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Surf shop guy/Law student’s MISSION: Incorporate surfing into an otherwise stereotypical university student Eurotrip, Pt 3 |
It is often said by aging hippies that the destination is not what is important; it is the journey that counts. Aging hippies are wrong. Nothing has ever reinforced to me the superiority of the destination to the journey than the mission myself and two other companions undertook to get from Paris to Hossegor. While meandering in a lovely Parisian park in the flirtatious warmth that only spring can provide as we awaited our 11.11pm train from Austerlitz to Biarritz was tolerable to say the least, the journey quickly deteriorated after that. The thing that is so wrong about journeys is the tendency for a multitude of little issues and problems to combine and make them arduous, such as having to wait for four hours in a McDonald’s before heading to the train station to kill time, having to then wait again in a slow-moving line to receive our tickets, or even having to pay 50 cents to use a public bathroom (it was a pretty nice bathroom to be fair). While each of these things may seem minor, after a day of waiting impatiently for 11.11pm to arrive, they somehow conglomerated to cast a frustrating shadow over the journey.
However, the good humour and patience of my fellow Euro-trippers made the combined 13 hours of waiting for our train (we had to check out of our room at 10am) bearable. Sadly, all the good humour of Russell Brand and the patience of the Dalai Lama combined would not be enough to make the overnight train ride anything other than brutal. In my relative ignorance to the exquisite art of Euro-tripping, I assumed that reclining seats would suffice as beds for our overnight train ride and therefore had purchased them, it seems I may have underestimated either our resilience or the comfort of the seats (most likely both). As the obese old man seated in front of me snored relentlessly, and the youthful Frenchman behind me sneezed and coughed sounding more like a rusty chainsaw than a human being, I focused completely on my destination and tried to allow the tantalizing thought of the vast, nude beaches and the epic sand-bottomed A-frames of Hossegor guide me to a peaceful dream. Somehow this tactic actually worked, I was ushered into salvation from the horrific journey by the thought of my beautiful destination. Sadly, I was not able to inhabit the sanctuary of my dream-world for long, I was awoken by the loss of feeling in both of my legs due to the awkward sleeping position the reclining chair of doom had contorted my body in to. It was almost light though, and I knew that once our train reached Biarritz at 6.50am we would only have a 40 minute bus ride to the deceptively far away Bayonne train station and from there another one hour bus ride to Hossegor, the place that made these 22 hours of pain between checking out of our hotel and arriving at the famed beach completely worthwhile. Destination 1 – Journey 0.
A day has past since our epic journey and arrival, currently the weather is a stupendous 22 degrees and sunny at 9:40am and will stay the same all day with the only alteration being a slight increase in heat. What’s more, the surf is cranking this morning. I am hoping to venture out soon enough, once my friends have awoken and have gotten over their anger that I have just devoured their chocolate croissants, and am equally as hopeful that my second surf at the prestigious break goes a bit better than my debut there yesterday. Although the overall euphoria of being in Hossegor at long last as well as the excitement of having my first surf for a month had given me the physical energy to pull on my wettie and dash out to the lineup, the mental fatigue of having minimal sleep and of traveling for the past day had left me a liability in the water. I almost dropped in on about three angry Frenchmen, whose anger was exacerbated by my inability to understand what they were saying to me, and found it increasingly difficult to find the right takeoff spot. However, after a couple of punchy little right-handers I started to find my rhythm and headed further inside in the attempt to snare a set wave. After waiting patiently for the locals (who absolutely rip by the way) to take their turn, a lovely little right-hander came my way. I was almost trembling with glee at my luck as I saw the wave begin to wall up down the line and prepared for the drop, unfortunately that was all I got to experience of my wave of the day as a beautiful French girl had just relentlessly dropped in and faded me. She then proceeded to absolutely annihilate the wave all the way down the lineup. Not only had I been burned by a girl, she was about a hundred times better than me as well. Of course there was no chance I was going to attempt to exact revenge, she was a superior surfer, a local and pretty good looking as well, I had to merely bite my lip and continue searching for another keeper, unfortunately it never came. That did not bother me though, being out in the warm water with my friends in France with the slowly descending sun casting an angelic golden light over not only the lineup but the huge metal boulders, remnants of German bunkers, that sit obnoxiously on the beach we were surfing at that act as a perennial reminder of the troubled history behind the country we are in, was more than enough for me.
Returning to the hotel exhausted and slightly sunburned, my two friends and I realised we had lost our room key but were too fatigued to care or look for it with any real conviction. After using primarily sign language to communicate with the hotel manager that we needed a spare key, we crashed onto our mercifully soft beds and drank a pint each of a Dutch beer that was 7.9% alcohol unbeknownst us. Perhaps it was the higher alcohol content combined with our exhaustion or perhaps it was the satisfaction that we had been vindicated after our epic mission from Paris to Hossegor, but we fell asleep then and there at about 7pm with no thought of dinner. It had been a long day preceded by an even longer night, but the destination had made the journey completely worthwhile.
– Hugo Dean
