Island paradise regained

Posted in Developments at 1:26 am by apipacific

A luxury resort run by an American surfer may be an unlikely saviour of the idyllic life on Sumba, writes Tom Allard.
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 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 east, remains relatively untouched.
It is a strange and alluring place, whose inhabitants live mostly as their ancestors did for centuries, practising the Marapu religion 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,” Graves says.
”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 started in West Sumba is nothing short of a new paradigm in tourism and development for what remains one of Indonesia’s poorest areas.
It is ecologically driven, but also unashamedly elitist. Graves has bought or leased 190 hectares of land surrounding the beach at Nihiwatu. While the locals are free to come and go as they please, anyone who is not a guest is forced out in no uncertain terms.

The left-hand wave is one of the finest in the world and featured in the seminal surfing flick The Green Iguana. But Graves allows only nine guests at any time to surf it. Interlopers have been known to have their leg ropes slashed and physical safety threatened.
More than a few in the surfing community have campaigned against the practice. Graves was, he acknowledges, considered an ”arsehole” by some for his hardline stance. But that hostility has eased as people see what Graves is trying to achieve

Instead of plane-loads of surfers coming in to party and leaving again, Graves encourages his well-heeled patrons to get out to Sumba’s villages.
Invariably set on high on hills and surrounded by stone walls as a defence against marauding headhunters and slave traders, the villages feature homes with towering grassed roofs encircling the megalithic tombs of the departed.
Women weave blankets on the balconies of homes, which sit on stilts over holding yards for livestock. The walls are adorned with the bones of animals that have been eaten or sacrificed – buffalo and pigs mainly, but also dogs and monkeys.
It was Pigafetta, the companion of the Portuguese explorer Magellan, who first wrote of Sumba, describing its undulating landscape, sweet-smelling forests of sandalwood and fierce warriors with a penchant for headhunting and slave raids.

The sandalwood has all but disappeared. There have been no reports of headhunting since the 1990s, even if Sumba’s famed ikat blankets still depict the skull trees where the macabre trophies of expeditions were hung.
Elders like Dangu Duka, an animist priest, remember when his next-door neighbour – he calls him ”the king” – had slaves, although the practice ended in the 1950s.

”My grandfather told me stories about them. When the noble died, the slaves would follow them into the tomb … alive,” he says.
Sumba’s most spectacular ritual is the Pasola, where scores of men on colourfully adorned horses line up on opposing sides of a field, charge at each other and hurl spears – blunted on the order of the authorities these days – with astonishing velocity.

The most famous of all is held in Wanukaka, timed with the arrival of the nyale or sea worms. Spread over three days, it begins with pajura, or Sumbanese boxing. As a group of rato, or priests, chant incantations on a hillside, hundreds of people descend on a small beach to watch the young men test their manhood by the moonlight.
It’s wild and brutal, but only the warm-up act to the main show, the Pasola itself.

Forty horsemen stand on each side, one side representing the coastal people, the other villages from the hills.
Thousands are watching and many of the spectators wear helmets, a sensible precaution as the spears regularly fly into the crowd.
For close to three hours, the action unfolds. Riders gallop ahead and toss their spears, whirling around to take the applause of the crowd if they score a direct hit. The highlight is when a spear flies in unerring arc for the head of a man sitting straight-backed on his pony. Blood is spilt and the heaving crowd lets loose with a cacophony of war cries and cheers.
There are no winners and losers in the end. But blood has been shed, and that augurs well for a bountiful harvest.

Alus Tuapala watched it all with great amusement. He remembers when the Pasola was fought with metal-tipped spears.
”Sometimes, two or three people died,” he said. Was it upsetting for the family and the village of the slain? ”No, they are happy, very happy. It is a good thing to have the blood.”
For Claude Graves, the Pasola, village life, the stunning landscape are all worth preserving, although not as some kind of museum, or by freezing a culture in the past, with all its attendant problems of malnutrition and poverty.

The aid organisation he has founded, the Sumba Foundation, tries to respect the traditions while laying a path of sustainable economic development.
When guests return to their rooms at Nihiwatu’s resort, there is a list of development projects. They are encouraged to donate, and usually do. More than $3 million has been raised this way in nine years.

As a result, malaria infection rates have dropped 80 per cent, 42 wells have been sunk and schools provided with toilets, libraries and stationery. Five health clinics have been built and surgeons from Australia regularly come to Sumba to perform operations.

But Graves has wider ambitions. For example, the resort runs on biofuel made from copra sourced from coconuts. Four tonnes are bought each week, providing a livelihood for 115 local families. The residual glycerine is turned into soap and donated to the community.
”The government is interested in what we are doing here,” Graves says.
”Indonesia subsidies [petrol] but that may not be sustainable. We are showing them that there are alternatives.”

Malnutrition remains a big problem in Sumba. The locals may eat anything that moves, including dogs and monkeys. But the crops are limited in scope: corn, cassava and a few other staples.
Graves has encouraged farmers to diversify their crops and has started four organic farms using water from wells the Sumba Foundation has dug.
Nihiwatu Resort buys a lot of the produce but the remainder is taken to market, earning the farmers ”impressive incomes”.
Ten per cent of the crops are donated to schools, where nutrition courses are taught to the children.

Perhaps Graves’ most intriguing problem is to address the chronic respiratory problems suffered by many Sumbanese.
The reason for the widespread malady is simple in origin, but complex to fix. Sumbanese cook inside their homes on wood fires, filling their homes with smoke.
The obvious solution would be to encourage them to cook outside, but in Sumba’s traditional culture, the home is sacred and equates with the human body.

The fire where the food is cooked is like the heart of the house and must be inside.
”Families are inside there 10 hours a day. Sixty-seven per cent of the people who come out to our clinics have upper respiratory problems,” Graves says.
”They also use a lot of wood in these fires, so it causes deforestation”.
Graves’ solution: to use the cow dung and refuse in the animal pens as a source of methane, and direct the gas via a bladder and tube into an environmentally friendly stove.
He concedes it is experimental but he is about to trial it soon.
”We have to be inventive because we have to do things that make sense to the people,” he says

Work cited From : http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-feature/island-paradise-regained-20100312-q45q.html

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