For decades, surfers have traveled miles for the perfect wave. But how has surf tourism changed and what’s the impact on the communities they visit?

“Are you sure you don’t want to dream bigger?”

The question, and accompanying raised eyebrow, belonged to my partner. It was my 40th birthday. The present? A surf trip, given free of expectation that it would be a family holiday. Faced with the magnitude of this generosity, I decided to keep my ambitions small, suggesting a visit to a much-loved beach, accessible via a short flight.

“You could do that,” my partner responded. “Or you could go literally anywhere else. Think about it. This is a one-time offer.”

Two weeks later, we returned to the conversation. “Alright then,” I said. “South Africa.”

The most memorable sequence in the most memorable surf movie ever made begins right in the center of the country’s coast. Four surfers walk across miles of burning white sand with nothing but the boards under their arms. They crest a dune, and are confronted by a vision that has defined the perfect wave ever since. “They finally got their first look at Cape St Francis,” intones film-maker Bruce Brown in voiceover, cutting to a wave that breaks so flawlessly, even non-surfers could sense how special it was.

Actual surfers? They lost their minds.

It’s now history that while filming The Endless Summer in 1964, Brown and his crew fluked an incredibly rare swell, and missed South Africa’s real perfect wave by just 30 miles (50 kilometers). Looking at a map, you can see how they did. Where the Cape appears well exposed to the Roaring Forties’ strong westerly winds, the unremarkable fishing port of Jeffreys Bay lies inside it to the east, out of the apparent path of swell-producing Atlantic storms.

Today, the waves at Cape St Francis are a shadow of those committed to celluloid in the 60s. In a sadly familiar story, beachfront development has halted the natural sand movement that made the break so special; the stretch of coast is now unrecognizable from the film, but for a small location plaque on the headland.

After a first handful of hours in the water, it occurred to me that if I lived somewhere with waves like this, I’d never leave. This was immediately followed by another thought: If I did live here, I likely couldn’t afford to.

South Africa’s real bucketlist surfing destination is Jeffreys. Known as the fastest wave in the world, and the spot where Aussie world champion Mick Fanning escaped a shark during the J Bay Open Final, it is unarguably in the top five of every published list of the world’s great surf destinations. In the book that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2016, the New Yorker’s William Finnegan describes the main challenge of surfing J-Bay as simply getting to your feet and trying not to scream with joy.

My own fascination with the place was sparked decades earlier, when US surf writer Jamie Brisick wrote a magazine story about catching a wave so perfect he didn’t perform a single maneuver, simply matching his speed with the wave’s so he could stand there, marveling at how beautiful it was.

Over many years, such stories, alongside imagery of surfers from Shaun Thomson to Stephanie Gilmore, have helped create a thriving industry: Surf tourism. But while thousands of surfers have been inspired to visit the world’s great waves or venture out to find their own, what legacy has been left by half a century of surf travel?

Six months after floating the idea with my family, I stood jetlagged and aeroplane-greasy above the beach at Jeffreys Bay, watching a line of swell break from as far to my right as I could see, until it disappeared in a haze of spray half a mile down the rock-strewn point to my left. I couldn’t get into my wetsuit fast enough.

After a first handful of hours in the water, it occurred to me that if I lived somewhere with waves like this, I’d never leave. This was immediately followed by another thought: If I did live here, I likely couldn’t afford to.

When surfers travel, it’s often to the developing world, where they’re forced to confront the inequality they’re likely contributing to. In South Africa—as in well-traveled destinations such as Indonesia—this is inescapable. South Africa’s economy is beset by structural problems: A third of the population is jobless, and even small seaside municipalities are fringed by corrugated iron and cinderblock shanty towns. With a median age of 27, most South Africans don’t have a living memory of apartheid, but it’s felt everywhere.

Jeffreys Bay itself is a town of around 30,000. While large signs welcome you to South Africa’s surf capital, non-surfers might wonder why. The town’s main road and retail strips don’t have beach views, and waves rarely break in summer months, when domestic visitors descend for December and January holidays. Beyond domestic and surf tourism, the town is sustained largely by squid fishing, a stable economic base over decades of export trade to Europe.

Needless to say, it’s a town of contrasts. Currently one of the fastest growing municipalities in the country; retirees and ‘semigrators’ leaving big cities for a quieter coastal life are driving a significant construction boom. But a few miles from J-Bay’s center lies the impoverished township of Pellsrus, reminding visitors and locals of South Africa’s complex social stratification.

Over the years, local and visiting surfers have made efforts to open surfing to South Africa’s Black community with initiatives such as Durban-based social worker S’lindile Ngema’s Girls Surf Too mentorship program supporting women living in high-risk areas, and US coach Rhonda Harper’s Black Girls Surf empowering more women to take their place among the waves. Beyond South Africa, high-profile organizations such as SurfAid work to address the scourge of malaria and create health initiatives for remote island communities, and Australia’s Surfers for Climate promotes renewable power generation while raising awareness of the link between fossil fuels and climate change.

Rising sea levels are yet to significantly impact the world’s premier surf destinations. But with so many located in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, it’s impossible to ignore plastic pollution. Visitors to Indonesia in particular now find otherwise-idyllic beaches and reefs covered in trash, especially during rainy season, and breaks on islands such as Java have become unsurfable due to the accumulation of trash.

As in South Africa, most prime surf seasons are driven by winter storms, meaning surf tourists create off-season income for tourism-reliant communities. But while traveling surfers have helped popularize holiday destinations such as Bali, Fiji, Tahiti, the Maldives and Puerto Escondido in Mexico, it can easily be argued that such places would be popular regardless.

The reality is surfers almost always travel with their own equipment, and beyond food and shelter, need little in the way of specific infrastructure. In fact, a popular option for surf travel is not to set foot on land at all, and stay on a charter boat.

At the less life-threatening breaks of mainland USA, it’s a different story. At some LA beaches, it’s hard to believe hostility to visiting surfers is anything but a selfish desire to keep waves free from visitors.

Without question, the premier destination for such trips is Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands, home to a series of offshore reefs and small islands that, wave for wave, contain the largest concentration of world class surf breaks anywhere on earth. With trips costing circa USD$2500 for 10 days, surfers will motor between famous reefbreaks such as ‘Lance’s Right’ and ‘Macaronis’ as conditions dictate.

Until very recently, boats were the only way to access these waves—and even then, involved multiple days of travel from the nearest large port of Padang, on mainland Sumatra. As word spread, boat tours sprang up to meet demand. Pioneered in the 1990s by Australian and US captains, such operations remain largely run by foreigners.

This state of affairs led to the introduction of the Mentawai Surf Tax. In 2015, the local Mentawai Regency government made the case that while thousands of surfers visited every year, local Indigenous communities received next-to-no benefit. Introduced in 2016 and designed to fund infrastructure for remote villages and manage waste, the tax doubled in early 2024, costing USD$130 for two weeks. However, it’s one of the most debated pieces of legislation in the surfing world, and inseparable from skepticism around how it’s distributed.

While the Mentawai tax is rare in how directly it targets surfers, governments in parts of Fiji, Brazil, Costa Rica and the Maldives have introduced environmental levies and permits to help ensure surfers bypassing traditional hotels and resorts still contribute to local economies and conservation.

Despite the debates, it’s rare to find resentment towards surfers from local communities. That’s far more likely from other surfers. When it comes to catching waves at crowded beaches, the sport’s laidback veneer can dissolve to reveal a single-mindedness bordering on selfishness.

At certain notorious beaches, there’s a long history of waves being regulated by violence either occasional (Hawai’i) or often (Los Angeles). A defined code of conduct means the surfer closest to a breaking section of wave has priority to catch it. In the case of Hawai’i, intense crowds and waves of real consequence mean little room for error, and locals—many of whom see themselves as custodians of both the waves and a storied culture with deep roots—may occasionally resort to tough justice.

At the less life-threatening breaks of mainland USA, it’s a different story. At some LA beaches, it’s hard to believe hostility to visiting surfers is anything but a selfish desire to keep waves free from visitors. The most egregious example is Lunada Bay, where for decades, wealthy locals who grew up in the multimillion-dollar homes overlooking the bay have intimidated and harassed visiting surfers, slashing car tyres, throwing rocks, and even attempting to spear visitors with their surfboards.

The Lunada ‘Bay Boys’ have attracted headlines everywhere from The Guardian to Newsweek: “While it’s easy enough to create rules around sharing a tennis court, the same is much harder to do in open water, where clear boundaries do not exist and the sought-after resource—a surfable wave—is impossible to predict and fairly allocate,” wrote Alexander Nazaryan.

Perhaps the situation was best summarized by a lawyer bringing a lawsuit against the Bay Boys, who told The New York Times that “in California, the ocean belongs to the public, not to a bunch of trust-fund babies.”

But running afoul of locals isn’t the most fraught aspect of a surf trip: That’s all in the timing. In 2026, surfers can leave home with an exact knowledge of the conditions they’re heading towards, but they still can’t control the waves. Unless you’re able to change plans at the last second, every trip is a gamble.

Another advance making its presence felt is in wavepool engineering. Across locales with both an established surf culture (Australia’s east coast, Spain’s Basque region) and those without any at all (Edinburgh, Dubai), the past decade has seen surf parks producing waves of genuinely surprising quality.

But despite the novelty—and the guarantee you’’ll most definitely catch waves as advertised—few surfers get truly excited by the idea of flying across the world to surf in a concrete pool. This isn’t to say technology hasn’t impacted surf travel. Of course it has. But the real game-changer has nothing to do with artificial, chlorinated waves.

In one week at Jeffreys Bay, I share waves with surfers from New Jersey, USA, and the original Jersey, UK. I meet surfers from Bicheno in Tasmania and Biarritz in France. And, for the three-hour peak of the best swell, one from Cocoa Beach, Florida: Kelly Slater.

Right up until the late 2000s, the kinds of people who pioneered world-class waves were exactly who you’d imagine: Impossibly romantic voyagers like Peter Troy, who set off from Australia on a cargo ship in 1963 with a few hard-won seafaring charts, a suitcase and a surfboard, and kept wandering for decades. Or larger-than-life characters such as Martin Daly, who discovered the surf potential of the Mentawai chain while captaining a scavenger boat, locating and diving on shipwrecks in the 1990s.

But when Google launched its Earth app, all of a sudden a limitless capacity for risk and endless weeks at were suddenly no longer requisites for surf discovery. You could, quite literally, do it from your kitchen table. In 2008, the US magazine Surfing held a competition to use GoogleEarth to find an undiscovered surf break with world-class potential. The prize? An expenses-paid trip alongside magazine staff and bona fide surf stars to check it out in person.

Putting its readership to work turned out to be one of the cannier moves a surf magazine editor has made. The winning discovery was Namibia’s Skeleton Bay, an undeniably perfect wave that breaks down an impossibly long desert sand spit. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the advent of surf-discovery-by-internet is that relatively few gems have come to light. Nearly two decades on, Skeleton Bay remains the singular achievement of surfing’s Google Earth-age.

And what video and photos of Skeleton Bay can’t convey is how difficult it is to surf. It’s one thing to watch impossibly skilled professional athletes slouch through pristine barrels. It’s entirely another to watch those videos, decide to travel to Namibia, only to watch perfect waves pass you by as you’re swept down the beach by currents that led early Europeans to dub this stretch of coast ‘the Gates of Hell‘.

Today, almost all surf travel remains to the same popular destinations: Bali and surrounds, Mexico, Pacific island chains such as Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti and Hawai’I, the Maldives, California, Australia… and South Africa.

In one week at Jeffreys Bay, I share waves with surfers from New Jersey, USA, and the original Jersey, UK. I meet surfers from Bicheno in Tasmania and Biarritz in France. And, for the three-hour peak of the best swell, one from Cocoa Beach, Florida: Kelly Slater.

Nobody turns up to Arthur Ashe Stadium and expects to share the court with Serena Williams. Yet more than a week after the World Tour contest at the break had finished and every other professional competitor had moved on, here was the greatest surfer of all time. On his own, no photographers on the beach, and no reason to be there other than to surf for himself.

Part of surfing’s magic is this democratization. Of course, you can’t be in the water if you don’t have the means to get there, but a big part of J-Bay’s charm is that it holds the same appeal to an 11-time world champion as it does a rank amateur. Despite the gulf of difference in skill.

Late one afternoon, paddling back to the top of the point, I watched Slater fly out of the lip of a wave twice overhead. Turning his board to send a sheet of spray above the steepest section, he unweighted his back foot, letting his surfboard’s fins disengage from the water. With nothing holding it to the surface, Slater’s board slid free until its nose pointed back into the foam, rider crouched low for balance.

Instinct told me how unlikely it was that anyone could recover enough speed to make it past the whitewater about to break between where Slater had stalled and where I found myself paddling, in the perfect spot to drop into the next 100-yard racetrack of unbroken wave. But in the seconds it took me to change direction, Slater righted himself.

When I looked back to check that I was good to get to my feet, he’d gone from laying back in the foam with just his toes hanging onto his surfboard, to fully upright and full speed below me, moving into another turn that appeared to send half the wave into the sky. Instinct, it seems, means something different to world champions.

As with all travel, experience is distilled into distinct memories. And for surfers, months of planning or days of arduous travel are forgotten the instant they ride their own perfect wave. Months after my trip to Jeffreys Bay, one wave remains burned in memory. The surf was great, and I’d stayed in the water until I could barely lift my elbows above my shoulders to paddle.

As the sun set, I found myself in position for a wave that swung wide of the main takeoff zone, and scrambled after it. I got to my feet, climbing and dropping, looking to place a turn, when two dolphins leapt from the water. Maneuvers forgotten, I stood, feeling the line of swell drawing below my surfboard, looking ahead at the sleek dark bodies running inside the wave face before me.

As our wave approached the rocks lining the shore, the dolphins simply disappeared. I was left to stand there, matching the speed of the wave, marveling at how beautiful it was. Of course, these experiences aren’t guaranteed. But if travel creates the opportunity for visitors to deepen their connection with the ocean and share the joy of surfing with new communities, its evolving story is still one to be celebrated.

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