Around The World In 80 Waves

It is somewhat ironic that Adam and Rosanna’ household is as uninterested in the lions tour as I am enthusiastic about it. As a consequence I go out to watch the game with some ex-pat surfing friends of mine from back in the UK.

Chris is another old flat mate of mine from back in London and I have surfed with Ben many times in the UK. We are joined by Saul who also lives locally.

All are now living in the Sydney area, and we bump into countless others because there is an army of lions fans who are all out in Manly, where we are watching the game.

We have opted for The Steyne Hotel and the bar is packed so there is a fantastic atmosphere. It also appears that Brits outnumber the Aussies because a lions’ score always gets a bigger cheer than a Wallabies one. 

The game itself was a nail-biter going down to the last kick of the game where had Kurtley Beale not slipped over there is every chance that Australia would have won the game. However he did, and they didn’t. Unlucky!!!! 1-0 Lions, lions, lions!!!!

Things get a bit chaotic towards the end of the evening when one of our party who shall remain nameless gets shown the door. Although it brings an end to our evening I am quite impressed by the approach to booze in Australia. If you have had enough they stop serving you and you are asked to leave. There are sobriety checks on every door to stop you moving your grief to somewhere else too. There was a time when the landlord did the same in the UK but we seem to have lost that somewhere down the line. Shame.

You can’t by alcohol to take home anywhere other than a pub or an off license either. I haven’t seen one drunken brawl anywhere in Oz yet. I will leave you all to make the connection yourselves, because I was too drunk by the end of the night to make it myself!

I stump up the cash for another ferry crossing back to North Island. Marlborough sound really is pretty but it isn’t anywhere close enough to justifying why it is $300 to take a campervan across.

My credit card takes the hit and I try to forget about it as soon as possible.

I arrive in Wellington and find a campervan park right on the waterfront where I stop for the night. I get settled in and then head straight out into the city to see on of the lions tour matches.

It is so long ago now that I can’t even remember who they were playing, but given I missed much of the game due to getting my time differences wrong that is not surprising. I caught the last five minutes of what was a rout and there is nothing much to report on the game itself.

I did however make some new friends in the bar which had plenty of ex-pats in it enjoying a night out. I got adopted by a table of computer animators who were all originally from the UK but now based here and working for Peter Jackson and the other movie companies based in the area on post production work.

It is more than a bit parky at the moment and we a freezing as we go on a bit of a pub crawl but it is a fun night for me despite missing most of the game.

I arrived at the bungalow I have hired in Tea’hupoo. It is one of about half a dozen at a place La Vague Bleue run by a really friendly Tahitian guy called Warren and his family. It was already dark so there is little to do apart from settling into my place and think about what I might be taking on in the morning.

The bungalows are right on the shore and it is more than 2 miles from there by boat to get to the gap in the offshore reef where the waves break, but every few seconds you can still hear the rumble of the swell crashing onto the reef.

As is I don’t have enough on my mind my sleep is somewhat disturbed by geckos repeatedly falling from the roof to land on top of me during my sleep. Whilst my head is protected by a good mosquito net, the end result of discovering a lizard anywhere in your bed is understandably a huge degree of freaking out until you know what it actually is, followed by a prolonged period of distress whilst failing to get the gecko out of the bungalow.

Of course the lizards couldn’t care less about me.

I do get some rest and by the time I find a lizard in my wash bag in the morning I am almost untroubled at all by it because I know in daylight they are no real threat. I am a wee bit in two minds about brushing my teeth knowing that a gecko has spent the night being romantic with it though!

I go down to the shore to see what the waves are like. It may be far away but you can see it is enormous. Time to get in amongst it me thinks.

I meet a fantastic Italian bloke called Giovanni who runs the yacht club in Portofino and is staying in the bungalow next door. He is also keen so the two of us head down to the harbour to see if anybody is willing to take us out to the waves.

Myself and a Swiss guy called Christian, who was also staying at the Moorea Surf B&B, were itching for a surf, so we drove down to Mark’s Place (where I had originally wanted to stay, but failed to find) to see if we could rent some of his kayaks to take us the couple of kilometres across the lagoon to the waves you can just see breaking on the reef in the distance. 

Mark told us that if we were quiet when paddling across the lagoon, dolphins and reef sharks would come right up to and alongside the kayaks for the journey.

Making as much noise as humanly possible and towing my surfboard behind me I covered the distance in about 20 minutes, and whilst my racket kept the sharks away it did not put off the dolphins which were swimming around me the whole time. It was an outstanding experience and the most unusual start to any surf session that I have ever had. 

The next bit was a bit more sketchy because to secure the kayaks it is necessary to slip into the afore mentioned shark infested waters on the sheltered side of the reef then dive down and tie the mooring line of the kayak to the reef to ensure it was still there after your surf session. All this was achieved without any worrying incidents with angry fish, and I’m happy to report I didn’t even see one.

I unattached my surfboard from the kayak and paddled out. The surf was about shoulder high but apart from my usual fears relating to angry fish I was also worried about the coral reef. It was the first time I have surfed over the edge of one, and because I was using Eric’s wife’s board the last thing I wanted was to return it damaged after bouncing across the reef during a wipeout. I needn’t of worried though because I was all over it having a blast in the predictable waves.

In the water there were five stunning Hawaiian girls on an assortment of surfboards, boogie boards and longboards. They had sailed into the lagoon on a catamaran to take advantage of the waves, were in their twenties and all were wearing thong bikinis for their surf session. As you can imagine I was having a ball bantering with all of them in between the many excellent waves I caught, and was delighted that my chat was being so well received.

I am without my gopro during surf sessions at the moment, so sadly have no pictures of the ladies concerned, but found this shot online which gives an indication of both the views I was enjoying at the time. The back drop to all this was the stunning island of Mo’orea. (I do realise the mermaid in this shot appears to be au naturel, but given the difference was only about 20cm² of fabric it is a pretty accurate depiction of the scene I was enjoying.)

Not to be outdone however the dolphins I had seen on the way out to the reef had never really left the scene, and were enjoying themselves by flying out the face of waves all morning, doing backflips, spins and somersaults. There was even an occasioal rainbow seen through the spray off the back of the waves!

I am half way through my trip now and think I may well have enjoyed the best surf session of this trip and possibly even of my life here at Ha’apiti. I think only discovering Alantis during the second half of my travels could top this! You have no idea how big my grin is right now. Stoked doesn’t come close to describing it.

I had a bit of a chuckle when  I heard that there had been an earthquake in North Wales recently.

It is rather ironic that I am covering almost the entire Pacific rim with it’s associaed seismic activity but have yet to feel so much as a tremor during my holiday, whilst the whole of North Wales is getting woken by a sizeable earthquake. 

I had to forward on this picture that somebody has posted online detailing the devastation left behind by the 3.8 quake.

Very funny!

The TT races on the Isle of Man back in the UK start this week. It is as absolutely bonkers as motorcycling gets, but I want to wish all the riders successful racing.

I went to see it when I was 8 years old and have been fascinated by motorcycles ever since.

The racers average in excess of 130mph on streets and mountain roads around the island, and sadly there are regularly deaths on the course.

If you want to know more about it I can whole heartedly recommend ‘TT-Closer To The Edge.’ The starting sequence will give you the general idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVMLv5It6Bk

Conor Cumming’s activities that year will tell you the rest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y07yt87lhEA

It is the dry stone wall that kills me every time, but apparently not Conor Cummings!

Massive congratulations to RGC 1404 for winning the SWALEC Division 1 East. Rugbi Gogledd Cymru 1404 is part of a long term objective to get more rugby players from North Wales involved in the national side.

Despite having many passionate players and supporters, North Wales has always been pretty bereft of access to top level sport. The Welsh Rugby Union have finally decided to tap into the resources available in the north of the country away from the rugby strongholds along the M4, by part funding this team and their development centre. RGC 1404 entered the lowest level of the Welsh leagues this season, with the long term objective of becoming another regional rugby side like the Ospreys and the Scarlets

I saw their first competitive home match before leaving on my adventures and have been following their results via the web, as well as wearing my shirt on match days for moral support. The team won the league at the first time of asking and managed to remain unbeaten at home in Eirias Park throughout the season.

Watch out world the Gogs are coming!

Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

On 1 June 2009 the Airbus A330-203 aircraft serving the flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.

All of the 216 passengers and 12 aircrew were killed.

Sadly two of the many friends from all over the world that I have made through surfing were among the people on that flight. Jose & Isis were travelling between the two countries to spend some time with their families.

I knew Jose (or ‘Rommel’ as we knew him) through having spent so much time on the water with him. He was, by a long way, the best surfer I have ever been surfing with.

This picture was taken on the day we surfed the Severn Bore together back in the UK. As you can gather by the outfit the water in the UK was somewhat colder than Rommel was used to here in Brazil. It never stopped him going though.

At the time of the crash I was getting treated pretty awfully at work and was dealing with some painful things outside of work too, which did not allow me to grieve properly. Consequently the incidents of that week have remained a very raw subject for me, and I couldn’t visit Rio without paying my respect.

I found a quiet spot just around the headland from the Billabong Pro surf contest site and spent some time thinking about the people involved before tossing the roses I had bought into the waves below.

‘Via Con Dios’ my friends.

Many happy returns to my brother Richard.

Hope you have a great day.

Thinking of you from South America.

Much love

Robert

The Darien Gap is the informal title given to the break in the highway which would otherwise run from Alaska to Chile. It gets its name from Darien, which is the largest and eastern most province in Panama, but also includes the northern extremes of neighbouring Colombia. It is what stopped me driving on towards South America

It is a vast area of rugged, sparsely populated, jungle covered terrain, which is second only to the Amazon in scale and within it’s confines are the huge Darien National Park and a self governing indigenous area.

Europeans first visited The Darien in the early 1500s. However people from my own shores arrived in 1696 when 2500 Scots tried to establish a trading colony. Many of the settlers died from disease, and those that didn’t had everything destroyed by Spanish soliers a few years later.  So much of Scotland’s wealth was invested in the colony, and subsequently lost, that Scotland was nearly bankrupted and effectively lost its status as an indepent nation as a result of the fiasco.

I know how they must of felt because all my own best laid plans are starting to look more than a little shaky because I can’t off-load the car. I have now significantly dropped the price to get rid of it, because it will be impacting on my later plans in a big way if I allow things to drag on much longer. A cheap selling price is not ideal but the financial implications of the potential delays, the time itself and the administrative overhead of any changes needed, will be far more costly for me in terms of this trip.

Drastic times call for drastic measures and I spotted this place a few doors down from my hostel yesterday. (www.darien.org.pa) I have decided that if I do not sell by lunchtime on Monday I will walk into their offices and hand over the keys. That would be outrageously generous of me but I really have had enough of feeding the local mosquito population and just sitting around for days on end. We did something similar on the Sahara Surf trip, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world and a lot of good would come from it, not least me leaving!