Surfing Tropical Beats

Bleakley, Sam (2012) Surfing Tropical Beats. Alison Hodge Publishers, Penzance, UK. ISBN 978-0906720851

Abstract / Summary

Sam Bleakley and the surf EXPLORE team take us on a roller coaster ride through Gabon, India, Vietnam, Algeria, China and Haiti, drumming up a tropical beat. Combining 'Deep Travel', John Callahan's incredible photography and Sam's performance writing, they capture the spirit of these turbulent coast scapes, blood racing, running on salt water fuel. The wide belt around the Equator - the tropics - has become an alluring path for travel, but a region often steeped in war and environmental disasters. Sam and surf EXPLORE go off the regular route, carving a niche, collaborating with locals, documenting the occasion poetically and with precision. Where 'waves transform from green glass to white foam, the surfboard is the frozen double of that transition - a rainbow bridge that allows you to step in the blink of an eye from inertia to adrenaline-fuelled ecstasy to the fear of the water-wrestling hold-down.' The paradoxical red hot and cool blue of surfing, and the often icy logic of preparation for challenging travel, form a matrix from which springs a distinctive kind of writing as performance. By turns, surf EXPLORE gather their wits at the cross roads where 'lovers part and souls get taken by the lost high way, lured down the wrong route.'

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