

So I kicked around Jack's mum's house for a total of about 6 weeks while waiting out the recruitment process for my new London job and in that time we probably surfed 6 or 8 sessions at a couple of different spots including Pease Bay. Pease actually got quite good a couple of times and in the winter it can absolutely go off. The novelty aside (surfing in front of a castle is pretty cool even if the surf is average), it was quite a revelation that you can actually surf in the UK! Living in London isn't quite the ideal setup for a surfer but maybe I will get a few waves now and then without having to go home...

London - England

I can tell you that I don't recommend wrestling a huge backpack and 2 surfboards through peak hour on the tube! I had no choice though, I had to get to Chancery Lane (if you don't know London that's a very busy part of the city) to get some keys from my friend Shaz. Oh well, interesting experience although in hindsight it would have been fun to tell a few porkies about being a pro surfer to all the people who asked (and yes, people actually talked to me on the tube!.

So what to do with this blog now? Is the Surfari over? My plans now are to live and work in London for a while (well, after travelling around Europe a bit, sans surfboard). I think the Surfari from here will cover any surf/snow travel until I return home for good. Or maybe just any surf travel I do from now on. I certainly intend to go on a few surf trips ex-London - Morocco, France and Ireland to name a few!

The Surfari, to be continued.....

San Francisco - USA

Last stop of the trip, noooooooooooo! Running low on travel budget by now and to be honest starting to feel ready to do something real after an epic trip. I'd always wanted to check out San Fran though and stoked that this was the last destination. Jack had been here before so didn't hang around more than a day. I had a couple more days so I could check out stuff like Alcatraz, ride the cable cars and generally get a feel for the place.

Quite weird to part ways with Jack after travelling together for so long but we managed to hold back the tears while we embraced for what seemed like ages. Not. I think Jack actually left the hostel room about 6am, poked me awake on his way out saying "see ya" and that was it :)

Before Jack left we did have the last weird experience of the trip here. Wandering around on the first afternoon, a gay black guy (with peroxide blonde hair) approached me going on about "aw yeah that white booty" and licking this, and f*cking that. I won't repeat everything but it took a second before I realised what he was on about and actually processed some of things he was saying. I ignored him for about a block while he followed us then turned around and suggested he cease and desist before one of us got hurt. Anyway he followed us for a couple more blocks from across the road shouting "nigga in tha hole". Thanks for your help on that one Jack!

All in all I enjoyed SF and will go back for sure. I didn't get to check out any music stuff for a start and there's a lot here to check out. Would like to do a trip north of SF, actually would be cool to do the whole west coast for that matter! Actually maybe not if the locals are all like the ones at Windensea. Anyway, this Surfari is over for now, time to board a plane for London!

Sorry? What's that? $100 to check in my surfboard? Certianly, let me just bend over for you....

Lake Tahoe - USA

What a way to end the trip! We flew via Las Vegas (so got to see the airport full of pokies) to Reno where after hanging out in the airport for several hours we met up with Massy, Jack's mate from Scotland who's been living in Tahoe for several years.

Massy has one of those dream lives you hear about - he basically runs a ski rental business which means he has all the gear you could ever want, lift passes for every mountain plus the flexibility to have hours every day on the slopes! He can even snowboard to work! Massy is a legend and totally hooked us up with gear and tickets then took us around for a couple of days to show us all the secret stashes. Luckily we got a couple of end-of-season dumps and had several days of fresh powder too! We ended up riding 5 or 6 different resorts in 7 days with fresh tracks at least half the time. Unfortunately I twisted my knee at Squaw Valley halfway through the day so was reduced to drinking beer by the pool at the top of the mountain with some drunk Cali girls, not all bad :)

Awesome place, will go back one day for sure (especially now Massy has two sleds to get into the backcountry). Would have loved to go to Mammoth too but you can't do everything! After a great visit we packed up our hire car, said thanks and goodbye to Massy and pointed towards San Fran....

San Diego - USA

After a stop in Houston where we checked out all the "Don't Mess With Texas" stuff in the airport shops, we arrived in LA and jumped on the downtown bus. Weird to be able to go up to anyone and speak your native language although still plenty of opportunity to speak Spanish! We made it to the bus/train terminal only to find the Surfrider train to San Diego wasn't going for a few hours (and they were filming an episode of Lie To Me in the station - just another day in LA I guess).

Finally we made it down to SD and were picked up by my friend Greg who'd moved over here for work and was very kindly putting us up for a couple of days. SD is cool, we cruised around Pacific Beach on bikes and generally chilled out, we even went for a surf! We didn't have wetties so had to rent the worst steamers on earth. Greg lent us his car and we cruised for waves, ending up surfing the famous Windensea, not known for friendly locals!

The surf was average and freezing cold, especially considering we'd been surfing in our boardies for the last 4+ months. On top of that I've never surfed in a more hostile environment in my life! All the locals stare at you with open aggression and it didn't help we were frozen and kooking it in all the rubber. Got a few waves anyway and managed to not get our heads punched in. A guy in the carpark wasn't quite as lucky and at the very least got a shouting at that you could hear from the water. Horrible experience. Even the most local spots in Australia don't feel like that...

Anyway, we had a couple of fun nights out and enjoyed ourselves then time for the icing on the travel cake, snowboarding in Lake Tahoe!!!

Mexico City - Mexico

Mexico City - more VW Beetles and cops than you've ever seen in your life! The Beetles are due to a VW factory having been in Mexico and the cops obviously due to the huge crime rate in Mexico but to be honest we didn't find it that sketchy. Probably because there are literally cops on every corner plus aggressive looking pickup trucks loaded with cops in riot gear getting about all the time.

We didn't go out to any bars, just wandered around and checked out various markets, tried some of the street food, etc. We also did a day trip out to the awesome Mayan pyramids just outside the city! Pretty interesting going out past the slums too and seeing the extent of the most populous city in the Americas!

I'd say it's worth visiting if you're going through but you don't have to go out of your way. Oh and don't eat tacos if you don't understand what's in them! On the last night (we spent a couple of days there) we went out for dinner with a couple of other guys from the hostel and ended up at this little taco place around the corner. I'd been trying to eat all sorts of new stuff I hadn't heard of in Mexico (like they say, Mexican food is different in Mexico and it's true) but this time I just decided to not roll the dice and just got chicken tacos. Jack and the other guys decided to try some of the, ahem, cheaper offerings without really understanding what they meant...

Well, we spoke enough Spanish to understand cabeza means head but somehow didn't compute that tacos de cabeza really means tacos from various head parts and that you can order eye, ear, nose, lip, tongue and skin tacos! When the came out mine looked great but the other guys tacos with filled with weird greyish stuff, some of it covered in hair! Jack passed but the other guys stated tucking in until some Argentinian girls from the hostel arrived and told them what they were eating! Hilarious :)

Sadly our Latin American adventure had come to an end. We finally got a taxi to stop (they didn't like the look of our surfboards) and convinced the guy to take us to the airport where once again we got taxed when checking in our surfboards. Makes me so angry when you see guys putting in golf clubs for free. Anyway goodbye Mexico and hello the US of A!

Puerto Escondido - Mexico

Mexico is awesome. Somewhere I've always wanted to go and it sounds so good rolling off the tongue - I'm going to Mexico, I'm just chilling in Mexico, I got drunk/barrelled/etc in Mexcio, I broke my surfboard in Mexico... damn, I really did!

We found a decent hotel right on Playa Zicatela which is the actual surf beach. Not the cheapest at about $60 a night or so (from memory) but it was towards the end of the trip and we were happy to be somewhere relatively nice. The surf looked bigish and messy out the front although a few guys were taking it on. We rested a bit after our mega bus trip then went for a walk to check the place out.

Up the north end near the main part of the town was were all the Mexican tourists went and it was comedy checking out their antics in the surf/sand. Not sure if they were posh tourist, bogans or a mix of both. Further down the beach (towards our hotel) was where you saw the surfers and foreign tourists. Unfortunately the banks weren't really very good for this time of year and the whole beach was pretty much a closeout. A fairly solid 6 foot closeout for that matter so I/we felt no compulsion to get out there (and nor did many others apart from some bodyboarders and a couple of hellmen surfers).

We got up before dawn the next day to check the surf and it seemed much the same but we ran into the owner of the hotel, also checking the surf. This guy was Italian but had been here 18 years, knew all the spots AND was keen to have someone to go surfing with! He offered (for the cost of splitting the petrol money) to take us with him about 30km down the coast to a semi-secret point that should be working. We jumped into his Jeep for one of the scariest car journeys I've ever experienced! In addition to surviving we also scored some waves, not the best surf ever but surfable 4 foot waves with power you could really feel, much more than anywhere else we'd surfed (except for probably Jakes in WA).

So after another ring-clenching car ride back we kicked back with a couple of Coronas and fell into a routine for the next few days - early surf check, scissors/paper/rock for who has to sit in the front of the Jeep, sweat out the car ride down the coast, surf all morning then chill all afternoon around the hotel/pool. We surfed a few secret spots down the coast although never perfect. Still, it sure beat surfing with the crowds at the point (southern end of Zicatela) and it just got bigger and bigger on the main beach with 8-10 foot heaving closeouts by the last day. Was awesome watching one guy towing in but even he only got a couple.

Ah yes the last day. We went back to the point down the coast and paddled out into 4-5 foot surf which turned into 5-6 foot (maybe more) after a while. Jack wasn't feeling all that great about it, especially on his backhand, and basically spent the session hanging out the back and sussing it but never liked the look of anything that came through and got one wave in. I should also mention it wasn't anywhere near perfect and there was a horrifying shorebreak on the inside section! Anyway, Jack certainly charged in Indo so I wouldn't hold anything against him, especially after surfing less than 5 years!

I was loving it though. Not charging but certainly keen to get stuck in and I hung out a bit further inside, feeling fit and happy to take big ones on the head if it meant getting the nicer ones that came though. After I'd had a few waves a big set came though which broke right in front of me. I duckdived it but it blasted me away from my board and ragdolled me around, coming up to find my board in two pieces! I still don't understand how it happened but I grabbed the loose bit and paddled my kickboard back in :(

Luckily I'd brought my 6'6 with me so grabbed that out of the car and got straight back out there! Got a few more bigish ones and felt much more confident with bigger board, should have taken that one out the first time. Anyway, I wouldn't say I charged but definitely went up a bit of a level in feeling confident in bigger surf. My best memory is the last wave, carving up and down the line then straightening out and looking straight back to watch the shorey closeout explode behind me!

To be honest we didn't do much more in Puerto but then, we never meant to. We had 4-5 days there, packed up our boards (for the last time?) and jumped on the bus for Mexico City! Loved Puerto though, will go back for sure and as surf trips go you could spend your whole time exploring Mexico. Will have to do that one day!

The only bad part of our stint in Puerto was an email from one of Kyla's colleagues in Nicaragua to tell me that she'd badly burnt her foot in a bonfire on the beach and was now in hospital in Managua! It turned out she'd been to a party near San Juan del Sur and was pushed into the fire by some drunk guy. She suffered horrific burns on one of her feet and ended up (after a nightmare experience in the little clinic in San Juan getting the sand and skin scrubbed out without anaesthetic) in the burns unit in the public hospital in Managua.

It's not where you want to be, especially without friends or family around. Nobody could get there to see her from either Canada or from Jinotepe so she was left alone in great pain (despite all the morphine) not getting much to eat and generally in hell. Not much we could do for her from Mexico apart from try to offer moral support via Skype which I did daily until the travel insurance came through and she was medivacced straight back to Canada! She's pretty much ok now (although not without scars) but what an awful way to end your overseas experience! I'm really careful around fires now at parties...