Adrenaline bride
By Richard Madden
Where in the world does an adventure travel addict take his bride on honeymoon? To Everest Base Camp, perhaps? To the North Pole for a tandem parachute jump? Or maybe even a swing through the guerrilla-infested cordilleras of Colombia? I had entertained all three possibilities, and many other adrenalin-pumping options besides, when a sobering truth dawned. When love is in the air, the scent of massage oils and moonlight on a deserted beach should never be far behind. An exotic, not to say erotic, tropical location is not a honeymoon cliché for nothing. But for three whole weeks? Without even a whiff of adrenalin?
After a mutual decision to rule out the element of surprise, Sarah and I agreed our destination should be somewhere neither of us had been before. By a process of elimination we knocked out huge swathes of the globe. Unvisited tropical paradises from the Seychelles to the Maldives were considered and discarded. We wanted beaches, yes. But not beaches, beaches and yet more beaches. Siberia loomed uninvitingly. “Indonesia,” announced Sarah one grey February morning. “Bali you mean,” I replied ungraciously, “the ultimate honeymoon cliché.” “Well, it’s probably a honeymoon cliché for a reason,” she retorted, “and apparently there are 17,000 other islands in Indonesia, none of which we’ve been to.”
Five months later as we set out on an all-out gallop along a deserted two-mile beach on the Indonesian island of Sumba, I had reason to be thankful for Sarah’s powers of persuasion. After slumbering late, we had breakfasted at our favourite table on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. In the distance fellow guests surfed what I later discovered is one of the best – and least-known - surf breaks in the world. In the afternoon, while I went diving on a pristine nearby reef, Sarah indulged herself with some reflexology and a tropical massage. Now as our horses hooves thundered over the sand beneath us and the sun like a juicy tangerine slipped off the edge of the world, there could be no doubt. Cliché or no cliché, we had arrived in honeymoon paradise.
As we trotted back our Sumbanese guide Dato told us something of the island’s animist tribal legends. “Many of the rocks on this beach are sacred,” he told us. “This is the Nihiwatu Stone, one of the most sacred on the island.” Closer inspection of the rock - after which the beach is named - revealed three shallow hollows where fertility offerings are made by the island’s holy men, the Ratos.
Every year the Ratos hold a vigil along this stretch of coastline awaiting the arrival of sacred sea worms, called Nale, which swarm along the coast during February or March. From these, the Ratos foretell the health of that year’s harvest.
This event is the herald for an annual ritual known as the Pasola. Conducted on horseback in ceremonial costume, young men armed with lances gallop into a specially prepared arena hurling their weapons at their opponents. In a ritualised bloodletting, the grudges of the previous year are settled. Death can, and does, occur. We learnt later that Dato’s deeds of Pasolas past are the stuff of legend.
After dinner that evening Claude Graves, the owner of the resort, drew up a chair next to our candle-lit table on the cliff. “It took Petra and I 13 years to create this place,” he told us. “We lived on the beach for most of that time while we built up the trust and confidence of the tribes in this area and persuaded them that the creation of the resort was in their interests. We experienced everything from nearly being killed by a witch doctor to a massive Richter Seven earthquake six years ago which destroyed many of the buildings. Most of what we had created here was destroyed but this was our life. We had no choice but to start again.”
Everything at the resort from the waiters who served us our food to the authentic Sumbanese design and construction of the villas has been done in conjunction with the local tribal chiefs and the employment of local Sumbanese. “Our concept is one of preservation for both the environment and the people,” Claude told us. “The Indonesian government in consultation with the tribal elders have agreed that any development on the island will be high quality and low impact. This way there is a real chance that Sumba will avoid the tourist excesses that have taken place in large parts of Bali.”
Next day we rode with Dato to his village. After an hour climbing onto an open plateau with panoramic views of the coast, we found ourselves approaching two huge boulders surrounded by trees and undergrowth like the doorway to a lost world. As if arriving on the set of a Harrison Ford movie, we emerged into a clearing surrounded by distinctive Sumbanese traditional huts with thatched, horned towers some over 60 feet high.
Surrounded by a gaggle of laughing children, we were escorted to the headman’s hut as squawking chickens scattered around us. Pig jaws and buffalo horns signifying wealth and status hung above the chief’s veranda. In accordance with traditional Sumbanese hospitality we were offered ‘siri-pinang’, or betel nut, which turned our mouths bright red like vampires. Happily, this only seemed to increase the general atmosphere of hilarity. Later, after a tour of the village where we were shown the distinctive carved gravestones of the village ancestors, Dato initiated us into the arcane art of a local version of spinning tops. Our ineptitude only served to enhance our VIP status.
After a few days spent sun worshipping on the beach at Nihiwatu, we headed into the centre of the island to a forested wilderness in the Wanukaka Valley. Our destination was a waterfall which cascades over 300ft down the mountainside, like the tiers of a wedding cake, into an enclosed canyon. After an hour and a half on the trail we clambered over some rocks and found ourselves staring at a Zen masterpiece. But this was not just a painting. And we were the only ones there. Behind a curtain of spray at the base of the falls, we re-enacted the love scene from every Hollywood Castaway movie ever made.
Our swan song at the resort was a dive on the ‘Magic Mountain’, an underwater pinnacle that attracts pelagic, deep-water migratory fish as well as sharks and rays. On cue, as we circled the pinnacle at about 80ft, the unmistakable outline of a shark appeared out of the gloom while below us the dark shadow of a ray, liked an underwater caped crusader, flitted silently by. More ominous was a lone barracuda that circled us ominously throughout the dive. Along with razor sharp teeth, they have notoriously bad sight and have been known to make sudden lightning attacks on shining objects underwater. Covering my crotch with my hand just in case, I suddenly remembered the silver bracelet on my wrist which Sarah had given me on our wedding day. It was the ultimate Catch 22. Happily I reached the surface with my potency unscathed.
Our visit to Sumba was topped and tailed by ten days of five-star luxury as Sarah initiated me into the arcane arts of pampering. Initially unwilling to allow my bags to be carried, my shirts to be folded, or my bed turned down, I soon resigned myself to 24-hour butler service. At the Oberoi Hotel in Lombok, we stayed in a self-contained temple of pleasure complete with its own swimming pool and ornamental ponds. During our five-day stay, with the exception of a boat trip to the nearby Gillie Islands, we didn’t even leave the hotel grounds. The island’s famous volcano, which I have wanted to climb for many years, remained virgin territory. Instead each day as we experimented with different massages, I grew ever more accustomed to the site of bougainvillaea petals floating in bowls of scented water.
On Bali, we stayed at two of the island’s most remarkable five-star hotels, the Puri Wulandari and the Begawan Giri, both in the countryside outside Ubud. If Nehru’s observation in the 1940s that Bali was like the ‘morning of the world’ is still true anywhere on the island today, then it is here. While surf slums and low-grade tourist developments have scarred much of the area around the capital Denpasar, the devout Hindu culture at the centre of Balinese life still thrives. Proof, if proof were needed, came in the form of a rare Purification Ceremony held at a nearby temple. Offerings from all over the island from huge dragons made of fruit and coloured rice to squealing suckling pigs ready for slaughter were paraded in the temple courtyard during a four-hour ceremony of exquisite traditional dancing, ritual and prayers.
The final nights of our honeymoon were spent at the Begawan Giri, one of the world’s most unique five-star spa hotels, spread out over 20 acres of tropical gardens overlooking rice terraces on one side of the sacred Ayung river valley. The Begawan is a hybrid mix of a top-class luxury hotel and an ultra-private hideaway. Attracting A-List celebrities from around the world, it regularly graces the pages of international architectural and design magazines. Each villa is a design masterpiece based on each of the five elements with Indonesian artefacts, hand-made furniture, tapestries and carvings.
At the health spa, fed with water from a nearby sacred spring, we indulged ourselves with the Javanese Mandi Lulur, a royal wedding treatment. Which is how after years of holidays spent sweating along remote forest tracks, I found myself being smeared in yoghurt by a Balinese maiden before climbing into a steaming flower-bath strewn with rose petals.
On our final night, in the same suite chosen by Sting to spend a week with his personal yoga teacher, Sarah and I sipped champagne as we relaxed in a hot tub hollowed out of rock after a candle-lit dinner al fresco in our own private water garden. Around us in our magic grotto were a jacuzzi and a meditation pavilion. The sound of clinking glasses and babbling water mixed with the music of two Balinese musicians playing traditional bamboo instruments. The ultimate honeymoon cliché? Guilty as charged. But we loved it.
Where in the world does an adventure travel addict take his bride on honeymoon? To Everest Base Camp, perhaps? To the North Pole for a tandem parachute jump? Or maybe even a swing through the guerrilla-infested cordilleras of Colombia? I had entertained all three possibilities, and many other adrenalin-pumping options besides, when a sobering truth dawned. When love is in the air, the scent of massage oils and moonlight on a deserted beach should never be far behind. An exotic, not to say erotic, tropical location is not a honeymoon cliché for nothing. But for three whole weeks? Without even a whiff of adrenalin? After a mutual decision to rule out the element of surprise, Sarah and I agreed our destination should be somewhere neither of us had been before. By a process of elimination we knocked out huge swathes of the globe. Unvisited tropical paradises from the Seychelles to the Maldives were considered and discarded. We wanted beaches, yes. But not beaches, beaches and yet more beaches. Siberia loomed uninvitingly. “Indonesia,” announced Sarah one grey February morning. “Bali you mean,” I replied ungraciously, “the ultimate honeymoon cliché.” “Well, it’s probably a honeymoon cliché for a reason,” she retorted, “and apparently there are 17,000 other islands in Indonesia, none of which we’ve been to.”
Five months later as we set out on an all-out gallop along a deserted two-mile beach on the Indonesian island of Sumba, I had reason to be thankful for Sarah’s powers of persuasion. After slumbering late, we had breakfasted at our favourite table on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. In the distance fellow guests surfed what I later discovered is one of the best – and least-known - surf breaks in the world. In the afternoon, while I went diving on a pristine nearby reef, Sarah indulged herself with some reflexology and a tropical massage. Now as our horses hooves thundered over the sand beneath us and the sun like a juicy tangerine slipped off the edge of the world, there could be no doubt. Cliché or no cliché, we had arrived in honeymoon paradise.
As we trotted back our Sumbanese guide Dato told us something of the island’s animist tribal legends. “Many of the rocks on this beach are sacred,” he told us. “This is the Nihiwatu Stone, one of the most sacred on the island.” Closer inspection of the rock - after which the beach is named - revealed three shallow hollows where fertility offerings are made by the island’s holy men, the Ratos. Every year the Ratos hold a vigil along this stretch of coastline awaiting the arrival of sacred sea worms, called Nale, which swarm along the coast during February or March. From these, the Ratos foretell the health of that year’s harvest.
This event is the herald for an annual ritual known as the Pasola. Conducted on horseback in ceremonial costume, young men armed with lances gallop into a specially prepared arena hurling their weapons at their opponents. In a ritualised bloodletting, the grudges of the previous year are settled. Death can, and does, occur. We learnt later that Dato’s deeds of Pasolas past are the stuff of legend.
After dinner that evening Claude Graves, the owner of the resort, drew up a chair next to our candle-lit table on the cliff. “It took Petra and I 13 years to create this place,” he told us. “We lived on the beach for most of that time while we built up the trust and confidence of the tribes in this area and persuaded them that the creation of the resort was in their interests. We experienced everything from nearly being killed by a witch doctor to a massive Richter Seven earthquake six years ago which destroyed many of the buildings. Most of what we had created here was destroyed but this was our life. We had no choice but to start again.”
Everything at the resort from the waiters who served us our food to the authentic Sumbanese design and construction of the villas has been done in conjunction with the local tribal chiefs and the employment of local Sumbanese. “Our concept is one of preservation for both the environment and the people,” Claude told us. “The Indonesian government in consultation with the tribal elders have agreed that any development on the island will be high quality and low impact. This way there is a real chance that Sumba will avoid the tourist excesses that have taken place in large parts of Bali.”
Next day we rode with Dato to his village. After an hour climbing onto an open plateau with panoramic views of the coast, we found ourselves approaching two huge boulders surrounded by trees and undergrowth like the doorway to a lost world. As if arriving on the set of a Harrison Ford movie, we emerged into a clearing surrounded by distinctive Sumbanese traditional huts with thatched, horned towers some over 60 feet high.
Surrounded by a gaggle of laughing children, we were escorted to the headman’s hut as squawking chickens scattered around us. Pig jaws and buffalo horns signifying wealth and status hung above the chief’s veranda. In accordance with traditional Sumbanese hospitality we were offered ‘siri-pinang’, or betel nut, which turned our mouths bright red like vampires. Happily, this only seemed to increase the general atmosphere of hilarity. Later, after a tour of the village where we were shown the distinctive carved gravestones of the village ancestors, Dato initiated us into the arcane art of a local version of spinning tops. Our ineptitude only served to enhance our VIP status.
After a few days spent sun worshipping on the beach at Nihiwatu, we headed into the centre of the island to a forested wilderness in the Wanukaka Valley. Our destination was a waterfall which cascades over 300ft down the mountainside, like the tiers of a wedding cake, into an enclosed canyon. After an hour and a half on the trail we clambered over some rocks and found ourselves staring at a Zen masterpiece. But this was not just a painting. And we were the only ones there. Behind a curtain of spray at the base of the falls, we re-enacted the love scene from every Hollywood Castaway movie ever made.
Our swan song at the resort was a dive on the ‘Magic Mountain’, an underwater pinnacle that attracts pelagic, deep-water migratory fish as well as sharks and rays. On cue, as we circled the pinnacle at about 80ft, the unmistakable outline of a shark appeared out of the gloom while below us the dark shadow of a ray, liked an underwater caped crusader, flitted silently by. More ominous was a lone barracuda that circled us ominously throughout the dive. Along with razor sharp teeth, they have notoriously bad sight and have been known to make sudden lightning attacks on shining objects underwater. Covering my crotch with my hand just in case, I suddenly remembered the silver bracelet on my wrist which Sarah had given me on our wedding day. It was the ultimate Catch 22. Happily I reached the surface with my potency unscathed.
Our visit to Sumba was topped and tailed by ten days of five-star luxury as Sarah initiated me into the arcane arts of pampering. Initially unwilling to allow my bags to be carried, my shirts to be folded, or my bed turned down, I soon resigned myself to 24-hour butler service. At the Oberoi Hotel in Lombok, we stayed in a self-contained temple of pleasure complete with its own swimming pool and ornamental ponds. During our five-day stay, with the exception of a boat trip to the nearby Gillie Islands, we didn’t even leave the hotel grounds. The island’s famous volcano, which I have wanted to climb for many years, remained virgin territory. Instead each day as we experimented with different massages, I grew ever more accustomed to the site of bougainvillaea petals floating in bowls of scented water.
On Bali, we stayed at two of the island’s most remarkable five-star hotels, the Puri Wulandari and the Begawan Giri, both in the countryside outside Ubud. If Nehru’s observation in the 1940s that Bali was like the ‘morning of the world’ is still true anywhere on the island today, then it is here. While surf slums and low-grade tourist developments have scarred much of the area around the capital Denpasar, the devout Hindu culture at the centre of Balinese life still thrives. Proof, if proof were needed, came in the form of a rare Purification Ceremony held at a nearby temple. Offerings from all over the island from huge dragons made of fruit and coloured rice to squealing suckling pigs ready for slaughter were paraded in the temple courtyard during a four-hour ceremony of exquisite traditional dancing, ritual and prayers.
The final nights of our honeymoon were spent at the Begawan Giri, one of the world’s most unique five-star spa hotels, spread out over 20 acres of tropical gardens overlooking rice terraces on one side of the sacred Ayung river valley. The Begawan is a hybrid mix of a top-class luxury hotel and an ultra-private hideaway. Attracting A-List celebrities from around the world, it regularly graces the pages of international architectural and design magazines. Each villa is a design masterpiece based on each of the five elements with Indonesian artefacts, hand-made furniture, tapestries and carvings.
At the health spa, fed with water from a nearby sacred spring, we indulged ourselves with the Javanese Mandi Lulur, a royal wedding treatment. Which is how after years of holidays spent sweating along remote forest tracks, I found myself being smeared in yoghurt by a Balinese maiden before climbing into a steaming flower-bath strewn with rose petals.
On our final night, in the same suite chosen by Sting to spend a week with his personal yoga teacher, Sarah and I sipped champagne as we relaxed in a hot tub hollowed out of rock after a candle-lit dinner al fresco in our own private water garden. Around us in our magic grotto were a jacuzzi and a meditation pavilion. The sound of clinking glasses and babbling water mixed with the music of two Balinese musicians playing traditional bamboo instruments. The ultimate honeymoon cliché? Guilty as charged. But we loved it.
Interested? Take a look at this accommodation and our adventurous honeymoon holidays.