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.