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Every morning, if you’re like me you have been waking up to your Instagram feed and seeing a bunch of friends and family living it up in Europe. Whether it’s Mykonos, Rome, Lagos or London, it looks like they’re having a lot of fun on their travels. The FOMO is a real thing right now in Oz.
For this week’s Tracks Flashbacks, we take it back to 1978, where Tracks breaks down what a surfer should expect on their voyage to the continent during the late 70’s.
This archive featured in Tracks Magazine Issue no. 94 (July, 1978).
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EUROPE
It’s a lot bigger than it looks in your high school world atlas and to catch good waves you’ve got to travel far and wide. Maybe pick up a good deal on a kombi outside the Australian or American embassies in London from some traveller who’s done his share of miles and needs the dough to fund his next intercontinental hop. But then the question arises, can you afford the bloody petrol money? At $1.50 a gallon a cruise around seven or eight countries won’t turn up too many cheap waves-but the variety is amazing.
Try Ireland, the west coast, where the points, reefs and rivermouths go largely unridden, copping huge sets from way out in the storm- ridden North Atlantic. Or the coasts of south west Wales or north Cornwall and Devon-not uncrowded perhaps, for the poms are into surfing in spite of the cold and fickle seas, or the west coast of Scotland where at midsummer you can be surfing at midnight and the sun’s still shining! Although it’s close enough to the arctic circle up there to see the midnight sun, the area isn’t as freezing as you might think-at Machrihanish the warm Gulf Stream current creates a climatic pocket which allows palm trees to grow!
If Ireland’s Guinness and the poms penchant for warm ale doesn’t turn you on, get on the waves, wine and cheese trail to France- again, although south-west-France has its fair share of waves, it also has its share of surfers too but the water’s warmer and France has a style all of its own. Wouldn’t you voulez-vous too?
Or off into Spain where the north coast spots, among them one of the best lefts in the world, have Tlkienesque mountains as a magical backdrop. It’s a trip in itself to be up there as the sun sets; precipitous drops at the roadside, mist hanging in the pines and in the valley floors and above you, the red and purple lightshow on the clouds which seem close enough to reach out and touch. Up there only the sky is higher than you are and the peaks of the thousands of mountains seem to stretch on forever.
To Portugal then-to it’s bracing cold water tubes (the Gulf Stream doesn’t touch here) and to a different cultural divergence yet again. Here, in the coblestone streets and harboursides, cackling fishwives dressed all in black and as wide as they’re tall will press on you soft corn-bread rolls and sardines, fresh cooked over charcoal braziers and straight off the last boat in. And the only people you’ll see in the water are maybe one or two other travellers-Portugal remains un- touched as yet by surf fever but don’t be surprised if your antics in the tube attract a crowd of onlookers. For the footloose, the road goes on-south to Morocco’s excitement and mystery or down to Lisbon or Cadiz to hop on a boat to the Canary Isles which lie off the coast of Spanish Sahara in northern Africa. And if you haven’t got the petrol money-take a motor bike or one of those weird European motor scooters on the train. Anything to close up the distances which look so small on the high school atlas.
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