After a motorcycle ride along an empty road, my daughter and I noticed from a high wooden platform in a deep lagoon with salt-white sand, healthy coral and no one else nearby.
While the Indian Ocean splashed, we swam, jumped again and laughed. We have lost sight of the time.
Maybe we were just lucky. The platform had to have been built by someone for the pleasure of many. But it was neither the first nor the last time we were practically alone in Sumba.
Sumba, one of the most eastern islands of Indonesia, is just one hour’s flight from Bali. But Sumba is as quiet as Bali is banging. There are no digital nomads, DJ parties or drones at sunset.
The island is twice as large as Bali with a fifth population. The airport is a Walk-Acrosss-the-Tarmac affair with one luggage parousel and a 40-minute drive to our hotel we might see a dozen people.
Whether Sumba can remain an anti-bali is a question. It is just starting to reach a turning point with sufficient hotel development and word-of-mouth reecloss buzz to draw more than just surf-crazy adventurers and celebrities with blank check budgets.
We heard about it from Surfer -Friends in Sydney, and when we had planned a journey of two months before departure, most of the handful of hotels on the island (ranging from $ 180 per night for a double Sumba Beach House up to $ 1,300 for the award -winning Nihi Sumba) were booked.
Some would claim that that means going now. Others will tell you, as they have told us, that for many reasons Sumba can never be Bali, from infrastructure to size and local culture, which requires a lot of trust and approvals from the community before something is built.
“There is just not much here,” said Kiri Desborough, the wellness director Cap KarosoThe hotel where we finally ended for a stay of four nights, which is private ownership and still feels manageable and intimate. “It’s a very different place.”
Room to spread
After we came from Bali, we immediately noticed a difference in the landscape. Geologically speaking, Sumba is an Australian continental fragment that drove north, which means no volcanoes or towering cliffs. They are usually plains of grass and corn, which serve as animal food.
The space is part of the attraction and, like the other hotels, spread throughout the island, Cap Karoso has made the best of it. The two -year building has 44 rooms and 20 villas on more than three hectares of hilly land that rolls to Karoso Beach.
None of the large hotel chains has set up a store in Sumba, so Cap Karoso is as large as it becomes.
The owners are a French couple – Evguenia and Fabrice Ivara, a former manager of the Luxury Goods brand and a digital advertising agency entrepreneur. Their aesthetics is minimalist, with modernist furniture and airy buildings, with plants on the roofs and lemongrass bushes along the walkways. We passed the hotel’s organic farm on the way to the lobby.
Upon arrival, David Garcia, the general manager, welcomed us and explained the ethos of the hotel: “There is much to do, or this can be the perfect place to do nothing.”
After lunch around the world in the Beach Club (Poke Bowl, Pizza, Bao Buns and a club sandwich, for about $ 50), my family-I, my wife and our two teenage children chose to be active. We went for a branding with the longboards of the hotel, which could be used for free. It was a bit of a paddle in small waves, but the water was crystal clear.
The next day we started a snorkeling trip that was recorded with our room price. Our guides were cold – they brought spear guns and caught a red snapper for dinner – and there were only a few other boats on the water. Under water I have seen a wider range of fish in other places, but in a time of climate change and coral blaxes the colors and health of the reefs brought a feeling of deep lighting.
Then, after our Lagune adventure, we booked a half-day surfing journey that sent us with a guide around the southwestern tip of Sumba. We bounced unpaved roads through traditional villages with thatched roofs that were high on different stories. Officially SUMBA is usually Catholic, but in the old animistic religion of the island, ancestors or “Marapu” accompany the living from above, so that traditional houses (and some government buildings) achieve a connection.
Wainyapu, our destination, was just past a river mouth and a village. There was no one else in the water. The waves were four to five feet, soft, clean and tons of fun for our intermediates – probably the best place we had ever surfed together as a family.
Our guide, Julianhanto, said he came to Sumba for exactly that kind of experience, after growing up in West Java and to work in more busy places.
“Bali has so many people,” he said. “I love Sumba because Sumba is still nature.”
Mr Garcia told me that 90 percent of hotel staff are Sumbanese. Many of them were trained by a partnership with the Sumba Hospitality Foundation, a local non -profit, and perhaps because tourism is still so new and seems to deliver local benefits, the relationship between guest, staff and community felt warm and not -reassed.
Children from a nearby village swam on the edge of the hotel beach, wave, smile and try to try a little English. When my daughter and I get lost on the way to the lagoon, the locals pointed us to a smile in the right direction.
A place to relax
We also succeeded in doing nothing. Sun suspicions at the main swimming pool, which is slightly higher than the villas, offered a great view of the sky, sea and a lighthouse in the distance.
One night my wife and I signed up for dinner Julang, Cap Karoso’s Fine-Dining option with guest chefs serving guests at a single long table of an open kitchen.
There were only six of us for a meal of Robbie Noble, A chef raised in Melbourne, Australia by the British. His menu leaned in local seafood and offered cooled crab tea, grilled octopus (with tahini and shallots) and a steamed Mahi Mahi dish with morning glory, also known as water spinach.
We all worked on it with a few American expats who lived in Amsterdam and a British couple who told us about their dating on a motor trip of 30,000 miles from Alaska to Patagonia.
Luxury in removal can be expensive: the Prix Fixe meal at Julang was around $ 90 per person, without wine; Dubbels at Cap Karoso start at $ 325, duplexes with two bedrooms at $ 750 and three bedrooms can cost no less than $ 4,000 per night.
More reasonable options at smaller boutique hotels or houses are available if you book early. In any case, you are probably on site for most meals and activities, because other development is scarce (although the kitchen staff called a karaoke bar near the airport).
The balance of Sumba at the moment, with nature, is personnel and food offers such as freshly baked cakes every morning, feels extravagant and vulnerable. As always, the rich-local gap between the rich visitors risks the culture of a place that continues to exist, largely unchanged, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
In the lagoon, for example, a handful of sellers set up stalls to sell local crafts and when we left, a few men and boys fought for whom a small parking fee had to get.
But compared to Bali – or a lot of Thailand, or Fiji, or so many other places – Sumba still feels like a secret outing, a place to erase the mind, enjoy the wind and the sea, and especially, avoid the crowd.
“We don’t have the infrastructure for four seasons,” said Mrs. Desborough, who recently launched a seven-day wellness experience, with immersion in the nature, community and shamanic practices of the island. “And to be honest, we are good at that.”
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