Malaria, Mud, Jungles

Shaun Ward, Macaronis

For our second No Fear boat trip of 2006, we wanted to surf the best waves in the warmest water and in the best conditions. In other words, we wanted to live the dream. If you want the ultimate surf trip, you go to Indo, so that's where we were going.

And so begins my tale of Jack London-like high seas adventure...After deciding on Indonesia, we needed to figure out who we could put up with for 10 days on a boat. It wasn't easy. We put pen to paper and made an invite list and on it we wrote the following names: Josh Montgomery, Shaun Ward, Randall Paulson, Mikey Bruneau, Mike Dodd, Homer Henard, Dave Nelson, Britt Galland and his kid Britton. So with that we then put out an APB (All Points Bulletin) and told everyone: WHETHER IT BE BY PLANE, TRAIN OR AUTOMOBILE, BE IN SINGAPORE WITH ALL YOUR SHIT ON JULY 23!!! (Yeah, we know you can't get to Singapore by car, but it felt cool to say it!) The surfing gods must have been smiling down upon us because, somehow, someway, everyone made it to Singapore. From there we climbed on a plane to Padang. After two days of traveling and waiting around, and after everyone got on the plane, I started to relax a little bit. The only big worry I had left was that the people in Indo remembered to pick us up at the airport and take us to the hotel. You never know, you know?

We made it to Padang, but per Murphy's law, something went wrong. The boards didnąt come through baggage claim. Travel for 72 hours and the @$&*# boards donąt show up. At least our connection in Indo managed to have it together and picked us up and got us over to the hotel. So it was 24 hours of lame card games and stuff like that. At one point we heard there was a surf shop in town, so we went to check it out. We walked in and there was a huge cardboard picture of Homer. All the locals recognized him and started freaking out. They mobbed him like he was Brad Pitt and took photos and fetched autographs. When we got back to the hotel we found out the boards had arrived so we were set. Next stop: The boat.