Sunset at Beng Beng. Photo courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
The year is 1986. I’m in a parking garage downtown Providence RI with a handful of friends, grinding, sliding and ollie-ing our way through the descending levels, bouncing off the walls and dodging rent-a-cops as we slingshot out into the pre-dusk golden hour settling in on the city. There’s a skate competition tomorrow in Richmond Square, put on by Peter Pan, the owner of our local surf/skate shop, The Watershed. My PVD friends have gotta get home and I have to be on an 8:10 bus back to misery. For now. That was a typical Saturday afternoon spent with my buddy Alex and the motley crew of street skaters that we ran with at the time.
Alex in said parking garage, downtown Providence circa 1986
Spin the clock forward a few decades and we’re at it again, but this time we’re on surfboards, where the landings are typically a little more friendly to aging ossified bodies. But not always. This particular time my 52 year old bald head hit the razor sharp, protozoa-laced reef at Burger World, a surf spot on the opposite side of the planet in the Mentawai islands, Indonesia. The Mentawais are an island chain located off the coast of Western Sumatra, not close to anything that even remotely rhymes with ‘hospital.’ Anything more than a flesh wound out there can quickly escalate to a serious predicament if you’re not careful. I wasn’t the only one in our group either; within a few days we had amassed an impressive array of bruises, sprains and cuts of varying depth and severity. Thankfully, between our agonized-over first aid kits and our gracious host’s specialized skill set, we didn’t need to learn the Bahasa word for stitches.
Me at Nipussi, somewhere around mid-trip (Hat and booties were holding bandages in place!). Photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
About 18 months prior, Alex had started a group email with a bunch of us aging intermediate surfers with semi-adventurous souls, and the concept of this Odyssean pilgrimage slowly came together. The idea was to have an authentic surf trip experience, but not too authentic. Somewhere between Timmy Turner’s feral Second Thoughts and the Four Seasons. Thanks to a copious amount of research and careful consideration by Alex, we decided on a little exclusive bungalow-surf camp by the name of Alaia Mentawai, run by two amazing human beings, Natsuko and Dave. It’s pretty bohemian, but it’s straight up five stars if you zoom out and look where it actually is. There’s a pool and a ping-pong table, with three pretty decadent meals a day, so it’s pretty plush for the Mentawais.
1) The view right out front from the deck, 2) Two pro surfers in one picture: Japanese up and comer Riku Matsumoto (foreground) and Torren Martyn (background), 3) The pool at sunset.
To reverse engineer the trip, Alaia is on a microscopic island named Masokut, which is about an hour’s boat ride from Siberut island, which is a 3.5 hour ferry ride from Padang, which is a two hour flight from Jakarta. Jakarta is another two hour flight from Singapore, which is a 21 hour flight from Los Angeles. Our entire group was made up of Californians except for myself, so tack on another 8 hour cross country flight for yours truly and you can begin to get an idea of the travel considerations. I could probably make the entire trip over again and I still wouldn’t be able to grasp the whole time zone weirdness when combined with the International Date Line crossing. Something about losing a day and getting it back later. Whatever. Suffice to say it’s mind-bending.
What’s also mind-bending are the waves. We traveled in October which is considered shoulder season, meaning the swell is either diminishing or rising (it peaks in July/August, which is winter in that particular part of the world). This turned out to be extremely good news for me, because if the waves were much bigger, I would have had to stay in the boat. It was consistently about 4-5 feet, with slightly overhead waves being about the biggest we saw for the 10 days we were there.
Good Times. Photo courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
Far off storms in the Indian Ocean generate long-period swells that travel across thousands of miles of open ocean before reaching the shallow reefs found along the land masses and islands of Sumatra and Java, where they come to a glorious, rhythmic finale in the form of long, almost never-ending turquoise wave forms with sloping, dune-like faces or hypnotic barreling tubes.
Good Times, Bank Vaults, Four Bobs, Nipussi (X2), Hideaways. Photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
Jonah Riemers on an impossibly glassy afternoon. Photo courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
As an East coast surfer, I’m accustomed to waves that are whipped up by wind and storms usually within a couple hundred miles, meaning that they don’t have a great deal of time to generate power, which is what waves do over long stretches of ocean. Given space and time, they organize and spread apart, creating a longer period between them, which translates to them packing more of a punch. In the Pacific and Indian Ocean, it’s typical for waves to have a 15 second or even longer period, as opposed to the East coast of the US, where we’re lucky to see 12 seconds from a (relatively) far off hurricane swell. That’s a long way of saying that a head high wave at Burger World or Bank Vaults is a whole different animal from the same stature wave in Rhode Island.
Somewhere mid-trip at Four Bobs. Photo courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
The folks at Alaia Mentawai are surfers as you’d imagine, and they understand the addiction that we collectively suffer from. As a result they will take whoever wants to venture out pretty much as many times as they care to each day. Being somewhat physically demanding, three sessions a day is about all even the most amped up twenty year old can handle. We typically did two, with the occasional third or sometimes just an extra couple waves on the ridiculously shallow left just out front of Alaia.
Weather is always a factor when hunting for clean, organized surf, and a subtle shift in wind, tide or swell direction can change the complexion of the ocean in a heartbeat, especially in the tropics around small island chains. Dave, our guide, is familiar with the weather patterns and waves, as well as the mentality of the other surfers and local guides, so he managed to consistently get us into relatively uncrowded waves when conditions allowed. Some days the conditions just wouldn’t, and even then the crowds were minimal.
From the top: Alex throwing some serious spray at Beng Beng, styling and fully bailing at A-frames, photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
A little more about getting there… Our first stop was Singapore International airport, which is about as swank as you can get (Singapore Airlines is also not playing around, they put our US standard of travel to shame). Then on to a short layover in Jakarta and finally, the last leg of air travel ends in Padang. The ride from the airport to the Hotel Mercure where we would stay the night before the next day’s maritime travel program was a funny-not-so-funny white knuckle affair through small roads crowded with all manner of transport, dimly lit through the haze from cigarettes and smoking meat by the amber-electric glow of bulbs strung through the temporary (but sort of permanent) tent bazaar situation lining every road as far as the eye can see.
Our accomodations at the Hotel Mercure stood in stark contrast to the relative squalor of the surrounding city. It’s a luxury hotel with all of the possible creature comforts you can think of, even a fresh pair of slippers for every guest. To be honest, this is the part of the trip where you can’t help but wonder if this kind of travel is really ethical. We’re dropping five grand to travel halfway around the world for waves when the average citizen in Padang is lucky to have a moped. Living with gratitude becomes so much easier when perspective is served up so plainly.
At dinner we happened to run into a few pretty well known pro surfers that were also on their way to the Mentawais, including New York-to-Pipeline sensation Balaram Stack and San Clemente and Ventura natives Ian Crane and Eithan Osborne. What are the odds?
Muslim call to prayer in Padang, as seen from the Hotel Mercure. A beautiful display of devotion, but a little spooky to a Western boy (Especially at night with the smoky cityscape).
The next and final legs of the journey are by boat. First the Ferry from Padang to Siberut, and finally the wooden Sampan ride to Alaia Mentawai on Masokut Island. The ferry docks and surrounding areas at Padang and Siberut epitomize what you’d call an ‘authentic travel experience,’ with crowded streets, shouting porters, intensely colorful panoramas, and the general buzz of organized chaos that goes with hundreds of people passing through small but significant spaces.
Wooden Pinisi and Sampang docked in Siberut.
Upon arriving at Alaia, we are welcomed by a troupe of island dogs, including Max, a border collie mix that does a good job of keeping everyone in line, including the guests. The place is a tropical storybook paradise with two oversized bungalows for lodging and a large, sprawling thatched-roof recreation, dining and bar area where we spent the majority of our downtime.
The tiny island of Masokut with traditional Sampang Indonesian fishing (surfing) boat, posh bungalows built by the owners Dave and Natsuko, and the pack leader, Max. Photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
It didn’t take long to develop a routine of breakfast, morning sessions, chilling back at the palapa, sussing out the day’s wave and weather forecast, and surfing another session or two depending on our physical and mental states, actual conditions and of course, Dave’s advice.
In the presence of Greatness (Titty Atoll and Other Stories)/Breakfast of champions/Rob, Alex & David dialing up the good vibrations.
Our captain Ladi kept us on course and afloat the whole trip, and just generally made it look easy. Oh, and he charges too. Photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
I could go into more detail about the surfing, but as is often the case in life, the main attraction has a tendency to become the backdrop when you zoom out or change your focus. There were so many shared smiles, so much camaraderie, and just an overall sense of bonding as a small tribe that happened as a result of being together on a tiny remote island on the opposite side of the world.
Everybody’s here; Charlie, John (Area Man), Alex, me, Rob, Ken, David and Jonah. Photos courtesy of Ken Pagliaro & Alaia Mentawai.
I’m probably not alone when I say that being so far from home gave me a nagging anxiety for a good portion of the trip. I told myself I’d just be present and even-keeled throughout, but to be honest it was a struggle to stay in that head space for any length of time. They say getting out of your comfort zone is good for you, but when you mix in all the things that could potentially go wrong out there, routinely hurling ourselves into unknown territory literally and figuratively, I’m not so sure. It might be a wash.
Having said that, it’s been almost two years now, and just typing this out is bringing up some primal feeling that I can only describe as reverse homesickness. It might just be time for another adventure. ➡️
Epilogue: Partial index of injuries.
Thanks to Kenpagliaro.com and Alaiamentawai.com for sharing the incredible photography.