– Mentawai islands 2003 –
The great thing about Indo is you can normally stay and travel all around for not much money.
Years ago, I managed to book a 992$ trip on a boat with five other guys. At that time it was quite manageable to avoid the crowds. But this kind of boat trip ended quickly and the Mentawai business moved up to another scale. It costs something now like three times more to spend two weeks on a factory boat, a price for which you find yourself packed with ten or twenty other guys to reach waves with sometimes until six or seven more crowded boats. Bilboards and shady promoters never had any trouble in pushing the masses to waste shitloads of money for crap. We all knew surfers ain’t nobel prize winners, but to that point…
I’d rather like to avoid the “mass hysteria” for my part, so if you still plan this kind of trip the first thing you need to know is that boats and resorts in the Mentawai are like total bulshit. Apart from being too expensive for what it is, it’s an unfair business of local resources made by foreigners where nothing goes back to the people; we are talking of a place where they don’t even have running water or electricity.
Everyone should know that.
You can actually go there for the same price as anywhere else in Indo.
And keeping away from this kind of colonial exploitation provides great oportunities for more legitimate experience, support to local life, and eventually free surf outside the insane boat circus, without being extorted. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t be a little upset at having yourself sheared like a sheep by a bunch of greedy exploiters?
The surf business sold me his grand mother, and all that I got left is a piece of soap.
