Nihi Sumba

Sumba is not Bali. The island sits 350 kilometres to the east in the Lesser Sunda chain, and almost nothing about it resembles the version of Indonesian tourism that has made Bali internationally recognisable. The landscape here is dry savannah, ikat-weaving villages, and megalithic stone tombs, with a coastline on the southwest that the Indian Ocean has shaped without obstruction since long before anyone was measuring waves. Nihi Sumba occupies 567 acres of this coastline, and the fact that it was consistently voted the world’s best hotel by Travel + Leisure readers for several consecutive years says something specific about what a certain category of traveller values most.

The surf break known as Occy’s Left — named after Australian world champion Mark Occhilupo, who surfed it in the 1980s — breaks directly in front of the resort. Left-hand barrel, reef pass, best at four to six feet in the dry season when the Indian Ocean swell trains arrive from deep southern fetch. Nihi controls access to the break as a resort amenity: a maximum of ten surfers in the water at any time, with priority for guests and slots bookable as a daily add-on. For a wave of this quality in a time when every known surf break in Indonesia is surfed by crowds regardless of conditions, this access alone justifies significant planning effort.

Beyond the surf, Sumba itself is the attraction. The island’s indigenous culture — animist traditions, ikat textiles woven by hand over months, villages built around communal megalithic tombs — remains largely intact in ways that Bali’s culture has long since been mediated by tourism. The Nihiwatu Foundation, established by founders James and Petra McBride, has funded malaria eradication programmes, school construction, and clean water infrastructure across the surrounding regency. Guest activities include foundation visits where these projects are visible and explained — not as marketing exercises but as working programmes with measurable health and education outcomes.

The horses are real. Sumba has a native horse breed — Sandalwood ponies, small and strong, bred for centuries on the island’s dry plateau — and Nihi Sumba’s equestrian programme puts guests on these horses for beach rides along stretches of southwest Sumbanese coastline where the nearest other person may be a fisherman a kilometre away. It is one of the cleanest available forms of the experience that expensive remote resorts promise and often fail to deliver: genuine physical contact with a landscape that the resort has not manufactured.