Australia: The Odyssey Begins

You know those times in life when you just want to hit the road and follow something, anything, that will consume your passions and thoughts?  You know, like when you spend the Summer driving around the U.S.A. to see games in all the baseball stadiums in the National League? Or when you find a friend and rent a truck and drive all over the Midwest looking for antiques? Or when you join the Hippie Caravan and follow the Grateful Dead and Phish around for weeks, months, years?  

Well, I’m not really into baseball, antiques or drugs, at least not enough to throw away gainful employment and my savings account to their intense pursuit.  However, I have found something perfectly suitable for obsession: World Championship Surfing Contests.  I’ve been to three in the last year (California, Hawaii, Australia), and I’m preparing anxiously for the fourth at Bells Beach next week.  By preparing anxiously I mean living in my car, eating pasta, and doing nothing, to ensure that I shall have nothing to do when the competition begin

ASP world tour events have all the ingredients necessary for life-consuming occurrences.  They only happen once or twice a year on each Continent, so it’s a rare thing to see a contest.  They last for two weeks, all told, and there are constant mini-dramas being played out before the most consequential battles.  Most importantly, these contests draw surfies and surf lovers from all over the world.  They are tribal conventions, bringing the best surfers, the biggest companies, and all wandering surf nomads that happen to be within a few thousand kilometers.

In March 2007 I happen to be one of those nomads.  In January I set out from Hawaii, sunk my savings into a 1994 Ford Falcon Panel Van, and armed with a work holiday visa and a library of information, I’ve hit the surfie trail Down Under.  

I’m going Surfabout.

Summer: Bondi Beach

Of course, it had to be Bondi.  The Melting Pot, the Backpacker’s Gateway to the Continent, Australia’s Most Famous Beach.  Hurl whatever superlatives you like: Bondi Beach can sustain them all.  You’ll fly into Sydney International and coast over the waters of Botany Bay before you jam down on the runway, thousands of kilometers from wherever you began.  Welcome to Australia!

The airport is sleek and shiny, the international terminal spacious and soothing.  Customs are a breeze, and a surfboard bag will earn you an expedited escort.  

Bondi, Bondi, Bondi.  For most of the twentieth century it was on the outskirts of the Harbourside City Center.  It was 

Write things down.

Trust me.  No matter how agile your mind may be, no matter how vivid your memory, or how important the moment may seem, you will forget.  

The cherished details, the names of acquaintances, even the reason you ended up alone in a faraway land on the opposite corner of the earth in the first place: All will fade with time.

For example, when I achieved the fresh age of twenty-six, I decided it was time to live in Australia.  For a whole constellation of reasons that I hardly have access to now, I made the move.  To Australia.  Of course.  Where else?  To the end of the earth, away from family, friends, familiarity, I moved.  

Of course I was pushed away, by family crisis, by psychological weakness and strength, by a general shiftlessness.  

But I was also desperately seeking something.  I hardly knew what, but I was sure I would find it in the deep spiritual recesses of our most ancient Continent.  

It was time to go away alone.  So, on 16 January, 2007, I boarded a plane in Honolulu International, Sydney Bound.  Armed with a laptop, a Lower Alpine backpack stuffed with all-weather clothes, and a coffin surfboard bag with boards for all sizes of waves, I set out alone.  I felt completely ecstatic and invigorated, by freedom, the unknown, the adventures that lay ahead.  

Is there anything like the feeling of taking the first steps on a year-long journey that will carry you to the farthest reaches of the planet, alone?  When all is ahead-the friends you haven’t met, the oceans you haven’t seen, the brushes with death that you may survive, or not?

So began my great adventure.