From the headland at Nihiwatu, a view both spectacular and serene reveals itself. In the foreground, clean barrelling waves break with a calming rhythm. A pristine beach of soft white sand gently curves into the distance, framed by hills covered in groves of coconut trees.
Farmers tend to buffaloes in small fields and smoke drifts from the tops of the towering grass roofs from a traditional hillside village.
”You know, man, Bali used to look like this,” says Claude Graves, a lanky American and one of the pioneers of surfing on the Island of Gods.
He lets the words hang, but no further explanation is needed.
While Bali is now choking on development, its roads gridlocked by cars, waves packed with surfers and landscape littered with rubbish, Sumba, a remarkable Indonesian island some 350 kilometres further east, remains relatively untouched.
It is a strange and alluring place, whose inhabitants still live largely as their ancestors did for centuries, worshipping a deity, Marapu, with animal sacrifices and rituals of beauty and brutality.
”I have seen what has happened to a lot of beautiful places in Indonesia, places that were surfing meccas, and not a lot of good has come from it,” says Graves. ”I wanted it to be different here.”
Graves has been living in Sumba, on and off, for close to 25 years. The headland where he stayed for three years in a makeshift shelter, filtering river water and fishing for food in the 1980s, is now a luxury resort.
What Graves, his wife, Petra, and a supportive local government have embarked upon in West Sumba is nothing short of a new paradigm in tourism and development for one of Indonesia’s poorest areas.
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