REMOTE MEXICO SURF TRIP - OAXACA // Hasta Alaska // S03E14

Last time on Astra Alaska we began an incredible adventure in our favourite state in Mexico, Oaxaca. Dealing with everything you'd expect from a Mexican road trip, from military checkpoints to political roadblocks. We visited Mexico's most famous waves and showed you exactly what it takes to find your own slice of paradise. This time we'll be continuing our mission to share our V-Dub Combi with the people that we meet on the road. Finding more classic waves, escaping to the mountains and dealing with one or two problems. Let's go exploring. We pick up the Astra Alaska story with Capito heading down a very long and dusty track towards one of my favourite surf breaks. It takes a long time to get down this road and we were about to use the remoteness of this surf break to our advantage. It's like the 5th day in a row we've woken up at like 5, 5.30am early so we can get to the waves before anyone else. It just feels weird waking up in the dark. I feel like I'm back in the UK in the winter. Ready for a surf mate? I am. Sleep well? Yeah man, it's passed out. The sun will come up if you don't move us out. With Combi Life we have an advantage over local surf camps. You see we can move our surf camp to wherever the conditions are best and when you wake up on the beach and you know the next person in form the local surf camps did eventually turn up but not until we were surfed out. All along the Oaxaca coast locals erect these simple wood and leaf structures known as palapas. At this beach we had the whole deserted palapa village to ourselves. This is base camp for the day. Hammock, surfboards, sombra, perfect. Our schedule involves surfing a couple of times in the morning to beat the midday winds, refuelling and taking refuge in our hammocks during the heat of the day and occasionally stirring to shake some mangoes out of a tree. That doesn't work does it? No, we should have brought the machete. These do something stupid. Mangoes! Try to catch this one. The village that we were basing ourselves in had an announcement at noon every day to tell you which household would be the village restaurant for that evening. We lived alongside these people long enough that they invited us to their annual harvest party. It was somewhat difficult to understand the finer details of why they celebrate but we particularly liked the dancing which led into a conga line which led into everybody frantically ripping fruit from the ceiling which was rather entertaining. Next in the Kombi crew was Becky and Laurie from Australia. You're probably wondering how it is that I find all these people. I'll let Becky explain. I found out about Aska Alaska on couch surfing which is the organisation where you can go and stay at people's houses and I was searching and saying that I was going to come and stay in Puerto Escondido and I saw that Aska Alaska was there and it wasn't until I saw the YouTube video like one of the intro videos and I watched it that I literally was like oh my god I could stay in the van and I contacted Ben and I stayed in the van. But wouldn't you be nervous going to stay with a random guy in a van in remote Mexico? I was and my mum and my sister were a little bit naggy about it but the good thing about couch surfing is once you've been couch surfing for a while you get references and I just don't stay with people at all that don't have good references and you have lots of good references from people that have been staying with you. How are you feeling? Ready for a surf? There's pumping surf with your name on it. We found from experience that anything left outside the tent and not secured isn't there in the morning no matter how remote you think your camp is. I like how the first thing that came out of the tent in the morning was the surfboard. Welcome to the world. Good morning. Free surf side camps like this are definitely one of my favorite things about traveling in Mexico. The street dogs are pretty entertaining too. Oh you nicked the lens. Well everyone will just have to excuse the fact that there is now a blur in the middle of the lens from where the dog looked at. Let's go puppy. Are we going surfing? During this time we spent many days hunting out the most remote waves. No we're not taking the puppy surfing, don't worry. He followed us down the beach for the mile hike to the surf and we couldn't very well leave him stranded on the rocks. The tide can be but unfortunately our rift top tube was broken at this point so we had to borrow the neighbor's shower. It's better than you'd think. There's a road mess to be going down in there. Depends on your technique I guess. Pasta a la Americana. Pasta a la beetroot. I'm the new combi life solution. Does any of the beetroot actually make it into the food? What have we learned today? Don't sleep with beetroot like pancakes. Murphy's law means that it's probably going to be spilled everywhere. You know I'm actually normally a really bad sleeper but something about sleeping in the combi, I told you man, I slept so well in combi life. I like the moving around, packing things up, everything in a small space, not too much crap you know. You don't have anything that you don't need and you get to go to new places all the time. Yeah it's really cool. Combi life is awesome. Do it. Do it everyone. Off on another adventure in Oaxaca. We survived these off-roads. I don't really know if the picture does it justice but this is where we've been camping for the last couple of nights. To surf beach it's literally just us and the beach. But surf is fickle and relies on good sand banks. A perfect point can turn bad at any time especially when humans mess with it. So a lot of these points here in Mexico change a lot. Points here in Mexico change a lot because they're doing a lot of construction, they build something and it changes how the sand moves. All day they've been moving this sand up here and it's started raining now and you can see in the background it's charging out. Off it goes. Which is a phenomenal break just hope that they haven't just destroyed it. The shape and size of these sandbanks is vitally important to the quality of the wave. When a lot of sand gets introduced to a break like this it can change it for months or years. It wouldn't be the first time in this region that a guy with a bulldozer has unknowingly destroyed a wave whilst trying to capitalize on the influx of surf tourism. Whilst the environmental challenges that face Oaxaca are very real and shouldn't be taken lightly, in Kombi Life we have our own problems to deal with. Were you enclaved by problems from the very start or did it happen at some point? I almost didn't make it out of Santiago. Yeah it's always had problems, always. From the very first place that you left from? I broke down at the first toll road I ever came to pretty much every half an hour after that. Almost threw the towel in twice before I even started, before I even left. Probably should have. Every half an hour for two and a half years? This is us trying to search a possible petrol leak. Well I've been with you for I think a week now and every single day this week the Kombi has been a bitch. That's Kombi Life. I still love you Kombi. I'm not feeling the same way right now Capito. I think the way you bang it like that is very refined in mechanic skills. On the way to Huatulco, probably maybe 20km, 30km out and the pulley here for the alternator is starting to chew itself up again. You can hear it rattling. I've only just bought a new one about a week ago because the same thing happened so obviously there's a problem with the alternator. I'm going to have to take the whole thing out and try and find out what the problem is. Hopefully we make it to the city to do that because leaving the bus here probably won't have any wheels on it by the time I get back. Wanting to avoid that situation we found a spot in the shade to assess the damage. We were staying with the village baker who turned out Mexican sweetbreads every day from this earth oven. This work here was done by a professional mechanic. I paid the guy to do it last time which was a few days ago probably less than 50 miles and it hasn't made it very far. Now I've got to take it all out and do it all over again. It's just a waste of money. Work myself because even if I mess up at least I haven't paid someone else to do it. I'm seriously seriously over this situation. I can't have said it enough times and those of you that have seen everything that I've been through will know why. We're filming this for when you put your compilation of why you hate the Combre together at the end of your trip. What's that that you're carrying in your hands? This is my alternator. We're walking up the road to catch a colectivo to a choco to walk around to find someone to fix the problem. With all the practice that I've had it didn't take me that long to find a man with the right tools to fix the problem and we had the alternator shaft re-threaded for just a few dollars. Becky and I decided at this point that we'd leave the Combre for a while and head away from the hot coast and into the lush Oaxaca mountains for a break. San Pedro del Pacifico is nestled 8400 feet above sea level. It's a place where the local butcher cures his meat in the misty mountain air and we could take a break from the sweltering heat at the beach. It's crazy in the afternoon when the cloud comes in and it engulfs the whole town. It feels like you're living in a cloud. I'm sitting in the mountains eating really really good cake and drinking hot chocolate and it's cold outside. We rented this cute mountain retreat for a couple of days and set about exploring the region's gastronomic eccentricities. So these are mushrooms from San Jose. Apparently there are many different varieties of mushrooms. These are good for just eating even though San Jose is quite famous for its magic mushrooms. I have never seen this type before just a little old woman came up to the door saying that she had mushrooms for sale and for once they weren't the magic type and when I saw these I thought oh well might as well give it a go. We had some of the best quesadillas with locally grown flowers called flora de calabaza. And then it got really weird. There's an ant here. Massive huge ants like the size of the end of my finger and they eat them so I let him roam. Should I eat an ant or a cricket? I don't know how I feel about these. I'm really scared of them. They're dead now and you're about to get your own back. Okay I'm eating a cricket. I'm really scared of them when they're alive. Tastes like tamarind. Yummy? You want to buy a bag? In case you were wondering and I know you were, fried ants and crickets go really well in guacamole. Bex is more of a sweet tooth kind of gal. Back on the coast the surf scene was not pretty. Heavy rains had emptied out the river filling the water with debris, dirt and the odd tree. It's not exactly the easiest thing to dodge around whilst you're trying to surf. At this point we turned our attention to alternative activities. We've slacklined in a bunch of our videos but highlining is a whole different ball game. In case you were wondering what it looks like when you fall, it looks like this. Back at the surf camp everyone suddenly had the urge to improve their balance. Which had one advantage, there were more people to lend me a hand. You can never be exactly sure who will turn up at the combi and in this remote part of Mexico I was very fortunate to have met so many cool people. Look guys, oh she's going. Bye, thanks for having me. Oh my gosh. Am I sweaty? Oh you're so sweaty and you're covered in sand. Sweaty and sandy, sexy. Bye Alaska. Becky was a great travel companion and a true she-explorer. Bye Bex, good luck, happy travels. Oh man, I don't know, I love traveling more than anything else in the world, like anything. I travel because I like new things, I like new cultures, I like seeing new places and I like meeting new people and man it's so much better than working. Oaxaca turned out to be one of my favorite parts of this journey and it was hard for me to leave, but for us it was time to continue our journey to Alaska. I needed to find people heading north and the best place for me to find northbound travelers was in Puerto Escondido. Until then, happy travels. Next time on Hasta Alaska, we're picking up a new combi crew and exploring more of Mexico's back roads. We'll be looking for more surf, getting dirty, saving a life, waking up on a super yacht and surviving the craziest night of the trip so far. Hey, thanks for watching the video guys. Please give it a thumbs up and leave us a comment. If it's your first time watching Combi Life, be sure to subscribe because we have a lot more adventures like this that we want to be sharing with you.