The black camel. It’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it? I’ve never been one to name vehicles, always seen them more as an extension of a lifestyle than their own personal entity, but I reckon this one has stuck.

Never thirsty, always dry, said Nath, a brash, long-haired Aussie out in the surf. And yeah. It feels fitting riding this empty, scorched 500km long road, through barren corn-fields and half-baked fishing villages.

I’m in a hurry to get across this island to its eastern port, but I’m worried that the rush might not be warranted. In the more populated parts of Indo, ferries run to some kind of regular schedule, at least by Indonesian standards. Maybe every hour, notwithstanding the lengthy delays. Here, they run every week. There is no online timetable, no one really knows when they’ll leave. The only way to find out is by riding to the port to ask. I have two days to rest and recover some sensation in my arse, which feels like it’s been welded to The Black Camel’s saddle after the 13-hour ride. Onboard, five long-haired Peruvians are the only other Westerners. They inflate a flotilla of blow-up mattresses in the middle of the top deck, stripping to their underwear and making FaceTime video calls.

The Indonesian passengers around them aren’t really sure how to react; some shoot them baleful looks, wondering what the hell they’re doing half-naked in one of the most Islamic parts in Indonesia. Others swarm the outskirts, setting up little camps and outposts on the edge of their palatial set-up. Meanwhile, I find a quiet corner of the deck. I roll out a little yoga mat and take a good swig from a bottle of local alcohol. Laying back, I rest my head on my backpack, and pull my hoodie tight over my head to blockout the full moon.

Nusa Tenggara Timor, Indonesia’s easternmost island group, is regarded as one of its poorest and most primitive. It’s evident from the moment you arrive in the port. A police officer takes my motorcycle registration papers to check and says I can collect them from the police post.

The concrete building has no doors or windows, and exposed steel pokes out from its half-finished cement façade. A labourer is scooping building sand from a tiny pile out front into a bucket. Two policemen sit on a little wooden bench inside one of the exposed concrete rooms.

“Yes, this is our office!” one says, proudly. “We’re self-sufficient, we have no help from the government, and we hope to finish the building soon. Whatever money you give will help us to buy cement.”

The deeper into Indonesia you go the more of a curiosity you become, the more at odds your life becomes with theirs. Filling up at a petrol station, I’m quickly surrounded by a soldier, two police officers, and the entire queue of customers. They all want to know where I’m from, what I’m doing here, how I can speak Indonesian, and if that 60-litre luggage box on the back of my motorbike is full of 100,000-rupiah notes.

In the city streets, men ride horses bareback, barefoot down the middle of the main road. The roads are lined with vendors selling huge cassava roots. Buffalo and pigs and dogs stray onto the road. Huge megalithic concrete tombs stand outside grass-thatched rumah adat, or traditional houses with their towering, central peaked roofs.

For the travelling surfer, accommodation options are limited mostly to one area. Rolling down into the once tiny fishing village, I’m surprised to learn that most of the accommodation options are lavish, gated resorts. They range in price from$100 per night, to Nihi’s top-of-the-range $21,000USD++ per night villa.

It would be remiss of me to visit this island without mentioning Nihi. You’ve probably heard of it already. You know that resort with the private wave, where only guests can surf and even they have to pay $100USD for a two-hour session, which has to be booked in advance.

It’s a highly controversial arrangement that butts up against the ethos of most surfers, but Nihi founder, Claude Graves, insists that the state of modern surfing is such that surfing good quality, uncrowded waves is now a privilege you have to pay for.

“It’s come to that. Of course, it has. There are too many surfers, not enough waves. And not everybody can do what you’re doing, driving all over the place and still exploring. It’s hard work, man. And if you’ve got a job and responsibilities and family, then what are you going to do?” he says.

“You go to the Mentawais, you’re surfing with 40-50 guys. And for me, you’ve got at least 12-15 guys that are better than me because I’m older and out of shape or whatever. It’s just not worth it. Here, you are guaranteed exactly what every surfer is chasing. There is a valid reason why some places should be kept special. Kept private; as private as can be.”

In my first surf at a cliffside, shifty right-hander there are 10 guys in the water: a couple of Euro kooks, whisked here by boat from one of the nearby resorts, the remainder middle-aged Australian men. They are all riding brand-new pop-out factory surf-boards, which belie their low surfing abilities. They talk of hedge funds, investment properties, a new boat; most of them the kind of surfers who have dedicated their lives to chasing money rather than waves.

It is a difficult proposition to pair with the basic rumah adat and bare-foot kids and betel-nut-stained smiles back on the beach.

Religion is a fundamental of life in Indonesia; Pancasila, the unifying state philosophy requires all Indonesians to identify with an official religion. While the majority of Sumbese are listed as Christian on their identity cards, many actually identify as Merapu, an ancient belief system associated with animalistic rituals. A few weeks into my stay at one of only two locally owned home-stays at Kerewe, the owner, Petu, invites me to attend a traditional ceremony.

Two-hundred-odd people are gathered around the village, the men dressed in the traditional garb of woven headbands, a short sarung, and a waistband holding a machete; the women in long kebayas. They all sit chewing betelnut as they wait, the dirt floor flecked with rivulets of bright orange spit. Night arrives. The men begin to drink peci, a local alcohol made from palm sap.

The men cheer and holler as 12 squealing pigs are brought one by one into a large concrete circle and stabbed in the heart with a long wooden spear. They light spear grass and sear the dead beasts, before butchering them and dividing every part of the animal –blood and guts included – among the entire village.

The men tending to the meat glisten with sweat, pupils bulging. “Now you get to see. This is Sumba,” says Petu. He is grinning from ear to ear, the ceremony igniting a beautiful, primitive impulse in him. It feels like a kind of live museum exhibit, a true demonstration of human beings in our most basic form.

Before Petu found himself here, bringing guests from his own homestay to experience traditional life in Sumba, he worked for eight years as a lifeguard at Nihi. Here, he learned to speak English and discovered the joy of surfing and the economic potential it holds for the people of Sumba, he says.

“The ocean is something that has been very valuable to me. Growing up, my parents were ocean people. It was destined that I would be too. I grew up fishing until I was offered a job at Nihi. The owner, MrClaude, needed somebody who could swim and knew the ocean. At the time, I refused the offer because I couldn’t speak English. He offered me a trial period, and then after three months of training offered me another three months. I was very happy and proud to accept the job and continue learning English,” he says.

“I got along well with many of the guests. I took them out fishing and spearfishing. I began to understand their experience of the ocean, which was very different to mine. When I first saw people surfing, I had no idea about it, or the potential for us to make money from it. I thought, why are they spending all their money just to come here and surf? I didn’t understand the happiness it can bring. I just saw that you could die from doing it, and for what?

“Working at Nihi, I came to understand surfing. Once I understood, I wanted to try. I felt the happiness that riding waves can bring and I decided to build my livelihood around this. When I left Nihi, I built my own homestay. I wanted to share the knowledge I had learned with other local people. I wanted to teach them about surfing. I wanted them to understand how it felt, and the great potential it has for Sumba too.”

Petu has since become a leader of the surfing community in Sumba. He has taught other locals to surf, which has helped them to open their own surfing homestays and find jobs at others as surf guides and resort staff. Recently, his nephew competed in the national surfing competition in Lombok. As one of few local surfers, he’s also got a few secret spots tucked up his sleeve.

The dead-end road also doubles as a carpark for 20-odd scooters. It’s low tide, and the exposed reef is spotted with people scouring for oysters and seaweed. I’m quickly surrounded by 20 inquisitive kids, all of them yelling, “HELLO MISTER!”A couple of men amble over and ask for a cigarette. They are barefoot and their teeth stained a bright betelnut orange. One of them, Bapak Egon, shoos the children away as I change into my boardshorts. He can’t believe that I plan on riding a surfboard, which he calls a ski, here.

“But it’s low tide!” he says. “Aren’t you going to wear sandals to walk out over the reef? And the current! And it’s going to be night soon. Sometimes I bathe in the water, but only on an inner-tyre tube, and only when the tide is high. On a ski, woah!”

Surfing alone takes a little bit of getting used to. You depend entirely on your own capabilities and it is up to you to understand their limits. There is always an element of fear and nervousness there. Once you come to terms with that, however, you learn to appreciate the purity and the tranquility of it. At least, that is, until you find yourself in a spot of bother.

Johan motors out from the bay out front of the surf camp in Petu’s 6.2m yellow plastic boat. The 15hp short-shaft motor is too short for the transom, and the prop barely sits in the water. At a top speed of seven knots, it takes us half an hour to make the two-mile journey.

This wave breaks in front of a cliff on the tip of an exposed cape. On the higher tides when it is surfable, backwash rebounds from the cliffs. There is no channel to watch the wave from so I jump in and paddle up for a closer look. The bottomless, midnight blue ocean quickly becomes clear enough to see the coral heads below. An eight-foot set stands up, each wave throwing as it hits the shelf. I paddle across and sit where I’ve judged the take-off spot to be.

A rogue, 10-foot set blacks out the horizon. I sneak under the first wave but the second one is even bigger, even further out, and I’m sucked over the falls and pinned to the reef, my legrope ripped off my ankle. I’m in the worst possible spot as the third one goes top to bottom. I need to bail but with no legrope attached and the cliffs right behind me there is no option but to try and duck dive. The board is ripped clean out of my hands and I pop up to see it in two pieces, heading for the cliffs. I try to stay calm and pray that soon there is a lull and I can swim back out through the closeout end section. I make it back to the boat without even having caught a wave – the board completely disappeared.

In a way, I’m kind of thankful it’s gone. With a grasp on some of the more known waves in this area, I’m ready to start exploring, and it’s going to be a helluva a lot easier with just one surfboard. I load the 6’9 channel-bottom single fin onto the bike, pack the bare minimum of things, and set out to scour the nooks and crannies of Sumba’s rugged coast.