With a fish skewer in one hand and a salt-rimmed margarita in the other, I watch a Marapu shaman priest slash a chicken’s neck with a machete, tattooing the rock behind with a torrid splatter of blood. After searing off its feathers above an open fire, he splits its body in two to reveal a tangle of squirming, pearlescent organs, then plunges his hands into the fowl’s body cavity to pull out its entrails, holding them to the light. We wait with bated breath.
Make no mistake – this isn’t typically how I enjoy a sunset canapé, but then I’m in no ordinary place either. I’m at NIHI, the legendary hotel that has dominated hospitality awards ceremonies since its opening, situated on the remote western coast of the island of Sumba. Despite being strung into the necklace of islands that makes up Indonesia, Sumba is remarkably different from that of Bali or Java, or anywhere else for that matter. As one of the last islands to come under the control of the Indonesian government in the early 1970s, Sumba lies in a province called Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT), which is jokingly referred to by locals as the ‘perpetually neglected islands’. A visit here is like being transported back in time.
Approximately 800,000 islanders still live the same hand-to-mouth existence as their ancestors; 95% of residents have never left the island; many live in three-tiered bamboo houses with pointy thatched roofs, store deceased relatives in megalithic tombs in their front gardens and sport intricately woven ikats tied around waists and limbs. Life is bound by a treacle-like phenomenon called idat, which crudely translates to cultural tradition, and many follow the ancient, animist Marapu religion, with customs such as reading the innards of animal sacrifices to foretell the future. Pigs are immolated for weddings, buffalo for funerals, and chickens for smaller events like determining whether NIHI’s newly opened beachside restaurant, Nio, will be blessed with good fortune.
Buffalo on Nihiwatu Beach
Tanveer Badal
A soft sand beach encircled by palm trees in Nihi Oka Valley
Tanveer Badal
“Most definitely over budget,” laughs NIHI’s co-founder James McBride as the priest continues to fondle the intestine, divining Nio’s fate. He nods, and the crowd roars – a promising future, I’m told. This opening night of gore and gizzards seems fitting, considering I’m here to experience NIHI’s new Wild Wellness offering – a programme that promises to awaken one’s primal self.
My primal self? I’m not sure I know her. I’ve lived in a city my entire life, spend most days curled over a laptop screen, and feel most alive when in the M&S delicatessen aisle. The only animals I encounter are pigeons defecating on my car or foxes fornicating in my garden. The air I breathe is thick with pollution, and my exercise routine involves riding a stationary bike that faces a brick wall. I’m hardly an anomaly: 4.4 billion humans (over half the world) live in cities, and increasingly people are recognising the benefits of swapping four walls for time outdoors, harnessing the therapeutic power of nature and healing themselves beyond the confines of a spa. Humans are biophiliacs by nature, meaning we tend to focus on life and life-like processes, so a yearning for nature is genetically hardwired into us.
With this in mind, more and more destinations like NIHI are rising to the challenge. Wild Wellness eschews the overly complicated, consumerist, and fad-driven aspects of the £2.8 trillion wellness industry in favour of following ancient healing principles, forging relationships with animals, and immersing oneself in an array of biodiverse environments.
Equine therapy
I kick off my primal journey by riding Elvis, a handsome Sumbanese pony with a satiny black mane worthy of his namesake. This is part of the equine-connection aspect of the programme, using the local sandalwood horses in animal-assisted therapy. With large and sensitive nervous systems, these ancient animals are adept at reading our scent, breath, heartbeat and body language. They can accurately reflect the human state in a phenomenon called mirroring. It’s a key tool in equine therapy, giving us a profound insight into our internalised emotions and acting as a catalyst for deeper self-awareness.
It may sound a little woo-woo, but there’s mounting evidence to posit the benefits of non-verbal therapies. In the case of equine therapy, bonding with ponies can alter your brain chemistry, lowering stress-inducing cortisol production and increasing oxytocin levels – the natural hormones that make you feel warm, fuzzy and connected to others.
Honestly, the prospect of burdening a new soul with my emotional woes is appealing, but I’m going in a sceptic. My earliest memory of horses isn’t particularly pleasant. Having been unceremoniously bucked off the back of a Shetland pony called Marsha when I was six, I’m not sure I have an inherent connection with these creatures.
The Pasola is a ritualised human sacrifice, where blood poured on the ground ensures fertile soils
However, there’s no better place in the world to turn this fate around than in Sumba. Horses are as ubiquitous to life here as pints are to Brits. Originally brought to the island by the Chinese, who used their muscle power to decimate the island of all its sandalwood, they have remained ever since. Not bred for a shiny coat, fast canter or good temperament, these dinky Mongolian horses are here because they’re hardy, surviving abandonment on an unknown, sun-toasted island. Integral to tradition on the island, the sandalwood ponies have co-habited with the Sumbanese for centuries, serving as both companions and dowries. Come February and March, they’re dolled up in ribbons and ridden into battle between clans in a jousting match called the pasola. It’s a ritualised human sacrifice, where blood poured on the ground ensures fertile soils. A fate I hope Elvis and I never find ourselves in.
Sumbanese ponies running along Nihiwatu Beach
Tanveer Badal
I get acquainted with Mr Presley in a dusty paddock. He presses his cushiony snout into my palm and snorts deeply. Eveline Akerboom, who runs the stable, mentions he’s prone to getting headaches, regularly sees a chiropractor, and doesn’t like to be played with – so in a lot of senses, we’re like peas in a pod. We plod along the crescent of Nihiwatu Beach together before he makes a break for the balmy ocean and plunges into the water – a moment of respite from the thick tropical heat. Unlike my previous buckeroo, this was a totally different experience. Your focus zooms in on the creature you’re riding, his emotions, anatomy, and how the surrounding ecosystem (like the pink-bellied buffalos charging towards us) affects him. In the same way as you might prefer to ride a bike to clear your mind rather than lock yourself inside and force yourself to practice Headspace, this kind of moving meditation renders the mind deliciously thoughtless.
I finally dismount Elvis, sure to have necessitated another visit to the chiropractor, and he trots towards the other horses, which congregate in the shallows. Before entry, he turns around to look at me, plummets to the floor, and flips onto his back, four legs flailing in mid-air like an upturned beetle. Rubbing his back into the sand, his lips peel away from his mouth, revealing an immense, toothy grin. It’s easy to see why man and horse have been close companions for centuries. In many ways, riding them is a clichéd metaphor for life – you sit in the saddle and tug on the reins but never have that much control over the ride.
Spa Safari
An absence of control seems to be a common theme of Wild Wellness, as I find myself gagging on a mixture of psychoactive betel nut and slaked lime I’ve been churning around in my mouth for the previous minute. Drooling uncontrollably like a bulldog, I’m unable to keep it in any longer and spit out the crimson-coloured ball into the nearby grass, my forehead embossed with pearls of sweat, gums growing numb and teeth stained vivid red.
I’m in the 500-year-old village of Waihola, sitting next to Chief Datto on his bamboo porch amid rows of buffalo skulls while he demonstrates the wonders of betel nut chewing. It’s one of the most popular mind-altering substances in the world, in fourth place after nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine. Betel nut produces euphoric, anaesthetic and stimulating effects – equivalent to drinking six cups of coffee at once. It’s a common practice among the Sumbanese. This becomes increasingly obvious when you notice the string of red, missing-tooth smiles of many of the elders.
Getting high isn’t normally part of my wellness regimen, but this pitstop is part of the Nihioka Spa Safari, a three-mile hike through traditional villages, tangled jungle, and waterlogged rice paddies, winding its way to a coastal spa. The experience is the antithesis of how you might imagine a wellness centre. Instead of heavily air-conditioned treatment rooms with sterile lighting and a mind-numbing mandolin playlist, you’re entirely swallowed by wilderness. Even the bamboo treatment bales are open air, complete with Mother Nature’s Spotify – better known as the soughing of waves and cooing birds.
Open treatment bales at the Spa Safari
Tara Shupe
My masseuse is Lucy from a nearby village, and she tells me I’ve got a body scrub, coconut hair mask, Nihioka signature massage and lomi lomi (a Polynesian method of kneading massage) in store. I’m practically leaping at the prospect after my 5am awakening, although I can’t help but feel slightly embarrassed. I’ve metamorphosed into the human version of WD-40 after trekking for the past four hours in 80% humidity; so sweaty you could use my limbs to lubricate rusty hinges. Over the next few hours, I melt into a dream state, drifting in and out of consciousness thanks to the rhythmic pulsing of the Ocean and dextrous touch of Lucy’s ten dainty fingers.
Unbeknownst to me, my earlier encounter with betel nut was not to be my last, as the massage oil slathered over my body is full of it, emulsified with six other ingredients that make up the ‘Sumba 7’ – including ginger, galangal, coriander seeds, turmeric, cinnamon and mangosteen skin. Despite sounding like the name of Sumba’s next big boyband, this cocktail of plants is a potent, meticulously researched combination formulated by Dr Simon Jackon (known to peers as Dr J) as part of NIHI’s debut product line, Wallacea Skin. A qualified oncologist who first came to the island in the 1980s as a medical student, he now dedicates his time to pharmacognosy – the science of studying medicine that derives from nature.
Nihioka Spa Safari beach
Jason Childs
When you’ve been raised around pharmacies filled with plastic bottled pills, it’s easy to dismiss herbal medicine as an alternative means to health – but to most of the planet, this is very much not the case. According to the WHO, 70% of the world’s population uses plants for primary healthcare, and you don’t have to look far to see this in action. Take aspirin, containing salicylic acid from willow bark that native American women originally used to ease the pain of childbirth or the compound paclitaxel from yew trees that’s used in Taxol – a drug used to treat lung, ovarian and metastatic breast cancer. Even cinnamon bark contains cinnamaldehyde, an ingredient used in toothpaste to prevent gum disease.
Many of the sumbanese are centenarians because of their knowledge of the island’s plants’ healing powers
As Dr J points out, many of the Sumbanese are centenarians because of their knowledge of the island’s plants’ healing powers and nutritional benefits, proven by a lady he recently met living in the capital, Waikabubak, ticking along at the ripe age of 114. Sumba is uniquely positioned close to the Wallace Line – an invisible biogeographic boundary that snakes between Bali and Lombok and Borneo and Sulawesi, meaning it exhibits an unusual cocktail of flora and fauna from both Asia and Australia and some 40 endemic species that the world has never seen before.
As is common across the world, the knowledge of healing and medicinal plants in Sumba is a matriarchal system, and it’s the ibus (or mamas) who harbour the plant wisdom, which is then passed down to their daughters with each successive generation. The plan is to set up an initiative that supports this knowledge and works with them to undertake small-scale medicine gardening projects. We live in an increasingly plant-blind world, so preserving this knowledge has never been more critical because once it dissolves from a generation, there’s no getting it back. With the help of the Nagoya Protocol as a blueprint for best practice, Dr J plans to go even further to protect the IP of this plant knowledge across the whole island, setting up a Sumba Charter with the village elders and chiefs alongside working with the Union for Ethical Biotrade to prevent biopiracy.
Mindful movement
In stark contrast to the soothing bosom of the Spa Safari, the final throes of Wild Wellness involve sporting a pair of Bluetooth headphones playing thumping European techno as I’m instructed to thrust my hips in the air among a sea of dancers by vest-clad Luuk Melisse. Together with his fiancé, Gabriel Olszewski, they make up Sanctum – the Amsterdam-born mindful movement experience performed in churches. If, like myself, you have an above-average appetite for Zumba dance classes for your age bracket, Sanctum is calling your name.
Private swimming pool at NIHI Sumba
Tanveer Badal
Nihiwatu beach at sunset
Tanveer Badal
“Fuck the embarrassment! Let loose! Be ugly!” Luuk talks down his headset, hands waving in the air as he pumps his groin ferociously. The latter instruction isn’t proving difficult, considering I’m once again perspiring like Prince Andrew and still sporting a hair mask with a wilted frangipani flower tucked into the strands from earlier. I resemble a kind of dishevelled Moana. To a soundtrack that manages to seamlessly weave house music and P!nk bangers with spoken word from Alan Watts and melodies from Whitney Houston, the next hour sees us execute a cocktail of aerobics-style cardio and primal movements, including thigh-twinging squats, shimmies, lunges and the odd burpee alongside a motivational outpouring from Luuk on the mic.
Confident that the class is winding down, we’re unexpectedly instructed to descend from our hilltop position to Nihiwatu Beach. We run barefoot through a forest until we reach a tower of logs set ablaze on the sand and continue to dance around the fire, limbs flailing, laughter roaring. Although to onlookers this might look like some unconventional Whitney Houston cult, or worse, a group of legging-clad folk having an exorcism – even a cynic can’t deny the energy you’re left fizzing with from Sanctum. It’s so unorthodox from the get-go that you let the self-consciousness melt away, and what’s left is a stirring feeling of togetherness as you dance in the waves with no inhibitions among total strangers.
Aside from a penchant for betel nut, a necessary spiritual reboot and the inconvenient urge to move a horse into my one-bedroom London flat, what you take home from Wild Wellness is an overwhelming sense of place. All too often, wellness retreats string together a schedule of yoga classes, gong-smashing and ginger-shotting, which, despite being perfectly lovely, could be plonked at any latitude of the planet without having any indication of where you actually are. The energy of Sumba, its people, ponies, plants and principles are tightly woven into the fabric of NIHI like an ikat, and it’s this fact that catapults it to the top of the leaderboard.
