Hughie, Milla & Co Send A Moving Postcard From Surfing’s Most Familiar Mirage

Club Tropicana. The name alone brings back the smell of sunscreen, mai tais, and pensioners sweating through polyester on the holiday they’ve waited a lifetime to regret.

Technicolor drinks come with paper umbrellas that wilt in the humidity. There are no hazards, except the clear and present threat of slipping on wet tiles or suffering a buffet-induced cardiac arrest.

You could, of course, swing the other way and reminisce about Wham!’s queer fever dream of a video for the song with the same name. But the sentiment remains: the tropics are always someone else’s fantasy, never the thing itself.

The Club Tropicana that matters in our minds was not filmed in the tropics, but on that imaginary line that splits the sphere — the Equator.

We’ll keep calling it a tropical holiday because that’s what we dream of, and as tired as the idea of an Indo trip may sound, somehow there’s always room for another.

Milla Coco Brown, Vahitamahana Inso, Lennix Smith, Kobe Hughes and Hughie Vaughan were lucky enough to be sent on one for eight days with the Sun Bum team and Wasted Talent. Wade Carroll and Tom Jennings tagged along to document “the ripping and the tearing.”

You now only need a single coordinate to guess exactly where they were. The waves looked as fun as waves get, and the crew’s variety of approaches makes this a very amusing watch.

The soundtrack, put together by Rick Snowden, leans more poolside than most Indo edits, and somehow helps making that right towards the end look deceptively tame.

Club Tropicana is short, a little saccharine, but it might just keep us going until we’re able to experience our own idealised versions of tropical paradise.