Milo's Blog

February 2009

Do The Greens Ever Win?

I’ve been writing and researching a few topics related to the environment recently and I am astounded by the way the capitalist greed machine couldn’t seem to care less about the world we live in. The bottom line always seems to trump eco concerns and though there is a lot of lip service paid to conservation and ‘going green’ by corporations and governments these days, I still think most of it is manure.
If you reckon it is bad in the west or China, third world nations are even worse. I’ve visited Indonesia a number of times and been astounded their exploitation of their national resources and environmental ignorance and rampant polluting habits. Sure, there is a cultural imperative and one should not be quick to judge the rural uneducated. We should also question why their government doesn’t do more (corruption, cronyism, they just don’t care?); yet it’s always amazed me these people are happy to live surrounded by their own litter, excrement and squalor and do nothing about it for themselves.
Poverty-stricken South Africa is pretty similar in many ways of course. In fact whilst doing some preliminary research for a big story involving a fragile, vulnerable pristine environment, money-hungry venture capitalists, black empowerment interests and the government, somebody recently asked me “do the conservationists ever win?”
To be honest, I don’t know. A couple of years back I wrote a feature on overfishing for Mens Health Best Life magazine and quite frankly it depressed the hell out of me. For all the efforts of conservationists and claims of awareness in the fishing industry, restaurants and pretence of policing it from the authorities, it seems that little real change is taking place and the stark reality is our waters may well become devoid of fish in the near future.
It seems to be the same everywhere, coastal housing developments, golf courses, mining ventures and pollution of our oceans, rivers, wetlands, beaches and exploitation of natural resources and wilderness areas continues unabated, especially when there is a profit incentive, corrupt official due process and public apathy. Opposing a development or polluter of any kind in any realm is a major challenge for everyday people, most of whom are poorly funded, lack the time to focus on it because they need to make a living (and are often thus fractured and unorganised) or possibly even too militant and zealous for their own good.
Thankfully there are those who are committed, rational, organised and have some access to funding to oppose and block these environmental rapists. What they usually lack is support and awareness, which is where you and I come in, and that’s why I try to take on one or two “eco” stories a year. Sure they earn me some money, but another motivator is also to highlight these causes and get their stories out there so that the general public can get involved and try to facilitate change through the sheer force of numbers and noise.
The sad truth is that we are all up against it and the financial and legal might of large corporations and dodgy government officials is often overwhelming, so the answer to my friend’s question is more often than not, no.
But does that mean we should all just give up and do nothing and accept the inevitable, as we watch nature being destroyed and the corporates soak up the all the profits?
I hope not.

December 2009

Embracing The Digital Realm

For a long time the advent of the Internet has been a harbinger of the “death of print media” and along with it professional journalism as we’ve known it until now. It’s a debate that is still raging furiously in media circles as you read this. Indeed, as a practicing freelance writer I’d be the first to tell you that in the past 18 months, feature commissions from magazines I was previously working regularly for have become more and more scarce, and in some cases have all but dried up (some of the mags like my beloved blunt, actually folding). But as they say in the classics, you have to adapt or die, and instead of sticking my head in a paper shredder, in my free time I dusted off my handycam and began videoing some surfing, something I haven’t done in ages. Subsequently I’ve only had a couple of video clips published on local surf mag websites, zigzag.co.za and thebombsurf.com. Of course the money I’ve earned doing it isn’t going to help me retire anytime soon, but it has been super-fun filming some surf sessions, especially the big wave stuff at Dungeons, and also flexing my creativity editing and making short films in iMovie. I’ve also been getting a bit more writing work for the web, utilising embedded video clips and links to other websites etc. as another medium to work in. I guess I’m lucky in that even though I’m on the wrong side of 35, I kind of came of age in my career with the Internet (especially as I was overseas at the time in the mid ‘90s) and have seemed embraced technology in a way that many people even just one or two years older me seem less capable of. Okay, to be honest I still SMS with one hand and I was sceptical about Facebook at first and only recently got onto Twitter (and I’m still struggling to see the point of the latter), but it’s all good. In fact, while many journalists are complaining about no work and the demise of magazines and newspapers I’m actually finding enough writing and other stuff to keep me going and then some. I guess the morals of this update are to work hard, never give up and to constantly keep changing and tweaking what you do to survive. I’ve got some big plans afoot in the digital realm for 2010 but that’s about all I can tell you now. Watch this space... or check out my Facebook, Twitter, My Space and YouTube accounts...

November 2009

Crime and Surfing; Surfing and Crime...

I couldn’t sleep last night. I’d left the back window to my bakkie open - with my boards and wetsuit inside - and I knew it. Surfed out, lazy, three beers down the hatch; ready to sleep, I’d consciously barred it and climbed the stairs to cloud nine.
Cloud nowhere, more like.
I had a nightmare, my boards were gone. And then I woke up, got up and pulled back the curtain to look at my ratty old van parked below. Not on the street, mind you, but inside our small complex gate. It was quiet as flat surf. Still, anyone with enough gall or a nagging crack habit could scale the metal palisade fencing and run off with my sticks and suit...
I dozed off. Woke again with a start. What was that? Was that the unmistakeable sound of a fibreglass board knocking? I looked out my window. Nothing but an open sliding window gaping up at me. Mocking me.
Lazy bastard.

Crime and surfing. Surfing and crime. The two words don’t really fit. What on earth has one to do with the other? I guess in South Africa crime really does affect everyone. Gone are the days when one could leave one’s boards in the car. Or anything, really. Now cars themselves get stolen from beach car parks. Bastards hide in the bush and watch where you stash your key.
And then drive off with your cabbie while you surf. How wrong is that?

If my suit or shortboard were stolen it would set me back big time. As it is I’ve creased my 6’2” and riding either a 5.6’ fish or a 6’7” mini gun. I scored the wetsuit for R800 from an industry bro bailing out of a distro deal gone wrong. But if that deal hadn’t come along I probably still couldn’t afford a new one at the mo’.

For the average joe, affording new equipment is a joke. Are the shops ripping us off? That’s a whole can of surf product and politics I don’t want to even get into. Save to say there’s enough dodgy dealing, backstabbing, rumour mongering and long overdue payments in the surf industry to make a Wall Street scammer look tame. It’s dog eat dog out there.
Yep, greed, avarice and white-collar crime are a fact of life in any industry, especially in good old Msanzi. Not to mention the street and beach crime. I heard a story about a cop who was mugged near New Pier. They took his wallet, gun, badge and keys. And he was a bloody big bloke. Most Durban ous will tell you that one.

Rape? Hijack? Murder? They’ve happened to surfers at remote beaches in South Africa, and more often than you’d like to think. Hell, I hear even the car guards and ADT at half of Cape Town’s beaches have been in on the scam. Surfers, it seems, make somewhat easy targets.
As a surf photographer, lugging around thousands of rands is like having a bull’s eye on your forehead. Surf brand warehouses also get cleaned out on a regular basis and their overheads take a knock, which affects all of us. Sure, insurance is there to bail out (kind of, there’s another scam we all suffer) but the bottom line is just that. Prices keep climbing as society rots.

But then again, in SA I guess everyone is a target for our raging crime and as they say, it’s a case of WHEN and not IF you will get taken out. Like my mate, an American model who spends half the year in SA surfing and working. Three armed men stormed his rented Llandudno pad. It turned out to be a bad plan for them because my mate is built like a boxer and fights like a ninja. He beat one to a pulp and got in a few shots on the others before they escaped.
He also got stabbed and bled, a lot.

I guess that could happen any where and there are other dodgy surf locations in the world. But this was Llandudno, top three most expensive locations in SA. What the f...? You are not safe with the larneys or in the hood or the ‘burbs.
Like old Kurt Cobain sang: “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Another surfer I know, seven Namibians robbed him in his home at gun and knifepoint. Cleaned him out. One of my favourite t-shirts slogans on crime is: “South Africa: if you are scared, get a dog.”

That didn’t help my mate. He had four. Big ones.
The government skirts the problem, we get robbed blind and worry at night about whether the windows are closed, the door is locked... worry when our loved ones are away from us. Stress when we get hit.
At least as surfers we can surf the pain away...

Oh and by the way my boards were gone in the morning...
No, just kidding, I eventually went down and closed the window... and promptly fell into a blissful sleep.

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The First Day of Winter

My Account of One Epic Week in the “Working Man’s Indo”

It’s a crisp Monday morning in Durban. It’s the first day of a six star prime WQS surfing event at New Pier, and heats are being contested vigorously by the visiting pros and their Saffa counterparts in knee high waves.

A few hundred clicks away though, a fresh swell is building. Here, along the coast, it’s a balmy morning. Yet the cool bite of the offshore wind, dropping in from the already iced-up Drakensberg mountain range inland, indicates that the long, humid summer is passing.

By mid-morning, 10 footers are rolling into the scores of rock/sand points lining this stretch, and all tools are downed.
At one cove, around 9.30 am, a local strokes into the set of the day. A diminutive natural footer, he gets to his feet, but hovers in the lip for a few seconds, as if a crouching Zulu warrior going in for the strike.

The wave jacks up. He free-falls, with only his fins caressing the dredging, dirty-lime green face as he drops down it. He makes it into the trough, and draws a deep bottom turn as 15 feet or so of Indian Ocean foam detonates behind him. A dozen or so mates on the shoulder scream their stoked approval.
Later, the same guy tries to take off even later on another, bigger bomb, but gets eaten and snaps his board, the morning’s third broken stick. He leaves the beach and returns with a couple of tall Hansa Pilsner quarts. Smugly satisfied, wave of the day man then lights a strong Stuyvesant Red cigarette, slugs his beer, and starts to roll a joint as he observes those still attempting to negotiate the hairy paddle out from the sharp rocks.
A 12-foot clean up set mows down these remaining few, and as the swell maxes, the crew retires with their attendant female posse under beach umbrellas. On the grassy knoll above the point, they drink and smoke it off in a haze of memories of the morning’s drops and maulings.
Someone claims the day as the first of winter, and brown bottles are clinked in celebration, until well after the sun sinks behind the hills.

Such is life on the coast. It’s a place where once the seasons switch from the summer onshores to morning land breezes, and the winter groundswells begin to arrive, the quality of the surf is often so good and consistent it compares to any fabled surfing paradise. In fact, it is so accessible and life is so affordable here, it’s been jokingly called the “Poor Man’s Indo”.
Or at least, “Working Man’s Indo”, as you’ll be corrected. The locals might not have much in these parts, but they’ve got their pride. They all drive battered bakkies, wear black boardshorts and flannel shirts, and sport feral woodcutter’s beards, if not a few natty dreads. And they are all men’s men: plumbers, builders, bricklayers, mechanics, fishermen, surfboard builders or itinerants who will find any way to fund their surf addiction.

Those with the cushiest beach jobs, as lifeguards or with the sharks board, fill the rest of the line up. Almost all of them rip. A talented few have achieved some competitive success and magazine ink, but the uncomplicated existence of home always draws them back, away from the perceived backstabbing and politics of the contest and industry scene in Surf City or what they call “Dirtbin”.
The mornings on the coast are usually best, winds and tide willing, so even the working stiffs can snag a few backlit pits, before they retreat grinning to the site. But some days the waves are so good, they simply stay and spend the whole day getting shacked with a handful of their unemployed friends. No one bothers to drive and see what even the closest point or beachie is doing. Why would you, when you’ve got perfect reeling waves right out front?

That said, the sanctity of every break - especially the more remote, fickle or lesser-known ones - is fiercely guarded, to the point where signposts to them are obscured or ripped down. Pros who are bros are welcome, but professional camera crews are frowned upon, a rule that sometimes has to be vocally and occasionally physically enforced (just ask the emerging California pro who tried, controversially, a few years back).

Indeed, pull up in your rental – complete with the “wrong” (read Durban) plates – and you’ll get a few dirty looks and muttered comments. Paddle out into the line up and you’ll get a few more. Like most places though, if you mind your manners and give the boys a few waves, and don’t blow your own, you should be okay. Show respect, slug a lunchtime beer with them and charge in the surf, and you’ll be in the loop. Suspicious of outsiders they maye be, but unreasonable or unfriendly they ain’t - once you get to know them.
In many ways, this obscure part of the SA coastline remains part of old school frontier Africa, where small town familiarity can breed contempt, and racial tension between the white blue collar white folk and the dispossessed tribes still festers in places. Though blessed with beautiful scenery - undulating cane fields, wide rivers and sub-tropical beaches - it’s a tough, dirty-fingernailed region, reminiscent of small town Australia, but with the added edge that it’s in rough, rural South Africa.

It’s can be a hard knock life for sure, but for the hardcore surfer here it can also be sublime, like for the duration of the abovementioned surf comp, when a cut off low delivers a glut of swell and offshore winds down the coast. Whilst the ‘QS surfers hack in two foot “contestable” waves a few hours drive away, this stretch of seafront lights up with rolling aqueous walls of green and gold - and the lucky few usher in winter with a week of overhead, funnelling righthanders.
As the proud news filters down into the carpark on the following weekend that a Saffa has won the comp, one of the local underground kingpins turns and asks no one in particular, “there’s a contest on?” He then drains his beer, stubs out his smoke and paddles out for yet another sick surf session.

As they are apt to say in these parts: “nothing wrong, bru”.

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Milo’s Blog July 2008: Incident at Home Affairs

Sometimes the worst travel experiences occur even before you’ve left home...

Losing your wallet on the road is never a great experience. Although, I suppose it’s not a total disaster when it only contains R20 and as I wasn’t at some remote overseas location, but just at Ubuntu backpackers in Jeffreys Bay, I could stop all my credit cards with one phone call and not give it much further thought.
Thanks to the cash flush state of my co-pilot, surf photographer Richard Johnson, we could also still drive home. Things could always be worse. No, from that point, the biggest stress for me was the anticipation of having to queue. First at the Traffic Dept. to renew my driver’s licence and then the ultimate horror: at Home Affairs for a new ID book.

Fortunately, a short time later my wallet turned up behind a couch, contents secure, and it was kindly returned by Jamie at Ubuntu. But I couldn’t escape the negative gravity of our most dreaded domestic institution forever.
In hindsight, the way it unfolded was my own fault. An opportunity to travel on a surf trip to Peru arose at the last minute. Stupidly though, only after I paid True Blue for my ticket, did I check my passport to find that it expired within six months, and so I had to quickly abort the mission. That was depressing enough, but I also realised that I would eventually have to visit Home Affairs or never leave South Africa again.
After weeks of procrastination, the big day came. Following the advice of a friend, I went in the afternoon, when the lines have usually thinned. I joined the (thankfully) single digit queue in the passport section, which mostly comprised of people discussing crime, politics and emigration.
The next, for the inevitable fingerprints, was longer. But by now I had plugged my ears with my iPod headphones, and so I shuffled along the next quarter of an hour softly banging my head to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before I smudged my opposable digit. When I emerged, the line had doubled in length, and as I looked over at the adjacent snake of people applying for ID books, I smiled and skipped down the granite steps outside: mission accomplished.
Not. Another opportunity for a work related trip, this time a travel junket to Mauritius, presented itself. Only problem was it was before I was due to receive my new passport, so I would have to go back to Home Affairs to apply for a temporary one or miss out again.
I had a mid-morning meeting in town, so armed once more with my boredom-killing iPod, I was the first in the queue outside the closed Barrack Street edifice. I was also the first to find out they had been burgled that night though. Someone had obviously really wanted a new ID book, a wise-ass heckled behind me, before we were told they wouldn’t be opening until the forensic officers came to dust the place.
A few albums later, the cops still hadn’t arrived (despite their Cape Town HQ being on the same block) and people had started to shout and jostle, so I decided to return later.
At three pm I walked straight up to the counter. With no need for my iPod, I stuffed it into my jacket pocket and scribbled intently on the forms I was handed by a harried-looking clerk. I became aware of a vague human shape lingering at my side, but was too busy making sure I jotted out my details correctly to care. I then trudged over to join the (very long) fingerprint queue and went to retrieve my iPod.
It was gone.
Existing in the 70s, as it does, Home Affairs has no security cameras, and head-scratching rent-a-guards were not much help when it came to identifying the pickpocket. So after I got my thumb inked for the second time in a fortnight, I crossed the street to Caledon Square to report the incident for insurance... where I joined another long, sweaty line.
The phantom thief had obviously seen me coming. Yet all considered, it’s a good thing this modern day Oliver Twist didn’t also nick my wallet, as I don’t think I could quite face another queue at Home Affairs, at least not for a while.

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February 2008

I don’t want to sound bitter or anything, but doesn’t the disparity in the amounts of money some people earn mess with your head?

I mean, Jay-Z made $36 million last year. Times that by seven and you’ll see what I am talking about.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve been on the rollercoaster freelance trip for over a year now and I’m a little dizzy. When I worked at a publishing company, sure there was stress but at least I knew I was getting a healthy pay cheque every month.

And once a month, around every payday, I took my wife for a steak.

Now it’s a constant chase: commissions, articles, admin, deadlines. And not much steak; on a budget, you see. Don’t get me wrong, I’m getting by adequately enough (I bought Megan a steak last month), but jeez.

Look, I know how lucky I am to have the freedom; I covered 10000 kms in two massive work-related road trips last year; got some good waves and had a good time. I also have my health, surfing, family and a handful of good friends and a roof over my head and enough to eat. Life is not bad, often good.

It’s just I find the Benjamins that some of these people earn staggering, don’t you? Look, I know Jay-Z is talented and works hard. I know that some movie stars are incredible actors and deserve to get paid well. But 60 million dollars a movie? Who are you kidding? And how much are the movie honchos making on top of that?

And Paris Hilton and those kinds of people? Heirs and frikkin’ royals. What the have they ever done? Okay, maybe now I am sounding bitter, but what the...?

And meanwhile the average salary in South Africa is R2000 and some people literally haven’t got two sticks to rub together.

Sure, charity does a lot, and that’s all good. But what is happening in a world when people who have got so much money they can’t spend it all in their lives leave it to their cat, dog or budgie (and circling lawyers)? And the starving billions see nary a fluffy toy.

Something is out of whack.

Me, if there is such as thing as re-incarnation, I think I’d like to come back as a rich dog, preferably in a beach house. That’s not asking too much, is it?

Miles Masterson