| Off The Map |
 Rethinking latitude and longitudeFSM international correspondent goes MIA The modern art of surf travel has evolved into an overtly accessible, expensively pre-packaged monster. With a click of your mouse you can have a ten-day, all-inclusive boat trip to the Mentawais, complete with air-conditioned cabins, all the latest surf videos and a high-speed Internet connection. But for some adventure seekers, a week in a high-end surf resort doesn’t get their blood pumping, and can even leave a foul taste in their mouths knowing the same amount of money can bank you a month or two on the open road. Beau Flemister is one of the true adventure seeking few. The 25-year-old surfer from Kailua, O‘ahu has been traveling far and wide for uncrowded surf much of his life. Beau has been to nearly 40 countries in the last five years and earned a degree in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He has expanded his breadth of knowledge by studying abroad in Chile and Spain and generally tries to work for six months at a time to fuel six month jaunts around the world in search of empty lineups. From tiny beachside villages to desperate and dirty slums, Beau has stuck his neck into more corners of the globe than Google Earth. 
The regularfoot underground charger is not afraid to put himself in some heavy situations to score. He travels alone, preferring to engrain himself in the local culture and develop relationships along the way. Beau has graciously decided to hand over his journal to FSM and keep correspondence coming our way whenever he can get to a town with electricity. From the Melanesian Islands to Sri Lanka, Africa to Iceland and over to the Caribbean, Beau plans on stopping off in landlocked conflict zones as well as water logged impact zones, scoring uncrowded surf and expanding his worldly intellectual pursuit. —KW MelanesiaThe simplicity and oddity of coastal village lifeBy Beau Flemister A solid week of incredible surf has gone by after settling into an obscure but idyllic village by the sea in far-western Melanesia. The village, being situated on a point, has a long, reeling right on one side and a left, usually a foot bigger though not quite as perfect as the right, on the other. The waves have been in the 3- to 6-foot category everyday since I've arrived. There is no electricity or running water, or ice to cool drinks, but I believe that this village is about as close as you'll ever come to a surfer's paradise for $10 a day, including meals. 
This is just an average village in this part of the Third World, but what is just ordinary to Melanesians is plain shocking to me. The village gets maybe twenty visitors (all surfers) each year and foreigners are dubbed the endearing and curious title wali, pronounced vah-lee. In my case it translates to white man. Walking to the surf spot at any given time of the day I’m greeted by a warm, “Morning, wali,” or “Good afternoon, wali.” It’s a different world here: Bathing in the river or at the well, squatting (with the fellas) at the seashore to defecate, sleeping in your own sweat under a stifling mosquito net while rats scurry around you in the darkness; The sight of blood is everywhere, but its just the residue of a national addiction to chewing the beloved betel nut; Hearing the rhythmic chatter-babble of Melanesian pidgin English; The beautiful women adorned with tribal-related facial tattoos; The constant smell of cooking-smoke, fecund jungle vegetation and recently chopped wood; The village’s perpetual soundtrack—a constant slush of waves lapping on the shoreline; Dogs yelping painfully from a sneak attack by malicious children in the distance. I wake up, surf, eat breakfast, read, surf again, eat dinner, and in between is life, a village life that is a beautiful redundancy. Nevertheless, regardless of village life slightly layered by poverty, every Melanesian must play in order to make sense of survival. The sea is their arena for pleasure and release. Men, women and children all surf on halves or quarters of broken boards left over by wali. Some have the luxury of being given unbroken boards. On feet and belly, it takes a village to know the feeling. But even before the arrival of fiberglass and foam, the elders speak of riding waves, forming bodyboards to ride in pleasure or even riding in from fishing perches made from the bark of sago palms. 
Surfing, much like the Polynesians, has been a part of their culture for centuries. Elders speak of old women who still posses the gift of calling in big waves during storms, a power intriguingly used out of anger. It is a power used by reciting a language to the gods, a language also used by men with this wisdom to summon protector animals, like the Hawaiian ‘aumakua. Ironically, after an older man told me of these things, with all seriousness he said, “But these days, with no tribes warring, the spells are normally used during soccer games.”
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