Mexico. A country filled with amazing food, beautiful people and perfect waves sprinkled with the heavy reality of murderous drug lords, kidnappings, robberies and the mafia. While all these things are a part of Mexico, the waves still remain a constant. It´s all about being at the right place at the right time. I plan on being at the right place at the right time, all the time.

ARRIVING

This place is just so unbelievably diverse in every way. There is no problem with swine flu at all. There are still the odd (and I mean ODD) person walking the streets in the city with a face mask on – but I think that is for pollution as much as it is fear of copping the sick pig. When I drove out of the airport there was a girl of about 15 years old dead and bloody in the middle of the road. Heavy. There was no roped off area around her and the police were questioning some really dodgy looking crew on the side of the road while cars swerved around her mangled body. When we swerved to dodge her I made eye contact with her. A surreal and eerie moment which will haunt me forever. Then we got passed all that and stopped at traffic lights to witness a bunch of guys in bandanas robbing a petrol station with a truck of army guys out the front. That was so heavy becuase we could see it unfolding and I wanted the taxi to bail so we didn´t get shot but he and all the rest of the traffic stopped to watch it unfold like a game of cat and mouse. It ended in the cops running in and the crims surrendering their tiny pistole while being pistol whipped by shotguns, machine guns and uzis. FULL ON first night in Mex thats for sure...

Loving it here it is definately all it´s cracked up to be...

Following Frames - I woke up early and super excited about my first day on the Mexican coastline to find a crazy, hollow, empty rivermouth setup with rights breaking flawlessly in about 30 cm of clear warm water. The problem was that the Airline had lost my surfboards, I had been told that they had turned up in Italy of all places and there were no local surfers in this tiny town for the whole day for me to photograph. I ran around the town at 7:30am with a wod of pesos yelling: ¨Neccesito un tabla de surf!¨ (I need a surfboard) and I was greeted by an old man with an 8ft pin tail Hawaiin style gun. I then realised that I was going to be shooting empty waves all day - but I suppose it could have worse. I shot the river mouth and then met a few fisherman who had been passing me all day to check out their catch.

Following Frames - Puerto Escondido. Even though it is the wrong time of year for this place to work it´s still a lot of fun tackling the ferociously heavy waimea-like shorebreak. The backwash at this place is like no other place I have seen and it creates these huge fans of water which explode out of the top of the wave as it curls.

Bloggers Bio:

What draws us to travel? For me it is all about new experiences and leaving a zone where I have become so comfortable. Nothing makes me feel more alive than knowing that I can go far away from my world, meet a person who doesn’t speak my language and get on like a house on fire.

The ocean is the worldly source of these human experiences and a common ground in which to build comrades. The location is Mexico and the goal is to show the world photographs, which to my knowledge have never been seen. I am going to invite you into undocumented areas of this coastline, where with respectful permission it will be revealed for it’s oceanic beauty, yet remain in the state I experienced it.

8 short months in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, 2 surfboards, 2 cameras 3 lenses and no shoes; what will come out of this can only be remarkable. All I hope is that I come home with some photographic evidence of the waves I have seen, the people I have met and the experiences I have had.

Tom Batrouney