Tom Anderson's new book, Riding the Magic Carpet: A Surfer's Odyssey to Find the Perfect Wave, is currently available from all good bookshops and online - so make sure you get your copy now!

Riding the Magic Carpet is a tale of surf travel, and of obsession.

Here's the original blurb:

'The right-hand point at Jeffreys Bay is one of the surfing world’s most exciting finds, and from the age of twelve it had been my life’s purpose to surf there.'

J-Bay, South Africa – the fantasy, the almost mythical waves every surfer dreams of riding once in their lifetime. But Tom wouldn’t go until he was ready. He would seek out surf-spots from the virgin reef-breaks of the Outer Orkneys to the temple point-breaks of Indonesia, from the beautiful beaches of France to the wilds of Sri Lanka, a secret cove in Panama and a reflective spell in Costa Rica, all on a quest to ride the waves of his dreams.

Riding the Magic Carpet will do for surfing what Fever Pitch did for football. Get on the road. Get in the water. Get stoked.

From Tom:

The book begins with Tom Curren’s famous end-of-Apartheid wave at South Africa’s Jeffrey’s Bay. As a youngster I remember seeing this wave on a big screen and knowing immediately that I had to go there. The combination of the circumstances in which the ride took place (simultaneous to Nelson Mandela walking free from prison) and the perfection of the wave itself created an irresistible allure.
Only the most boring of journeys take you directly to your destination, though, and getting there is more than half the fun. In the course of the Magic Carpet journey, the perfect wave is almost sniffed out in some pretty obscure places – like the freezing Orkney Islands for one (where there really is a town called ‘Twatt’, I promise you).

But it is experiences beyond wave-riding that give the surf trip its character. Some are bad, some good, but all remain a crucial part of the ride. Among others, Riding the Magic Carpet sees me running away while in France as a teenager, collecting a well-deserved punch to the face in Spain, grossing out at an Indonesian cockfight, sitting at the mouth of the Panama Canal on a half-stolen drug-dealer boat, getting washed bareback over live coral and losing hundreds of hours in transit – all in the name of a surf.
Is it worth it?

Can one wave really merit a lifetime of looking?
Of course it can.

See some of Riding the Magic Carpet's REVIEWS

Book Details:

Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84024-502-8

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 129 x 198 mm

Number of Pages: 320

Publication Date: 5th June 2006