Where on Earth? Week 44 – Montañita, Ecuador

by Aaron Hotfelder on

This week’s Where on Earth is Montañita, Ecuador, a small tourist-filled town on the coast of Ecuador. If you’re heading to Ecuador and want to learn to surf on the cheap, this is the place to do it. Boards can be rented for about $5 a day and lessons are cheap as well. You’ll find plenty of other backpackers to hook up with here (in just about every sense of that phrase) if that’s what you’re looking for. Be careful visiting, however, as you might never want to leave.

Congrats to all those who knew the answer, and to those who didn’t, hang in there. Things’ll pick up.

How are the beaches in Hawaii? Take a look yourself

by Jerry Guo on

I’m sure many of you have a pretty picture of a tropical island or cozy beach hanging up in your office. But here’s a thought: what if you could be there, just for a moment (virtually of course).

You see, recently a batch of “surf-cam” sites have popped up that hosts streaming videos of various beaches across the states–and around the world–taken by cameras set up on everything from hidden bushes to lamp-posts.

Two are particularly well-developed: WaveWatch and Surfline. Sure, you might not be a surfer, but this kind of service is a great way to kick back and daydream a little about the tropical lifestyle. WaveWatch is a very addictive site; you can actually control the video-cams and have a look around the beaches (which are surprisingly empty. At Surfline, you can’t control the cams, but they have more locales (several in Bali, a couple in Europe and Peru, etc).

Surfing in Munich, Germany

by Justin Glow on


When I was in Munich, Germany this past October, I heard about a place on the Isar River where you could surf outdoors any time of the year. “Long ago an urban designer placed three rows of rocks in the streambed to create some aesthetic roil,” wrote Scott Ostler for the San Francisco Chronicle, “and, voila, Surf City.”

The bridge overlooking the wave is on Prinzregentenstrasse at the south end of Englischer Garten. Here’s a map.

Be sure and check out the video above, and the gallery below. Fun!

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Giant foam attacks Australian coast

by Neil Woodburn on


I’m not sure how we missed this last August, but since it is now winter in the northern hemisphere and time to start thinking about heading south for some summer surfing, we thought we’d dig this up and share with our fine readers a rather bizarre phenomenon which recently occurred in New South Wales, Australia.

Dubbed “Cappuccino Coast” by Daily Mail correspondent Richard Shears, this 30-mile long swath of frothy bubbles consumed the coastline north of Sydney and gobbled up swimmers and surfers alike. The foam was created when powerful storms off the coast whipped up the ocean’s cocktail of impurities-“salts, chemicals, dead plants, decomposed fish and excretions from seaweed.”

The result was hardly what one would expect from one of this planet’s greatest surfing and diving nations. Nonetheless, it would still be fun to visit and frolic in that crazy foam. People pay big bucks to do this in Ibiza and I sure hope the Aussies took advantage of Mother Nature”s blender to throw a little party.

(Photo via Daily Mail – click here for more)

Best adventure videos on the web

by Neil Woodburn on

When National Geographic Adventure decides to run an article titled, Top Ten Online Adventure Flicks, you just know that your productivity at work will slam to a halt until you’ve watched all ten.

The videos are fortunately short in length and cover a variety of genres such as kayaking, BASE jumping, rock climbing, snow boarding, skiing, surfing, mountain biking, and the art of parkour.

In short, it’s a miniature Banff Film Festival on your computer. And yes, it will make you feel spineless and a bit of a loser watching other people live exciting lives while you’re hiding behind the safety and comfort of your work cubicle.

Go ahead. Click it again and dream a little.