The differences between the received wisdom, the standard version of events, and the facts on the ground may be subtle or they may be stark, even profound.

Rich white people show up in a poor country to pursue their leisure-time fun, get served by black and brown people, and live in relative - or absolute - comfort. In the water, that situation can get turned on its head, though. Local kids learn to surf, know the breaks, and take most or all of the best waves, fuming turistas be damned.

Hawaii is the birthplace of surfing, and many Hawaiians or part-Hawaiians surf, but in the rest of the United States it's a pretty white sport.

I need to conduct myself differently in different communities. In my experience, the journalistic conventions - you know, I'm the reporter, you're the subject, the interviewee - actually tend to hold steady much more consistently in rural Africa than they do in the American inner city.

Poor-country surf communities can be complex and, to some extent, leveling. The fisherman's kid is competing head to head with the plutocrat's gilded son. Your father can't buy you a good frontside hack.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.