Paradise Lost

It’s June 2006, and surfing enigma Andy Irons has just arrived with Joel Parkinson, Taj Burrow, and a young local surf guide named David Ramirez at what soon will become known as a world-renowned right pointbreak in Salina Cruz, Mexico. Taylor Steele is setting up camera equipment on the beach to document the session. 

The lineup is empty. The winds are light and offshore, and a clean south swell is hitting an exceptionally well-honed sandbank as the sun comes up. The surfers hurriedly wax their boards as perfect waves go unridden down the point. The lines Irons, Parkinson, and Burrow draw on this morning are just a little truer to form than anything seen during the impending next stop on tour as they find freedom from the paranoid exercise of squeezing extra fractions of a point into their contest scores. Irons throws signature hack-to-airdrops before tucking into lengthy barrels. He merges one long, arcing roundhouse perfectly into an eight-second tunnel across the inside sandbar. Burrow sleighs on the foamball, sometimes getting swallowed up as the guts of the wave push inside out. Parkinson’s refined style tells the lie that even an aged-out desk jockey could easily find multiple tubes on a single wave here. But the truth is that a deceptively strong current is sweeping down the length of the point, and for a layperson it’s harder to find waves than it appears. Ramirez is an excellent surfer in his own right. He knows this spot as well as anyone, yet still finds the conditions that day somewhat elusive. “I’d never surfed it that big and hollow,” he says. “I was getting so beaten on the paddle out. Some sets were 6 foot but thick and shallow on the inside. Andy was yelling, ‘Hey, get out there! Go get some more waves!’ any time I went in to rest.”

The surfers break boards, half-jokingly claim waves, and jog laps up the point while staring in disbelief at the conditions. Ramirez has done his job, delivering his clients into perfect, empty surf. The session is immortalized in the opening salvo of Steele’s 2007 surf flick, Trilogy, set to the forebodingly titled pop-punk ballad “Secret Crowds” by Angels & Airwaves.  

Days later, Irons goes on to win what many still regard as the greatest surf contest of all time, the Rip Curl Search Somewhere in Mexico, just a two-hour drive to the north. The contest earns its place in history by the sheer forces of nature: more clean south swell meeting a perfectly groomed sand-bottom right point for the full duration of the event. If Irons wins the contest by a margin of points, Burrow and Parkinson each in their own way also leave victorious. In perhaps the best single wave of competition, Burrow weaves in and out of three consecutive grinding barrels down the full length of the point. Parkinson, a lifelong aficionado of sand-bottom right points if ever there was one, says, “The Search is over. What more do you want out of a wave? Twenty-second barrels—that ends my search.” 

Every moment of the action is live-streamed over a WCT webcast, and even more eye-grabbing footage from sessions outside the contest surfaces (see Cory Lopez’s 30-second backhand tube), thus stocking enough fuel in the reserves to launch thousands upon thousands of surf trips to those very same perfect, but no longer so empty, pointbreaks. 

*

More than 17 years have passed since the session with Irons, and Ramirez is no longer just a young local guide encountering his surfing heroes for the first time. He’s the godfather of surfing in Salina Cruz and the founder and head of the local union that now oversees all surf tourism in the region.

Ramirez says everything about surfing in Salina Cruz can be divided in time by that summer of 2006, when the first world tour event ran at Barra de la Cruz. The contest’s attempt to shield Barra from exposure with the pseudonym “La Jolla” proved fickle. “After the contest, a bunch of people started coming here and they all wanted to surf La Jolla,” Ramirez remembers. “Everyone started asking me, ‘Where is La Jolla?’ Pretty soon Barra started to get really crowded.” 

There had been a steady flow of surfers to Salina Cruz for decades, but the world tour spotlight pushed things into overdrive. Visiting surfers began driving trucks haphazardly on the beach, getting drunk, leaving their trash behind. To further complicate matters, accessing Salina Cruz’s pointbreaks often requires passing Indigenous communities and previously undisturbed local landowners who had no interest in surfing and who were becoming wary of the sudden increase in traffic to the area. “The place became really popular all at once, and we didn’t have a plan to grow,” says Ramirez. 

At the time, there were already a number of established surf guides in the area, including Ramirez and his brother, César. But visiting surfers began circumventing those local businesses, instead traveling the region on their own with very little benefit to the local community. “There were people trying to come from all over—people who didn’t surf launching businesses not involved in the community,” Ramirez says. “There was a lot of conflict with tourists because they wanted to just come here in a van and surf. People would rent a car cheap, sometimes staying for just a couple hours with no benefit to anyone in the community. There would be 12 cars of every nationality parked on the beach.” 

The stigma about traveling surfers in the area got bad enough that the Ramirez brothers and their fellow local guides banded together, instituting a policy requiring all visiting surfers to hire a Mexican surf guide when accessing the Salina Cruz pointbreaks, which remains in effect today. “Now you don’t go anywhere with your own car,” he says. “People from Australia and Brazil started trying to become guides here, but we didn’t accept that. We had to push people out who weren’t showing respect and stick together to take care of the area. If you show up alone, someone’s going to tell you really gently that you have to find a surf guide. And they’re gonna tell you really gently, twice maybe. And the third time they’re gonna tell you not that gently, for sure, but in a way that’s easy to understand.”  

When asked how the surf guides handle instances of visitors refusing to abide by the policy, Ramirez says, “We’re gonna let them in the water, but they’re not gonna catch a wave,” explaining that the guides work together on those rare occasions to physically block any attempts to surf. “Normally it doesn’t happen, but it has happened.” As a result of the guiding system in Salina Cruz, the local community has become supportive of the growing surf-tourism industry. “It took some time for people here to understand the idea that surf guiding is a real, formal job. There are still problems, but we’re able to work through them to help tourism grow.” 

Ramirez says one key to rallying support was the way that surf guiding has helped generate broader economic benefit for Salina Cruz, bringing new opportunities in the form of locally owned accommodations for surfers as well as the service jobs in food and hospitality required to support the growing influx of visitors. “At our camp, we try to have the highest quantity of workers from Salina Cruz so that everyone can benefit,” says Ramirez. “People get good tips from the camps, and it goes to the general crew, not just the surf guides. It goes to local families, and it’s created an opportunity for everyone to make money for their household. It’s created new jobs for a bunch of people. Now families are learning English, becoming educated, and preparing for the growing industry here.”

It’s noteworthy that the local surf guides achieved this broad approval—including police support—without ever having the policy written into law. “Now you can go to the authorities and they are going to tell you that you need a surf guide,” says Ramirez. “The authorities trust us to help them keep the beaches safe, clean, and free of violence. You can’t change that easily because the community has assembled, and now they understand the benefit.”

Ramirez also sees the role of surf guides as striking a balance between the expectations of the community and of the traveling surfers. In addition to training guides in first aid and emergency protocols, the main skill Ramirez tries to cultivate is helping diplomatically steer guests toward less- crowded waves. The union he established with the nine major camps in the area to manage surf guiding and tourism—as well as sportfishing—works to distribute crowds across the region as evenly as possible in order to create a better experience for guests. 

“The community doesn’t care if guides come to surf with 15 guys,” he says. “They don’t care if there are another 30 people in the water. They are still gonna get good money. The guides have to make those decisions. 

Sometimes people just want to surf a famous wave, even if there are already 50 people in the water, and you can’t force your clients, but we have to at least try to give them better options. We talk a lot about crowding, the number of cars on the beach, and the number of people in each car—three to four people maximum. You could fit 12 people in a Suburban, but that’s not a good experience for anyone.”

While the surf camps in the union set the policies that have shaped surf guiding in Salina Cruz, Ramirez also acknowledges that “there are still smaller guys growing their businesses, not in the union yet,” which creates the added challenge of managing crowds when the total number of guides in the area remains uncapped. 

Terry Way, a photographer and surfer from Santa Cruz, California, spoke about his experiences traveling to Salina Cruz with surf camps registered in the union as well as with new guides launching with just the essentials: a truck, some shade, a cooler, and basic accommodations provided at his guide’s parents’ house, the same way the Ramirez brothers started guiding many years ago. 

“Surf guiding was a model that was interesting when it started, but I also wonder how long they can maintain it,” Way says. “Everyone’s getting into it as a business. There are almost too many guides now. If you’re a young man in Salina Cruz and you surf, you think, I’m gonna open a guiding business. It’s good money because there are still plenty of surfers who want a piece of that sand-point dream. It used to just be a few guides who were able to hold it down in the first generation. Even if you had no more new companies, the companies that already exist are expanding too.”

Way remembers often seeing more than 20 surfers in the water at popular spots. “It was crowded when I was down there,” he says of his most recent trip, in 2022. “For an old dude who just wants to get a few barrels, you can get frustrated immediately. Barra is the same. It’s a packed house—pros, guys coming from Puerto Escondido, and local rippers.”

Ramirez describes balancing the increase in surf guides and surfers traveling to the region as a basic question of managing supply and demand. Existing guiding companies within the union that operate legally recognized, tax-paying businesses could conceivably try to tighten the restrictions on surf guiding to squeeze out new upstarts and raise the rates that they charge surfers to access the best waves in the region. But for now, Ramirez and the union have maintained a less-exclusive  philosophy. “Between the surfers and the community, we try to keep it pretty accessible for everyone,” he says. “We try to make it so it isn’t crazy expensive or crazy restricted.”

In addition to managing crowds, Ramirez highlights the other common element of his guests’ expectations, which in many ways come from the indelible image left by that summer of 2006. “When Andy Irons was here, people saw that it gets really good. But I think that might have just happened for Andy,” he says, laughing. “It doesn’t happen that much. He got the day of the year. Some people think it’s going to be like that every day. For sure we have great waves, but the conditions aren’t always like that, and you have to depend on your guide to put you in the right place.”

Way echoes that a knowledgeable guide can still make all the difference in finding empty waves. On one trip, he says, “we expressed that we were over the crowds, and our guide said, ‘I’ll show you guys a secret wave.’” 

Way’s guide drove his group down a long dirt road followed by a long beach track to a deepwater right point breaking off a big rock outcropping. “We were the only ones there, so in our eyes he’d achieved what we’d wanted, which was to surf by ourselves. We were super grateful. It was exactly what we’d hoped a guide would take us to when we were down there. The wave wasn’t as good, but we were by ourselves.”

One benefit of the increased attention on the Salina Cruz area that’s shared by locals and visiting surfers has been rallying support to protect the coastline from development. In recent years, there’s been a proposal to build an industrial port that would threaten one of the region’s marquee waves, Punta Conejo, and the delicate ecosystems in the surrounding mangroves. 

“It’s a serious situation, and we have to go to congress here to make real changes happen,” Ramirez says, adding that surf tourism in the area has helped bring international attention to the issue as well as an increased sense of the value of conservation within the community. “There’s been a lot to learn about ecology to make people proud of their area,” he says. “In a tourist destination, it’s not just about the money. It’s about having a sense of obligation to care for the beach.”

In terms of the lessons that other rapidly popularized surf destinations could learn from the guiding system in Salina Cruz, Ramirez emphasizes the importance of maintaining land ownership and taking control early, before outside business interests accumulate too much power in shaping the way that tourism operates. “Luckily, before surfing there wasn’t much of a focus on tourism development here,” he says. “Once tourism gets established, it can be hard to get the resources in place to benefit the community. When you lose land ownership, other businesses move in, and people sometimes don’t have the education or government support to give people the ideas to do this.”

If the initial pains that Ramirez and other local surfers experienced are an inevitable byproduct of the surfing spotlight shining a little too brightly on some of the most idyllic spots in the world, then Salina Cruz, for all its challenges, begins to look like one of those rare places where local surfers have succeeded in maintaining control of their community. 

It becomes even more remarkable when taking a look elsewhere the surfing spotlight has shone too hot and too bright—a seemingly endless list of much less fortunate examples of the myriad ways that traveling surfers have fucked up paradise.

*

To paraphrase the American writer Janet Malcolm: Every traveling surfer who is not too stupid or full of themselves to notice what is going on knows that what they do is morally indefensible. 

There’s something uniquely troubling about surf travel as distinguished from other forms of travel. Jess Ponting, who leads the Center for Surf Research at San Diego State University, emphasizes how surfers have a tendency to seek “fragile coastal and marine environments, often in less-developed countries, and often in remote parts of less-developed countries, where Indigenous people are marginalized, in already marginalized developing countries.” 

The story of surfers entering these fragile environments often begins rather innocently, with a handful of the more itinerant among us quietly passing through some of the most paradisiacal coastal reaches on the planet. At first, surfers contribute directly to the local economy and maybe even share with a few locals the gift that is this odd little pursuit of riding waves. But as the popularity of a surf destination increases, the existing community tends to lose control of its resources and the economic benefits of a tourism boom. 

Outside business interests in the form of prepackaged surf tours, resorts, and speculative expats buying up land can quickly siphon most of the financial benefit of a tourism boom while also straining the resources that exist within delicate coastal environments.  

“Central America is a pretty good case study where there were relatively impoverished landowners who owned a bunch of beachfront property and would sell that to a speculative surf-tourism developer from the United States for what seemed like a lot of money,” says Ponting. “But in five years the original landowner could run out of money and be raking the leaves on the property they used to own for the new owner, who’s now running a surf camp where the land is now worth millions.”  

When a surf spot becomes a “surf destination”—overrun by traveling surfers—the only way that the existing community can remain intact is by harnessing the benefit of the increasingly valued, increasingly strained surfing resources and the surrounding resources on land. The challenge is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to harnessing that benefit, and the possibilities are always informed by the existing realities on the ground.

Questions of how a surf break is accessed, which existing laws govern ownership of land and ocean resources, government tourism policies, the size and number of the existing communities seeking benefit, and which other natural resources are available to support an increased surfing population are all paramount to understanding which model is best suited to a given surf destination. For instance, the model that developed in Salina Cruz would be impossible to replicate in the Mentawai Islands, where there are many disparate communities scattered across an island chain that traveling surfers frequently access by boat.

In the court of public opinion, surfers tend to hold strong opposition to the idea that a surfing resource should be made exclusive or that access should be limited. “The ocean is for everyone” is perhaps the very loudest refrain now sung on a wide variety of social media posts about surfing. And when speaking about surf destinations that have become beset by traveling surfers—from Indonesia to Central America to the South Pacific—this refrain can sound particularly uninformed and entitled, because in practice what “the ocean is for everyone” really means is “the ocean is first and foremost for us, as surfers, and who cares if that produces an utter free-for-all, and who cares what havoc it wreaks on the communities that existed there before we arrived?”

Ponting says that when considering the impact of surfing on these destinations, “it’s important to think about it from the perspective of the resource owners. It’s not your place, and you don’t have the right to be there. If a local person has decided to achieve some form of economic development from the very few surfing resources they have, I don’t think it’s our place to tell them they can’t.”

As an example of how challenging it can be to put these ideas into practice, take one of the more hotly debated instances of wave privatization in any surf-travel destination: Cloudbreak and Restaurants in Fiji. In 2010, after nearly three decades under the control of Tavarua Island Resort, the reopening to public access of Fiji’s two most iconic waves was widely celebrated. An article in Surfer from that year featured the two Fijians, Ian Muller and John Philp, who lobbied to have the resort’s exclusive rights removed. Philp compared himself to “Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich—an underdog activist who somehow defeated a corporation who was up to no good.”

The article goes on to draw a hypothetical comparison to the same sort of scenario happening in California, at Rincon: “A Russian billionaire buys Rincon and the exclusive right to surf it. Only a few well-heeled friends and guests of the owner, nearly all of them Russians, are allowed to paddle out. Everyone else is barred. Yes, it seems fair to say that the locals would go crazy.”

It’s a comparison that fails to recognize every aspect of the vast cultural, political, and economic differences between the ways that the United States and Fiji operate. For one thing, Tavarua Island Resort never bought or owned the waves at Cloudbreak and Restaurants. They developed a joint partnership with the local villages under qoliqoli, Fiji’s existing system of rights that had previously governed reef access.

Prior to establishing the Center for Surf Research, Ponting lived in Fiji, where he developed a surf-tourism master plan with the government administration of the time. He was surprised by the enthusiasm Fiji’s Indigenous communities held for joint partnerships like the one with Tavarua Resort. “I met with a lot of the Indigenous stakeholder groups,” Ponting remembers. “Speaking with them directly, they really liked the setup where they could have a surf resort managing their resources. That was an unexpected result for me. I wasn’t expecting when I dove into my research that I would come away with that conclusion, but over and over the Indigenous communities were pretty happy with the situation.” 

Ponting also noted that while Tavarua Resort’s partnership garnered most of the international spotlight, similar partnerships with local villages and resorts had been established across other areas of Fiji, including Kadavu and the Coral Coast, and more plans were gaining momentum elsewhere across the country.

When thinking about questions of ownership and access in surf destinations like Fiji, Ponting says that the experience helped show him that “sometimes we have to think outside our normal understanding of surfing resources. The European tradition of resource ownership ends at the high-tide mark. Many other cultures aren’t like that.”

Under the partnership with Tavarua Island Resort, 5 percent of profits went to the local villages holding reef rights. The benefits to those communities were immense. It added dozens of homes, community centers, schools and access to scholarships, medical aid, small-business aid, and communal electricity and water. All of that went away overnight when Tavarua Resort’s license to manage access to Cloudbreak and Restaurants was revoked. 

A 2023 article in the Fiji Times estimated that villages in the area that were partnered with Tavarua Resort lost $12 million in income as a result of their joint venture disbanding. The year after resort partnerships ended, one resident told Surfer, “We are suffering. The village can’t pay its water bills. The government has shut off the water. Everybody is afraid that the villages will just go back to poverty.”

If from the narrow perspective of a traveling surfer the reopening of Tavarua’s waves was seen as a democratic move, the reality of how things unfolded is much more complicated. The decision to undermine the qoliqoli rights of Fijians in 2010 was made unilaterally, without consulting those communities, under the decree of then–prime minister Josaia Voreqe “Frank” Bainimarama, who “seized power in a coup and ruled the nation as an autocracy until reverting to a democratic system in 2014,” according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

After seeing what hellscapes so many destinations have become, the argument that waves should always and without exception be accessible to everyone rings hollow. Surfers have proven to be terrible conservationists.

In hindsight, it’s also clear that the effect of opening Cloudbreak and Restaurants was not just a matter of increased access for Fijians. At the time of the reopening, there were more than 1,000 surfers in Fiji, according to a 2011 Surfer article. By all accounts, the boats that have regularly accessed Cloudbreak and Restaurants since then still carry only a minority of Fijians. T he majority of surfers at those waves continue to be international visitors— as they were in the days of Tavarua Resort’s exclusive access.

If the intent of the government decree had been access for Fijians, it easily could have included a cap on the number of foreigners who could access those waves at any given time. Or if it had been about extending business benefits to all Fijians, it could have prohibited foreign-owned businesses from providing access to the wave. But under the decree as written, any enterprising foreigner with enough money to purchase a boat in Fiji can launch a surf-tour operation.

Ponting acknowledges the difficulty of successfully implementing models of exclusivity at surf breaks to manage tourism and is hesitant to advocate for them. “There are almost precisely zero places in the world where the number of people in the lineup is able to be managed,” he says. “It almost never works.”

At the same time, he argues that—at least conceptually—there are clear communal benefits to implementing a system of exclusivity that extends beyond surfers’ self-interest in managing crowds. “There are still advantages to having fewer people in a destination, in my view,” Ponting says. “It’s about the economic yield you get from each surfer. So you could have a hundred surfers in a place crowding it out and not having a very good time, or you could have fewer surfers paying more and having a really good time, and as a destination you need to provide half as much infrastructure, half as many resources, and deal with half the amount of sewage and other waste. But you’re getting the same amount of economic reward from that. That, to me, is a more sustainable way to go.”

While there were clearly flaws to both the days of total exclusivity at Cloudbreak and Restaurants as well as the reopening by government decree, changes to Fiji’s political administration in 2023 have again begun to reshape how surf tourism operates, potentially leading to some form of compromise between those two extremes. 

In late 2022, Bainimarama was voted out of office in a free and fair election, and the new administration, under Sitiveni Rabuka, wasted no time in stating that the Surfing Decree would be reevaluated to better account for those communities that had benefited from partnerships with resorts. In an article about the financial losses sustained by Indigenous communities due to the Surfing Decree, Fiji’s current deputy prime minister and minister of tourism, Viliame Gavoka, told the Fiji Times that one of the current administration’s priorities is “to repeal some of these decrees.”

As for whether Cloudbreak and Restaurants will ever return to exclusive access as a result, Ponting says as of press time that he thinks it’s very unlikely—and that, all things considered, it’s not the best solution, given what a highly trafficked tourism area it had become. “The genie is out of the bottle, and I don’t think there’s any way to put it back in,” he says. “I don’t think access there should restrict anyone, but I wonder if there is a way for people accessing those resources to contribute to those communities and to the upkeep of the biodiversity and environmental integrity of that area. There are still ways to address the value that was lost by Indigenous communities and the use of their traditional resources. I think that’s something that could be handled through a management plan that asked for a very nominal amount from every visitor.”

*

Nowhere has seen the trials and tribulations of surf tourism gone wrong like the 17,000-island surf mecca of Indonesia. It is practically a cliché to speak of the death of surfing’s Indonesian Dream—the kind of ready-made pronouncement that, like the death of the American Dream, is too often deployed as a lazy excuse for continued bad behavior, cultural degradation, and lack of political willpower. 

Yet the cautionary tales that one finds across Indonesia give testament to how difficult it is to get things right and how easy it is to get things wrong: Bali is now inundated by millions of tourists annually—6.3 million in 2019. Iconic surf zones from Canggu to Uluwatu have become so overdeveloped as to be unrecognizable to anyone who traveled there a few decades ago, with no end to the development in sight. Amid strained resources, rampant pollution, and an estimated 85 percent of the tourist economy controlled by entities and individuals outside Bali, only nominal benefit has gone to inhabitants. Bali’s poverty rate has dropped to an admirable 4 percent due in part to these developments, but the gains seem out of proportion to what has been extracted through almost unchecked exploitation. 

Other well-established surf destinations throughout Indonesia have fared even worse, seeing even less prosperity as tourism has taken root. In Nias, “Sorake Beach has been put forward as an example of a surf slum,” says Ponting. “I think that’s pretty unkind, but it speaks to the economic disparity and social breakdown there.” Similarly, at Sumbawa’s Lakey Peak, surf tourism has catalyzed a housing shortage and drug problems severely affecting residents of the area.

Meanwhile, the Mentawai Islands Regency has made some attempts to capture the economic benefit of tourism. A “surf tax” charged at roughly $70 per each 15 days to anyone traveling to the area to ride waves has been in place since 2016. Yet there’s little accountability in seeing those funds distributed to the benefit of existing communities instead of filtering toward more infrastructure projects that grow tourism primarily to the benefit of foreign stakeholders. 

With the expansion of an airport on Sipura—one of the infrastructure projects completed in 2023—commercial flights can reach the Mentawais directly for the first time. “The island is going to expand,” Jaco Steyn, the South African owner of Kingfisher Resort on Sipura, told the Washington Post in an article that covered the airport development. “The Indonesian government is pushing hard to make it a tourist destination. We are getting a lot of help for infrastructure, with the surf tax, pushing to make it a holiday destination.”

Yet some still see the rapid pace of development as lacking a framework to ensure benefit to the local community. “The Mentawais are in trouble because too many people are trying to develop,” according to Alberson Fidel Xastro, a local surfer who worked in public health for the Mentawai government before assuming his role as chairman of the United Mentawai Resort Association, a collective of seven existing resorts in the area lobbying to better manage tourism. “In 2023, there [were] at least 12 new projects trying to come into the Mentawais,” he says. “They often find a local partner without caring about the regulations for doing business. They try to build without getting a permit or determining how much tax they must pay or how much salary they should pay workers. We still don’t have a minimum-wage requirement set up here. We’re trying to fix all of that before more investment comes.”

This despite the fact that the area has long been an established surf destination, saturated with surfers, resorts, and charter boats. One of the first surfers at Macaronis in the ’80s, Chris Goodnow, published an account of his return in 2013, in the book Surf Stories Indonesia, and described his astonishment that “the postage stamp-sized take-off spot was always packed as densely as pictures you see of the Superbank. As our teenage sons pointed out, the lineup was way more crowded than any of the waves we surf at home, and much more tense.”

The year Goodnow returned, the number of international tourists visiting the Mentawais was only 4,823. By 2018 it had nearly tripled to 12,325, and with the arrival of direct flights to the Mentawais it seems to be on a similar course as other impacted destinations in the archipelago. In 1970, the year before Bali’s own airport expanded to accommodate large jet planes, there were fewer than 500 hotel rooms on the island. By 2019, there were more than 60,000.

Claude Graves is one surfer who recognized this emerging trend— where travelers move in and trash one destination after the next—as early as the 1970s, while living in Bali, and opted for a different course. He had a home built on the island by 1975 and was among the first to regularly surf Uluwatu, including Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell. 

With the benefit of hindsight, however, Graves says, “I was part of the problem. I would call people and tell them how good the waves were, and then years later the place was packed out. I went through that whole cycle of seeing that in the ’70s and ’80s and learned what not to do. Now everywhere is packed in Bali. It’s a mess. You’re definitely not getting waves to yourself. There are, like, 80 people out at Ulu on a good day. The beaches are all choked with surfers, and it’s impossible to get a wave. I was very against that and I still am.”

Graves and his wife began casting about for a new spot to build a resort where it would be possible to place a cap on the number of surfers in the water. Eventually they landed on Sumba, and in 2001 they opened Nihi Sumba resort, overlooking Nihiwatu, a left reefbreak as worthy of five-star reviews as the resort itself. Nihi Sumba has since become an internationally acclaimed vacation spot—regularly praised as the best hotel on the planet by Travel + Leisure, among other industry critics—with rooms starting at upward of $1,500 per night and a celebrity guest list including Christian Bale, Heidi Klum, Caitlyn Jenner, and pro-surfer-turned-famed-DJ Paul Fisher.

In parallel with the resort, Graves also started the Sumba Foundation, a nonprofit designed to support the island community. The foundation soon grew beyond anything Graves had anticipated, due to the popularity of the resort. It now averages $650,000 per year in donations from resort guests, and no single resort of its size comes anywhere close in terms of the philanthropic impact generated: reducing island malaria cases by 93 percent, providing more than 45,000 people access to clean drinking water, opening 22 schools and five health clinics that have served more than half a million residents and saved 430 children’s lives.

Yet the resort’s exclusivity on the wave at Nihiwatu has been a controversial topic among surfers, particularly those who have tried to gain access to it, only to be snubbed by hotel security, local law enforcement, or Graves himself. In one such instance—recounted in a 2002 piece here in The Surfer’s Journal—Graves paddled out to the wave with a diving knife and cut through a couple surfers’ leashes after they refused to leave. 

In other cases, local law enforcement has stepped in to apply pressure, given that charter boats from elsewhere aren’t legally permitted to anchor near the wave. “Honestly, it was an allout shit fight for about 17 years, but it’s cleared up now,” Graves says. “Once a few boats got in some serious legal problems on the island, word got around that there’s no open welcome mat. I’ve gotten a lot of grief for that. It didn’t feel good telling other surfers to get out of here.”

Graves originally instituted a cap of eight surfers who could reserve a spot to surf Nihiwatu during their stay. The cap later increased to 10, which is still only 25 percent of the resort’s total occupancy. “From the start, we’ve hardly promoted surfing because our surf quota is full all the time,” says Graves, noting that they regularly have to turn guests away from surfing. “We’ve needed to promote the other activities that draw people here. It’s always been by word of mouth that we fill the surf slots in our bookings.”

Graves sold the resort in 2012 and now his work is focused primarily on the Sumba Foundation. He says the cap on surfers remains essential to maintaining such significant contributions to the organization, which is often gifted outsized support from surfing guests whose donations can represent as much as 80 percent of the total funds received in a given year. The resort also brings significant economic benefit to the island as the largest single taxpayer on Sumba, providing upward of $1.3 million per year in revenue to the government. And, by maintaining such a low head count, it’s avoided the jarring cultural impact seen in other areas where surfers have overwhelmed local communities. 

“Surfers need to realize we’re in some of the most special places in the world, and we’re taking up space. We’re taking water and other resources that could be going to the community,” Graves says. “This attitude that we should be able to surf anywhere in the world, I don’t get that, and I never did. I don’t believe that all waves should be for everybody. There should be places that are protected.”

The work of the Sumba Foundation has set a tone with other tourism operators on the island, who have striven to make their own positive contributions. The owner of Ngalung Kalla, Christian Sea, worked as the waterman at Nihi Sumba for nine years before starting a retreat focused on environmental sustainability in everything from farming to construction. Many of Sea’s guests are surfers, but he isn’t opposed to Nihiwatu’s exclusivity.

 “We don’t want Nihiwatu to be public and surfed by everyone for a lot of reasons, but the main one is the Sumba Foundation has done so much in the area and they have a really good model set up,” Sea says. “Instead of having a depleted surfing resource, you have a very healthy surfing resource where people have come and donated millions to help the local people—way more than any tourism destination I’ve seen in Indonesia, by more than a hundredfold.”

*

Listen closely and you can almost hear academics crying foul at the title of this piece for its use of the word “paradise.” Hundreds of papers have been written on surf tourism. What so many of them seem to say in one way or another is that destinations from Mexico to Fiji to Indonesia were not paradise even before the arrival of surfers. They had problems, like everywhere else, and in many cases those problems have only been accelerated by an unexpected tourism boom.

But for all their issues, Salina Cruz, Tavarua, and Sumba are paradise, at least for surfers. To miss the elements that make them so is to miss why many people want to travel to those destinations in the first place.  More importantly, it is to miss the things that might inspire people to care for them. 

If less densely populated fragile coastal environments hold inherent appeal to surfers, the upside of that reality is that our choices can make a big difference in how tourism ultimately takes root. In areas not yet dominated by outside business interests, supporting the local economy and existing cultural practices is a more straightforward proposition—another reason for avoiding heavily trafficked surf destinations altogether. It’s also easier in certain established destinations such as Salina Cruz, where a majority of community-owned businesses maintain a vested interest in coastal conservation—or even in Fiji, where strong government policies for conservation exist alongside the availability of locally operated surf-guiding businesses. Where it becomes more complicated is with luxury resorts, or, at the other end of the cost spectrum, with prepackaged surf camps, which in many cases extract profits and crowd out local offerings. With great luxury and great convenience comes greater responsibility, in other words. 

This may be why, initially, it can be so hard to see the merits in privatizing a wave such as Nihiwatu, especially after hearing horror stories of surfers getting run out of the area. Unless you can afford the astronomical rates the resort charges for access, from a purely self-centered perspective, it’s in essence one more perfect wave wiped clean from the face of the earth. 

Yet after seeing up close what hellscapes so many destinations overtaken by surf-camp populism have become, the argument that waves should always and without exception be accessible to everyone rings hollow. Surfers have proven to be terrible conservationists, and what you find in so many of the world’s most popular surf-travel destinations is nothing to uphold—paradises slowly eroding in their own way, until they vanish altogether.

This either leaves us in an inescapable dilemma or forces us to reframe the problem. Maybe there’s no justifying the means by which exclusivity was staked on Nihiwatu. Even Graves expressed some misgivings. But in helping set the presence of surfers on a more sustainable course for Sumba, he also seems to be staking claim to something more important—a claim about how screwed up surfers’ priorities have become whenever we decry the exclusivity of one wave, regardless of the thousands of lives the restriction has improved.

Perhaps in our collective disinvitation from Nihiwatu, we have in turn been granted a new and more valuable series of invitations: first, to surrender a surf-lust-driven sense of entitlement to every wave on the planet; next, to think more expansively about the ways such finite wave resources can bring greater benefit to their surrounding environments.

[Feature Image by Nate Lawrence.]