Marco in our 80′s vehicle, Southern Spain

This time Marco was on the road, in the suitably adapted 80′s Citroen van that you might expect a surfer of Marco’s calibre to be driving. He was on his way, really slowly, from Marbella to Biarritz, catching as many waves and selling as many of his second book as possible, ‘Panoramica’.

Anyway, of course one of Marco’s first questions: “so what the hell are you all doing these days?”. South African Man-of-the-month was probably not an answer he expected for Tim. He batted an eyebrow, processing, before leaning back in the chair and laughing approvingly. It clearly takes considerably more to shock Marco.

It was only a matter of time before the paparazzi caught onto our vibe. Latest South African HEAT magazine #272; 20 July

Eddie Murphy narrowly pips Tim to the “cut-out-and-keep-treat” section…

Heat magazine votes Tim…

Marco and Stone ordered another Super-Bock each and carried on catching up as if rummaging enthusiastically through an old drawer full of notes, postcards, and all the interesting odds and ends you have that you had nearly forgotten about…

Not just an economic-whizz, Tim with another cause in Cote d’ivoire, circa Oct 2007…

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IN OTHER NEWS

Congrats Angelique on winning the Surf-Lesson raffle, Bournemouth awaits! Thanks to all those who entered the comp, AfricanSurfer raising over GBP100 towards new clean water wells in Africa.

We learned to love clean water in Africa!

Now having spent almost a year and a half in some  of the most remote places on the continent… we can really appreciate the value of clean potable water! Which is why we thought we’d get involved and use the Diageo talk to do our bit for AMREF.

The closest surfschool to London (in Bournemouth), Surfsteps Surf School were quick to come to party and donated a couple of free surf-lessons to raffle off for those who are inspired by Stone’s talk, valued at £70. We’re selling the tickets at £2 for one, or £5 for three tickets, and are going to keep the raffle open for a week, closing next week Thursday 2 April 2009 at 17h30 (UK time) when we will draw the winner. 

YOU CAN ENTER ONLINE BY SIMPLY DONATING £2 HERE.

Stone in French Congo… maybe he could use one of the Bournemouth Surf School lessons himself instead of giving them away? 

Surfsteps Surf School in Bournemouth are open 7 days a week and really accessible from London. They’ve got all the gear and do water safety, beach awareness and then all the necessary stuff (just like in the movie “Point Break“) to get you up and riding by the end of your lesson! As a bonus they’ve just added stand-up paddle-boarding if you want to give that a whirl before you cough up your life savings for the board and paddle!

www.bournemouthsurfschool.co.uk

Thanks SurfSteps for helping us raise a little bit of ‘tom’ for AMREF!

Darwin: “Damnit – wish I’d taken my surfboard with me on the HMS Beagle!”

In the mid 1800′s Darwin may have been addressing the society on such subjects as ‘the evolution of species’ and ‘natural selection’. On the 19 March 2009, you are more likely to find us talking on such profound topics as the ‘evolution of Lurker’s beard’ and ‘wave selection’. Journey of the Beagle? I’m feeling something a little closer to ‘Journey of Mzee Kobe‘, our trusty 1981 landcruiser.

Lurker: ‘The descent of man…’

This is a society that once absorbed something called the ‘Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa‘… we figured we might just be able to throw in a thing or two about the coastal parts from our first-ever trans-African surftrip. Expect inspiring, ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting.

Not to detract at all from the Modern Theory of Evolution… that stuff’s important too!

Tim in Cote d’Ivoire circa Oct 2007: Natural selection vs Wave-selection

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AFRICANSURFER AT THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
KENSINGTON, LONDON
19 MARCH 2009
(THINK YOU HAVE TO BE A SOCIETY MEMBER FOR THIS ONE)

Markovina employs novel up-close techniques to research fish in Africa…

Needless to say they’ve just hit one of our favourite obstacles. Here’s what they had to write about the Mayumba mud puddle…

We chopped our way through fallen trees and climber over maddy banks and small rivers and then there it was, the infamous mayumba mud puddle from hell, which likes to eat cars. It did not help that a couple of elephants decided to take a bath there and leave great big holes in the mud, which one had to avoid. I know there are 3 guys reading this and smiling as they had a car eating experience here in June 2007. We laid down all the wood we could find and carefully guided the car onto it, trying to avoid the mud, this was not to be and we were instantly stuck at 3pm. Getting out of the car to check the problem I was obliterated by horse flies, probably my least favorite animal in the world. We dug, and winched and jacked the car for hours. We inched half a meter at a time. At times like this it is important to stress and drink cold beer, so we did, drink beer that is.

Thankfully Markovina had some previous experience with the puddle. After Stone famously walked 32km’s through hippo and buffalo-infested jungle to find cellphone reception to call the Wildlife Conservation Society outpost, approx 100km further North – it was Mike who the park manager despatched by quad-bike! Mike was working as an ocean conservationist in the area at the time, and had previously worked together with Stone on the University of Cape Town surf club committee… coincidence!

Gabonese highway…

When we attempted the same road circa June 2007, the intel we had received advised: “not to attempt route without a chainsaw, and a strong spade“. We had neither. But we were still intent on tracking the coast as the only other road North was a few-hundred-kilometer diversion inland. So we borrowed a machete from a generous biologist in the Congo, and set-off with little more than a scrappy page of directions and a lot of canned beans…

The note should have rung a warning bell. Part of it read: “…they will have to get off on a busted up sh#tarse piece of crap road that takes off to the right. It is hard to spot and they will have a hard time accepting that it is a road at all…” Apparently this is how an 8-mile road that takes 3 days to pass begins!

Anyway we eventually emerged from the jungle across the border – filthy, cut, bruised, and carrying numerous new parasites… but with a great adventure under our belt.

Mike & Linda -  we’re stoked you had the same fortune… and also stoked that our dignity is somewhat redeemed by the fact that we were not the only one’s eaten by the hungriest car-eating mud-puddle in Gabon!!!

A part of the story which is often forgotten is that on the same day he walked 32km for help to freeing our landcruiser from the mud, Stone twisted his knee badly on a quadbike, putting him out of surfing for the next month! Tim and Lurks were stoked to finally have someone to film…!

And so was inspired this post of interesting things we passed on our trip up Africa, that you can check out on google earth. Unfortunately we found, some of the cooler things we thought of are not quite clear enough on the satellite images available from google. The mysterious multi-coloured Manengouba lakes, and Mt Cameroon lava-flow bisecting the road near Etisah spring to mind…

Here are some other interesting places we passed, and covered on the site, which we can now offer a bit of vertical perspective on…

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1. The bridge over the river Congo – Matadi, DRC

“how on earth will you get across the Congo river” was one of the more common questions we had in the earlier part of our journey. We were thus stoked to find this – a beautiful suspension-bridge just outside Matadi in the DRC.

Indeed the Congo is an inspiring body of water. To put things into perspective just take a look at the size of some of those ships docked on the pier South East of the bridge… (more HERE)

View Larger Map

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2. Basilica of Our Lady of Peace – Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire

Contrary to popular belief, the largest church in the world is not in Rome. In fact it is in Yamoussoukro, the small political capital of Cote d’Ivoire, a few hundred km’s north of the more vibrant Abidjan.

There is much we don’t understand about this church (for example, were there not maybe better uses for the money?!), but one thing is for sure – it is probably one of the biggest and most impressive modern structures we’ve ever seen… (more HERE)

View Larger Map

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3. Grand Mosquee – Djenne, Mali

The largest mud-brick building in the world is in a small town on the Bani river in Mali. The whole town is actually made almost entirely of mud brick, and is typical of most towns found in this fascinating area of Mali. (more HERE)

View Larger Map
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4. Ship graveyard – Nouadhibou, Mauritania

Surrounded by the Sahara desert, we did not have very high expectations for Nouadhibou. No one, however, had told us about what must be one of the worlds’ more expansive ship graveyards that exists here for various reasons.

There’s something quite powerful about seeing so many of these once graceful vessels in one place, dying a slow and rather uncomfortable-looking death. (more HERE)

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5. Perfect empty left-hand pointbreak – Somewhere on the west coast…

Of course AfricanSurfer is a surf trip, and one of the greatest sights to any surfers eye is an empty set-up like this.

This particular wave was one of the longest we’ve seen, and according to the locals on a good day runs uninterrupted down the approx 1.5km long point…

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Nope, Rail-to Rail is a surfing blog from Stone’s home town, covering all topics ‘Port Elizabeth’ and ‘waves’. AfricanSurfer is stoked to feature! There’s a piece about Stone HERE, and while you’re on the site be sure to check out a classic post about the bar where the author learned to pour a shooter to the brim HERE.

To this day I cannot pour a shot without hearing a voice screaming at me” Remmemer laaightie! Yoo just bladdy remmemer to pour mine wif a meniscus! else there’s gonna be kak. Kay doos?”

This post may also give further insight to the city of Port Elizabeth, which perhaps explains why Stone turned out the way he did…

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AfricanSurfer in Surfing magazine:
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Oh ya, on the subject of surfing media, AfricanSurfer have also made some waves in the December 2008 issue of Surfing magazine. It’s the “On location:Africa“, edition, so I guess it’s only fitting that AfricanSurfer is in there. If you can’t afford to buy the mag, we suggest you go page through it at the local CNA and check out the interview with Tim on pg 74/5, and an article on “Why Africa remains surfing’s least known continent” on pg 101 which Stone contributes to.

Peggy our little Cameroonian friend also gets a mention – we need to get him a copy along with the 2 new sponsored sticks we have waiting for him in Cape Town (who would have thought that freight to Douala would be 4x the price of the boards?!!)

Lurks’s bare pasty torso dominates page 74…

Note: one very important correction on the Surfing piece – pg102: It was our Toyota land CRUISER that became stuck in waist-deep mud. Had we been in a land ROVER we suspect we probably wouldn’t have even made it as far as the mud puddle!

No strangers to the limelight – AfricanSurfer media circus in Northern Angola circa May ’08…

For those of you who haven’t seen our article in GolfPunk yet, i finally got my hands on the PDF (although that shouldn’t stop you from buying South Africa’s best golf mag).

I’ll upload the PDF as soon as i work out how to, but in the meantime, here’s a full text of the article…

At a certain stage in our lives, a young South African’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of London.  And so, each year, work visas in hand, thousands of our best and brightest troop onto the rain-drenched pavement of Heathrow airport to spend a few years in a land where the most important item in your golf bag is your umbrella and a pub lunch in any club house canteen costs more than a 2-year membership to the Royal Johannesburg.

Stricken by this same strange affliction, two friends and I decided to join the temporary migration to the UK last year. But, because we were all too aware of the dreary hardships of life on the ‘mud island’, we wanted to make our trip there as entertaining as possible. Twelve hours in SAA’s economy class versus six months cruising along the beaches of West Africa? No contest. After all: why fly to London when you can drive?

We had a three-step approach to planning our trip from Cape Town to London. The first was to procure a vehicle. An ancient Toyota Landcruiser was all our meagre budget would allow, so we relied on the fact that we could get her across the Orange River and into Namibia before the traffic cops could discover her lack of roadworthiness.

The second step, vehicle-preparation, involved spending lots of time ensuring we could get six surfboards and two roof tents onto the roof, and buying loads of Pronutro.

The third was to plan a route. Twenty-one countries in six months? No problem. We can get through the Congo in three days, right? Sure we can…

Finally, in March 2007 we set off from Cape Town and headed north. Our nerves about the road ahead began to dissipate as our old truck managed the first two thousand kilometres without a hiccup.  “Maybe it won’t be so difficult after all”, we thought. Then we crossed into Angola.

There wasn’t much talking in the Landcruiser as we inched our way over the ribbons of tar that linked the potholes making up the road into southern Angola. What little talk there was dropped to nothing as the sun began to set on our first day in “Africa-proper” and we faced the prospect of finding a camp in the landmine-littered bush.

Our spirits were buoyed slightly when we came across the wrought-iron gates and palm-lined driveway of a commercial farm.  But when we headed up to the farmhouse and a scarred and muscle-bound Angolan war veteran stepped out of the entrance hall (in which he and his men had built a campfire) and growled “we live here now” in broken English, we were sure the game was up.

Then, as pretty much everyone else we met on our trip did, he grinned, and offered us a place to stay.

This hospitality continued in Luanda – where a new friend Paulo repaired our broken suspension for free; in the DRC – where three Catholic priests took us into their bombed-out cathedral; in Nigeria – where we stayed with Zimbabwean farmers recently given land and capital by the Nigerian government to start commercial farms after theirs were stolen by Robert Mugabe; in Cote d’Ivoire – where our new friends guided us to surf spots that have hardly ever been surfed before; and all along our route.

It wasn’t all fun and games though.  Parts of Northern Angola, the DRC, Congo and Cameroon have no roads to speak of and it took days of low-range driving to get through them. In Gabon we had to be rescued by a national park official when we became hopelessly stuck in a deep puddle in the jungle. In Togo we were presented bowls of food confidently identified as ‘beef’ by the cook, only to find ourselves picking out miniature ribcages belonging to some unidentified and  hapless rodent.

‘Lurks’ the trip mechanic who used to be a Chartered Accountant, got malaria in Benin and again in Mali. ‘Stone’, who left a promising audit career to take a post as the trip chef, battled a vicious ringworm infection for weeks in The Gambia and Senegal. In Morocco I got jailed briefly for a visa infraction.

Overall, however, our experience of the rest of our continent was overwhelmingly positive.  In a village in the south of Cameroon we surfed with Peggy – the only surfer in the region – who rides a 10-year old board, broken in the middle.  In a village in the north of Cameroon we swam in volcano lakes with our new friends Francis and Fidelis who cooked for us every night while we stayed in a spare room of their seminary.

We camped on the beaches of West Africa with Kingsley Holgate, and in the deserts of the Sahara with poetry-writing freedom fighters.  We didn’t pay any bribes, experienced no crime to speak of, and made hundreds of friends all the way up the coast.

So next time you’re looking to book a flight to London, consider taking a drive up the coast instead. It takes a little longer (our trip ended up talking fifteen months instead of the six we initially intended), but it will almost certainly be worth it.

If you really need to get on the course:
Morocco is your best bet if you want to get a round in on your way up the west coast of Africa. This North African country has 20 golf courses but the most famous course is the Robert Trent Jones-designed Royal Dar es Salaam Golf Club in Rabat.

The popularity of golf in Morocco is attributed to the previous King of Morocco, Hassan II, who was described as “an internationally ranked player”.  One fears that the journalist who wrote this may have been to the same school as the North Korean journo who wrote that that nation’s leader, Kim Jong-Il, shot “five holes-in-one during his first try at the game and finished 38 under par”. Jong-Il and Hassan II do, after-all, share a similar human rights record.

Thankfully, modern day Morocco is run in a much more enlightened manner by their new King, Mohammed VI who is more keen on water sports (he founded Morocco’s first surf club after he met a young Moroccan surfer while he was out jet-skiing).

He is still seen on the golf course every now and then, however, so look out for him and his entourage while you’re on the 3 courses and 440 hectares of the Royal Club.

“From the beach meanwhile, might be seen boys swimming into the sea, with light boards under their stomachs. They waited for a surf; and then came rolling in like a cloud on the top of it.”

Captain James Alexander of the Royal Navy on an expedition in Ghana, circa 1832

This quote was ferreted out of the archives by Spike over at wavescape.co.za (the online home of surfing in South Africa).  You should definitely check out the article he wrote around it called Roots of Africa.

It provides an interesting perspective on the origins of surfing that dovetails nicely with one we touched on briefly last year.

Stone of the AfricanSurfer.com expedition doing his best impression of a cloud in Cote d’Ivoire, circa 2007

If you’re in South Africa you absolutely have to check out Golf Punk magazine for prehaps the best photo-spread of the trip so far. We’ll upload an online version soon. Don’t ask how we got a four-page piece in a golf magazine when we didn’t see any golf courses on our 15 month trip.

And, from the other side of the pond, the fashion journal Vanity Fair wrote this piece on our sponsors.

It takes an interesting line on the experience of following our trip online:

For an added dash of masochism, check out the Bantu-sponsored surfers—they’re guaranteed to make you feel terrible about those looming cubicle walls.

Masochism? Ok, I guess if you’re here:

when you could be here:

It may hurt a little…

While we are sure that the volunteers who take up this offer end up doing very important work, we can only assume that, when one has to pay to do volunteer work, then something has gone very wrong with the world.

The Africansurfer crew volunteering smiles and tourist dollars in the Ghanaian surf village of Busua

Instead of paying your money to such an aid organisation, we recommend you e-mail us for a copy of the Ghana Surf and Travel Guide we wrote and then head along the beautiful Gold coast on your own steam. This way you can spend your volunteer money on taking local taxis, eating good local food, visiting slave forts and hiring surf equipment from the guys at the Black Star Surf Shop

Outside another hauntingly picturesque slave fort

You get to experience the best of West Africa and at the same time you contribute to uplifting and empowering the communities you visit.

Stone & Lurks hanging out with Frankie and a visiting surf tourist at The Black Star

To give you an idea of how far this volunteer money will go in West Africa – at the current exchange rate, £27 pounds will give you about 56 Ghanian Cedi. Accommodation in a double room with three excellent meals at the Green Turtle Lodge, an ecolodge near Busua, will cost you at most 30 Cedi.

The Green Turtle Lodge – tourism gem of West Africa and valuable initiative keeping Ghanaian turtles from being ‘chopped’ (eaten)

Throw in a few cold beers at 1 Cedi per beer and you will still have something close to 20 Cedi to spend on your daily activities. In this regard we recommend you take a taxi to Busua beach and hire some equipment at the Black Star Surf Shop.

Fishing boats moored in Dixcove Bay

Oh yes, when you are hiring your equipment, tell the owner of the surfshop, Frankie, that AfricanSurfer.com sent you…