Why Sumba, Indonesia, should be your next island holiday
Though luxe hotels are sprouting, the lesser-known Indonesian island of Sumba remains unspoilt, with palm-fringed beaches and horses roaming wild.
In Indonesia, it takes just 50 minutes to travel back in time. Sumba might only be a short turboprop-hop from the tourist epicentre of Bali, but temporally this rugged island feels decades away. There are no bass-thumping beach clubs, nor cafes doling out spirulina-dusted smoothie bowls. Water buffaloes seemingly outnumber cars, and international flight connections have yet to be introduced. Sumba’s prime real estate is still reserved for frozen-in-time villages where whole families – all big smiles and betel nut-stained teeth – laze in the shade of their patios.
Only the small solar panels poking through their dwellings’ pointy thatched roofs give away that we are, in fact, firmly in the 21st century. At the village squares, buffalo skulls rest on megalithic tombs as part of a Bronze Age funerary ritual still practised here, just like the centuries-old Pasola spear battles to herald a prosperous rice harvest (once a blood-shedding affair, now a festive get-together). In the surrounding fields, wedged between terraced rice paddies and hillscapes creased like colossal heaps of green laundry, men with daggers tucked under their batik-printed cummerbunds tend raw-boned cows and Sandalwood ponies.
-
Discover untapped and extraordinary destinations in the latest edition of Travel + Luxury magazine, available online and in print on Friday, 17 March.
-
I watched it all pass by, vignette after rural vignette, during my Jeep transfer to Nihi Sumba, a two-hour drive south from Sumba’s Tambolaka Airport. Some three decades after the resort’s founding by American surfer-turned-hotelier Claude Graves, who washed up here in 1988 with a dream of pitching up a surf retreat “nice enough to take your girlfriend to”, Nihi’s surf’s-up, hair-down vibe has turned it into a holiday honey pot for Silicon Valley big-shots and yachting tycoons. Among them were American investor Christopher Burch and South African hotelier James McBride, who, after initially staying as guests, took over the reins in 2012 and spearheaded a $30 million spruce-up that saw the resort expand into a small village of multi-bedroomed estates with sombrero-shaped vernacular roofs and gardens exploding with palms and hot-pink bougainvillea.
-
“The tribal nature of the Sumbanese people and the raw beauty of the land made big impressions,” McBride told me of his first visit to the island that is twice the size of Bali.”
-
While all villas now open to private pools and some guests arrive by helicopter, Nihi’s lo-fi, toes-in-the-sand spirit hasn’t changed – and is still the reason its most loyal fans return year after year. I could see why: from the open-air bathroom of my ikat-accented villa, I had uninterrupted views of the miles-long swoop of private beach, with surfers bobbing in the waves at daybreak. At sunset, steamy and violently orange, I watched the resort’s resident troupe of Sandalwood ponies emerge from the jungle fringe – a rural tonic. I filled the moments in between with guided walks through the surrounding countryside, where I’d pass saronged women balancing buckets of water on their heads and gaggles of crisp-shirted school kids shrieking “hello, misterrr” as they rambled past. There were jaunts to waterfalls and glassy lagoons, and another day I joined the boathouse (Nihi’s water sports centre) crew on a spearfishing trip that ended with an ocean-fresh sashimi picnic on a nearby beach. At the resort, dining options were similarly low-key: no chichi diners with starched tablecloths and fussy dégustation menus, but two sand-floored restaurants where Indonesian and Mediterranean-tinged kitchens draw on Nihi’s recently expanded vegetable gardens and dinners of grilled fish and turmeric-rubbed chicken are served under the sultry glow of bamboo torches.
It wasn’t until my sojourn at the Nihioka Spa Safari, though, that I truly fell under Sumba’s spell. After a 90-minute trek through the palm groves and rock-strewn bays of the island’s south-western coast, I arrived at this all-you-can-spa cliffside hideaway miles away from the main resort. Within an hour of being here, life had slipped into the slow-paced rhythm I had been craving. It wasn’t just for that lounger-lined private plunge pool unfurling from the foot of my bed, or those muscle-melting hands of massage therapist Asti, who was on standby for herbal body wraps and reflexology rubdowns at the drop of a hat. No, it was the soothing sum of Sumba’s palliative parts: the white noise of the Indian Ocean, occasionally interrupted by the thud of a falling coconut or a cicada chorus engulfing the jungle like a stadium wave; the frangipani fragrance lingering in the air; the lack of Wi-Fi this far out in the sticks.
I finally understood why high-flyers like Burch and McBride put down roots here. “The tribal nature of the Sumbanese people and the raw beauty of the land made big impressions,” McBride told me of his first visit to the island that is twice the size of Bali but with a fraction of its population. “It felt like my Africa in Asia and evoked so many memories of my homeland.” It was the deep passion for this place that fuelled his drive to overcome the logistic challenges of haute hospitality in this remote corner of Indonesia, which is, infrastructure-wise, decades behind its more famous neighbour. McBride said that charter flights were once so sporadic guests had to stay for at least a week. Supply chains and staff training required elaborate playbooks. “We’re a smooth-sailing ship now,” McBride added, and there are a couple of daily flights from Denpasar. “But we had to truly innovate and break new ground to make this magic happen.”
While Nihi became synonymous with Sumba, McBride’s tenacity also paved the way for a wave of intrepid hoteliers. Over the past two years, a handful of resorts have cropped up on Sumba’s southern shores and chimed in a new era for the island’s tourism industry. Right after the pandemic hit, Australian couple Daniel and Jess Baldock opened their wellness-centric boutique resort, Alamayah, along a surf-facing stretch a few coves to Nihi’s west. The look is mid-century tropical, with arched doorways and whitewashed suites furnished with local wickerwork and ikat tapestries. A sandstone-clad steam room, hydrotherapy bath, and Ayurvedic spa offer relief to post-surf muscle aches, while the kitchen doles out skewers of chargrilled chicken satay and coconutty vegan laksa.
One beach over, I met the British-Australian owners of another newcomer, The Sanubari, which welcomed its first guests last July. The couple moved here five years ago to set up their five-villa beachfront resort on the fringe of a nature reserve they plan to turn into a farm and artist’s retreat. Each of the villas is a straight-lined, thatched-roof dwelling with sliding glass doors framing dazzling ocean views. They open onto private infinity pools clad in pebble-washed terrazzo as eye-blinding as the bone-white beach they seemingly fade into. Over frosty Bintangs at the resort’s beach bar, where a motley mix of yachties, drop-in surfers and resort guests mingle every sunset, Sydney-born co-owner Micha Burn told me it was the island’s calm energy that initially drew the couple here, a world away from the Balinese busyness they had become used to. “Sumba connects us to nature – we can be outdoors and at our own pace,” she said. “It’s simple, but soul-filling.”
In little-visited Kodi on Sumba’s western tip, French husband-and-wife duo Fabrice and Evguenia Ivara are putting the final touches to Cap Karoso, opening next month. Given the resort’s size and amenities, it’s Sumba’s most ambitious newcomer yet: guests can choose between 67 suites and villas, which range from snug studios with daybed-dotted terraces and hand-carved wooden furnishing to palm-fringed three-bedroom villas with private lagoon pools pitched right on the shore. There’s an infinity-pooled beach club and an open-air cinema, and the couple plan to host French fine-dining chefs for residencies at the central Julang restaurant where they’ll cook with ingredients grown at the resort’s organic farm.
Burch and McBride, meanwhile, have set their sights on new frontiers. In the coming few years, the Nihi collection will grow with an outpost in Flores, just north of Sumba, where the brand will introduce Indonesia’s first overwater villas on a private islet near the Komodo National Park. South-east of Sumba, on East Timor’s Rote island, they’ll open a 24-villa beach escape on surf-friendly Bo’a Beach, while another Nihi will open on the northern shores of Costa Rica in 2024. Guests with shallower pockets will soon be able to sample some of Nihi’s untamed spirit at Kodi Bajo, the brand’s more affordable offshoot, that’ll make its debut on Labuan Bajo next year.
Back at Nihi, one question kept gnawing: how could I enjoy my private pool on an island where more than 60 per cent of its residents still don’t have access to necessities such as clean water? It’s one of those moral conundrums for which I’ll never find a fully satisfactory answer, but it was hopeful to see that the resort made significant efforts to improve local living conditions. In close-tied partnership with The Sumba Foundation, for which Graves laid the groundwork back in 2001 and is still a managing director, Nihi and its cash-flushed guests contribute directly to water wells, school programs, and health clinics in Sumba’s poorest regions. “The foundation is at the core of all we do at Nihi,” McBride said. “All future Nihis will have a local philanthropic association – it’s important to us.”
The Nihi team also suggested I stop by Makan Dulu, another good cause close to Tambolaka Airport. This restaurant and social enterprise, perched under a giant swooping gazebo built entirely from bamboo, is a training facility for young Sumbanese at the start of their careers in the hospitality industry. As part of the Sumba Hospitality Foundation, a hospitality school and eco-resort opened by Belgian founder Inge De Lathouwer in 2016, the project aims to equip locals with the knowledge and skills to claim their slice of Sumba’s rapidly expanding travel industry pie.
Over lunch, a kaleidoscopic spread of Sumbanese rendang, satay, and nasi campur (cooked rice with meaty sides and sauces) brought to my table by students with toothy smiles and the utmost concentration, I met one of the local founding partners, Dempta Tetebato – though her students call her Mama Sumba. “I don’t see myself as a teacher,” she told me. “I want to show these kids how to build their dreams, be their role model. That’s why we don’t just focus on skills, but on personal development and resilience. We teach our students that if you know your direction, you’ll work for it, and you’ll get what you want in life.”
The approach seemed to have paid off. Glowing with pride, Tetebato told me her students now work in hotels from the Seychelles to Oman and have taken up positions at Six Senses, Hilton, and Kempinski. Closer to home, my kapten, or butler, at Nihi, 26-year-old Petrus Gulihunga, was one of the 30 former students working at the resort and told me in almost accent-less English how the Sumba Hospitality School had taught him to be confident in dealing with visitors from abroad. Alamayah’s resort manager, too, was an alumnus, as was the bartender who served my beers at The Sanubari along with Cap Karoso’s food and beverage manager. “Our work here doesn’t only benefit the next generation, but it shapes the future of this island.” Tetebato concluded, “When I visit those former students at their new jobs, I can’t stop my tears. I’m a really proud mama.”
Review: This new Melbourne hotel is hard to fault
The very cool independent hotel comes with beautiful interiors, a rooftop restaurant and a surprisingly reasonable room rate.
Which airline has the most spacious seats in economy?
Most of us travel in cattle class but not all economy cabins are equal. There are differences in seat size, service, legroom, toilets and wi-fi across international carriers. Which is the best and how does Qantas stack up?