About Secrets of Surf Travel

The Short Version

For decades I’ve chased waves around the world — from Baja and mainland Mexico to Central America, Southeast Asia, and remote corners of Indonesia.

Surf travel rarely goes according to plan. Roads end. Boats break down. Storms move in. Directions are wrong. Sometimes you’re sleeping on a toolbox in the back of a truck, or riding through the jungle on the roof of a packed bus, ducking branches while holding onto the ropes that keep the boards and chicken cages tied down.

Most people dream about surf travel but hesitate because the unknown feels intimidating. My approach has always been the opposite: go first, figure it out along the way. Because the crazier it gets, the better the stories are later.

Somewhere along the way I realized the thing I’d actually collected across all those miles wasn’t a list of spots — it was a method.

I don’t pre-plan. I pick a destination, buy the ticket or point the truck south, and go. Land in the zone, find a cheap hotel, and give it a day or two before deciding anything else — that’s the rule. In that first day or two I talk to everyone: other travelers, locals, the hotel desk clerk, waiters, bartenders, the expats who’ve lived there for years. “Where’s a great place to stay?” “Where do you eat, where do you go, what do you actually do around here?” I check it out, then decide — which part of the zone, which town, which corner of it is where I actually want to post up for the extended stay.

That’s how you find the honest rental counter, the good kitchen, the person who fixes dings, the room that doesn’t break the budget, and let the coastline do the rest. That method is this site.

“You don’t plan everything. You show up and figure it out. That’s how exploration works.”

Why This Covers More Coastline Than I’ve Personally Stood On

I’ve spent real time in Baja, mainland Mexico, Central America, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong — years, the slow way, one extended stay at a time. That’s where this site started, and it’s still where the deepest logistics live.

But surf travel is bigger than any one person’s footprint, mine included. The whole point of how I travel — pick a direction, leave room for the unplanned, trust that something will work out — falls apart if the information stops at the edge of where I’ve already been. So the site doesn’t stop there either.

Every zone on this site gets the same honest two layers, and the badge on the page tells you which one you’re looking at:

• Researched means the desk work is done — real local operators found and checked on paper, logistics mapped, seasons and paperwork confirmed. Good intel, worth building a trip around, not yet stood on.
• Ground-Truthed ✓ means I’ve actually been there — driven the roads, eaten at the places, confirmed the vendors in person.

A zone I haven’t personally reached yet isn’t a weaker promise, just an earlier layer. And that layer is exactly why the Ground-Truthing has to keep happening — which is what the travel content is actually for.

What the Videos Are For

The travel footage on YouTube and TikTok isn’t marketing on top of the site. It’s the mechanism.

A zone doesn’t earn its Ground-Truthed badge because I say so — it earns it because I went, checked the vendors are real, confirmed the logistics still hold, and found what changed since the research was done. The videos are that process, filmed as it happens: the wrong turn, the vendor who’s moved, the tip a local gave me that wasn’t in any write-up. When you see a badge flip on a zone page, the footage is usually where it happened.

It’s also the other half of the “go first” method, lived out loud rather than just written about. If the site is the case for why you don’t need everything planned before you leave, the videos are what that actually looks like when it doesn’t go according to plan — and works out anyway.

What This Site Does

Secrets of Surf Travel documents the adventure of exploring unfamiliar coastlines, meeting local guides and businesses, and gathering the knowledge that helps you plan a great surf trip — everything around the surf. The spots stay where they belong: out there, waiting for you to earn them. That promise is written down in full in Our Code.

Where to Start

1. Read Our Code. Two minutes. It explains everything this site will and won’t do.
2. Browse The Zones World Map. The starting point for all of the zones: drill down through the regions to the hubs, then the full logistics layer.
3. Join Field Notes. The newsletter on the home page — stories and intel, straight to your inbox, no spot reveals ever.

See you out there. — Jed