Disneyland

Every now and again I’m reminded that no matter how messed up things get, there’ll be a little sequence of events that remind me that everything is in order. That even though life may get a little repetitive, if you allow yourself to open up to the possibilities and just go with it and you may just have an experience of a lifetime.

- Scott McKercher

This was one such trip - a trip to surfers Disneyland. Iballa Moreno is an old mate from my past life as a professional windsurfer. Which is part of Iballa’s current life, for even though she’s just cracked 40, she’s the current women’s wave world champ and been pushing the world’s best in SUP as well for quite some time. Basically she’s a legend.

We have this love-hate relationship, like we just love to give each other shit. We’ve hung out a lot over the years at various places around the world and she’s been niggling me to go to Indo on a surf trip for the last couple of years. Despite constantly competing between the two disciplines, she just wanted to go surf.

The other link of this seemingly pre-destined chain of events started when I was with another old mate, Rourkey, in Bangkok. We’d just arrived, booked into our hotel and were having a beer on the veranda waiting for our rooms to be ready, and I was talking about how this other fella we knew, Pete, was living in Bangkok. So who at that precise moment should come walking down the street? Yep, Pete.

That led to catching up for a few more beers later on with talk coming around to the fact that he’s living in Sumatra and that there’s “this wave”. Hardly anyone surfs it and the pics on his phone had me pretty excited.

I told this to Iballa and she fast tracked everything. With me being reluctant to commit to anything these days, she had me committing to a date when we would meet up. I wanted to get some footage of young Wes Fry, so I booked his ticket too and there was no backing out.