Sumba day 3: long drive reflections and stories

It was a long drive day as we went from west to south, then back to east north for our second hotel. We left the hotel 9am and arrived the next hotel 4:30pm with 3 stops in between, a lot of time on the road for reflection and naps.

My day started with another run on the treadmill during sunrise time. So beautiful and peaceful, only animal sounds around.

Our first stop, after 2 hours drive was Watu Bella beach, at the south part of the island. It is a beautiful cliff that one could go down to the beach during low tide. It was high tide when we got there so we didn’t go down. There were few foreigners playing with the waves that looked dangerous to us.

Story #1: the locals came to try to sell us coconut. There were no other tourists around, other than the other group and us. We were ready to buy some coconuts when our guide said it should cost 10k each so he asked for the coconut. The locals asked for 20k and refused to negotiate, so we didn’t buy. We found their attitude inflexible to stupid (sorry for the word) as there were no business and we were the only people that potentially can buy from them. Coconut is basically no cost, they just pick it up from the ground, so either they sell as 10k or even 15k that we offered, or they get nothing. They chose to get nothing.

Story #2: the girls had their lunch box there, picking up what could be eaten out of the un-eatable box of fried chicken, rice, spicy vegetables, fried tempeh, fried noodles, crackers. We had a lot of leftovers that we planned to feed the dogs. The dogs eat EVERYTHING!!! But when we were about to leave, the locals (who refused to sell us the coconut) asked for our leftovers. We gave them of course but were surprised for it.

Story #3: Then we drove 10 min to another near by beach. The beach is beautiful but nowhere to hide from the strong sun at 12pm. We found a beach house that had no customers, so we walked in and ready to order drinks. We ordered one drink each and ready to relax for a bit, contemplating the beautiful and peaceful beach. Few minutes later a lady came and told us that there’s a minimum order per person (200k per person). Note that our drinks would cost us 160k for 4 of us. I said we just ordered drinks, and she said: yes but needs to be 200k per person to be in this bar. We left and felt sad for these people. They are so inflexible, either their way of doing business or no business. Maybe that gave us a glimpse of why this island is so underdeveloped and so few tourists. Mostly it made me sad to know that their chance to develop would be so slim if most of the locals think that way.

We continued our drive for few hours until the next spot: Wairinding Hills. It’s beautiful but we stayed there only for few minutes because we were tired and wanted to get to our hotel asap.

Finally we got there and the girls did the horse riding.

We were pretty tired by then, so went for dinner and called it a night.

Seeing the island, which is 3 to 4 times the size of Bali, so underdeveloped, made me think how hard it is to develop a place. The roads are good but there are not much economic activities other than agriculture. Few years back, I thoughts countries like the Philippines and Indonesia, with so many natures beauty, should explore them to help with economic development as their comparative advantage. Now, I am not sure because even if I am the island governor, I am not sure how to start it. There are so many challenges that need to be addressed that require resources and human capital. Nature beauty? yes, they have plenty, but other places/islands have them too, so they are less scarce than I thought they are. Sofia said she’d been into poor places, but Sumba seems not poor but hopeless. She looked at kids on the streets walking to/from schools, and said: even I was born here, the only aspiration I could have is to get a nanny job in Jakarta. That pretty much summarizes the life and opportunities of the locals. Very sad indeed.