Padang

So yeah, it's, it's really not that dramatically different than any other entry fee.

So I, I flew in, so I, I flew straight from Padang out at the end of the Sumatra trip.

Via Jakarta, of course.

Everything's through Jakarta.

Yeah, I, I'm flying out on Saturday to the Mentawais.

So are you gonna go through via Padang, Fletch?

We are.

We'll be in Padang Saturday night.

And then are you flying back through-

Jakarta

Mm.

We call it the Padang rice.

Mm-hmm.

Bro, it's over.

And I worked on some kit houses in French Polynesia later and did research on that.

And then in grad school, I did the tsunami risk mitigation project in Padang, Indonesia, and traveled a couple of times, three times? Yeah, three times to Indonesia for a couple of different projects.

And my PhD, I did a certificate in kind of the same stuff development engineering and it was really it's the way it's interesting and it's fun no offense to my you know good friends who are still engineers but like I do have more interesting work stories like to talk about at a party or or with friends and family I mean it's not like most of my family knows what I actually do I think my mom had just always told people he does something with water internationally which

I've never done that actually

Well, it certainly helps to have friend or friends who've recently been somewhere and can uh very quickly get you up to speed with their recommendations from having been there recently so that that was a big help sumatra is a huge place in itself let alone indonesia as a whole you know it is an enormous island the roads are pretty slow so if you wanted to try for all the sumatran endemics it would probably take about a month And some pretty remote, rugged places without real good accommodation, and a lot of flights, and a lot of ferries, some quite unreliable.

But the good thing, if you want to go do a relatively short trip, like I just did, you can fly into Padang, which is a pretty big city on the southern coast, and pretty modern place, you know, comfortable hotels and everything.

And then from there, you can do... less than two weeks and you can really see most of the Sumatran endemics, the majority, and I would also say all of the cooler endemics.

I mean all the ones that I was really keen to see are in that zone and yeah so it makes a nice little compact and pretty logistically simple trip.

And there's a couple endemic birds out there.

And there's different islands that you can go to.

But the most accessible one where there's a ferry, I think every day at the moment, from Padang is Sipura.

So we went out to Sipura.

Several water capture mechanisms were set up to try to capture rainfall from tropical storms.

They reached Padang on the southwestern side of the island of Sumatra on the 27th of November.

To reach the port they successfully navigated with charts or a local pilot through treacherous islands of coral by looking out for changes in the color and motions of the surface water.

Sumatra was a Dutch island and therefore neutral.

So that place is amazing.

There's another wave in a place called the Mentawi Islands, which is a archipelago of islands, like an island chain that is off the coast of Padang in Indonesia.

On my first trip to the Mentawis, there is a wave called telescopes.

And this particular day, it was so good.

The first started in Laguna Beach, California, where he discovered surfing as a kid, got sponsored in his youth, and then developed a professional surf career, traveling the world, mainly free surfing on photo shoots through his twenties.

On one such trip in September of 2009, he was aboard a boat off Sumatra when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocked the region, destroying the nearby city of Padang.

It would take more than 1,000 lives and left an estimated 100,000 people homeless.

John had brought 10 water filters with him, and he had planned to donate to villages when he got to Bali.

But when he saw the devastation in Padang, it became obvious that those filters could serve this community immediately, not only with fresh water for drinking, but also for medical assistance.

It was in that instant that he started Waves for Water and would go on to establish a nonprofit and spend the next 15 years responding to natural disasters and conflict zones as a first responder.

Waves for Water has responded to 47 major natural disasters, five war zones in over 50 countries, distributing more than 150,000 water filtration systems in addition to boring wells and building rainwater harvesting systems and impacting more than 4 million people's lives.