Australia: The Final Goodbye

Ten Months, Ten Thousand Kilometers, Three Hundred Days, a Thousand Beaches, a Hundred New Friends, so many goodbyes.

The final goodbye came at the Margaret River Classic, the annual local surf competition at the best wave in the most powerful break in Australia: Surfer's Point. I payed the sixty dollar entry fee, surfed like a mongrel for the weeks leading up to the event, rewaxed my 6'2" epoxy J.C. and I was ready. Well, almost. Two weeks before the contest I managed to face plant into my fiberglass fins and emerge from the sea with one eye swollen shut, blood streaming from my forehead, and a gland so swollen I couldn't eat for a day. So much for training.

By the time my heat arrived, at 8 AM on a chilly Spring morning, my wounds had subsdided. I sat huddled alone in my white Ford Falcon panel van, wrapped in a duck feather subzero sleeping bag with a fleece beanie. Sadly, what is at times the most powerful wave in Australia had temporarily become host to two-three foot runners. The wind was offshore, the sun was out, and the waves were flawless, but West Australia is the domain of power surfers, and this was not what we wanted. I pulled on my 3/2 Excel and reef booties and jogged down to the edge of the Indian Ocean for a water start.

To be honest, I didn't have a chance in this contest. Yadin Nichol was surfing in it, and he gets paid 300,000 bucks a year solely to surf. Dave Macauly was a competitor, a former World Number Two. And here was I, a Seppo surf vagabond, vying with the big boys. Still, I'm as good now as I've ever been, so it's now or. . .

I splashed into the water alone, the other guys were late for the heat, and dipping into the refreshing morning ocean, I was ready. The first wave was a cracker, cutback, off the top, floater, into the channel. Two minutes in and I was winning! The other guys leered at me. Buzz, a former pro brought low by decades of drugs, snarled at me. A Brazilian kid traveling like me began kicking around like a shark. Veteran Jay Davies knew he would whip me soon enough.

I had one chance to win the height, a peeling, barreling set wave running down the point. I dropped in late, but stalled for the tube when I should have driven hard off the bottom into a critical manoeuvre. And twenty minutes were over, as quickly as ten months. I jogged up the beach where my Quebecoise housemate Maxim was smashing his morning sausage roll and Chocolate milk. "You got third", he grinned. "Nice try."

And so it's ended. Ten months exploring Terra Nullius solo in my panel van. For me it's been an odyssey, throwing myself between people and places and oceans like a pinball in a machine gone mad. It's what I intended, to see the whole surfable coastline of Australia, but it's so surreal now. I brushed with madness, plunging into a violent sea after thirty hours of nonstop driving across the Nullarbor Plain. I experimented with euphoria, seeing landscapes and seascapes I never could have dreamed would be so breathtakingly beautiful. Most importantly, I met all kinds of people, and many very good people, who are a compliment to the Lucky Country.

It's bittersweet to leave. It's not mine, Australia. I've been away from my people for long enough. I miss them. But there's a lingering intoxication from this country I may never shake. There's en enthusiasm, a bravery, and a grandeur to this land. Blessed by warmth, brimming with prosperity, overflowing with beauty-This isn't a land that can be taken in quickly. I've been fortunate to see more of australia than most, but it's merely inspired a greater respect for the endless spaces of here and everywhere. You can't see it all, you can't do it all. Life is so vast and varied, how could you expect to?

Words fail. All I can say is, come see for yourself some day. Australia is as good as you imagine.

Mucho amor a todos

And one last: G'day!

Andy