Beginner’s Surf? I Wish.

The surf camp has a locker room air to it.

Bunk bed dorms sit off a lino-clad lounge with a grubby floral sofa, where one muscular chap is stretching out his impressively knotted deltoids and substantial thighs.

“Hello,” I say. “You guys don’t know where we can hire or borrow surfboards do you?”

He curves out of his stretch. “You can’t get them here,” he says. “There’s no indigenous surf culture in Sumbawa. We’ve had to bring everything from Bali – bikes, boards, even wax.”

Oh god, I think. Of course there isn’t an indigenous surf culture here. Even in Lombok, folk have only been surfing for twenty years or so.

“Do none of the hotels have any to lend?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “A couple of Chilean guys showed up last night, and we had to tell them the same thing. You might have luck in Maluk.”

We have detoured to Rantung Beach, in Sumbawa, Indonesia, the second island along in our mission to get to Papua, because I’ve read that there’s an excellent, reliable beginner’s surf break that falls right on the beach here.

A beginner’s break on a beach by a hotel is kind of a holy grail for us. It means that rather than biking 20k or more over bad roads with boards, and back with aching muscles, we can just wake up, amble onto the beach, and, well, surf.

It has not been the easiest of journeys.

We catch the boat from the Gili islands in the morning, pick up our bike at Bangsal harbour, and amble across Lombok to the east coast port of Labuhan Lombok. A sweet enough journey, in its way.

We stop at the museum in Mataram, where a curator gives us a guided tour, from seventeenth century chain mail through to the gaudy leather horses on which young Sasak boys are paraded around their villages after circumcision.

We cast our eyes over the temple of Lingsar, sacred to both Hindus and Muslims. And then we head across the island, through a stream of unmemorable small towns, stop for lunch – and blam!

We emerge from the cloudy, damp shadow of the volcano into a startling dry, coastal heat, drive a narrow causeway and embark on the ferry to Sumbawa.

As an implausible scrum of vendors pushes banana crisps, leaf packages of nasi campur, bottles of the unappealingly titled Pocari Sweat and suchlike on me “for your baby, missus” and Z balefully ejaculates “I am NOT a baby”, I realise we’re the only bule on the boat.

It also dawns on me that it is nigh-on 100k from the West Sumbawa port of Poto Tano to Rantung Beach. And unless the road is the sort of highway not normally found on Indonesia’s less-developed islands, we’ll be doing it in the dark, or stopping short.

I wander out onto the deck and get chatting to a Sumbawan guy bringing his baby daughter home. “How is the road from Poto Tano to Sekongkang?” I say.

“Not good,” he says. “From Poto Tano to Taliwang is 16 kilo. It takes at least half an hour on a motorbike.”

Oh god, I think. If locals who know the road drive it at 30kph, we’ll be doing 20kph. Probably 15kph in the dark.

“Are there hotels in Taliwang?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

Thank god for that, I think.

The port of Poto Tano is pretty enough, a neat line of tiny, colourful, stilt fishermen’s cottages ambling along a bay studded with volcanic islands of a dull grass yellow.

In the beginnings of twilight, it would be rather beautiful, were it not that twilight currently signifies a painfully slow bike ride in the dark, and that the charm of the cottages is unlikely to extend to any accommodation in town.

We bounce across the rutted port in a swarming school of scooters and dust-spitting lorries and set out along a surprisingly good road.

Moths and bugs flutter, mesmerized, into the headlights of the bike, and thence into my face – specifically, my eyes and mouth. I can’t put my visor down since, stupidly, the helmet I bought is tinted.

The road winds right and cuts through scrubby farmland. This island feels wilder, somehow, than Lombok. Drier. We wind up a hill bordered by broad-leaved deciduous trees and scrambling vines, and I feel the first spots of rain.

Oh god, I think, spitting out a bug. Rain and dark.

The rain intensifies, and tiny frogs hop out of the grassland and across the road. I pull over and we don our rain gear – royal blue poncho for Z, blue and grey jacket with matching plastic pants for me.

The road’s not bad for an Indonesian minor road, in fact. It’s narrow, and the edges tend to drop away on tight corners. There’s more than the odd pothole, and occasionally the tarmac turns into rutted mud and stones, but folk are clearly making an effort to keep it in some sort of repair.

Still, it’s dark. And, with rivulets streaming across the tarmac and rendering the potholes nigh-on invisible until you’re on them, it’s slow and strenuous driving.

Z perches, uncomplaining, on the back of the bike.

Which is nice of him. Because, for both of us, it’s hell.

The rain is now coming down so hard it’s hard to keep my eyes open against it. We come to a decent sized settlement, with lights, and pull over outside a store, where a cluster of local guys outside it are waiting, like us, for the rain to slow.

“What’s this village called?” I ask.

“Seteluk,” says the chap.

“How far to Taliwang?”

“10k.”

God knows how long it has taken us to get this far. I brace myself. “There are hotels in Taliwang, aren’t there?”

“No!” he says. “No hotels in Taliwang. You need to go to Maluk.”

“Maluk?” I say. “How far is Maluk?”

“40 kilo,” he says. “An hour and a half. Maybe two.”

Oh Christ, I think.

We stop again to fill up with fuel, at one of those roadside shacks with shelves stacked with corked glass bottles of adulterated petrol you find along roads of almost any size in rural Indonesia.

The rain competes with the sounds of prayer from the mosque across the road. “Where are you going?” asks the guy.

“Maluk,” I say.

“Maluk?!” he says. “That’s far. An hour and a half at least. And dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” I say.

“Yes,” he says, making winding motions with his hands. “Lots of mountains. You must take care!”

“Oh,” I say, wondering whether this is the point at which I ask to speak to the head of the village and spend the night on the floor of the village office. “Are there hotels in Taliwang?”

“Yes, yes,” he says. “Taliwang’s not far. Half an hour from here. They have hotels.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“Drive safely,” he says.

I don’t really need any reminding.

We spend the night in Taliwang, a small town with a clean and surprisingly pleasant hotel (Losmen Ifo, opposite the petrol station, should you be stuck here) that caters to the local government workers who come through here on business.

Then we wind slowly up and down steep hills, populated largely by grey macaques and pale butterflies, and along the bayside to Maluk.

The driving force of the west coast of Sumbawa is a massive, US-owned and operated mine, 30k inland from Maluk. 8,000 foreign workers and their families inhabit a gated township, a private citadel, accessed only by pass, with a hospital, international school, golf course, swimming pool, health clubs, spas and restaurants.

Once upon a time, when the P. T. Newmont Township was in its infancy, it looked as though the wealth was going to trickle down to the coast.

So Maluk, a little town lined with hair salons, chemists and bakso stalls, which sits on a splendid golden beach, pounded by surf that tends to the terrifying, is lined with mouldering signs to places like the Kiwi Bar.

We stop and eat, and ride the steep, narrow, winding road through more hills. At the dusty settlement of Sekonkang, dominated by an implausibly large and apparently empty hotel, and get directions to Rantung Beach.

We take a turn, down a dirt road, to some beachside bungalows, abandoned but for two puppies which move from the defensive to the playful within a couple of minutes, a surfboard and a novel. There are drinks in the fridge behind the bar, a pingpong table set up, but the place feels like the Marie-Celeste.

Spray rises up from the beach below, where scary surf clashes and pounds against the rocks, and slow, heavy waves roll in from the left.

This is, I realise, with a sick and sinking feeling, not a beginner’s break.

“So,” I say, optimistically, to the large chap in the surf camp, “Are there any beginner’s breaks here?”

He looks at me, then at Z, standing skinny and optimistic with his bike helmet in his hand. “No,” he says.

Another guy chimes in. “There’s no beginner’s breaks on Sumbawa. It’s all reef breaks.”

“The reef’s quite deep,” says the first guy. “But it’s not for beginners.”

“Are there strong currents?” I ask, feebly. It’s obvious, even to a novice, that there’s a lot going on in the water.

“Yeah,” says the big guy. He pauses. “It was scary out there today.”

“You have really f*cked up this time, Mum,” says Z. “This is epic.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry.”

We wander around the vast expanses of garden, where horses graze above a beautiful bay framed by tall headlands, in search of someone who can sell us a room.

“Look at that surf, Mum,” says Z. “That could kill me.”

My plan was to spend a few days down here, working on our surfing, and doing a little bit of work on the internet which I’ve been assured exists here.

But there are no waves we can ride. And no boards on which to ride them. No one knows of anyone with a spare surfboard, and the chances of finding a longboard are nonexistent.

“I think we should spend the night here, anyway,” I say. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” says Z. “It says they’ve got international telly! I might be able to watch Family Guy.”

It’s a strange hotel, all in all. Like a summer camp for miners and surfers, or the restaurant at the end of the universe.

Trash novels and holiday reading sit alongside magazines with titles like “Plant Manager Monthly” and beers come in stubbies branded Metso Minerals.

It’s a Sunday, and a lot of miners seem to have the weekend off. The single men sit at the bar, working their way through Bintang beers and eying the sports channel on the TV.

The wives, neat in floral skirts or Capri pants, dressed by some suburban Australian mall, make small talk with each other, and pet the puppies with their children.

The rooms have the surgical feel of a defense or mining town in Outback Australia, but for the beauty of the view. All that’s missing, in fact, are the “Shift Worker” signs which replace “Do Not Disturb” in places like the Eldo Hotel in Woomera, South Australia.

This place was to be the highlight of our trip across Sumbawa. I decide to establish what else the island has to offer.

“There’s not a lot in Sumbawa, to be honest, apart from surfing,” explains Dave.

“I’ve seen a lot of guys go bad here. It’s the boredom, you see. If you don’t have projects to work on, all there really is to do is drink.”

I can see that. Already, I can see that.

Sumbawa’s a poor island, with much of its original culture subsumed into a generic Indonesian Islam, a volcanic morass of goats, cattle, farmland, small tin-roofed mosques, scrubby forest and generic kampung houses.

“Do you have Channel 9?” asks Z.

There will be no cartoons tonight.

“Is there anything to see on the island?” I ask.

I know about the stone tombs, the Sultan’s Palace, but the stone tombs are some way off our route, and I feel they are unlikely to vaut le detour. I know there’s weaving, too, but we’ve seen ikat and songkat weaving in Lombok.

“There were some giant clam fossils in the next bay down,” says Dave. “Great huge things, millions of years old. But they dug them out and sold them.”

“Oh,” I say. “Have you been to Sumbawa Besar?”

This is Sumbawa’s second “city”, the de facto capital of the Sumbawan half of the island — the Bimanese, in the east, have their own capital and sultan’s palace at Bima.

“Yeah,” he says. “Nothing there. It’s about five hours in a car if you drive fast. An hour and a half back up to Poto Tano, then three and a half hours down to the town.”

“We’re on a bike,” I say.

“You need to be careful on those roads on a bike.”

Sumbawa does not look like a big island on a map. But it appears it will take some time to get across. And that there is little to do en route.