Text: Nathan Myers
Photos: D. Hump

“It wasn’t like we heard chicks moaning in the back room or anything.. but still, we probably should have known better.” —Mike Losness

Mike Losness and his girlfriend Ally were playing Scrabble in the front room of their South Vietnam “hotel” wondering why sketchy, older men kept checking themselves into rooms for just an hour at a time. These are the types of scenes you come to expect when you team up with Dustin Humphrey and Taylor Steele to pioneer the perimeters of surf travel. Who surfs in Vietnam anyway? Hump-n-Steele are hopped up on Apocalypse Now visions and Full Metal Jacket flashbacks in their quest to re-invent rambling on film. And nice guys like Mike Losness and Dion Agius sometimes pay the price of believing.

They arrived after twenty hours of flying, blind with fatigue and dazed by the whirlwind of Asian neon and foreign crypto-scribble. A baggage delay. Two hours in customs. And then what? They stumble into the wicked-hot Saigon dawn to find an old Vietnamese man and his young son holding a sign with just one word: LOSNESS. He spoke no English. So they simply got in his car and rode along with him for the next ten hours. Ten hours! Straight into a Chinese New Year celebration somewhere painfully remote and disturbingly crowded in South Vietnam. Fire balloons in the sky. People and music and motorbikes everywhere. Dragons dancing in the street and deep fried dogs on a spit. Mike and Ally are starting to lose it. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dustin are straight out of Indian Jones. They’ve spent the last two weeks roaming the vast jungle mountains of Sappa to the north, drinking cobra venom and filming extreme scenics for their upcoming chaser to Sipping Jetstreams, called Castles in the Sky. The title says it all. Who surfs in ’Nam? Dustin and Taylor are convinced they’ve pinpointed a series of secret pointbreaks even Colonel Kilgore never dreamed of.

Ally and Mike stumble back to their hotel room, with no equation for how many jetlagged hours they’ve gone without sleep, only to be kept awake all night by the fireworks and human belligerence of the Tet Festival raging outside their window. They toss and turn, insane with exhaustion, until…
“Five a.m., time to catch the train. Straight into the full experience. By sunrise we’re on this rickety old railroad heading off towards, well, I don’t even know where. Just heading off. The swell was coming and we had to go catch it.”
South Vietnam is a footnote in most travel guides. It’s a question mark. A DO NOT DISTURB sign. Unless you speak Vietnamese, you can’t book a room in advance. Unless you eat Vietnamese (like, the real Vietnamese food), you’re about to lose a few pounds. And unless you are Vietnamese, you can’t rent a car there, so the entire twleve-person crew ends up packing all their gear into one, big equipment van. Wives. Kids. Filmers. Directors. Stars.

Navigation was a game of charades, pointing to places on the map where no roads go with a no-English driver who had no idea what they were doing here. Pointing to surfboards and making sick carving motions with your hands only complicates things further.
“This is the first country I’ve been to where literally no one spoke English. We did a lot of long hikes through the jungle to check for spots and I couldn’t help but think of all those soldiers during the war, wandering through these same places fearing for their lives.”
They found the pointbreaks by matching the headlands against the images they’d stored in their iPods. But there just wasn’t enough swell to light them up. So, they ended up paddling out at some playful little beachbreaks, with Mike and Dion doing their damnedest to make some scenes for the film on the wind-warbled scraps.
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