Webby wants to turn to back. His repaired bike tyre is leaking air again, and he says he doesn’t want another ordeal like the one we’ve just had.

I suspect, though, there is a little more to it than that. I mean, we’re out a long way from anything we know, and even with a grasp on the Indonesian language I still feel pretty alienated. I can only imagine how Webby is feeling. Probably like some kind of mute, double-headed Martian, capable of generating the odd laugh through some awkward charades.

Truth be told, I’m not too upset about his leaking tyre because it’s also a convenient excuse to get rid of him. I’ve discovered he’s not actually the documentary maker I thought he was… he’s actually spent the past 20 years doing shift work in a horse racing TV channel control room, beaming gambling addicts out their poison. 

Is he just a handbrake on this whole show? I wonder.

Or am I being entirely selfish and intolerant, totally single-minded and hard-headed in pursuing my own mission?

We ride 10 kilometres along the road searching for a tambal ban, or tyre patch place. They are everywhere in Indo; people set them up outside their houses using rudimentary tools – an air compressor and a homemade kerosene press – as a means to make a quick buck. 

Sure enough, within a few hundred metres we find one, but the mechanic is out drinking and celebrating at a traditional ceremony, his wife tells us. At the second and third ones, the power is out, they say. At the fourth, it’s too hot and the bloke just can’t be bothered. 

“Just keep going, up there, a little way,” he says, in that vague, mealy-mouthed Indonesian way.  It could mean anything from 100 metres to another 10 kilometres. 

Finally, at an open repair centre, I translate Webby’s request to three men. I tell him I’m going to ride ahead alone to our destination: a small seaweed farming village, where we may be able to arrange a boat to an offshore island where I’ve heard there are waves.

“It’s a good three hours, and that’s if the roads are good.” I say. “One of us should really get there before dark to talk to the village chief and try arrange a place to stay and a meal and a boat tomorrow.”

Webby panics a little when I tell him he really is on his own; he can’t rely on Google Maps out here and there will likely be no mobile service.

“We just have to make the plan and stick to it,” I say. “Just ride straight along the road and ask for the name of the village anytime you get to an intersection.”

Secretly, I figure this is the last I’ll see of Webby; he’ll probably turn back for the safety of the surf camp. I’m kind of relieved as I ride off down the rough, dusty road.  I’m free. Back on my own mission. No more hindrance, no more hand brake. 

But as the road climbs a mountain range into a remote national park, I start to have second thoughts.  What if I run out of fuel up here? Maybe I would like Webby’s company. And fuck. Am I just a complete arsehole? This guy has come out to help me and I’ve sort of just dumped him alone in the middle of Indo. Even if he is pretty annoying, I hope he doesn’t die. 

Finally, at dusk, I arrive at the tiny little seaweed farming village. It’s harvest time, and men, women and children are loading armfuls of the dried stuff into large nylon bags. As a Westerner in Indo I’m used to being greeted like a celebrity, but unusually, everyone ignores me. I ask a man for a meeting with the village Chief, and he leads me to a small, wooden hut. I sit with the Chief, his eyes all foggy with cataracts. We make small talk as I try to demonstrate the patience and joviality that lubricates any kind of transaction in Indo.

We’re deep in conversation when I hear someone yelling my name. I turn around and am shocked to see a familiar outline.  

“Webby!” I say. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Dude, where have you been,” he asks. “I’ve been here for hours.  I’ve already organised a boat for tomorrow morning and found a place to stay. We just gotta get some dinner sorted,” he says. 

Jeez, I think. Gotta give the guy some credit. He’s proved his worth. He’s pushed on through some pretty trying circumstances, and through it all he’s even managed to put up with me too. That’s an achievement in itself, I figure. 

In the morning, the village Chief directs us to Bapak Tia, our boat captain. Tia wears a bright, fake gold Casio watch and a brighter, faker grin. He lives on the island 40km offshore and works for Perusahaan Listrik Negara, the national energy provider, he tells me.  He’s here to cart 3000 litres of fuel back across for the island’s generator.

While Tia’s deckhands load the boat, he calls what he terms “a meeting”. It consists of a group of men sitting in the shade, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Hours pass.  Webby and I watch a fun, overhead right-hander peeling into the narrow boat channel. 

I want to surf, but I know too that waiting is a pretty active thing in Indo. You can’t really just sit around and wait for someone to call your name, like in Australia. Things go from zero to complete chaos in an instant, and you need to be ready for when they do.  

Finally, Tia calls us aboard.  This one of his two 12m wooden boats is loaded with 2000 litres of fuel in blue drums.  He fires up two little ketinting motors, which are basically just lawnmower motors with a long, modified shaft, and a tiny twin-blade propeller.  We putt out into the open ocean, where Bapak Tia hands the controls to one of the younger boys.  He moves up and lounges on one of the barrels of fuel. He pulls out a bag of donuts, and lights a cigarette.  

There are two islands offshore. One has around 800 residents, almost all of whom are squid fishermen.  Here, there are no waves. The other island is uninhabited and apparently has a good left-hander off its exposed tip.  Tia agrees to drop us there later this afternoon, but not before 5pm when he has eaten, showered, and slept. He insists we do the same while his wife cooks us supplies of squid and rice.

“This is all we eat out here,” says Bapak Tia. “Squid and rice. It’s too barren to grow vegetables out here. Squid is our vegetable.”

The mood changes when I try to hurry Bapak Tia. I want to tell him that we need to get across now, before the sun is too low, because there are waves and this is why we have come here.  But I know this is so far removed from his reality, and that nothing happens during the heat of the day in Indonesia. His smile loses its brightness. Silence hangs over us in a dark and awkward cloud. 

At 4pm, we load our surfboards and water and rice and dried squid into the boat, and begin motoring across the choppy, open stretch of water. A large concrete tower stands sentinel on the far side of the deserted island. It is all that is left of Dave Wyllie’s resort. 

Dave was one of the pioneering characters of Indonesian surf exploration, credited with discovering waves at Canggu, Green Bowls, and Cimaja. As one of his mates commented at his funeral in 2013, “He lived the dream, chased the dream, and probably beat the dream to death half-a-dozen times when most people would’ve packed up and gone home.”

This part of Indonesia is pretty wild even now, but Dave explored it on horseback in the 70s, when there were no roads and tribal wars still waging. He married a tribal Chief’s daughter and found a way to make a buck by exporting the island’s world-renowned woven textiles and built a couple of surf camps with the profits. 

Tia used to work for Dave on this island.  He says it was abandoned in 2005, after Dave raised an Australian flag at the top of the now crumbling tower. “Within a week, Indonesian navy troops arrived on the island, tore down the Australian flag and reinstated the Indonesian one,” says Tia. A 2005 Sydney Morning Herald story also suggests political interference was a factor. 

Today, all that is left of the eight villas he built with the support of Finnish investors and the King of the nearby Ngangi district are roofless, crumbling concrete shells. Tia suggests we set up camp in one of these. He begins walking with us as we lug our heavy gear alone across the 700-hectare island. Underfoot, there is a thick layer of ash. Near the resort, hundreds of burned turtle carcasses litter the ground. 

This island was a turtle nesting ground, Bapak Tia tell us. These turtles were massacred by poachers for their meat and the island set ablaze to destroy the evidence. Turtle meat sells for 250,000 rupiah per kilo in the provincial capital, and with the biggest turtles weighing up to 25 kilos, meat from just one animal could bring in more than two-months’ salary. 

“It was a terrible thing. They lit it up at 5pm, it burned until midnight. Everything has been destroyed. There is nothing left on this island that lives.”

As he talks, there is a duplicity written on his face, a disingenuous note in his voice. I get the sense there is more to his story. I’ve been in Indonesia long enough now to know that for everyone, the environment has a very different meaning. As an Australian it is a thing of beauty, something to be worshipped, appreciated. Here, it is opportunity.  Income. 

Trudging through the ash and dust and blackened turtle skeletons, I can make out waves through the gold-lit afternoon. Webby and I dump our gear at one of the roofless concrete structures, and I run down to the beach. A long but shifty left is breaking on an outer reef some 500 metres offshore. 

I start paddling out through the lagoon. The sun sinks below a low line of clouds. I begin to think about all that ocean between us and the mainland, the stink of those rotting turtle carcasses, tiger sharks, the energy I’m wasting. I almost reach the channel, then turn around and paddle back to camp. 

For dinner, we eat, yeah, you guessed it, dried squid and rice. Webby climbs the crumbling concrete stairs inside the lighthouse tower and sleeps up top. I curl up inside my board bag in the roofless, concrete villa, praying that it doesn’t rain tonight. 

In the morning, the surf is much smaller. The odd tiny left is running down the reef.  A Zodiac motor cuts the peace of the dawn, and the boat drops three surfers in the lineup.  We look across to where it’s come from. Another large charter boat is anchored up on the leeward side of the island.

“You’re fucking kidding,” says Webby. “We miss the only day of waves, and now this? I’m starting to wish we took the easy way, just like they did.”

“Yeah.  But where is the fun in that? Where’s the adventure?” I say.

“Bugger the adventure.”

During the day, there is nothing to do but sleep, smoke, dream of food other than dried squid and rice. Each meal gets progressively more rancid from the sun.

Tia promised us he would be there this afternoon to pick us up, but he also said something about if the wind was strong maybe he would come tomorrow instead. At 4pm, I’m starting to wonder where he is. We’re all out of water, and I can’t bear another night among the dead turtles and ash. 

Fortunately, he arrives. We spend the night on the floor of his bamboo shack. In the morning, all 23 people who live inside in the main house are on the boat with us, heading back for the weekly market. The exhaustless ketinting motor vibrates inside my skull.  I squat on the floor with everyone, trying, like them, to smoke the noise away. It doesn’t work. 

As we hit land, I just want to get out of here. I’m tired of it all. Of the lack of personal space and privacy, of the “HELLO MISTERS”, of the same scripted list of questions, of all these hosts parading me around like some sort of trophy. Tired of the squid, the rice, the waiting, the endless journeys. But as we load our bikes, our path out is blocked by the trucks being loaded with seaweed.

I walk down to the beach and find a quiet spot in the shade. Out beyond the boat channel, a few little peelers are running along the edge of the reef. I grab my board and paddle out.  It’s quiet out there. The ocean is so glassy that it is hard to even see the swells arriving.  I take off, wriggling to generate speed, gliding along the slick, oily water.  I notice Webby paddling out too.  He gives a little hoot. We laugh, looking around, breathing in the salt air.  Everything is quiet, still. All that frustration seems so far away; forgotten with just one tango on the liquid dancefloor.  

“You reckon all that was worth it for this?” I ask Webby.

He shrugs. 

“It’s definitely an adventure I won’t forget in a hurry,” he says.