Places We're Going, Places We've Been

Revisiting Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson’s wanderlust-inducing African odyssey

- Matthew B. Shaw

“We’d all paid our dues at various frontiers,” wrote Southern California surfer Kevin Naughton in a dispatch from Africa published over the course of three issues of SURFER Magazine in 1975. Or was it Naughton’s traveling partner, Southern California photographer Craig Peterson who wrote that? The duo famously penned their epic travelogues in the third person, with the narrator attributing quotes to both Naughton and Peterson, so we can’t be sure.

In any event, in Part II of Naughton and Peterson’s Africa feature, the line about paying dues serves to paraphrase a campfire conversation between an international gaggle of surfers—our two American narrators, Tito from Brazil (whose epic 4x4 rig makes him the OG #VanLife acolyte), and a group of Australian surfers led by 1973 Australian National Champion, Richard Harvey. It’s a reference specifically to issues related to customs enforcement (“border hassles,” as our narrators call them).

But taken out of context, the line could easily serve as the summation of our shared experiences as traveling surfers. It’s the gist of the stories we tell when—like Naughton, Peterson, Tito, and Harvey did nearly 50 years ago as waves thundered behind them on that African beach—we encounter surfers from other parts of the world. Every surfer can relate on the subject of dues paid in exchange for waves; greasing a highway patrolman, evacuating a stomach bug, wearing a piece of exposed reef or a brutal, local-hootch-induced hangover, etc.