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Where the waves were, tourism was minimal so you were always directly interacting with locals in a non- commercial way. It was beautiful. Even France, Spain and Portugal were considered a long way to go and only a few friends had been there in the 70’s. Excluding the many surfers who bought brand new VW vans in Germany - drove through Europe, surfing their way to Morocco, filling up the voids with hash, shipping the van to Canada and then driving across the border and down to Southern California - there weren’t many who travelled.
There was no one to ask about where to go for surf, who to see, and where to stay. You were on your own. You had to go see for yourself to really believe the fantastic stories you had heard. After my first surf trip to Hawaii in 1971, I realized that the surf in California was a joke. Surfers in La Jolla would say that the wave called Big Rock was just like the Pipeline in Hawaii, They had no idea. Pipeline was like a steroid version of Big Rock.
We lived in a world of visual fantasy that was presented to us through Surfer Magazine and some of the surf movies such as The Endless Summer. There was no other surf media. In the 70’s I traveled to Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, South Africa, Mauritius, Reunion, France, Spain, Bali, Costa Rica and all up and down the California coast. All of these countries had better surf than California.
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