What is hard-core surf travel today?

Borders, bandidos & ballenas.

Can you drop everything for a run to Indo next week? Is your lifestyle such that you can call in all your promises without a hitch? Can you clear a three-day calendar within hours and be off to Madeira? Can you cancel everything without financial hardship to yourself or your business? If the answer is yes, then you are among the hit and split crowd--surfers who arrange their lives around the surgical strike. You, my friend, represent the new hard-core surf ethic, which stands side-by-side with the still valid ethic of discover, wait, don't tell.

Back in the 70s we went because nobody had gone. We went just because we could. We went because the adventure lay in painting the rainbow, rather than in what you receive at the rainbow's end. Todays travel ideal ignores the rainbow altogether. Today we go straight for the pot of gold.

Recently a good buddy of mine came back from his fifth or sixth trip to Tavarua. I asked him about it and he looked at me and said, "You know, 4-foot Restuarants, 6-foot Cloudbreak. You know, it was Tavarua."

"Right on," I smiled back with a knowing nod.

He didn't really have anything else to say. Neither did I. Most everyone knows what a trip to Tavarua is about. All you have to say is, "I went to Tavarua."

My friend had no stories about bus rides gone bad or seedy drinking establishments or government hassles. In other words, no adventure.

Many contend that it is the travel--surf or no surf--that determines the level of hard-core. The hardship one endures to get from point A to point B. The thing is, relatively nothing is unknown about surf travel these days. Thanks to our determination to discover back in the 70s and 80s, and with the speedy onset of the information age, we're almost out of discoveries (we should have elevated the secrecy ideal to the lofty position of commandment). It's time to capitalize on the fruits of our hard-core travel. We must hit and split.