You see some crazy things on the road in Indo.  Yesterday, mid-way through this two-day journey across three islands, I watched a motorcyclist swaying with a full-sized refrigerator strapped to the back of his scooter.  Also, two motorcyclists carrying a fifteen-foot ladder between them, heads poking through the rungs. 

It’s bewildering, but there’s a kind natural order to the chaos.  It just seems to work.  Nothing to do but embrace it and keep riding.  On, into the dry country; everything, brown and mountainous, horses and goats chewing at weeds beside the wide and potholed road.  I’m a long way from Bali now, in this renowned surfing area that is also a bustling Indonesian gold-mining town.

Outside of the surf camps, it’s hard to find cheap digs here.  20,000 workers have arrived from all over the country to build a new smelter.  All lodgings are either full or ghastly over-priced, at least by Indonesian standards.  Fortunately, a friend of a friend offers me a couch at his beachside house.  Even more fortunately, this couch happens to be just a short walk from one of the best waves in Indonesia. Travel helps to restore a kind of faith in humanity; people really will go out of their way to help you along the way.

With a forecast typical of this woeful Indonesian surf season, there is little else to do but explore the area.  This tiny beachside hamlet of three western-owned houses offers insight into the bizarre collision of two worlds.  My Australian ex-pat neighbour, Julie, is 60-years-old.  She moved here after her marriage broke down and has lived here alone with her four dogs for the past four years.  It’s an idyllic life at times, she says, but living in a cheap and tropical paradise like this isn’t all it appears. 

“You can’t be a high maintenance person.  You have to be someone who enjoys their own company.  In Australia, I always had people around.  Here, I can go for days at a time without seeing anyone.  Being a single woman here, you can’t be a girly-girl.  You have to be pretty tough.  You have to stand your ground,” she says. 

“It’s really different living here full-time.  It’s not a holiday.  You have to really fend for yourself.  You have to learn a different culture, and learn that things don’t work the way that they do in Australia.  Everything here is difficult.  This is so different.  The locals call this the wild west, and it is very much like that.”

Living beneath Julie are three migrant workers from Lombok.  Kusnardi, Rezan, and Saipul are here to paint the other currently vacant house, owned by a West Australian.  For most of his adult working life, Kusnardi has moved around various parts of Indonesia for work.  It’s a common phenomenon in this country known as merantau, which loosely translates to ‘to travel abroad to seek one’s fortune’. 

Indonesia’s 14,000 islands have evolved in vast distinction of one another.  Each still maintains its own unique language and traditions.  While us Westerners travel overseas to experience a different culture, many Indonesian people, like Kusnardi and his cousins, are able to do this in their own country while still maintaining a sense of comfort and familiarity through the language and culture, he says.

“The primary purpose of merantau is to make money,” says Kusnardi.  “We are from a small village, where there isn’t a lot of work.  Our ambitions are simple.  We just need enough to be able to provide a normal life for our kids.  But at the same time, we can seek out new experience and learn more about our own country and all the different groups of people who make it up.”

After three weeks, the wave out front begins to show its teeth.  Silky emerald cylinders, reeling along a razor-sharp 200m long coral reef pass.  Mesmerising, hypnotic.  The kind of waves that will make you abandon everything and build your life here, just for the chance to be in the spot on the rare occasions they break.  Fifteen years ago, that’s exactly what Merdeka Surf House owner, Joey Patterson, did. 

“It’s the kind of wave you go blind staring at waiting for it to break.  It’s a mesmerising thing when you see it.  Anyone who he is here to see it is definitely gunna go home and feel like they ticked a box off the bucket list,” he says.

“It’s like a drug.  It’ll frustrate the hell out of you, beat you up, punish you.  But you get that one, just that one little glimpse, and it will always keep you coming back for more.”

In the line-up, and the crowd is hyper-competitive.  The vibe up the top of the reef is serious.  Every surfer, bristling with the brashness and jostling ego necessary to snag a set wave here. 

Indonesia presents an argument for localism.  The crowds here are like nowhere else in the world.  Outside of Bali, there are few local surfers and an obvious absence of hierarchy in the water.  Most surfers have paid thousands of dollars to be here, and they’re here for a short time only. They’re keen to convert their cash into tube time and there is an urgency to their objective.  The line-up is an absolute dogfight.  Maintaining a sense of order helps ensure everyone’s enjoyment and safety, says Joey. 

“The town I grew up surfing in, there was a definite hierarchy and an older crew that made sure everybody toed the line.  Otherwise, there were definite repercussions.  You waited your turn, and you eventually got respect and eventually got waves.  I think everyone in Australia has had that experience,” he says.

“Indo has got a few anomalies about it.  People come wanting the wave of their life.  Sometimes they’re a little bit blinded by that and are maybe tempted to take it in an unsavoury manner.  It’s a tough one.  I think surfing has changed a lot too.  Twenty years ago, you could wait your turn and get a couple of waves and go home happy.  The last few years, lineups have become pretty saturated.”

Much of that saturation has been focused on Indonesia since international borders reopened.  In July 2023, foreign tourist arrivals jumped almost 75 per cent year-on-year to 110,000 visitors.  While there are no figures available for how many of those visitors are surfers, anecdotally, crowds have been out of control.  Hawaiian ex-pat John Kelly has lived in Indonesia for 15 years, and says that during one particular swell at one of Indonesia’s most renowned waves in July this year the crowd was the worst he’s ever seen.

“I saw seven people on one wave.  Seven people!  It’s like, who do you get pissed off at?” he says.

Joey says he has also noticed a shift in the type and behaviour of visitors over the years too.  Prior to surf forecasting, the most committed and patient surfers were the ones who were rewarded, he says. 

“Back then, most guys that would travel out to remote spots would come expecting to sit for a month and wait and you get what you get. Forecasting has made experts out of fools because anyone can have a look and know that next Tuesday it's going to be on. It’s bittersweet, of course, because I like to know that the waves are coming too.

“Surfing is so popular now that a lot of people in the line-up are kind of semi-new to surfing.  Maybe they did the surf course, but just brushed over the etiquette bit.”

A short way up the coast, on the beach, the moonlit whitewash of a renowned offshore reef-break just beyond.  A small crew of local Indonesian surfers are sitting around a wooden table plonked in the sand beneath a pandanus tree, drinking beer and arak and home brewed rum.  Ballads from Iwan Fals, a kind of Indonesian Bob Dylan, are playing through a cheap speaker. 

This area was once the domain of a subsistence people, says Musan, who now runs a homestay just around the corner.  There was only one rough stone road out to the nearest village, and they fished and farmed corn and rice using horses and buffalo.

“It was a hard work but a good life.  The thing with farming and fishing is that you never need to spend much money.  All your food is already sorted.  We used to just eat fish and rice mixed with corn, maybe three kilos of corn to every kilo of rice.  You gotta have a balance, right?” he laughs.   

“Everything we earned went straight into our pocket and could go towards spending on things that we needed.  A motorbike, new machinery.

Musan was around 14-years-old when the first surfers began to arrive here by boat from Bali in the mid-1990s.  He remembers the fear and the confusion at first, then later, the sense of opportunity and change it brought to the place.

“The first time I saw the boat I ran.  I thought they were here to steal things.  But they were good people.  They gave us t-shirts and shoes.  I was just a little kid, and they would hang off me like a clown’s outfit.  One of them gave me a packet of uncooked spaghetti.  I had no idea what it was.  I took it to school, thinking it was a sapu lidi, a broomstick,” he says. 

“Then some starting coming overland, riding or coming in cars from Bali.  They would sleep in tents here on the beach.  To go and get supplies from the village we would travel up the road on horseback.  My mother used to cook for them and would earn 30,000 rupiah ($3AUD) per week.  I used to cart boards for 5000 rupiah.  You look at things now.  Surfing has brought change and opportunity to this place, to the village, to us.”

In 2007, the municipal government began asphalting the road in to this village.  Now, many of its local residents are surfers.  Surfing helps to bring them a livelihood and also a way of life that aligns with who they are where they come from. 

“A lot of people go and work in the mine, or sign up to a nine-to-five sort of office job,” says Jack, another local surfer.  “They get fixated on the money they think they need to live a good life.  But how much money is enough?  If you’re not hungry and have a roof over your head, you’re already wealthy.  The roof they have over their heads has a limit.  Look at this!  Look at the roof we have over our heads.  It’s limitless.”

He points up the night sky, glittering with stars like caster sugar spilled over a sheet of black velvet. 

“Here, surfing brings us an income, and also a means of enjoying the place that we live in.  It helps us to connect with people from all around the world and gives us the opportunity to grow, and enjoy a better life through the tourism it brings.”

Perhaps the kindest, most empathetic, most compassionate people you will meet in this world are ones who have all gone without.  The Indonesian people know what it is to struggle. They understand that when you have nothing material left, all you truly have is what you carry inside of you. 

At midnight, when everyone retires, the boys offer me a hut to sleep in.  In the daytime it doubles as a bar, and there are beanbags laid out in the sand, a little wooden desk, and a powerpoint.  It looks directly out at the wave.  It is perfect.  I sleep for five hours in the sand, beanbag as a pillow, hoodie pulled tight over my head to keep out the mosquitoes and lights from the nearby warungs. 

After one month here it feels time to move on.  Travel is similar to surfing in the way that you’re guided totally by your intuition, and it is just a feeling that propels me back out onto the road.  I pack the few belongings I’m carrying – two boards, a hammock, few clothes, a first aid kit – into the back of my bike and prepare for the 500km ride and ten-hour ferry ride ahead.  Kusnardi insists I wake him up at 5am before I leave, so that he can make me a packed lunch of chicken and rice and chilli sauce to carry. 

A little way out of town, I stop at a roadside mechanic to pump up the tyres of my bike and adjust the back brakes.  Ardini, the mechanic, insists I stop for coffee.  The deeper you go into rural Indonesia the more of a curiosity you become, and Ardini wants to know all about my life, my family, just what the exactly hell I’m doing out here.  He tells me about his own adventures before he was married with two kids: moving to Bali to work in an organic garden, eking out a living selling things in Jakarta.

“It is a human need to explore.  To go beyond what you know, to be uncomfortable and meeting new and different people, it helps us to better understand who we are.  It puts into perspective the place that we come from and broadens our understanding of the world.  I hope you reach your destination, whether that’s a place you hope to visit or a learning inside of yourself.”