Al Chilazo.

No le di cacho. Didn’t overthink it. Didn’t cheat at the moment. Just followed the pulse.

Lo estoy haciendo al chilazo. I’m doing it on the fly. Rough, instinctive, no plan. That phrase stuck with me. Listen for it when something’s thrown together, unscripted, but still works. The best stuff never happens on an itinerary anyway. You get lost, you end up somewhere better. That’s the tradeoff. Control versus story.

I’m a pretty big fan of improvising. Not in the half-assed sense. But in this way that means trusting your gut before your brain catches up. There’s something kind of sacred about that.

There are a few unspoken tenets that steer me, in regards to travel, when I can get my monkey brain out of my own way. They’re not written down or even consciously acknowledged most of the time, but they drive most of my movement through the world. They’re sometimes broad, but also can be very narrow at certain times:

• A compelling story.

• A culture that is different from mine.

• A moment of preservation—of food, ceremony, or some fading form of craft. And that doesn’t always look like a grand ritual. Sometimes it’s a guy like Javi, passing on surf wax and stories to a kid in a town that not long ago wasn’t safe to walk through. That’s culture too. Quiet, alive, and still being written.

• A misunderstood belief or reality that deserves more curiosity than judgment.

• Bonus: good surf.

That’s usually enough to get me on a flight.

 

A couple of days after arriving in El Salvador, Javi and Felipe loaded up me and my buddies’ boards into the back of a 4x4. We bounced through sugarcane fields for two hours, hired a fishing boat, and rounded into an inlet flanked by Texaco and Chevron plants. The boat dropped us at a remote left point break with no one in sight. Just us and the incoming pulse of the Pacific.

Why do we do this? Fly across borders, bump through backroads, and hop into boats to catch 20 seconds of water folding over itself?

Because it’s there. And because it feels like a call. Something primal and ancient is shouting your name and you either show up or miss it entirely.

Everywhere I’ve ever surfed with good waves has had good energy. It’s a theory I’m confident in.

When energy moves through water for thousands of miles only to crash into land, it changes something. Shifting the coastline, it’s energy transfers into the ground. But also into the air. In the people. In the way conversations happen. Surf towns breathe differently.

Javi, 34, long sun-bleached hair, dark skin with a streak of zinc across the top half of his face, stocky frame carved from three decades of paddling. He sat in the back of the truck holding down our board quiver, “yeewww-ing” through the curves past trucks hauling lumber and narrow tunnels with a wide grin.

I heard his uncle was shot seven times in front of him. That was normal here. That was life for a lot of kids growing up. He said, “We had to keep our heads down. Even a smile could be dangerous.” That stayed with me. What does it mean to smile freely now? To cheer in the back of a truck like a kid? That’s not just joy, it’s survival turned into celebration.

Five years ago, El Salvador was a different place. Towns run by drug trade and barbarous gangs. Almost every corner I explored, our local driver would say the same thing: “Esta zona solía ser muy peligrosa”. Businesses paid daily protection bribes. Javi grew up with one foot in that world and the other on a board. His family pushed hard to stay clean, survive, and avoid the path so many others fell into. Now that the gangs are gone, either jailed or on the run, people like Javi can speak more freely.

Whatever your stance on the politics, whatever we’re fed about the violence, and the political solutions to mend, people here talk about peace like it’s a brand-new color they’ve never seen before. And that kind of peace, earned, fragile, unfamiliar, leads a new culture to unfold.

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible.” – Anthony Bourdain.

I wish I had written that. But I can’t top it. So I’ll just honor it here.

Because the world is small. And most people’s perspectives are even smaller.

And that’s not their fault. It’s just that we’re raised inside a bubble of convenience, fear, and headlines that don’t tell the whole story. Especially for the young, whose minds are wide open and capable of shifting the whole world—but are told to stay put. Be safe. Be realistic.

I found out that I could have my own outlook on the world when I was 22 years old. I’m not afraid to say that I was comfortable with the beliefs I was spoon-fed up until that point. Why wouldn’t I be? My family is the center of my world—supportive, encouraging, content. Those are beautiful, but ultimately limiting characteristics designed to keep you put. I can’t make my own decisions. I have to run it by someone first, right? I’m alone in my ideas. They’re not smart enough, and everyone will laugh.

When I spent two months motorbiking along the coast of SE Asia—my first real trip alone in the world—I realized how singular my ideals were. How I thought my narrow world was the only one of comfort. I was homesick. I was afraid of how vast things were. I didn’t believe other people truly existed—not in the same full, textured way I did.

If I could just strip away the self I know and am supported by, I might see how much of the world I don’t know. But I didn’t want to take off my layers. All that I had ever known. I didn’t understand the way they washed their clothes, or began their mornings with rituals of faith. I didn’t get the slow pace of life.

I was afraid of the aloneness I would feel if I let myself fully join in—if I became more distant from all I had grown up with. A pit in my stomach opened from diving into the deep end without a life vest. But as it turns out, that pit—that void—is the space that opens up room for so much more.

Keeping it closed is like the Hindu idea of blocking your chakras, or the Taoist belief of disrupting your chi.

I want enlightenment. I want that all-knowing, rounded, non-rigid understanding at the end of my life.

And the fact that I know I’ll never fully get there—but that the process itself is enlightenment—that’s what keeps me moving.

I want to keep opening myself to that same pit in my stomach—to dive into the rituals of different lives.

…I want to keep opening myself to the same pit in my stomach—to dive into the rituals of different lives.

Because that discomfort? That disorientation? That’s the very gate. Not the obstacle, but the entry. It’s where understanding begins, not where it ends.

I used to think “culture” was food. Colorful ingredients, regional spices, maybe a holiday or two with handmade things. But now I know it’s how people love. It’s how they mourn. It’s whether they sleep in or rise before the sun. It’s the music they play when they clean their house, and the way they teach their children to show respect. It’s all these subtle, inherited rhythms that seem invisible until you try living among them—and realize your own rhythm is just one song in a massive, wild orchestra.

At first, I didn’t want to join the music. I didn’t know the steps. I didn’t know how to move without looking like a fraud. But over time, I learned that curiosity is a kind of grace. That you don’t have to master a way of life to honor it. You just have to be quiet enough to hear it, soft enough to feel it, and humble enough to not center yourself in the middle of it.

I want to keep walking into places where I don’t know the rules. I want to sit at tables where I don’t recognize the food and listen to stories I’ll never fully understand. Because the more I do, the less tightly I cling to the idea that I’ve got things figured out. And that feels like progress.

Not linear progress. Not the checklist kind. But the kind that says: You are not the center of the world. And that’s uncomfortable. Because I am special. I have a mom and a dad that care so much about what happens to me. I care what happens. I’m terrified of the bad and relieved of the good.

But there’s a strange comfort in not being the protagonist. You get to observe. You get to see into others and feel something real—not filtered through your own expectations or ego.

You become a listener. A guest.

I was packing for Portugal on Monday.

I went there two years ago, stayed with some friends south of Ericeira in a sleepy surf town. A group of three Portuguese guys smoked me in poker every night—this trip was supposed to be revenge. I had a refundable flight.

But the swell shifted, and I remembered something someone once told me about Central America during the rainy season.

So I changed my flight. El Salvador instead. No real plan. Just curiosity.

We’re torn by the media’s stories of other places.

But people here? They want the same things I do.

Connection. Good waves. A cold local beer at the end of the day.

But they live differently. More in the moment. Life shaped by whatever the ocean hands them. Surfing when the tides call. Stretching when the swell goes flat. Dancing in tropical rainstorms, taking shelter under palm canopies when the sky gets mad.

They don’t force things. Don’t grind through unnecessary bullshit just to get ahead.

They live with this quiet, passive wisdom. They observe, like I try to.

I’ll probably go back to Portugal. But this — this decision to chase something off-script, al chilazo — it gave me something I didn’t even know I needed.

And I think that’s the point.