Koa Rothman battled a bout of Bali belly on a recent Indo trip. Photo: Koa Rothman // YouTube
Lately, Koa Rothman has been offering an unfiltered view of what it is actually like on a surf trip. It started off with a video from a recent excursion to Indonesia, where the Hawai’ian surfer chose to highlight be moments that typically fall through the cracks on a highlight reel. With his most recent video, Rothman’s unfiltered perspective returns, this time with the Pipeline local battling Bali belly in between sessions in the Mentawais.
The video starts off optimistic, as any trip does. “Somewhere, it’s going to get good at some point,” he says to camera, sitting next to a pool. There’s an idyllic vista in the background, but it is touched with a sense of foreboding from dark clouds hanging over the horizon. “Once these [clouds] kind of just disappear and the sun comes out, which it should, then we’re going to be surfing somewhere.”
That wasn’t exactly how it turned out.
The next clip was Rothman standing in a torrential downpour, unable to surf. A day later, he was reporting back from his bedroom, in the midst of a bout of illness. “Day two on the island and me and Jack have both gone down with I think you could call it Bali belly, flu-like symptoms and all that,” he told the camera. However, despite his corpse-like appearance, he remained the eternal surf optimist. “I heard Rifles, the wave around the corner, is pumping, so I’m gonna go take my GoPro out and try to vlog it.” That idea turned out to be wishful thinking as well.
It was a long journey to the surf – much longer than any of them could have anticipated. However, in the end, they made it. On the very last day of the trip, Rothman and company finally made it to Kandui and scored what to almost any surfer would be the waves of a lifetime.
