Alison Teal, all alone in the lineup. Photo: News.com.au
Think you’ve had some spooky surf sessions? Tell that to Alison Teal, a 30-year-old Hawaiian who’s seriously got you beat. Sharks, heavy waves, sharp reefs, none of that compares to the remains of six million dead people.
Just in time for Halloween, Teal became the first person — and definitely the first wearing a pink bikini — to paddle through the world’s largest gravesite: the catacombs beneath Paris.
The catacombs are a network of former mines and ossuaries below the city where the bones of six million humans lie.
Teal was in Paris for the Environmental World Forum, where she spoke about the importance of cleaning up our oceans and freshwater sources. The paddle through the Catacombs, along with paddles in the Seine River in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, at the Louvre Museum and other places, were intended to highlight exactly that.
On her YouTube post of the catacombs video, she wrote that she was “in the city to make a environmental statement that if we do not protect our oceans we will end up surfing in fountains, dirty rivers, or in the depths of places like the Catacombs.”
She continues, “human beings depend upon fresh water for survival AND the sea creatures depend upon a healthy ocean for survival — not to mention if the oceans die, we die.”
Teal, dodging a set under the Eiffel Tower. Photo: Alex Voyer
Teal said she was eager to explore to the city’s waterways and when she ventured through the drain she didn’t know she would encounter human bones. She said she suggested to her guides that they turn around, but they assured her it was not uncommon for people to venture down there for a taste of adventure and history. “I had no intention of surfing a grave,” she wrote on YouTube.
“The Catacombs is a mine, not a grave, however, a portion of it became the “largest grave on earth” when a series of cave-ins starting in 1774 by extracting the rock for buildings, and overflowing cemeteries, caused the city take the bones from their original resting place and pile them in the tunnels – and thus many refer to the entire maze as a grave,” she adds.
For this mission on October 13, Teal climbed down a drain and crawled for hours through very cramped tunnels while schlepping her pink surfboard. Finally she and her guides reached a stretch flooded with water, where she shucked her drysuit and made one of the eeriest paddles imaginable.
Surf check at the Louvre Museum. Photo: Sarah Lee
Teal endured apparently gag-inducing odors, hypothermia-inducing water, and a whole night of claustrophobic conditions.
“It suddenly got crunchy and I looked down and saw we were crawling on skeletons. Skulls lined the walls, and it smelled horrid. As soon as someone turned a corner, you had no idea where they went,” she’s was quoted as saying. “We got down to one of the lowest levels when all of a sudden water started flooding the tunnels. It was time to surf.”
By the way, Teal is the same pink bikini wearing surfer who this summer paddled up to the bubbling Kilauea Volcano on the big island of Hawaii.
Teal, who you might remember as a kick-ass competitor on “Naked and Afraid,” is the daughter of a globe-trotting National Geographic photographer. She’s made a career of traveling the world, pink bikini and surfboard often in tow, making videos about her adventures, and she even shares her environmental-centric exploits on occasion to The Inertia.
Photo: Sarah Lee
Photo: Sarah Lee
