Surfing Safaris in the 21st Century

PHOTO: Surf Las Olas offers surf and yoga getaways that "turn women into girls" (photo courtesy Surf Las Olas)

Let’s go surfin’ now
Everybody’s learnin’ how
Come on and safari with me

(Copyright Brian Wilson and Mike Love)

By the time the Beach Boys caught on to the surfing craze in 1962 and wrote “Surfin’ Safari” the sport had already been around for centuries. In the early 1960s it was spreading like wildfire in Southern California and the craze was strong enough for the Beach Boys to ride the wave to a successful recording career. The sport has continued to grow in popularity worldwide since that time and today there are many tour operators and packagers ready to help travelers incorporate their passion for surfing into travel.

Surfing has been part of Polynesian culture for centuries. The first Europeans to visit Tahiti in 1767 on the ship Dolphin saw surfing. James Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks reported seeing surfers in Tahiti on Cook’s first voyage to Tahiti in 1769. In Mark Twain’s description of Hawaii in “Roughing It” he wrote, “In one place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.”

Jack London discovered what he would call “a royal sport for the kings of the earth” in Hawaii. Staring out over the vastness of the sea at Waikiki Beach, London was astonished to see the emergence of a human figure.

“Where but the moment before was only the wide desolation and invincible roar, is now a man, erect, full-statured, not struggling frantically in that wild movement, not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands. He is a Mercury – a brown Mercury.”

Surfing came to California in 1907 when a Hawaiian surfer named George Freeth was brought to California to demonstrate surfing as a publicity stunt to promote the opening of the Los Angeles-Redondo-Huntington railroad owned by Henry Huntington, whose name is still the name of Huntington Beach.

The Superstudy of Sports Participation Survey conducted by American Sports Data in early 2000 found 1,736,000 surfers in America. A 2002 survey by Boardtrac, a surf industry group, estimated the American surf population to be 2.4 million. International Surfing Association estimates 23 million surfers worldwide.

A Niche Travel Market

Tour operators have packaged surfing into their products in various ways. For sports fans who want to watch the world’s best surfers in action, Qantas Vacations, the private label brand of the Ausralian national carrier, offers packages for the Australian Open for Surfing.

For those who want to experience surfing as participants, a wide variety of offerings are available from many different tour operators for many different regions where surfing is good, and it is good in choice places all over the world, including on both coasts of the US, in Australia, Central America, South America and Africa.

Tico Travel of Costa Rica offers a series of surfing packages at a variety of beaches and lodges in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The company has offices in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Four Lauderdale, Fla.

Surf the Earth is a branch of Go Tours Travel, a travel agency of Queensland, Australia. It also doubles as a tour operator, offering surf packages in the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Cadejo Adventures is a multi-sport adventure tour operator in El Salvador that offers mountain biking, horseback riding and falconry, and Cadejo gives instruction in surfing. Roy Beers, the founder of Cadejo Adventures, and his associates have been surfing all their lives. It’s second nature to them. They will patiently take you through the elements, showing you how to distinguish between a beach break, where the waves are mild and good for beginners, and a point break, which is great adventure for accomplished surfers.

Cadejo’s surfing instructors will show you how to wax the board for traction, push the board out onto the water, hop on lying face down, paddle out, turn around and raise and catch that wave. They’ll train you on the shore for that difficult move when you have to whip your feet up under you from a prone position and stand up. Ideally you have a few days to master it, build up your strength and develop some muscle memory. And then you might actually get up and experience that exhilaration that inspired movies like “Endless Summer."

Surf Las Olas is a California based specialist in surf and yoga trips for women. The company claims to “make girls out of women” at its own special secret town a 40-minute drive from Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. Founded by Bev Sanders, the company gets rave reviews from women from their 20s to their 60s and from virtually all walks of life.

The Surf Las Olas day starts at 7 a.m. with a yoga session on the grounds of the pastoral resort that serves as the headquarters, followed by breakfast in the town and then surfing orientation and instruction from the company staff, a team of accomplished and competitive surfers.

The program has some additional niceties connecting participants to the local town and culture, including cooking classes such as “How To Make Authentic Mexican Guacamole” and “The Art of Mexican Bead Making.”  Massage is also available, and the slow tempo of Mexican beach life is highly therapeutic for stressed out Americans.

Though surfing packages are still a niche market, many of the high-profile tour operators are also including surfing in their packages.

Austin Adventures offers surfing components in its Costa Rica packages as well as its Nicaragua packages.

Learning Journeys powered by Perillo, incorporates surfing components in its Hawaii packages on a custom basis.

Pleasant Holidays offers surfing as an optional activity through its Pleasant Activities division in its packages for hotels as surfing prime spots, such as Moana Surfrider, a Westin Resort at Waikiki, and the Westin Maui.  

Big Five Tours & Expeditions is developing a surfing package for Peru, which should appear on the market in a week or so from this posting.