DISCOVERS THE OTHER SIDE OF INDIA
Surfing by Dave Rastovich and Mitch Coleburn
Photos by Dustin Humphrey
Words by Nathan Myers

Taylor Steele and Dustin Humphrey crisscrossed India twice to get this photo — and in too many ways, it’s exactly what you’d expect. An obscure aerialist punting a photogenic air-reverse on soggy mushburger waves with a magnificently exotic backdrop.
Novelty surf. We’ve been playing this game since Bruce Brown’s Endless Summer. This is India.
But turn the pages of this story and you may find out that’s there is life beyond the novelty destination, you just have to push a little further.

Dustin is staring at the cracked, Internet café monitor like it’s Chinese algebra. Pained. Tired. Determined. Outside the door, India is pulsing in the dusky streets. Women in bright saris. Vendors selling sweet samosas. A theatric swirl of ancient cultures and modern influence. This is the trip he’s been planning for five years. And now that he’s here, he’s planning it again.

India was the holy grail. Unmatched culture, postcard scenery and nutty, seat-of-your-pants getting-there-ness. A massive untapped coastline. Huge swell exposure. Minimal surf culture. And if the waves were famously brown, mushy and gutless, the backdrops all but made up for it.
Five years later, we reach the Indian coast and find ourselves staring into a grim realization. Mushy brown waves breaking beneath the magnificent statue we saw in a surf magazine last year. Novelty trips had lost their novelty.
But Dustin keeps going. He drags our local guide to an Internet café.
“What else have you got?” he said, downloading a dated version of GoogleEarth.
Just when you think you’ve gone far enough, you always need to go a little further.

Rasta packed little more than a pair of boards and a ukulele. He was teaching himself to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
He was plucking this tune in the airport when we met him, and he was strumming it as we desperately GPS’d the coast for undiscovered slabs. He practiced it some more sitting on the beach while Kalani hacked and punted away at the brown-water beachies considered India’s best known spot (we only saw one other surfer, who happened to be someone Dave knew from home). These waves weren’t impressing anyone.
A local told us about a spot. Big. Hollow. Blue. “But it’s too hard for you to get there,” he added. “The area is restricted to foreigners. You can’t even drive there.”
The more he said “no,” the more we needed to get there.
So we called travel agents, helicopter pilots, charter planes, train conductors and pack-mule rentals trying to scheme a way in. We left messages for the Minister of Tourism, telling him we were from The Discovery Channel. The Minister, it turns out, was a big fan of The Discovery Channel. We had our permission.
We packed. Took a tuk-tuk. A plane ride. A charter van to a train station. And a rusty, roach-infested cargo train for two days while the locals stared at our obvious out-of-placeness. Getting there.
Check out SURF TIME MAGAZINE for full story