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54-year-old Australian man identified as Ronald Stephen Schneider died on Tuesday evening after he was hit by a big wave when surfing at a surf spot in the Mentawai Islands regency, West Sumatra.

Mentawai Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Reko Indro Sasongko said the wave slammed Schneider into rocks, severely injuring his head.

'€œAccording to the information we have received, the accident took place on Tuesday at 6:10 p.m. The man died promptly at sea. It was purely an accident,'€ Reko told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Reko said the surfer'€™s body, as of Thursday afternoon, had been kept at Dr. M. Djamil General Hospital in the West Sumatran capital city of Padang and would be flown back to his home country sometime soon.

Mentawai, located around 150 kilometers west of Sumatra Island, is considered one of the best surfing locations in the world and has been visited by about 5,000 foreign surfers annually since the 1990s. Last year, more than 7,000 surfers visited the islands.

There are about 400 surf spots in Mentawai, with 13 of them offering international competition-scale waves as high as 6 meters. Tuesday'€™s accident took place at a surf spot in Katiet hamlet in South Sipora.

Reko said Schneider had arrived in Mentawai on a rented tourist ship, MV Nomad, captained by a 35-year-old Padang man named Kadir. Soon after the accident, Schneider'€™s body was evacuated to Padang onboard the same ship. It took five hours for the ship to reach Padang from the accident site.

The police, according to Reko, have no data on the number of passengers on board the ship as it transported foreign tourists from Padang directly to the surf site without notifying local authorities.

Separately, Mentawai Deputy Regent Rijel Samaloisa said that Tuesday'€™s incident was the first fatal surfing accident to have ever taken place in the regency.

In response to the accident, he also called on travel agencies and cruise operators to notify local authorities when transporting tourists to the islands. He argued that if a similar incident reoccurred it could have a negative impact on the Islands'€™ tourism economy.

Meanwhile in Denpasar, Bali, a 67-year-old French man died on Wednesday in a hotel in Kuta allegedly due to food poisoning.

Kuta Police chief, Comr. Dedy Januarta, said the victim, identified as Cristian Marcel Cateloy, died in room 9 of the Palasari Inn after he had repeatedly vomited and complained that he was in pain.

Prior to his death, Cateloy made a phone call to his French friend, Thomas Arthur, and asked him to come to his hotel immediately. '€œHe told his friend that he was suffering from food poisoning after dining at a restaurant in Serangan Island earlier [on Wednesday]. But we will have to wait for the autopsy report to know the cause of the death,'€ Dedy said.