Call of the Sea: the measured adventures of Manhattan Beach’s Andrew Szabo

The dunes are covered in concrete, the vacant lots swallowed by suburbia, the alleys prowled by police. Even the Pacific Ocean seems pacified: Surfing, once the pastime of drop-outs and derelicts, now comfortably draws hedge-funders to the lineup. Can the South Bay still howl with the call of the wild?

Andrew Szabo thinks so. The Manhattan Beach resident came here from New York with his family in 2008. After some discussion with his wife about where in Southern California to live, they settled on the South Bay in order to be close to the coast.

“We were supposed to live in Silver Lake. I said ‘Come on,’” Szabo recalled with get-over-yourself tilt of the head.

Living here, he now thinks constantly of how easy it is to stumble into wilderness.

“It’s just so unbelievably convenient to take my kayak out of my house, walk two or three blocks and be in the ocean,” Szabo said. “Not a lot of people can say that.”

One Sunday last month, Szabo hauled his kayak down to the beach at 29th Street and pushed it into the ocean. Unlike a typical afternoon jaunt, however, he would not return later that afternoon. He would be gone almost two weeks, kayaking from Manhattan Beach to Tijuana.

Szabo, a Hungarian Internet entrepreneur, is a refreshing contrast to the modern adventure-lete, polished in a sterile gym and clad in fashionable activewear. He has wild hair and thick glasses, and when we met his casual ensemble betrayed no trace of sponsorship. His powerful upper body teeters over an injured knee, and was marked by the distinct appearance of muscle added later in life — an unchiseled burliness that suggests he could survive for a while if truly stranded.

Szabo was an avid kayaker when he was younger, but abandoned the sport some 20 years ago after nearly drowning when his kayak capsized while going down the Danube River in Budapest. But he picked it up again last year, reinvigorated by the treasures lurking just offshore.

He enrolled in a sea kayaking class at UCLA and, not much after that, announced his intentions to trek to Tijuana. Szabo’s wife Erica Lefkowits was hardly surprised.

“Quite honestly I wasn’t really shocked. It goes along with his personality. He said he wanted to learn how to sea kayak. Then, ‘Oh yeah, I’m kayaking to Tijuana,’” his wife said.

Having realized how easy it was to get in the water, Szabo quickly found he did not have to go far to find himself immersed in a new world.

“People fly to the end of the earth, they fly to Antarctica to ‘go on adventures,’” Szabo said. “but they really haven’t seen all the coastline in a 200 mile radius, which is just as fascinating.”

Of course, when Szabo says “people,” he means people like himself.

On the road

Szabo is the founder of the Budapest-Bamako, an annual event in which 400 to 500 participants drive from the capital of Hungary to the capital of Mali. On their way, they pass through everything from glitzy Monte Carlo to the harsh Mauritanian desert. Dubbed the world’s largest amateur rally, it is a road race in which contestants spend little time on actual roads.

But what makes Szabo’s more passive vision of adventuring cohere is that for the most part they are not actually racing either. There are no stopwatches or checkered flags in the Budapest-Bamako. Contestants have designated start and finish points each day, while nights are often spent communally, sharing stories — how a river was forded, or how a car was flooded — over food, fire and drink. The rally, while taxing, is more about finding yourself in a new place and enjoying your surroundings.

“It doesn’t matter how fast your car is, as long as you know how to drive, and you know how to take care of your car, and you know how to navigate,” Szabo said. “And how well you can get along with your partners for two weeks.”

The inspiration for the rally came by accident. In 2004, while working for a mining company, Szabo travelled to Conakry, the capital of Guinea, on a business trip. He was scheduled to travel on to Bamako, but his plans fell apart.

“I had a plane to catch on Saturday, and then on Thursday the airline’s only plane crashed. It fell into a swamp,” he said.

He began looking into other options, and found few. There are neither trains nor car rental companies in the area, and bus service was limited. So he and a business companion spoke to a “local fixer,” hired a car, and drove across 36 hours of savanna, sahel and jungle. The experience was life changing, and he wanted to repeat it.

“At first I wanted to enter the Dakar Rally. Until I realized it was not only way out of my league, but that it was organized in an old-fashioned, colonial, ‘We’re going to drive through your villages, we don’t get out of the car, we drive as fast as we can,’ style,” he said. “So I wanted to come up with a kinder and gentler rally.”

For many of the participants, the Budapest-Bamako marks their first time in the backcountry. One such newbie was Sean Flynn, a Boston resident who met Szabo during the 2012 running of the Budapest-Bamako.

“It was my friend Dan, his buddy Art, Dan’s son Connor, and me,” Flynn recalled. “I think Art might have been the only one who had driven anything offroad before.”

Caught in the net

A longtime Greenpeace supporter, Szabo made the trek from Manhattan to Tijuana last month to raise awareness of unsustainable fishing practices among major canned tuna companies.

“He doesn’t like to do anything for no reason,” his wife said. “He always likes to have some kind of a purpose or a cause.”

Canned tuna processors have been under scrutiny for years. A six-part New York Times series last year documenting slave labor practices and illegal fish poaching prompted Congressional inquiries into Thai Union, the world’s largest canned tuna company. (Following the Time’s revelations, Thai Union issued a new “Code of Conduct” in November 2015, and said in a statement they plan to increase the share of their tuna coming from the Proactive Vessel Registry, an industry-sponsored initiative to promote sustainable tuna fishing.)

The solution, Szabo said, is to rely more on line-and-pole-caught tuna. Although he admits this would drive up the price for consumers, and probably force a significant reduction in overall consumption, Szabo believes that the current model is not sustainable.

“It’s just like cigarettes: Years ago, everyone smoked, people thought it was fine,” he said.

The journey and the cause began to intertwine. His route would take him through San Diego, where many of the U.S. headquarters for tuna companies are located.

It was not exactly an operation of military precision. Szabo charted out an 11-day course to tackle the roughly 130-mile distance — or about 150 miles with “zigzagging,” he estimated. He would camp at night along various portions of the California coast, hoping to avoid state park rangers for fear of being mistaken for a vagrant. The middle of the day was set aside for rest and granola bars. He paddled a pre-owned Current Design Strom GT kayak, a 17-foot long model no longer in production. He recorded his observations in a bound journal with laminated pages.

Among the obstacles he encountered were rapidly rising swells between San Onofre State Beach and Oceanside Harbor, which nearly tossed him into the ocean. He also had to be on the lookout for military ships, and used his most advanced piece of technology — a marine radio — to inform the Navy that he came in peace.

Navigation was done mostly by “keeping the coast on my left.” He stayed less than a mile from shore, and came even closer off Palos Verdes to take in the wildlife.

“There’re just so many undiscovered places along the coast that you can only see from a boat — that you can only see if you stay close to the beach,” Szabo said.

Racing for the future

Szabo was greeted in Tijuana by friends waiting on the beach with a bottle of tequila. He took some time to decompress, and then drove home with his wife. Journey completed, the focus shifted back to the cause.

There was no Kickstarter, no GoFundMe, no social media linking his quest to the pocketbooks of strangers. Szabo wanted to focus on changing people’s hearts, minds and habits. He is working on a documentary about his trip and the tuna industry that he plans to show to schoolchildren, in hopes that they will ask their parents to pack something different for lunch.

“It’s so easy to say, ‘Ah, climate change is out of my hands,’ or ‘Arctic oil drilling, the politicians really need to do something.’ This is small, you can do something about it,” he said.

Szabo is also organizing the Baja 4000, a rally slated for the coming January that will propel contestants from Los Angeles, down the Baja peninsula along the Sea of Cortez, and then back up along the Pacific Ocean. A portion of the race’s proceeds will go to Corazón de Vida, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of orphans in the area.

“With the rallies, there is always some kind of charitable component. He wants to make it about more than just him,” his wife said.

Szabo’s philanthropic impulse is matched by a kind of social engineering streak, in which the race becomes a tool to jostle the outlook of its participants. Every running of the Budapest-Bamako, for example, features a stage in which contestants are not given GPS coordinates. In villages whose names appear on no map, drivers and passengers get out of their cars, and talk to the people who live in the places they are passing through.

“You had to go out into Senegalese bush and make nice with natives. That was a great day,” said Flynn, the former Budapest-Bamako contestant.

The link between cultural exposure and international empathy is not as clear as it might seem. Contestants likely do not sign up for the Budapest-Bamako intending to save the world. (In Flynn’s year, money from the rally built a school in Guinea-Bissau.) But whether they plan to or not, participants are forced to slow down and get involved.

“That, I think, is Andrew’s humanitarian genius. He figured a way to leverage other people’s adventurism and innate decency into providing real, tangible aid — and a lot of it — to people who desperately need it,” Flynn said.

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