John Borthwick ventures to the Indonesian island of Sumba in search of the perfect wave

Sumba makes Bali seem like Manhattan. This high, undulating island of 11,150sqkm is home to about 500,000 people who, despite their veneer of missionary Christianity, remain animists and ancestor worshippers. Roughly halfway between Bali and Timor, the island is, according to Australian anthropologist Lawrence Blair, “a time capsule of our earliest beginnings”. Within minutes of leaving the airport at Tambolaka in western Sumba, I notice men sporting ikat turbans and parang swords cantering along the road on tough little horses.

These ponies and their equally sturdy riders are the stars in Sumba’s celebrated ritual, the Pasola, battles on horseback that take place each February and March.

In this dangerous war game, hundreds of horsemen thunder across a large field flinging wooden spears at each other. The national government still allows the jousts to take place but these days insists that the spears at least be blunt. Officials realise they have no chance of banning the tournament as Pasola is far more than a display of machismo and horsemanship. It is integral to the island’s animist Marapu belief system. Despite the blunted spears, serious injuries are common and there are even occasional deaths. Rather than regretting these, the Sumbanese believe that blood spilled on the earth during Pasola will ensure a fruitful harvest and their survival.

As spectacular as Pasola is, I’m in pursuit of a different thrill. On a stretch of the southwestern Sumba coast so pristine and wild that it almost defies description, two Westerners, Claude and Petra Graves, have captured a slice of time. Their creation, Nihiwatu Resort, sits facing the Indian Ocean on a low bluff cupped by almost 200ha of virgin jungle-clad hills and grasslands, with 2.5km of empty beach sweeping west, away from Nihiwatu’s beautiful stone bungalows. In front of the resort, the surf pounds across the reef.

Out in that surf is always a handful of Nihiwatu guests who have travelled halfway across the world to revel in a surfer’s fantasy: perfect, uncrowded waves. Their fantasy is just part of the dream that became Nihiwatu, Sumba’s only up-market resort. Former Bali dwellers Claude, a lanky surfer in his 50s, originally from New Jersey, and his German wife spent a decade making Nihiwatu a reality. To find the site for the resort they dreamed of, in 1988 they trekked for two weeks along Sumba’s remote jungle coasts. Discovering this perfect location was just the beginning.

“We had to negotiate 263 separate traditional land titles to buy the area. It took years,” Claude tells me. “Then we lived in a tent for a couple more years while we built the first resort. And just as we opened in 1997, an earthquake flattened everything.” As if this weren’t enough, their land was located on the border between two warring tribes.

Throw in a local shaman’s curse on Claude, plus droughts, malaria, monsoons and, in the early days, a six-hour bush-bash drive from the nearest town, Waikabubak (it takes only a half hour since Claude built a road), and you have just part of the resort’s epic genesis.

Undaunted by the earthquake, the Graves rebuilt their dream and finally opened it in 2000 as an up-market escape hatch for romantics with a taste for the exotic and for well-heeled divers and surfers with a thirst for perfection.

Thanks to the resort’s philanthropic body, the Sumba Foundation, which has put more than $1 million into the under-funded public health and education systems of western Sumba, Nihiwatu also attracts many medical professionals on “helping holidays”.

In the morning, I find myself surfing alongside Claus, a Danish microbiologist specialising in the eradication of malaria. (The Nihiwatu district is malaria-free thanks to his program.) At dinner I meet two Californian pediatricians, here for an intensive voluntary stint at one of the foundation’s seven free clinics.

“We’ve been drilling deep-water wells to provide clean water for the villages,” Claude explains over coffee. “We also help the schools by providing the children with textbooks and other materials.” Here, the idea of responsible tourism goes far beyond the pale-green platitudes often heard in ecotourism. Meanwhile, the long, left-hand reef break just keeps pumping.

Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, may be the nominal religion for 65per cent of the population, but Sumba’s original Marapu culture is evident everywhere, from elaborate funeral ceremonies and headstones to a fervent belief in divinations, signs and omens. In many traditional villages, livestock remain the only acceptable form of bride price and missionaries are still forbidden to enter. In the largest Muslim nation, Sumba remains uncolonised by Islam.

Early Portuguese and Dutch sailors called it Pulau Cendana, “the sandalwood island”, although the Portuguese soon felled all its aromatic trees, then moved on. Antonio Pigafetta, Ferdinand Magellan’s lieutenant, was the first European to mention Sumba, in the 16th century, but it was only in the mid-19th century when the Dutch established a government office that Europeans settled here. The Dutch ruled in little but name until Indonesian independence in 1949. Later Sumba became known as the “cowboy island of the South Seas” because of its mounted warriors on their sturdy ponies.

The surf flattens out, so it’s time to explore the island. Borrowing a motorbike, I head for the market town of Waikabubak. Schoolchildren in neat uniforms rush out to greet me (foreigners are still a rare sight) and saronged villagers with red betel nut-stained teeth wave back. I notice numerous old graves on the outskirts of the town. Each is surmounted by a massive horizontal stone slab, or dolmen, decorated with motifs such as buffalo horns, horses, men or women, the size and embellishments reflecting the wealth and status of the deceased.

I ride 20km farther across the grassy savanna flats to Pasunga village in Anakalang district, home of the largest megalithic tombs in Sumba. These famous royal resting places are up to 4m high with slabs twice as wide weighing up to 20 tonnes. The largest tomb, for five aristocrats, was built in 1926, with 150 buffalo said to have been sacrificed during its construction.

The dolmens for these massive tombs are still hauled by men, sometimes in their hundreds, from the quarry to the tomb at the home of the deceased noble. The largest and heaviest monolith, 5m high and weighing about 70 tonnes, stands in the village of Galu Bakul. One thousand men were needed to haul the stone from the quarry.

In contrast to these ponderous monuments that house Sumbanese dignitaries in their afterlife, the homes of the living commoners are light, graceful wood and thatch structures. The traditional house design features a distinctive, high-peaked roof spire in which families store their heirlooms, as well as keeping food out of reach of predators and preserved by the smoke that rises inside the chimney-less houses. New homes are often built of more durable but far less lovely corrugated iron, but still with the same peaked, central spire as the traditional houses.

Magical and malarial, Sumba is not for everyone. This intriguing and isolated island, in transit between the ages of sorcery and the satellite dish, is for adventurers. Instead of spas and boutiques, you go bargaining in the market for hand-woven ikat textiles. In lieu of shaded sun lounges and quick-stepping waiters are prolific reefs and untrammelled beaches. The people are courteous to a fault. And always there are the signs and omens to be watched and obeyed. Tradition here is far more intact than in most parts of Indonesia but change, inevitably, is coming to Sumba: airstrips, clinics, regulations, roads and blunted spears.

Source : http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au