“Dude we’re fucked,” says Webby.

He looks ahead at the rough track running along the ridge line, then down at the scrub fires in the empty savannah plains below. He starts throwing off all the gear strapped to his rented 150cc trail-bike – camera bag, two surfboards, snorkelling gear, sleeping bag, pillow – and jimmies the taillight up to get a better look at his broken surf-rack. Both bolts are sheared, clean.

“You’re kidding,” he says. “There’s no way we’re going to get down to the beach now.”

I’ve been with Webby for one day and already I’m beginning to regret inviting him. I was suss on him from the moment I met him just a few weeks ago, when both of us were freeloading at a friend of a friend’s place in West Sumbawa. Within five minutes he was spilling his guts to me about the five months he spent in prison in Banda Aceh, supposedly for overstaying his visa by five days. He really wanted me to write a story about it, but I didn’t buy it.

Why was he so keen to share something so humiliating?

And really? Five months in an Indonesian prison and $17,000AUD to get out for overstaying your visa by five days? Yeah, nah. That doesn’t quite add up. Still, he’s here to film, and with his company I feel bolstered in pushing the limits of this adventure into one of the wildest and most remote parts of Indonesia.

We take the strap Webby had holding his bags to the back of the bike and use it to tie the rack back on. It sags down a bit with the weight of his board bag, all loaded with food and water and cigarettes, but it might just make it if he drives carefully, I suggest.

“I’ll be surprised,” he says. “If the track is anything like it has been I don’t like our chances.”

Webby’s negativity turns out to be a portent, a prophecy. Deep ruts and random boulders slow our progress to a crawl. In parts, the track is barely wide enough for our bikes. Occasionally, it skirts the edge of a100-foot drop down into the valley. Riding hard up one very steep section I hit a rut and fall. Webby laughs from behind.

“Bro, come and help,” I yell.

He helps lift the bike and we steady it. Now we really are fucked, I think. It’s so steep there is no way we can hill-start or back it down. We’re trying to work out what to do when movement over the hill catches my eye. Four figures appear, each of them a black spectre silhouetted in the afternoon sun. One man in a police shirt carries a rifle. He stops to light the dry spear-grass on fire at the hill crest. Behind him, two men hold eight-foot spears, and there is a woman with a machete and a scrawny dingo-looking dog.

The men throw away their spears when they see us. I greet them in Indonesian. They smile, and I ask for a photo together and offer them cigarettes. We finish our durries, and the deer hunters put down their weapons and get behind the bike, pushing as I roar up the hill. Webby follows behind.

“Woah, that was wild,” says Webby, up on the crest. “Only in Indonesia would some-thing like that happen. Gotta be one of the friendliest countries in the world if you can speak the language.”

After five hours of riding we glimpse the beach, all virgin sands and electric-blue water. We stop for a rest, taking deep, relieved drags on our cigarettes, stuffing our faces with the four chocolate-filled bread rolls that were supposed to last us the next three days. Then Webby stops and cocks an ear.

“You hear that?” he says.

The faint whirr of a bike motor draws closer, and a little Yamaha Sporty 125ccscooter with a foam esky strapped to the back comes putting down the hill. The Indonesian rider is smoking, helmetless, wearing thongs. He waves as he passes us.

“That’s unbelievable,” says Webby. “We’ve just spent all day battling on our dirt bikes, and he comes down like that?”

Down at the beach, we make a camp in a little clearing by the edge of the jungle. Webby lights a fire and we set our heavy board bags down. They are our chairs, our table, our beds for the next three days. We’ve hardly eaten, and my mouth waters with the thought of sambal and chicken and vegetables I asked the cook at the homestay we just left to pack us. We open the packs. There are only four small portions of rice and four boiled eggs.

“I saw a dog wandering around before,” says Webby. “I guess if we get desperate, we could always eat that.”

I’m not really sure whether he is joking or not as I break open a bottle of urine-coloured peci, a kind of traditional alcohol made from palm sap. We take long swigs, losing our focus in the flames. I light a durry from the coals and ask Webby the question that has been burning in the back of my mind this whole time.

“So, dude, why did you really go to prison in Aceh?”

It was early 2018, he says. He had been there for a month and his visa was about to expire, but there was a swell coming and he wanted to stay. He paid a doctor to write a medical certificate declaring he was too sick to fly and presented it to immigration. Still, he would be fined, they told him. But Webby didn’t want to pay. He took a ballpoint pen and added a few extra days to the date on his visa stamp.

“It was a schmicko job,” he says. “No one was ever going to know. I got through immigration no worries and was waiting at the gate to board. Then the police showed up to collect the fine and saw what I had done.”

Really? A schmicko job? I think to myself. I dunno how he thought he was gonna get away with that. I mean, two plus two doesn’t exactly equal seven.

Webby offered the arresting officer a$1000 bribe, but that still wasn’t enough. This could earn him a promotion. When Webby refused to increase the offer he was detained in immigration detention. He spent the next three weeks sleeping on the floor of the guard’s quarters, before being transferred to a solitary confinement cell in Banda Aceh’s maximum-security prison.

“I was bawling my eyes out when I first moved in there. I was terrified. Then after about two or three days I was moved up to the general population, into a cell with about 30 people. It was tiny. Everything was falling apart. There was one little toilet in the corner, and you’re sleeping kind of curled up in a ball,” he says.

“Once I started meeting people I realised I wasn’t really in any danger. Most people were in there for real petty stuff and couldn’t afford to bribe the cops. A lot were in there for having weed, and some for ice. Aceh is under Sharia law too, so there were people in there for having sex before marriage and being gay, things like that. One guy told me he was a dressmaker and was measuring up the mother of the bride and touched her breasts. He’d been in there a year and hadn’t even been to court yet.”

As a Westerner, Webby was a curiosity, even something of a celebrity to the other prisoners. They queued up in the shower to look at his penis, trying to validate the rumour about bules having bigger dicks. On his birthday, they killed a goat for him and made a big stew. The staff also allowed him to use the office phone and computer, and eventually even gave him his own mobile. That contact with the world he knew was all he had to keep him going.

“On my birthday, a group of mates were at a wedding and they called me. There were 10 of them all on the piss, yelling, “YEAHWEBBY!” When I hung up I was bawling my eyes out. I went back to the guard’s house, and they asked, ‘what’s wrong?’ It was all right, I told them. These are good tears. They’re happy tears.”

“My Mum took it pretty well too. She came to visit. She was like, well you didn’t do anything really bad. It was just stupid. I bet you learned your lesson. And yeah, Indonesia is not a good place to get caught doing something wrong.”

It took Webby five months to secure his release. It happened only when his brother, who was working in the Philippines, flew over and found out who he had to bribe. He paid the judge and prosecutor and defence lawyer $5000 each, and another $2000 to ensure it all happened instantly. Webby was released two days later, but everyone had gone on holidays with his money and he had to wait another three weeks for them to return with his passport. Finally, he was back home on the NSW central coast, blacklisted from Indonesia for six months, looking for a job and doing his best to enjoy his freedom.

“I just smoked a lot of weed and went surfing. That was about it. And tried to forget about what had happened,” he says. We wake in the morning to see the surf is small. At the far end of the bay, it looks like there is a spitting right-hander out off the end of the cliffs. I’m tempted to make the kilometre-long paddle, but we have nowhere near enough rice or water or eggs to justify the expense of energy. We settle on a few little peelers near shore. As we prepare to paddle out, a huge wooden boat motors into the bay. It is far too big or luxurious to be an Indonesian fishing boat.

“Fuck. That’s a charter boat,” says Webby. “All that effort to get down here to uncrowded waves, and 10 frothing surfers roll in with a red-carpet entry. Pricks.”

“We should just paddle out and ask ‘em for food,” I suggest. “I bet they’ve got beer. Fruit, vegetables too. Fuck, they’ve probably even got ice cream.”

In the afternoon, we ride to the fishing camp in front of the freshwater creek at the end of the bay. I bring an offering of chillies, peci, and a handful of Australian tobacco and ask Jhony if he can helps us make a more permanent fix to Webby’s surfrack. He straps it on with rope and an inner motorbike tyre tube, and even gives us two mud crabs to take home.

Just as we’re about to leave, an inflatable dinghy approaches the beach. Eight blokes jump out. They’re a group of lads from Newcastle here on the Sama Sama charter for two weeks. They hand me, Webby,and Jhony each a cold can of beer. Tears well in my eyes as I crack the ring and savour every little molecule of crisp, delicious liquid. They hand us a plastic bag of cooked tuna steaks in bolognaise sauce, a block of chocolate, packets of chips, salted biscuits. Back at the camp, we cook the mud crabs in the coals and feast until we feel sick, laughing in disbelief at our change of fortune.

We wake to find the ocean is flat and our last bag of rice has gone rotten. After a breakfast of tuna steak, we pack up and start riding. Near the top of the first hill, Islip into a crevice and get the bike stuck. Webby comes down to help. He cries in anguish as he looks at my bike. The backtyre is flat.

“Now we’re proper fucked,” he says.

He starts to panic, suggests riding backdown and paddling two kilometres out to the charter boat to try and hitch a lift to the surf camp a couple of bays back, maybe seeing if he can charter another boat to cart our bikes back there. I try to talk him out of it. With only half a litre of water and no food, the wrong decision right now could literally cost us our lives. I suggest he ride down to see if Jhony has any repair tools at his camp.

Webby is gone almost two hours. He comes back all flustered, yelling. “Dude, look at my tyre!” he says. It is flat too and strapped to the rim with a piece of rope. He hands me another length to do the same. I struggle with it in the baking heat.

It is almost impossible work wobbling on flat tyres back up that hill, but we’re moving, at least. Halfway up, I fall and snap the front brake handle, and the only way I can control my speed now is by using the clutch as a brake. I smell it smouldering, and stall so many times the electric start cuts out, the battery exhausted. Just as we come over the steepest hill, my bike runs out of fuel.

Webby’s fully panicked now. I am a little too. It’s stinking hot and we have no water and not much shade, and at least seven kilometres to the closest village. He wants to leave me and go find help, but he can’t speak Indonesian and if something happens and he doesn’t come back, well, I really don’t want to think of that. After some heated discussion, we figure it’s best if he rides and I walk. I write a note in Indonesian, asking anyone walking past to remain honest in the eyes of God and not steal anything from my bike. I translate a request for help into the notes in his phone.

“Just remember, the word for emergency is the same in Indonesian,” I say.

After two hours Webby returns with Cornelus, a local villager who carries water and fuel. I skull the entire 1.5 litre bottle of water in one guzzle. Cornelus gives me a ride back to the bike and fills it with fuel, refusing to take any money. We ride all together back to his rumah adat home, where 15 people sit on the raised wooden veranda, the dirt floor flecked with rivers of betelnut stained saliva. His wife feeds us rice with sardines cooked in a tomato sambal. Cornelus fetches us each a coconut. He promises to take us down the hill to help us fix bike tyres. We clamber back on our bikes, wiping the dirt and sweat from our faces.

“Phwoah, that’s the closest I’ve come to dying for a while,” says Webby. “And we didn’t even really get any waves.”