Sometimes, remarkable hideaways turn up in the unlikeliest of places. The island of Sumba lies 250 miles east of Bali in the remote Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. Until recently, even lifelong globe-trotters had seldom heard of it. With an area of 4,270 square miles — almost the same as that of Jamaica — and a population estimated to be around 760,000, Sumba is no mere tropical microdot. But for centuries the island was isolated, undisturbed and practically unknown. A handful of Dutch colonizers came and went, leaving little permanent impression. Headhunting ceased only in the 1960s.

Today close to a third of Sumba’s people still practice an animist religion known as Marapu; an astonishing variety of languages are spoken, including Kambera, Mamboru, Anakalang, Wanukaka, Wejewa, Lamboya and Kodi; prominent individuals are still buried in megalithic tombs, familiar elsewhere as remnants of the Bronze Age; and each year during the rice-planting season, Sumbanese men engage in pasola, a ritualized battle on horseback. (Blood must be shed to ensure a successful harvest, and while nowadays the wooden spears are blunted, fatalities still occur.)

Origins

Sumba began to attract a flicker of international attention in the late 1980s, when surf enthusiast Claude Graves and his wife, Petra, discovered a wave on the island’s southwestern coast that subsequently became known as “Occy’s Left” (after the World Champion Australian surfer Mark Occhilupo). During Indonesia’s April-to-October surfing season, this is a 10-foot-high, 300-yard-long curl of turquoise water, topped by a crest of white spray, that is regarded by the cognoscenti as one of the best left-hand breaks in the world. After a period living on the beach, Graves built a shack, which turned into a low-key bohemian surfing resort, which subsequently found favor with a select group of wealthy people in Europe and the United States who valued privacy, pristine nature and the experience of being close to the end of the world.