Summer 1986, in Oaxaca, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Huge, barrelling waves were pounding the beaches of Puerto Escondido. I was a teenage surfer on my first foreign surf trip, and I had befriended a 30-year-old kneeboarder from Llantwit Major who was obsessed with these heavy, tubular beach breaks. I, on the other hand, was obsessed with a piece I'd read in an old Aussie surf magazine on La Libertad in El Salvador. The story told of empty, mellow, tropical point breaks.
La Libertad. The name means freedom. I convinced my Welsh friend to make the trip south with me. The only problem was, a civil war was raging there. Every night, the environs of the capital were blacked out, and in the villages out towards the coast, the hills resounded with small arms fire and mortar shells. But out in La Libertad, an hour from San Salvador, we knew that beautiful, empty waves were peeling into the cove – and they were impossible to resist. We packed up, hopped on a bus to Guatemala City where we would make the transfer to El Salvador.
That's the thing about surf travellers. All that really matters is the quality of the waves. And surfers' thirst for the new has resulted in their pioneering many coastal destinations – from the Andaman Islands to Bali – teeming now with tourists of every creed.
The current generation of surfers are party to the newly-packaged adventure experience, and flock to all-inclusive "surf camps" that filter out the hazards, pitfalls and perils of independent travel where few hardy souls have ventured.
But it doesn't matter how far flung, or how exotic the world of surf camps, boat charters, and all-expenses-in surf packages have become - an exploratory, feral-living surfer got there first.
The feral surfer is a completely committed coastal survivalist who will remain camped in a parasite-infested jungle, and will brave political turmoil and natural disaster for months on end in order to ride pristine, empty waves. He is surfing's Holy Fool, and, whether or not the ethics are intact, every traveller to the exotic coastlines and islands of the planet is deeply indebted to the trail he has blazed.
The early 1970s marked the feral surfer's ascendancy. It might have been partly to do with design innovation, partly to do with avoidance of the Vietnam draft, and partly to do with the rise and rise of drug culture. Either way, the design of surfboards had made quantum leaps from the easy-gliding longboard era of the early-to-mid sixties. Since 1966 when Australian surfer Nat Young won the world championships on a revolutionarily board, surfboards had been dramatically shrinking in size, making them more portable than ever. As a result, new coastal frontiers with faster and more hollow waves, from Bali, Java and Sumatra to Latin America and the South Pacific, were being pioneered by a new breed of tuned out, turned on wave riders.
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