Written by Cindy Sui / Translated by Claire Ku

For Greg Nolan, his journey to the outlying archipelago involved not just a major career change, but personal adjustments.

The former civil engineer from Brisbane is now known as the man who introduced surfing to Penghu. Over the past five years, he has encouraged many local residents and tourists to try the sport, which is surprisingly new to the area even though it’s surrounded by water and is notorious for strong winds.

Nolan, 54, ended up in Penghu when he found himself divorced a few years ago after a 12-year marriage. He moved to different parts of the world for his job and his ex-wife, who had a successful career in Australia, couldn’t move with him. The two grew apart. With a comfortable life of two homes, hourly wages twice what he makes now and more than 20 years of experience in engineering, Nolan decided to give it all up and heed a Taiwanese friend’s calls to teach English in Taiwan in 2001.

“After my divorce, I thought: let’s tear that page out and start over,” Nolan said, speaking from Penghu by phone.

He spent two years in a remote mountain village in Dongshih, Taichung County with no bar or nightlife. Nolan loved it, but missed surfing. One day, an ad in a newspaper caught his eye - “Island Life - English Teacher Wanted.”

“I had no idea what Penghu was. I had in my mind a beautiful tropical island,” said Nolan.

Penghu was not a pretty sight when Nolan arrived in the winter, but his strong understanding of the conditions for good surfing made him doubt what the many windsurfers there were telling him – that there was windsurfing but no surfing in Penghu.

“I thought this could be a nice place; it’s not going to be Hawaii. It’s going to be nice and not too many people out in the water,” Nolan said.

He spent months scoping out the beaches and figured out the secret to good surfing in Penghu – hitting the water at low tide and after typhoons when a lot of sand is moved from the beach into the water, making the water shallow and helping waves break.

He now teaches English part-time at the same cram school in the main island of Magong where he answered the ad and spends most of his daytime surfing, renting out boards and fixing up his clubhouse, which opened last year and grew from his hobby.

When Nolan arrived he had just one surf board. Whenever the weather was right, he would put the surf board under his arm, get on his scooter and head to the beach. Soldiers stationed in Penghu and locals asked him to teach them how to surf.

Then he bought five boards and built a trailer on the back of his motorcycle to take the boards down to the beach. By the time he was up to 15 boards, he rented a van. In his third year there, he rented an old shed on the beach and just left the boards there. Whoever wanted to surf would take the boards and just pay him when they bumped into him.

People soon heard of him and hotels began telling tourists interested in surfing to look for the silver haired foreigner at Shanshuei Beach, Penghu’s most popular stretch of sand.

Last year, Nolan and a Taiwanese friend opened the clubhouse called Mahalo on the beach. The clubhouse rents out surf boards and gives surfing lessons. There’s a restaurant and pizza place next to it and hotel rooms upstairs for rent.

“I came down here just to do some surfing and have fun,” Nolan said, not expecting his hobby to grow into a business. But he said now there are probably as many surfers as windsurfers.

The local university, National Penghu University, has asked Nolan to teach surf camps to the students, the first one of which was completed recently and another will be held soon. The university, which tries to teach skills useful for the hospitality or water sports industries, has also asked Nolan to teach kayaking and scuba diving.

“Before Greg Nolan came here, only a few people surfed because of the lack of equipment. Greg Nolan brought a lot of surfing boards and held classes at Shanshuei Beach. Now it’s spread not only to students but tourists and a lot of people on Shanshuei Beach,” said Jerry Wu, associate professor of marine sports and recreation at the university.

Despite the increasing local interest, it might take a while before surfing becomes a major sport in Penghu and a big draw for tourists, reflecting the slow development of other water sports in Taiwan, in spite of the abundant coastal areas.

“Up until a few years ago, the sea was still not open for a lot of people. … That’s due to historical reasons because there was still a lot of tension between China and Taiwan, so most coastal areas were controlled by the military,” Wu said.

But for Nolan, who has lived in the United States, the U.K. and Saudi Arabia, he is here to stay.

“The surfing is going to grow in the next 10 years (in Taiwan) because it’s so accessible,” said Nolan, who is building a small shop to make surf boards so he doesn’t have to import them.

Penghu - a place which Nolan describes as something from the 50s or 60s where people don’t lock their cars or worry about being burglarized - has become his second home and Taiwan has become a place he’s lived in for longer than any other country, other than Australia.

Most of his income comes from teaching English. The clubhouse only makes enough to support one worker and pay for its own expenses. Eventually, Nolan would like to work down there full-time, surfing and teaching surfing, which he said would be “a surfer’s dream.”

He said he wouldn’t trade his current life for the old one.

“This is better. … Engineering was good to me and the money was good but in the end there was a lot of stress over a lot of money and it ended up in a divorce. …

I’m less gullible now. … I don’t need a new car every year like I used to; You don’t have to have a million dollars in the bank, as long as you’re happy. I was trying to fulfill the Australian dream – get your career, get your house, have your 2.3 children. Now there are no rules. To me this is magic.”

To rent surf boards or get surfing lessons, contact the Mahalo clubhouse at its website www.mahalosurfing.com or call Nolan in Penghu on 0952910985.