Taking the West Road - A moto-surf adventure
We have decided to re-publish all of the material we have from the motorbike surf trip we did in 2015. Some of you may have seen this at the time, but the website has been down since 2017 so it seemed appropriate to re-publish it now. We’re going to release an entry every few days, or once a week perhaps, so please join us on a trip down a memory dirt road which, at the end of this, will hopefully lead to fun times in the sea together!
“Essentially the plan is to ride small motorbikes from Santiago, Chile to California over the next year, hugging the coastline as much as possible. We will pass through 12 countries in total and should clock up around 15,000 miles.
We have a really small budget; a lot of which has already been spent on the bikes so we need to camp, couch surf and exchange work for accommodation as much as possible along the way. We don’t speak much Spanish; barely enough to get by, so a big part of the trip for us is to learn. We both surf so leaving boards at home wasn’t an option; the boards will be coming with us, attached by racks to the bikes. We have small bikes and a lot of luggage so we aren’t going anywhere fast.
Sally and I both had careers, bought a flat, finally bought a reliable van, got married, had a few cool surf trips; in many ways things were going really well but I was working as an art and photography teacher in a secondary school and after four years in education, if I am honest, I was heading towards a pretty dark place. I was uninspired, stressed and really ground down by the whole thing like so many other teachers. To add to this, like every other person that lives by the sea and works full time in winter, we could hear the waves but there were no daylight hours to surf, we would go a month at a time without waves. We both knew that something needed to change.
The idea of the trip simply came about by thinking about how we could work less and surf more. Although we initially thought that all our responsibilities made that harder, we realised that this was the perfect time to do something. We spent the year working hard and saving money. Eventually, I went down to working 3 days a week at school and started working hard to build up a client base for my freelance photography and video work, this was really inspiring and I wanted to push my work to new places. A trip with a focus on surf and photography seemed like a great adventure.
As surfers, you really need your own transport, the idea behind the bikes was the fact that when your on a motorbike you aren’t separated from the places your travelling through which is a really nice way to get around. A car or van would struggle with the access we need to surf and feel like we were travelling in a bubble.This whole thing has been an interesting journey for Sally too, she’s behind it 100% and has definitely changed a lot in order for this to happen, learning to ride a motorbike was just one of those changes. It has been really good for her too, she quit her job in education and spent the summer life guarding and teaching surfing, I have never seen her so happy. I think we are both happiest when we are outside.
We are excited about all the point breaks and waves down here. We really don’t have a set itinerary or definite route to follow, already we are realising how futile it is to plan a trip like this down to the detail. Santiago was only supposed to be for a few days but we’ve been here for two weeks, living with a Chilean Family in a house at the foot of the Andes while we wait for a strike to finish and the backlog of bureaucracy to be over in order to get licence plates for our bikes. This has been a really positive experience, given us the opportunity to meet amazing people that we know will help us along the way.
Travelling over land, 15,000 miles at 50/600MPH offers an amazing opportunity to witness pretty much the length of a continent first hand as it changes; the people, food, landscape, colours, and climates. Not having a lot of money always puts us in interesting situations when we travel. We have heard camping under the stars in the Atacama Desert is amazing, riding through the mountains of Colombia will be an experience and Sally seems to think that she will settle in Central America somewhere with a brood of ferrel children in the jungle. We have the freedom to move at our own pace and I guess we won’t know what is ‘must see’ until we see it. Surfing is definitely fundamental to the trip, we want to surf as much as we can. We’re really excited to see what these countries have to offer in terms of waves, there are so many possibilities. We are also really excited to meet people here, get a feel for local life and hopefully through my photography and Sally’s surf instructor skills we will be able to exchange work for accommodation which is always a great way to see local life.
Surfing is the thing that anchors us here and gives us a reason to do this trip, it is the thing that decides our route and hopefully will take us to places that are interesting and beautiful. However cheesy it sounds, I cant wait to get fully in tune with the sea and have it decide our lives for us for a while- tides, swell and wind.”
- Tom - Nov 2015.