INDIA

This story first appeared in issue 34 of "Surfer's Path" magazine.
Click HERE for photographs of this trip. (opens in a new window)
Photo's by Emi Mazzoni and Stuart Butler.

"So, let me get this straight. You want me to lounge around a swimming pool for a day with my arm around a pretty girl that I've never met and then you want to give me money for doing this". My luck was in, miracles really do happen, but in a country with bright blue elephants and self proclaimed gods driving Rolls-Royces the miraculous and the ridiculous are nothing to get to excited about. I mean nowhere else but here would someone decide to walk sixty-five kilometres with a full milk bottle balanced on their head and few other people could come up with a business venture that involves renting out underfed babies to beggars hoping to increase the pity factor. And of course it's only here that a court case take 761 years to be settled or unclaimed corpses be stolen from morgues and turned into skeletons to be sold to universities. And could there really be any other place on earth where a man would deem it necessary to stand perfectly still for more than seventeen years! In comparison being paid to hang out with a girl seemed quiet normal.

Fortune and enlightenment are the promises of India. Whether you're a businessman after a slice of the Indian computer boom or a now cynical 60's hippy grumbling about fresh-faced teenage backpackers in search of the miraculous, India welcomes everyone and mystifies all. It's contradictions are immense, it's the seventh biggest industrial nation and one of the worlds largest markets for information technology, yet most of her one billion citizens happily spend the first couple of hours of their day dressing, washing and feeding statues of the gods. And what a plethora of multi-coloured gods there are, mischievous monkeys and musical womanisers, dope smoking planet creators and tiger riding evil. All of these things have, for centuries, made the promise of India a magical potion to westerners, we've happily believed the unlikely and accepted the ridiculous, convinced that only India can show us the truth of our inner selves. Call me cynical but I wasn't buying into the Indian myth, I didn't need to come here on a search for myself, I just wanted to go surfing. I suppose it never really occurred to me that to even consider coming to India to search for surf meant that I too was willing to believe the unlikely and accept the ridiculous, I mean, who'd ever heard of surfing in India?

Maybe the people I'd first approached to accompany me on this journey were even more cynical than myself, because for a long time I couldn't find anyone willing to believe in India and the chance of good surf. It wasn't until I'd started to forget all about the idea that I stumbled upon other believers. Emi Cataldi and Alessandro Maddaleni, two of Italy's best surfers, photographer Emi Mazzoni and fellow English bodyboarder Jon Bowen were all willing to accept the ridiculous thought that after all the years that surfers have scoured the Indian Ocean for waves that no-one had yet thought to take a proper look at the country that had given the ocean its name.

Of course we weren't the first, we'd never claim to be, surfers have been passing through India ever since Gõa became the hash filled heaven at the end of the 60's hippy trail, even Miky Dora is rumoured to have searched for something here. Many of this first wave of surf explorers forgot their boards and lost their minds as they waited in the opium dens of Kathmandu for the flower power revolution to take over the world. Others were more focused and hurried through to Sri Lanka whilst one was ship wreaked into a Maldivian dream. Today the die-hard hippies are largely a thing of the past, but the next generation of travelling surfer is still passing through, en-route to the now famous goals of Sri Lanka and the Maldives or maybe even the distant Indian administered Andaman Islands. Yet, even if you ask someone whose ridden waves in India, what the surf is like you'll get the same vague response every time, "Yeah, there's waves, I only surfed one or two beaches, but I heard stories of some good point breaks further up the coast". Finding someone whose actually ridden one of these points is damn near impossible, the closest we got was when a guy from Saltrock Clothing told us that he'd seen, but not ridden, a good right point deep in the southeast of the country. He gave us some rough directions and told us that he'd heard a rumour that an Ozzy expatriate and a couple of French hippies surfed it every now and then. It wasn't a lot to go on, but maybe, deep down inside of us, we were already starting to believe in the Indian promise that miracles really do happen.

By the time Emi C, Alessandro and myself were offered money to have girls draped over us for our part as extras in a Bollywood extravaganza of kung fu fighting, soppy romance and unforgettable dance scenes we were already firm believers in the unlikely and ridiculous belief that India had good surf. Our journey had begun a few days earlier in Chennai, formerly known as Madras, like a rush of blood to the head the exhilaration of finally being in India had barely had time to settle before we were out of the noise and colour of the city and into the countryside.
We stopped in a small coastal town where, at the end of a dusty main street overlooking the ocean, we found a series of weathered temples and sunset pink granite boulders engraved more than a thousand years earlier with images of daily life long ago. And there, just in front of the temples, in a place where no one had mentioned waves, we saw the perfect surf trip discovery. We stayed for several days, riding a fast and hollow right peeling off the edge of the wall built to protect the temples from wave erosion. We couldn't have asked for anything more, two to four foot barrelling waves, sometimes offering up to three tube sections on one wave before shutting down in-front of a large rock and offshore winds that, thanks to the direction of the trade winds, lasted almost all day. The tide seemed to have quite an effect on this wave, as it rose the swell increased but so too did the rips and frequency of close-outs and then, as it dropped, so did the swell, but to compensate this the waves cleaned up and the currents died away. Whatever we'd heard before we left home about Indian surf we had, on our very first day, discovered a wave that, though not world class, was more than worth travelling for.

After a few days of endless surf sessions physical exhaustion began to overtake us
and so, to give our tired muscles a break, we set off along the coast in a hired van in search of the point break our friend from Saltrock had told us about. Passing by any number of fun beach breaks we found ourselves in a lively Muslim fishing village and there, true to our contacts word, was a long sand spit point. The waves tripped up over a reef twenty metres or so offshore and then rolled off down the side of the point for up to a hundred metres. It clearly need a bit of swell to get it going and even though we only rode it at two foot we could see that it was, potentially, the best wave we found. Our arrival in the village had caused something of a stir and when Alessandro and Emi paddled out into the waves half the village gathered around to see what was going on. Emi was first to his feet and to great cheers of excitement and much applause he rode down the length of the point and kicked out onto to the beach. As he jogged back up the sand to the head of the point the excited masses decided that they too wanted to be surfers. Undeterred by the lack of surfboards in the village the kids found themselves some enormous bits of wood, dragged them down to the waters edge and paddled out with an ease that only born naturals could ever manage. Once sat in the line-up next to Emi and Alessandro the kids, like true plank riders, dominated the peak by frantically paddling into anything that moved. It was, considering they were riding three metre long, thirty centimetre wide bits of wood, about the most impressive bit of first time surfing I'd ever seen.

After a couple of days surfing with the plank riding kids we moved onwards to a tiny dot of Gallic charm in British dominated India. Pondicherry was the most important of France's small Indian possessions and the care and money that had been lavished on the place is still obvious in the fading grandeur of the Mediterranean buildings lining the seafront promenade, but it was more than just a physical difference, the atmosphere seemed somewhat more refined and orderly, some would say dull, whatever, it was very unlike the average Indian city. Many foreigners pass through Pondicherry, sombre and serious they're engaged in something much more than just mere tourism. Pondicherry is one of India's promised towns; enlightenment and inner peace is just a short step away. The ashram in Pondicherry is one of the most popular spiritual centres for westerners in India, as is Auroville, its offshoot just up the coast, which is 'an experiment in international living where men and women can live in peace and progressive harmony with each other above all creeds, politics and nationalities'. Except of course when it involves money, as was demonstrated in the '70's, when a dispute over the control of Auroville's finances led to violence that was only quelled after police and governmental intervention - peace and harmony indeed. It was in Pondicherry that we met up with a long time French resident of Auroville, Patrick. It turned out that Patrick was the famous French surf hippy that we'd heard about before our arrival in India. I was a little disappointed to find that he didn't match the dread locked, bangle-wearing picture I'd had of him in my mind. In-fact it would be hard to meet someone less hippy like, though whatever it is they get up to in Auroville's golf ball shaped meditation dome, a building that sits like a slightly incongruous alien spaceship in rural India, certainly works. We thought Patrick was forty at the most, turned out he was sixty. His journey to Auroville and conversion to surfing is a classic tale from the great days of the hippy trail. Brought up in Paris he was never very happy there and, though he freely admits that the Auroville system is not perfect, he says he'd never return to France and the French system, "Maybe if I'd been born a millionaire I'd have liked France, but take the goodies (products) out of the west and there is nothing. There's much more richness to be had in the simple life". When France finally got to much for him he packed his bags, left a note on his mothers kitchen table saying he was just going off for a bit and bailed for Scandinavia. It was two years before he returned. He didn't actually know where Scandinavia was and so failed to pack any warm clothes, not that this was to matter as, by the end of the first day, he'd got fed up carrying his bag and so threw it and all his luggage away. Eventually the road led him east, to India, where, down to his last few coins he slept in the temple in front of the first spot we'd surfed. Though he'd set out with no particular direction he knew that in India he'd found a place where he could be happy. He finally returned to France, though just for long enough to raise some money, before hitting the trail east again. It was on a train with some friends travelling between Istanbul and Tehran that Patrick met his future wife, a German girl heading to the Pondicherry ashram. Leaving his friends to carry on to Kathmandu without him, he followed her to Pondicherry. They lived in the ashram for a year before making the ten kilometre move to Auroville and it was here, in 1978, thanks to a passing Italian with a surfboard, that Patrick and a couple of friends started surfing. "It was a great discovery for me, it gave me something to look for and friends to share waves with" Like the original surfers in every area their first equipment was primitive indeed, broken old boards scrounged off passing surfers, the stringers mended with aluminium poles. Patrick and his friends did exploratory trips up and down the coast, sometimes sitting on buses for nineteen hours or more. Nowadays he satisfies himself with the beach peaks in Auroville or the occasional journey to the wave in front of the temple. Today Auroville is into its second generation of surfers, they have a hut on the beach to keep their boards in and modern equipment shipped out from Europe or Australia. I wondered what Patrick, as an already deeply spiritual person, got out of surfing. It was a while before he answered, assuming I imagine that I wouldn't understand. "Surfing is a chance to have a free gift from nature, you're taking from nature and afterwards you have to be thankful. It's certainly a spiritual thing, you have to surrender to it and not get worked up over missing a wave or something and then it can become a good tool to being on the road to a certain spiritual life. It's not all you need though, India is full of mystics, gurus and saints who devote their lives to being a spiritual force for other people, but surfing can certainly help you in spiritual gain".

Although we hadn't got any waves in Pondicherry or Auroville it had been an illuminating stay that had done much to change my view in a positive way over the 'spiritual tourists' for which India is so renowned. Another thing for which India is renowned are its railways and for our hop down to the end of the country we abandoned the luxury of the taxis we'd so far been travelling on and entered the whirlpool of an Indian railway station. Indian train stations sit at the centre of every town and, just like a whirlpool, they suck in all forms of life and occasionally spit out the weird and the wonderful. Some people enter an Indian train station and never resurface from them, sleeping on the floors of the station, travelling the tracks in a third class carriage and touting the most unlikely of items to survive. An Indian train station can give you the
opportunity to buy a green plastic walking stick whilst having your shoes polished, your fortune told and incurable diseases cured. As such the arrival of a dozen surfboards and a mountain of camera gear in our second-class carriage did little to raise the eyebrows of our fellow passengers. Eyebrows were, however, raised by the members of our group who had never before experienced an Indian train journey. Jon, after commenting on our carriages similarity to a prison train, decided to take no chances and swallowed a couple of diarrhoea pills thus avoiding any possibilities of having to enter the toilet.

Early the following morning we reached the very southern tip of India, for the spiritual this is a major pilgrimage centre and for middle class Indians a popular holiday spot. Painted onto the rock that marks the very end and beginning of the country is the word 'Danger', though we never discovered if this was a warning not to climb onto the wave lashed rock or a more general statement about the land that lay to the north of it. A couple of hundred metres offshore of this was a small island, utterly dominated by a tower block sized statue of a guy who'd spent a good stretch of time sat on the island in silent meditation - though what he achieved from this was never made clear. Breaking between the dangerous rock and the meditating island was a long, but fat right hand point. However this being the meeting point between the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal an unceasing and near gale force wind was blowing, caused by the mixing of the two seas wildly differing currents and temperatures and resulting in messy and bouncy waves that were decidedly uninviting. We had had high hopes for this bit of coast, the maps had shown lots of bays with potential points that would gather up any swell going. As it was we found nothing but blown out beach breaks and close outs onto dry rock. It was time to head north up the west coast.

Surrounded by towering coconut palms the red and white candy lighthouse is a great place to look out over the beaches of Kovalam, the second biggest beach resort in India after Gõa. Despite its big resort status it's a mellow and low-key kind of place with a string of chilled out cafés and hotels backing onto the sands. It was from the series of small cove beaches that make up Kovalam that we'd heard the most surf
related rumours before we left. However it had never been very positive news, most people regarding the wave as little more than a closeout shore break. I don't know if we got lucky with the sandbars whilst we were there, but we actually found a really playful wave, it was certainly true that many waves did closeout but plenty of them opened up enough to provide good tubes and whackble sections. Before we arrived in India one of our biggest worries had been the prospect of coming to the west coast during the monsoon and discovering nothing but onshore gales and constant rain, as it turned out, the Indian monsoon, about the most consistent and reliable weather pattern in the world, had for the first time in memory failed to arrive. This meant that the west coast was being blessed with hot sunny days and morning offshores and there was certainly no shortage of swell for us to make the most of the conditions. On the biggest day of the trip solid six foot barrels sucked sand up the face and slammed down onto a shallow sandbar with a respectable amount of power. With its swaying palms, girls in bikinis, mellow atmosphere and fun waves Kovalam was more Hossegor than India and in-fact it seemed to be trying in a somewhat half hearted manner to promote itself as India's surf centre with plenty of banged up old boards for rent on the beach and even a local surfer, though with him away on business at the time we weren't lucky enough to meet. This makes Kovalam the ideal place for a surfer travelling around the sites and cities of India to come for a bit of a break and some waves without the hassle of having to cart a board around.

Our intention had been to spend our last few days scouring the coast further north but as so often happens with the best laid plans, they somehow got put aside under the palms of Kovalam. It didn't matter though, people come to India to search for many things, some find nothing, some find the miraculous and some find themselves. Us, we'd found waves and a place to be happy. Just around the corner could have been the perfect wave, we'll never know, but maybe you could. All you have to do is believe in the unlikely and accept the ridiculous and who knows what you'll find. And that, of course, will always be the promise of India.