The original wandering surfer hippy, Australia’s Peter Troy visited 140 countries in the quest for discovery, pioneering Lagundri Bay in Nias in ‘75, as well as countless other surf spots. Way beyond the ‘hippy trail’, Troy once hitch-hiked from Chile to Norway introducing surfing to Rio de Janeiro on the way, rode motorbikes through Bali, Thailand, Burma, India, Nepal, and sailed the Indian ocean surfing Reunion Island, Mauritius, the Comoros and the Seychelles. He surfed 26 African coastal countries, almost the entire west coast, crossing the Sahara Desert — on the roof of a lorry to Morocco and eventually Spain, the Channel Islands and Britain. Troy’s own explanation before his death had an air of Forrest Gump’s trans- America jog reasoning, “It just kept on going. For some reason or another you’d look at the map and think ‘oh, I’ll go on down there’.
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