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.
When the relatively small cadre of explorers tamed these outposts there was little or no infrastructure to support tourism. They by and large lived as locals, or at least made camp and made do with whatever local food, drink and mind-altering substances they could beg, borrow or barter.
But crucially. as well as surfboards, sandals and patchouli oil, a few of these pioneers took their cameras with them. Surf films, such as Albert Falzon's seminal 1973 offering Morning of the Earth (in which Bali's famous Uluwatu on the Bukit Peninsular was surfed for the very first time), nurtured surf culture's collective wanderlust.
Magazines also played their part in spreading the news. In a 1974 Surfer magazine cover story The Forgotten Island of Santosha, Tamarin Bay in Mauritius was showcased as the ultimate exotic surf destination. "Santosha is not a place," wrote writer/film-maker Larry Yates in the piece, "but a state of mind". The magazine spread and the film of the same name was saturated in a lush, psychedelic take on tropical perfection, shimmering with electric blues and greens.
Intrepid surfer writers and photographers such as Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson made a living while on the road throughout the 1970s, selling stories of their travels in West Africa and Central America to various US and Australian surfing magazines, further tempting thousands of adventurous young surfers to take flight in the search for uncharted surf spots.
By the 1980s, packaged surf camps had started to spring up. Many pioneer surfers became owner-operators and salaried guides at all-inclusive surf camps and on charter boats operating from the very spots they had "discovered". The quintessential poacher-turned gamekeeper was Tony Hinde, who died recently, and who almost single handedly created the Maldives as a tourist destination after being shipwrecked in the North Male Atoll in 1973.
The hardcore Aussie surf traveller was en-route from Sri Lanka, supposedly bound for South Africa with a crazed, incompetent skipper. Finding himself marooned on a tiny Island surrounded by pristine reefbreaks, where waves were barreling endlessly unridden, Hinde must have thought he'd died and gone to surf heaven. He ended up marrying a local woman, converted to Islam and surfed the warm, clear waters of the area pretty much alone for the next couple of decades. In 1990, he founded Atoll Adventures, and now the Maldives is indelibly inked on the surfing map, joining a legion of blue-water surf camps all over the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
By the turn of the century, the exotic surf travel market was firmly established, and regions like the remote Mentawai Islands at the far end of the Indonesian archipelago, once silently majestic and populated by relatively un-harassed indigenous population and the most perfectly symmetrical, unsurfed waves on the planet, are now patrolled by dozens of chartered surf boats and at least two land-based surf camp operations. The interaction between surf culture and local populations hasn't been without controversy, of course. Take, for instance, the five star, all-inclusive surfer's paradise of Tavarua on a heart-shaped island off of Vitu Levi in Fiji, where two American surfers in the early 80s were able to set up one of the earliest South pacific surf camps by negotiating "exclusive" surfing and fishing rights from local headmen. How can anyone own the right to ride a wave?
But, despite the near ubiquity of packaged surf adventure, there remain scattered around the planet small pods of stoic adventurers who continue to define the frontiers. Recent dispatches have filtered through the jungle telegraph of Google Earth-inspired explorations to the troubled southlands of Mauritania, where desert pointbreaks have hidden in the lee of the well-trodden hippy trail to Morocco.
Many degrees north, the Norwegian Lofoten Islands is now home to a hardy coterie of visiting, rubber clad surfers as well as a handful of locals who exploit the Islands' treasury of reefs and points. In the southern provinces of China, a pop-culture hungry youth are currently being turned on to wave-riding by a slow but highly motivated flow of Aussie and American surfers who are enjoying the empty left-handers and plotting the construction of the Chinese surf industry.
Truly hard-core ferals meanwhile, mostly from South Africa, are blazing trails through the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and onward to war-torn Angola, and West onto the storm-wracked coastline of Madagascar.
And were there waves in La Libertad? Hell yes. Punta Roca peeled head high and perfect for the first three days we were there. The only local surfers we met were a couple of easy-smiling teenagers with broken boards stuck together with duct tape. The town itself was an unlovely chaos of shanty-style bars. We spent most of the time avoiding the madness, talking to bearded Vietnam veterans from the Gulf Coast of Texas, surfers who had shored up at Punta Roca and opened a café sometime in the mid 1970s. "It was a little edgy back then, you know," they told us night after night, "but nothing like today. You should have been here 10 years ago. Man, you should have seen the surf…"
Five (semi-charted) surf spots
1. Crab Island County Clare, Ireland
In the lee of the natural wonder that is The Burren is one of Europe's heaviest, wildest waves. September and October are the times to catch Crab when the swell is powerful and the water not too frigid.
2. Chicama, Northern Peru
Perhaps the longest wave in the world, Chicama is an incredible sand-bottomed left hand point set against a spectacular Peruvian landscape.
3. G-Land' Grajagan, Java
Once the kingdom of the true feral surfer, 'G Land' remains a near mythical spot stalked by hardy campers at the edge of the Plenkung National Forest.
4. 'The Bluff', Western Australia
To experience a surfari to the north of Western Australia, you need to take everything with you, including a sturdy 4x4. This is the quintessence of a desert surf experience.
5. Ponta Da Barra Falsa, Mozambique
Lack of medical facilities and alleged shark infestation doesn't deter surfers from seeking the incredible waves here, that come with a beautiful Afro-Portuguese culture to boot.
· Michael Fordham is author of The Book of Surfing: the killer guide to surf culture (published by Bantam Press on June 16)
