Tom Rezvan works as a janitor and… surfs the world! Eight international trips a year! But, how?
In the dismal days of job automation, a hankering surf habit and a case of wanderlust are the kiss of death. Many are perfectly content with 14 days of freedom out of 365, but for us real adventurous mother fuckers. Staying put is a death of everyday truth.
We must runaway to remain sane, but international vagabonding costs a fortune and bouncing around within one’s borders just doesn’t quite have the same appeal.
So how does one go about funding such a life?
Do you hawk morality and skip out on youth, only to wash up on the shores of middle-aged existence, a flabby failure with pale cold hands gripping money hard earned? No, that would take too long. You need to leave right now.
What if I told you that Tom Rezvan, 40, has been pushing, on average, eight international trips a year since 2011 and contrary to rumors, he is not an heir to a trust-fund, a drug smuggler or a spy, but works part-time as a janitor for a school district.
If you pay homage to his Instagram or Facebook page, you’ll scroll through a dazzling feed rich with stories of travel and photographs from strike missions in the name of surf and culture. All of these jaunts across the globe however are done in three or four day hits, just enough to sedate the aesthetic voyager in Tom before he heads straight back to work on Tuesday.
You know those guys who invite you to go to Lowers and then has to stop to get coffee, a bar of wax, chats on the phone, and then wants to grab a quick burrito for when he’s down on the beach? Yeah those guys can’t do this.
But how does he afford to decorate his passport so extravagantly? BeachGrit called to find out…
BeachGrit: How do you get off work on a Friday and decide to go to Rome, or Egypt for the weekend?
Rezzy: I’m one of those people who can’t sit still and am lucky enough to be able to disappear whenever I want.
BeachGrit: So how do you do it? Do you buy an around the world ticket in the beginning of the year or do you have a sugar mama?
Rezzy: No, one of those tickets would cost way more then what I do and women slow me down. I am on a high-priority standby list courtesy of an anonymous employee of a major airline. I pay the taxes for the flights which comes out to be 10% or less of the ticket price.
BeachGrit: How do you navigate your way through new locales”?
Rezzy: I use this app called Navmii, it downloads the entire map of the country you are in. Every satellite view of every road that you need to know. It downloads a shit ton of data though but I have entire maps of most of Europe.
(Author’s note: I imagine Tom riding on a buddy pass in the middle seat with his knees drawn towards his chest, breathing like a Buddhist monk. Perfectly calm, harvesting his chi to unleash once the plane touches down and he clears Customs and Immigrations. He would then take out his iPhone on airplane mode, hail a taxi, and carry on with reckless abandon like an Indiana Jones in boardshorts.)
BeachGrit: How do you sleep on planes?
Rezzy: This isn’t a normal buddy pass, I’m fortunate to fly business class most of the time and with this particular airline, they have fully reclining beds. I sleep most of the flight and then only sleep three to four hours while I am traveling. Not everyone can do what I do. I have to map out and plan everything as much as possible because getting stuck at an airport or a train station means the strike mission is over”.
BeachGrit: What kind of person do you have to be to pull this off?
Rezzy: You know those guys who invite you to go to Lowers and then has to stop to get coffee, a bar of wax, chats on the phone, and then wants to grab a quick burrito for when he’s down on the beach? Yeah those guys can’t do this.
BeachGrit: No laggers allowed, got it. Do you always travel solo?
Rezzy: Yes, I have too. Nobody I know has this buddy pass so I would get bumped off the flight as well. Most of the time, I’m the last guy on the plane. How this works is that my golden ticket allows me to fly direct to major airports that the airline is headed too, but the connector flight I book and pay for myself. Sometimes I have multiple flights reserved at once, like when I went to Egypt I had five flights reserved at one time with destinations heading in every direction to avoid getting stuck and missing out on the experience.
Beach Grit: Tell me. Highlights?
Rezzy: The greatest aspect of what I’ve been able to do is score waves that rarely break. I’ve scored Mundaka and Desert Point absolutely flawless by tracking a swell a few days in advance, and spending countless hours investigating what was the best and cheapest way for me to get there. I flew from Lax to Singapore and straight into Lombok to surf Deserts. Most people hang out in Bali for months hoping to score Deserts, and they have to slug it out on a ferry with flies and no sleep. I bypassed that whole part of the journey and arrived ready with my tent and bug repellent.
There was the last swell of the winter in northern Peru a few weeks ago and I’ve always wanted to go to that area and surf those lefts. I’m also super into archeological stuff as well so I wanted to see Machu Pichu and Nazca Lines (geoglyph portraits of animals handcrafted by the Nazca circa 500 B.C). Most people do that in two weeks and I was trying to do it in five days. The goal was to get there in time for the strike and then get south as fast as possible and do the ancient ruins. I had to take nine planes in total, two trains, and two busses, leave boards at the airport in Lima, and get my boarding pass 24 hours in advance. I thought I had thirty minutes to board the plane from Cusco to Lima, but I actually had no time at all. So I paid a taxi driver double to pull off the impossible and get me there before five pm and he did it. I was picked up from my hotel in Lima the following morning and saw the Nazca Lines.
BeachGrit: What have you done to fund these travels? You don’t have to tell me if you’re 007.
Rezzy: (Laughs) Everybody thinks that I am a spy. I was being paid professionally to surf two years ago and had a decent career in the 1990’s and 2000’s and once scored a back cover in a surf magazine as well. I have had four different ways of obtaining income and that has varied in the recent years. I used to have a travel company called “Rez Charters” that took pro surfers to the Mentawais islands (Wilko, Eric G, Tonino, and Simpo included) , and have traded stocks. I’m not from a rich family. My father is retired and in a nursing home. The whole short trip idea started because I was looking after my dad’s health. He suffered a major stroke and I couldn’t be gone for long periods of time for fear that he wouldn’t get the health care that he needed. So after six months of visiting the hospital two times a day every day of the week, just totally burnt out and exhausted, I thought I would go to Egypt for three days. I made some phone calls, looked at flights and accommodation, booked it and made it work. From the success of that first trip, I knew that with this buddy pass, I could leave the country, and get back home to work and take care of my father.
BeachGrit: You’ve ridden the world’s best wave pools far before the surfing media even knows they exist. How do you have your finger on the pulse of these machines?
Rezzy: I have surfed Wadi in Dubai, Wave Garden, and Snowdownia. The trip to Dubai was my most successful surf trip ironically. I caught three hundred waves in four days and returned home with a hard drive full of images.
Tom tells me that he has to get off the phone because that he is packing for a swell headed to Desert Point. His board bag weighs exactly 50 pounds and he’s going to be back to work on Tuesday. He’s a genius, a magician of the system that keeps wild men rooted in their location. I am envious of Tom and the way he seems to teleport across the globe.
He’s going to Deserts in February? Really??
Ah! Congrats, we have an actual surfer here…
REZZY IS DA MAN
Shit, having over a thousand Instagram posts is pretty damning in itself but I’m definitely picking up what you’re putting down. I was being an arse hole because I think Tom is running a bit of a scam and is a wanker but I didn’t intend for the poor guy to have to defend himself on a homosexual expose.
Surf Splendor did an interview with him a few months back, pretty funny he was bragging about how he had just bought a load of quiksilver shares….
Based on the quotes above, you just outed this writer for appropriating content from the Surf Splendor boys without attribution.
Moral of the story: washed out surf pros end up as janitors!
i like coffee
A perk of traveling business class is sometimes meeting beautiful women who like to assume you’re a person of interest. When old Tom Rezvan the mop jockey meets beautiful women in business class he is obliged to tell them he’s a school janitor. He then fumbles moronically with the knife and fork he’s been provided as he is accustomed to eating with his filthy children’s shit stained hands. From that point onward, there is no possibility of a hand job under the blanket on a long haul flight. Now that’s justice. The world remains on an even keel.
Wigg’s flown Business class?
Between Sydney and Brisbane once.
I dont know if sitting next to the bus driver counts as “flying”
Oh believe me I was flying in every sense of the word.
SIMPLY BEAITFUL
It’s inefficient. I’ve learned the hard way.
wax, coffee, phone chat, burrito ? Taylor Knox !
which app does he use to find company in these far off locales? and how the fuck do you get that ‘buddy pass’?
Every time the waves are firing in California and I play hooky, I see this guy all over the coast. NIght time janitor? And I mean, shooting all over the planet with business class tickets for nothing makes this rubik’s cube a lot easier to crack.
Question of the day: how the fuck do I go about getting one of those passes?
btw, whats that illuminati sticker on his board?
Sounds like Tom has the perfect surf/shit balance.
This also answers my question about whether anyone would actually travel OS to surf a wavepool.
I’d SUP from Hawaii to LA to get a solo hour out at Leemore
I don’t care what he says, this dude sells weed.
This story reminds me of the time one of my semi-pro mates {gets wetsuits at cost!} wanted me to write a story for a surf-mag about a package deal Indo-Trip we did with a bunch of portly 40 year old’s. It was hard to decline such an exciting opportunity, but I felt the potential of a Pulitzer would have gone to my head.
I too define myself as “semi-pro” by only purchasing wetsuits at 50% off sales, thus scoring my new suits at cost!
But that’s The Surfer’s Journal’s demographic!!!
More chance of a Pulitzer moderating a bunch of bitter assholes commenting on gossip about surfing anyway.
I know this is supposed to be admirable and induce some kind of envy but…….business class, fly in fly out, a phone app to tell you where you are…..I ain’t feeling the romance or adventure of travel here.
More, boxes getting ticked.
Still, good luck to the guy I guess.
He is from Orange County…
Business class tickets for the price of the tax… I think a lot more people would be surfing the world if they had this kind of hook-up.
yeah, should have been titled “what you can do as a “janitor” when $2500 tickets are yours free of charge” but whatever, people love him on Instagram
so all we have to do is get a buddy pass, always travel alone, never get married or have a family, have a job where you clean up kids’ sh*t and piss, and live out of a bag and we can have this too? I’ll give it some thought.
Exactly, I’m sure one day those that have committed their entire existence to surfing will look back and think “what the fuck did I do?”.
not unlike most of my married friends with children.
I’d take my kids over 3 day fly in fly out surf trips for the rest of my life.
Those that have kids clean up way more shit and piss than this guy.
Besides, he’s more of a maintenance man than a janitor….
unlikely.
Hi there Rezzy.
yeah but, tubes
an alternative would just be to move someplace where you can get barrels all the time. Shit, if you’re open to being a single janitor forever, why not just move to J-bay or Mainland and be done with the hassle?
but that would negate the main point of the article, being the draw of wanderlust. Getting barreled in different locales will always be better than surfing the same point or beachie, regardless of quality
I’d say that there’s very little wanderlust in traveling to a spot for 3 days and then leaving. You don’t get to know a place or its people in such a short time. If he lived at J Bay he could wanderlust all over Africa, months at a time.
That said, it’s been suggested that people with wanderlust are likely bipolar, depressed and/or running from guilty feelings. Maybe he’d be better off spending a few of his travel dollars on some zoloft.
But how exciting to be able to think, “I’m going to indo tomorrow, gonna surf deserts for 3 days, then I’ll be back home in time for work on monday”? Just the ability to break from the norm and see a swell coming and go surfing half way around the world is amazing and exhilarating. Por ejemplo, there’s a cyclone swell going to the GC in the next few days, and I’d love nothing more than to drop everything and go see perfect Kirra firsthand… But I can’t. And Tom can. So that’s cool.
I’ll be there, I’ll let you know whats it’s like.
Inertia meet Michael.
Back cover credentials would certainly open many more doors than the common man…
Having a buddy pass, always traveling alone, never getting married or having a family all sound like someone with backdoor credentials to me.
Is Toms too old for your cousin?
Who is my cousin? I think it was you that showed me my mum on here a while ago. Very “impressive” woman!
The cousin you called a paedo…
That motherfucker….. right. I haven’t seen the sick bastard since he was about 19 tugging himself off in the swimming pool at a Christmas lunch. In fairness he isn’t mentally sound or at least he pretends not to be. From all accounts he is not a good sort. If he and Tom want to get together that’s fine by me.
What about back door credentials? I’d imagine they open up a few interesting passages as well.
So I gave a look at this guy’s instagram and there are hundreds of pics of him – all by himself. I feel sad for him despite the waves he gets.