“There is no hotel called AirBnB at this address,” the immigrant official snapped, glaring at the pleading phone in my hand. His hair stood loosely upright and his eyes flickered with frustration as the people banked up behind me. Another flight had arrived, he didn’t have time for this. I smiled and tried to think of a way to explain how the most lucrative hotel business in the world worked. I was ushered into another line and faced with a new prospect. “It’s my friend’s hou

I flicked idly through the used books in the dank enclave of a second-hand bookshop beneath Pike Place Markets in the city centre of Seattle. I picked up The Alchemist, wondering if I should read it again. I could hear the shopkeeper’s voice commenting in jest on an elderly woman’s comments loaded with innuendo. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I couldn’t buy a book. My bank card had been frozen earlier in the day, skimmed in an ATM and the last remnants of my mon

Image: Todd Glaser My mum got annoyed at me yesterday afternoon for the racket the live streaming of the awards ceremony from Portugal was causing in her lounge room. "Why does it have to go on for so long?" she squawked. "Muuu-ummm he just won the World Title," I whined back. "Why do they have to make such a big deal out of it? It's not as if he has a message or anything, it's only sport." How dare she, I fumed as I shut my laptop to Rosie Hodge grappling for a touch of John

I love people who break boundaries. I'm not just talking about exceeding performance expectations but actually split apart social, gender, racial, athletic fences and whatever other hurdles might have been built to keep them in a particular box. This is why I fucking love Tyler Wright. Even more so now she is the World Champ. The thing about Tyler is that she seems to have cracked the formula of the surf industry and made it work for herself. There are no bill boards with her

Remember that time some dude from England tried to crowdfund Greece and raised like 80 million dollars? Remember how everyone was so generous? Well, now I need you, my loyal blog readers, to help me help Mini. Mini is the kid from the previous post with a big future in surfing and very little resources to get there. That's why Saltwater Pilgrim has started a crowdfund campaign to help him! It's not a lot of money, but it's very important, life changing money. So if you want t

I used to hate Jordy Smith. Not with a passion or anything, just in the way that I didn’t want him to get through heats because the made up idea of him in my head wasn’t good and I once saw him doing chin ups in a bar after he got knocked out of the Jbay Open, a reaction that screamed “dick”. That was until I ran into him at a point break in Mozambique and now, now he is my favourite surfer. This story isn’t even really about Jordy. This story is actually about two brothers,

Ripcurl recently revived their old campaign of ‘The Search”. They brought back to life their deep seeded ethos that surfing and exploration go hand in hand. They sell this lifestyle loaded with idyllic beauty, foreign lands, palm trees and jeweled seas. However, what they failed to highlight in their perfectly sound tracked shots of Alana and friends laughing their heads off then getting vertical in tiny bikinis, and I suppose what many people fail to bring up all together, i

“See dis,” our driver waved enthusiastically at a faded red and white statue as we flew by. “Dis San Sebastian, he my hero when I was small,” he explained, his energy making up for his broken English. “What did he do?” “He have many story, but don’t worry about dem. He good rider. Horserider.” “I like dis.” His head wobbled slightly as he swung our surfboard packed van onto a crowded highway, my eyes drifted into the lazy chaos outside. Tuk tuks, the transport so nice they n

I always sit on the backwards seat On the right side Facing the wrong way The backwards seat sometimes feels bad because it faces the back Wrong way When you sit there you can see everyone’s faces looking at you Or not The backwards seat sometimes wishes it faced the front like all the others But sometimes not People don’t always choose it But it knows it doesn’t have to compete All the others are just seats But the backwards seat is the backwards seat. #surf #sydney

In parts of North Africa, mostly on the Mediterranean side, is a tribe called the Bedouin people. You may have heard of them, or at least their tents. They are a traditionally nomadic people, with exceptions provided by governments in the region for tax paying and border crossing due to their cultural structure revolving heavily around non-stationary existence. The way their social systems work is very complex, with vertical, horizontal, diagonal and non-linear hierarchies, i