If you’ve seen The Drifter, Taylor Steele’s insufferably ponderous film about Rob Machado’s solo quest for purity, soul and isolation in the Indonesian archipelago, then you’ve perhaps wondered about the identity and whereabouts of the barrelling left-hander that appears towards the film’s denouement (not the really famous one right at the end — you certainly won’t be finding any isolation there — but the one before that). Machado seems to stumble upon it quite by chance as he journeys across a remote island, equipped with nothing but a surfboard, a tent and an enviable array of dense curly locks.

The reality is rather different. Since 2001 Nihiwatu has in fact been the site of a luxury resort, where these days a room for the night will cost you $900 USD — a price which includes food but not alcoholic drinks, nor the 21% government tax and service charge, nor your reservation for one of the day’s ten available “surf slots”. If you’re not staying at the resort and have not paid for a “surf slot”, you can’t surf the break. If Machado had genuinely stumbled upon the wave by chance, he’d have been kindly asked to leave, possibly by a local wielding a machete.

And yet some people will tell you the wave doesn’t belong to the exclusive resort at all, but is in fact “Occy’s Left”, and has been ever since Mark Occhilupo’s iconic performance in Jack McCoy’s 1992 classic The Green Iguana. Others take a different view of the ownership debate, and maintain that it remains the property of its original creator, God. Either way the locals aren’t allowed to surf the place, but one wonders what would happen if Occy — or Jesus, for that matter — turned up without a laminated day pass.

Whether or not the luxury eco-hotel, which is powered by bio-diesel generators running on coconuts, is a good or bad thing for the local population is a matter of much debate on online discussion boards. The resort, for its part, says all profits are “repatriated” into the Machado-approved Sumba Foundation, which in the last 13 years has “set up over 15 primary schools, built 48 water wells, five clinics; supplied 172 villages with clean water and reduced Malaria by 85% in neighbouring villages.”