Vanimo
"Vanimo is about as far from anywhere as I've ever surfed, which is exactly why the waves were empty."
A remote border town on PNG's far northwestern coast where perfect, empty waves break within sight of Indonesian territory.
Getting to Vanimo takes actual commitment — it sits at the far northwestern edge of PNG, in Sandaun Province, close enough to the Indonesian border that on a clear day the hills of West Papua are visible across the water, and it’s a small propeller-plane flight from Wewak or an even longer road journey most people don’t attempt. I went because a surfer I’d met diving in Kavieng described it, unprompted, as the best wave he’d ever ridden in the country, and I’ve learned to take that kind of unsolicited enthusiasm seriously.
The town itself is modest — a market, a scatter of trade stores, government offices left over from when this was more strategically significant to the colonial administration than it is today — but the coastline either side of it is a string of point breaks and beach breaks that a small, dedicated community of surf-camp owners has quietly been protecting from overdevelopment for two decades. I stayed at a simple camp run by an Australian who’d first come through in the nineties as a backpacker and just never left, one of several similar stories I collected in PNG’s more far-flung corners.
The wave I surfed most mornings was a right-hand point break that wrapped around a headland with such consistency that I could predict, almost to the wave, where I’d need to paddle to catch it — a rare, generous kind of wave for someone whose surfing skills are more enthusiastic than technical. Between sessions, kids from a nearby village would appear on the beach with hand-carved wooden boogie boards, riding the shorebreak with a fearlessness that made my own caution look faintly ridiculous.
Evenings were simple — grilled fish, rice, a fire on the beach, conversations that drifted between Tok Pisin, English, and pidgin sign language when none of us had quite the right word. Vanimo is not a place you end up by accident, and everyone I met there seemed quietly pleased about that fact.
When to go: The surf season runs roughly October through March, when swells wrap in from the northwest. Flights from Wewak are infrequent, so build in flexibility, and note that Vanimo’s proximity to the Indonesian border means it occasionally sees additional document checks.