During the long, long flight to the Indonesian island of Sumba – 18 hours in total from London, via Dubai, with another stopover at influencer-infested Bali – it is advisable to avoid watching any seasons of The White Lotus. I wish I had taken my own advice. Even though we had stopped over in Bali for two nights, upon arriving at Nihi Sumba, I was still a little jet-lagged and not sure if I was fully awake or still dreaming. Everything from the insane first view of Nihiwatu, where the waves break on the white sand so perfectly as to seem AI-generated, to the unnatural level of perfection of flora, and the unreal colour grading applied to the sky, kept me ambivalent. It was like that terrible TikTok meme, where a woman asks, “No, seriously, what is this place? This. Is heaven.” Thankfully, I escaped being murdered by the gays or being poisoned by strange fruits. But by the time I came to put pen to paper back in the meagre generosity of London clime, my confusion hadn’t subsided.

You can trace the place’s look and feel back to its origin story. Nihi Sumba began in 1988, when American surfer Claude Graves and his German wife Petra discovered the remote coast of Sumba Island while searching for the perfect wave. You can feel that this was a place that was first imagined from the perspective of someone out at sea looking inland, not from the beach looking out. Claude and Petra gradually established a hotel resort named after Nihiwatu beach, meaning “mortar stone”, in reference to an isolated rock formation along the tide. In 2012, the American entrepreneur Chris Burch – ex of fashion designer Tory – acquired the resort in partnership with hotelier James McBride and has been investing substantially to transform it into a world-class destination.

Today, the 27 villa resort spans 567 acres of largely untouched jungle, with accommodations inspired by traditional thatched Sumbanese structures. Perched on steep hills above a private beach, the resort overlooks Occy’s Left, one of the world’s most renowned and greatest surfing breaks. Each villa has a private infinity pool, indoor and outdoor bathrooms, teak and marble finishes, and a dedicated and most gracious host who makes such a fuss of you that it would shame your granny.

At Bali’s huge international airport, one can be forgiven for thinking that we are in town for an international tattoo industry jamboree. There is hardly any human flesh visible that remains un-kissed by a tatooist’s needle. It is sobering to think that Bali, once a wistful faraway destination of adventurous backpackers, is now as exotic as Benidorm. Thankfully, our stay at the legendary Raffles Hotel, with its high, colonial, elegant, wafty atmosphere, kept us far from the maddening crowds. Founded in Singapore by a couple of keen Iranian brothers in the 1870s, Raffles is regularly listed as one of the best hotels in the world. Now an international group, it has branches in 25 locations. The concept was created to appeal to the Mem Sahib market in the late 19th century and has maintained its standards with the times, while so many other formerly glorious hospitality brands have crashed and burned, victims of the tender mercy of investors and the cruel demands of mass-market travel.

The tales of guests leaving in tears may sound like the overactive imagination of a copywriter, but stay for a few nights, and it becomes believable

By contrast, Sumba is often described by travellers as the Bali of 30 years ago. Sumba is less accessible, with only a tiny airport. The claim is that Nihi Sumba maintains its rustic surf-shack spirit, and that would be true, but only if that was rustic as imagined by Coco Chanel. A sense of old-school refined luxury pervades the place, which exudes a level of self-confidence only available to an establishment that knows it’s among the best of the best. On this trip, I stayed in one of their three tree houses. Architecturally Tarzan, the room is built around mighty ancient trees, and while it doesn’t lack any of the modern mod-cons, the experience of going down the winding steps around the tree trunk to breakfast is as much fun as childhood itself. The resort is renowned for its horses, which swim at the beach each morning and are available for exhilarating gallops along the shore if you weigh 85kg or less. For those as generously proportioned as your humble narrator, there is the fun of swimming alongside them, having them nuzzle your ears at the spa as your feet are massaged to extinction, or simply admiring them dashing about under the somewhat lighter load of local youth putting on slightly cringey racing displays along the shores. The Sumba pony, also known as the Sandalwood, is a distinct breed brought to these islands in the 9th or 10th century by Mongols or Arab invaders and traders, looking for the prized wood. Once they had stripped the islands of sandalwood, they left some of their ponies behind – almost as an apology? – which evolved to acclimatise to the heat and humidity. Nihi’s James McBride, a horsey type himself and appalled by the neglect of these animals on the island, first rescued a couple destined for the pot and then pioneered an equine wellness programme. Now, it’s the first hotel worldwide to offer horses for therapy and wellness purposes around the clock at the spa. It’s much more relaxing than goat yoga, and considerably less smelly.

Indonesia is one of the largest Muslim-majority countries, but Sumba has preserved its ancient Marapu belief system, which influences all aspects of daily life from architecture to social customs. This indigenous religion venerates the spirits of the dead, sacred places, heirloom objects, and instruments used to communicate with the spirit world. Funeral rites, in particular, are the culture’s most significant social events. We were told that the funeral of the local king was still in preparation, though the king had died four months earlier – and he was expected to have to wait up to another three months before he could leave this world and enter the next.
Sumbanese funerals are a bloody affair, with a vast number of creatures slaughtered for several days of feasting – we were told by a local teacher that they were frequently the only occasion most people ate meat. Another animal often spotted is the hatchback-size swamp buffalo, which here doubles as a form of currency. You need them to acquire a wife and can barter them for anything from a Toyota Land Cruiser to an iPhone 17. Naturally, buffalo get very anxious whenever a large funeral is being planned, but horses, chickens in vast numbers, and even dogs have reason to fear ending up in the pot or the roasting pit.

The network of relationships that connect individuals not only to each other but to their livestock, wild animals, and plants finds expression in the distinct Sumbanese architectural language. Sumba’s most iconic architectural feature is the Uma Mbatangu, or “peaked house”, distinguished by its dramatically high-pitched central peak rising from thatched alang-alang grass roofs, although the majority are covered in painted or rusting corrugated sheets. One local belief is that placing an old car tyre or seven on the roof will protect the house from lightning strikes. This alternative understanding of the laws of electromagnetism is somehow connected to the frequent fires that ravage many houses, but as we know, that is because of unhappy ancestors or displeased spirits.

The house’s elevated structure is believed to protect the living from evil spirits and wild animals, while the collection of buffalo horns from generational funeral feasts forms a representation of one’s position in the social hierarchy. The graves of the dead in the form of raised platforms made of stone are placed on the threshold of houses, not in dedicated cemeteries. In this way, the dead direct daily foot traffic, as it’s considered rude to step on or sit on the graves. The high roof not only represents the connection between the living and the afterlife, where ancestors reside, but also works as an effective smoking chamber where foods like fish, rice, and meat are preserved by the smoke generated by daily cooking in the kitchens below, placed at the centre of each dwelling. Family houses are an architectural expression of a communal way of life, and accommodate multiple couples and their children, with areas demarcated according to gender and seniority. The biggest peaked house is known as Uma Bungguru, meaning “house of the fellowship”, which serves as the main place where important rituals relating to clan unity are held, including weddings and funerals, and is the permanent residence of the village’s eldest person. We were lucky to see one such building being worked on in a state of near completion. Health and safety were not much in evidence – instead, maybe 15 to 20 men and boys worked with speed and efficiency in organised groups under the scorching sun, collecting materials, treating wood, and fixing and trimming thatch by climbing all over the 15-metre structure. The traditional building design and techniques are perfectly adapted to the climatic conditions by providing shading and ventilation.

Sumba Foundation, funded by the resort as well as the donations of its guests, is engaging in community outreach, organic gardening, composting, and water recycling initiatives. But the most important and effective effort is the investment in local clinics and community health visit programmes, which aim to eradicate malaria through free diagnosis, mass blood screening and treatment for entire villages, free mosquito nets, and expert-level malaria education for all health staff at the Malaria Training Centre. It’s easy to wax lyrical about the beauty of the horses, gleaming with salt water, but other human-animal relationships aren’t so pleasant – mosquitoes are still the deadliest animals on earth, responsible for the deaths of up to one million people a year.

Out of this heady mixture of peril and high luxury emerge experiences like the Omakase Dining Experience at Kabok, a highly authentic restaurant in the resort serving quality food any Michelin-starred Tokyo establishment would be proud of. The mind boggles at the kind of support and logistical effort required to deliver the level of urbanity here: a sophisticated restaurant of just six covers that serves the finest sushi in the middle of a hot tropical jungle. The Sumatran-born chef Muhammad Yamin Sazili and his Japanese assistant would be snapped up by any five-star establishment in Paris or San Francisco. There, they’d be reliant on a network of suppliers reachable via a few taps on the mobile, but here, this is just shy of sci-fi.

In the same vein as managing its environmental and social footprint, Nihi Sumba tries to square the circle – giving first world visitors to the resorts a luxury experience at the edge of wilderness. It’s a crazy ambition. How do you offer an experience of luxury in this far-flung corner of the world that would be hard to match in any metropolitan centre, all while navigating the environmental impact, and yet stay respectful of the host culture and the wellbeing of the local people?A huge amount of money helps. It would be hard to imagine anything remotely close to that ambitious to-do list being remotely viable for a resort at any other price point. Luxury this far from everything isn’t an exotic form of hospitality, but probably the only kind that is possible at all, thanks to the super affluent visitors and the eye-watering price tags. But not all challenges are solvable by throwing money at them – you need to have something extra, something to do with feeling the place in your bones. McBride and his team – part Crocodile Dundees, part hippies high on hope – are tuned to the undeniable cosmic vibrations of this unique place and manage to transmit to guests a vibe that is romantic to the point of manic. The tales of guests leaving in tears may sound like the overactive imagination of a copywriter, but stay for a few nights here, and it becomes highly believable.

Despite the long distance, Nihi is in high demand and attracts the well-heeled from far and wide. There were honeymooners aplenty here, most of them American. Yet it was surprising to discover that the place was at capacity during our stay – the generous size of the resort and the ratio of staff to guests made it feel semi-empty for the five days I visited. I wish the young, golden-haired, shiny-teethed, American Adam and Eves well, of course. But upon leaving, I couldn’t help worrying that starting married life here sets rather an impossible standard. What comes after heaven? .