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A Panamanian beauty.

A Panamanian beauty.


The Inertia

Surf trips can give you that feeling in the pit of your stomach – a sensation born from equal parts fear of the unknown and anticipation of the epic. If you don’t have that feeling when you travel you are going somewhere familiar and you are doing something comfortable. It takes years of travel to understand the difference between a journey and a casual jaunt. Both are important, but only one gives you the bubble guts.

The first time I traveled to Panama I had that bubble guts feling. I was a broke graduate student in my early twenties studying sustainable tourism, while attending the University of Peace in the central valley of Costa Rica. At that time, this was about as far as you could get away from the beach in Pura Vidaville, it took three to five hours for the local buses to wind up and over the cloud covered mountains through Puriscal to the Jaco/Hermos/Esterillos area for a weekend surf, but I still did it with my tent and board every weekend without fail. I got used to the screaming babies and the mothers throwing used diapers out the window and the oppressive heat of the standing room only busses packed to the brim. That became a casual jaunt.

My first real in-ocean local encounter was especially memorable – in fact, it is the memory that has stayed with me over all these years. My friend Greg and I had just pulled up to an area with a series of fickle right points. There was however, nothing fickle about the first point we encountered – a head-high right, with ripable walls peeling into a bay for 30 seconds after breaking off of a rock promontory, which was carved from centuries of wave action hitting different altitudes at different tides. There was one local surfer and two local body boarders in the water when Greg and I sheepishly paddled out. We did not know if they were going to throw rocks at us or cut our leashes, ignore us, or welcome us. We had that feeling in the pits of our stomachs. Out of respect, we sat on the inside and tried unsuccessfully to paddle into a few corners. Then, perhaps because he could tell we were humble, or perhaps just because he was a good welcoming guy, the local surfer, who we came to know as Gonzalo, coached us into the take-off zone and showed us the popper technique for getting accepted into the energy of his backyard point-break. We were instantly a part of the crew and together we all surfed until blinded by the erosion of the afterglow, hooting one another like lifelong surf buddies.

We stayed for a week carrying on like that, paying Gonzalo’s mom in the AM to feed us in the evening, surfing all day, and going to war with the pesky red-clawed crabs infiltrating our coffins in the night. We then tracked from there to the well-known outpost of Santa Catalina, where we were re-introduced to paddle battling, and then up into Costa Rica. But that first stretch of the Panama trip, culminating at Cambutal, never really left my mind. With that experience as the litmus test, everything following felt basic. Not just with that trip, but the many to follow. In Indo, all over Central and South America, Fiji, anywhere I went after I never felt that level of authenticity and true interaction with the wisdom of a place and its people. From this experience, I learned that it is not just all about the waves, in fact, the perfect wave might actually be less about the quality of the surfing conditions than I ever thought.

I think we all begin embarking on quests for waves for ourselves – the epitome of a selfish pursuit. Our lives in the States get hectic, we are glued to our phones, there is always work to do, and on top of that the waves suck or they are jam packed. We need a fucking break. The magazines we look at and videos that captivate us show impossibly beautiful scenery with waves so amazing they would attract thousands of frothing surfers if they were only around the corner, rather than on the other side of the world.

What I learned from reading the work of Steve Barilotti and Dr. Jess Ponting from the Center for Surf research (who is now my boss at the center) and traveling around myself, is that these films tend to conveniently leave out is the fact that people actually live in the areas surrounding these “perfect” waves. Furthermore, the folks living around these waves don’t just wait around to smile and hoot at your surfing and carry your board from point A to point B. They are there trying to make ends meet in some tough situations and many of them are industrious enough to try and use your presence to boost their families’ earning profiles and lift themselves out of poverty.

The whole reason I became an academic was because I was curious to know more about communities surrounding “perfect” waves. Specifically, what do they think about surf tourism as it creeps in and takes over – do they think they are better or worse because of it, and how do they define sustainability in their communities? I know that places like Uluwatu and Tamarindo, where small surf destinations mushroomed into surf ghettos represents a situation that is undesirable in the eyes of those not raking in the serious coin. These places, and others like them, have serious environmental issues with dumping untreated effluent into the ocean (yes, turds in the line-up), overconsumption of fresh water resources, solid waste pollution, and deforestation. Socially, surf slums are rife with gentrification, prostitution, and drug and alcohol abuse. No one wants anyone to have to deal with those things, all so some tourists can get a few perfect waves. At least all of my faith in humanity hinges on the idea that no one could conceivably want this level of social and environmental injustice to occur – especially not surfers.

In short, sustainable surf tourism is messy. To make it seem simple is reductionist, but to make it seem impossible is equally damaging. My goal has become to teach just how complex sustainable surf tourism is in the field to college students through short-term study abroad programs. Using surfing as a lens was the only way I was able to grasp difficult concepts like international development, globalization, social equity and sustainability and I am confident I can use surfing to get students excited about learning and inspire then to follow their own passions as they peruse life in productive ways. The tangential and lofty hope is to inspire a new generation of surfers to help foster a new future for surf tourism – to move the industry from neocolonial to equitable. The idea behind the courses is to show students examples of entrepreneurs trying to adopt best practices and to give them the tools to use theoretical frameworks to assess the sustainability of communities where surf tourism is growing rapidly. We are finding that meeting people operating in communities and talking to locals about tourism and cultural change opens up a new world to traveling surfers and helps change the dynamic from, “let’s get as many waves as we can and get out of here,” to “hey, what do people living here think about tourism and how can tourism help benefit local communities?”

So after almost a decade away from the Pacific coast of Panama, I returned last spring to teach a credit bearing sustainable tourism course to a place called the Surfer’s Garden on the Veraguas Peninsula. This time however, I actually knew a bit about Panama’s history as the inter-isthmusian transit route and this passageways function as a resource curse in the area for centuries. First the Spanish colonized the area to move the gold they siphoned from Andean colonies to the mother country in furtherance of their mercantilist agenda. This followed by centuries of neocolonialism in the form of US domination of the Canal Zone to first ship Californian Gold to banks on the East coast and then as a military outpost and general shipping route for valuable commodities. The U.S has directly interfered with movements towards Panamanian independence and democracy to keep the goods flowing until turning the canal over to Panama in 1999. Now Panama has been liberated to steer the direction of its own economy and tourism has become a big pillar of the plan to boost GDP. Panama has begun to incentivize foreign investment in tourism, and coastal areas are beginning to use surf tourism as a mechanism for marketing tourism on both coasts.

The goal was to teach sustainable tourism couched within this local historical context to eight surfers enrolled from a few different California Universities. On this long overdue return to Panama I again had the full-on bubble guts. I didn’t know anything about the Veraguas Peninsula in Panama (missed it on my first trip); I did not know much about the operations of the Surfer’s Garden; I did not know what my students would be like, if they would learn anything, or be stoked about the place and course.

When I pulled up to the bluff overlooking the A-Frame at Surfer’s Garden, met the proprietors (Dustin and Steve) and my students, that fear in my gut almost instantly turned to comfort, and that comfort quickly morphed into joy. Dustin and Steve were the kind of entrepreneurs that hope to leave a positive impact on the people and environment where they are establishing an enterprise. Of course they want and need to be profitable, but that is not their sole aim. Ironically enough, they found the location for their surf hotel while surfing in Cambutal and having Gonzalo refer them to the location of their current business site. When I heard Dustin tell our students this, I had one of those epiphany moments that the surf world is so interconnected and that good vibes and ideas can travel as quickly as damaging ones.

They explained how there is always some resistance and unanimous community buy-in is challenging, if not impossible when doing something new. Despite the humble nature of the proprietors, or perhaps because of it, Surfer’s Garden has done a commendable job of helping to stop sand mining on the beach in the community they operative, to begin to change the waste paradigm in the area, and to employ local community members, even some who have lost work in the area when other enterprises have left. They also have been careful to learn the community history and political dynamics. As part of this effort they introduced our group to Caliche, the first man to ever settle in Playa Reina and who first attempted to tame the chitre filled and almost inaccessible wilderness. Caliche teared up as he shared stories of how the first lightbulb he was able to illuminate in the area brought him to tears decades ago. Hearing this first person historical account really tied the new phase of surf tourism development in the town to the history of the community. This all had a profound impact on not only the students, but on me, and this set the stage for one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

For the first time in my decently long history of running study abroad programs, all of our students on this trip surfed at a really high level. We tend to always set ourselves up to get good waves, but on this trip they were firing. No matter where we went or what time of day, there were awesome waves without too many others riding them – the gold standard for most surf trips. For me now, I cannot imagine a surf trip that did not involve a group of students interacting with local communities and discussing the current state of research on sustainable surf tourism while participating in the activity. In the end, students were asking themselves if what we were doing was sustainable and that was really the major goal all along – to make students question their own role in the world, especially as surfers, and surf tourists.

Only time will tell if students on the Panama trip will be in some way changed by the experience we created. Will they continue to travel and surf, will they teach others what they have learned, and/or go out of their way to respect locals and spend money in ways that benefit local populations and environments. Might they try and establish their own sustainable businesses, or become teachers and academics in the sustainability field. Truthfully, I have no idea. All I know is there are a bunch of awesome people in the surf community trying to do some good in many places around the world. None of them are perfect, but the fact that many are trying is a good sign for the future of surf tourism and their efforts can be turned into great experiential teaching tools. I just hope I am becoming a small part of the larger sea-change.

We are all indebted to the places we travel. Especially to the places that impact us as much as Panama has impacted me – as the site of my first real surf adventure and the location of my most impactful and unique teaching experience. I am not sure if this debt can be paid off, but I’ll keep trying, one course at a time.

Editor’s Note: To earn more about the author’s study abroad programs in sustainable tourism, otherwise known as “semester at surf, taught by himself, Jess Ponting and Sam and Matt George visit TheSeaState.com 

 
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