Amanwana

Moyo Island rises from the Flores Sea off the north coast of Sumbawa, a long, low island of forest and grassland that Indonesia protects as a nature reserve. On its western side, facing a sheltered bay, sits Amanwana, the Aman resort on Moyo Island. It opened in 1993 as a camp: twenty tents at the edge of the trees, a dining pavilion by the beach and little else between the guests and the forest.

History

Aman was founded by the hotelier Adrian Zecha, whose first resort, Amanpuri in Phuket, opened in 1988. The group grew quickly in its first years, and 1993 brought two island openings in very different registers. Amanpulo, in the Philippines, has casitas and a private airstrip. Amanwana chose canvas over masonry, so that the camp would sit lightly on a protected island. The name joins two words: aman, meaning peace in Indonesian, and wana, forest.

Moyo had long been set aside for its wildlife. Its forests hold deer, wild boar and long-tailed macaques, and its birds include megapodes, which bury their eggs in mounds of warm earth and leave the heat to hatch them. The camp was laid out so that this life carries on around it, and deer often graze close to the tents early in the morning.

Diana, Princess of Wales, visited Moyo in 1993, the year the camp opened. The pools of the Mata Jitu waterfall in the island's interior have been linked with her name ever since.

Rooms and suites

The twenty tents are tents mainly in their walls. Each stands on a raised timber platform under a fixed roof, with canvas sides, air-conditioning, a large bed, a writing desk and a full bathroom. Jungle Tents face the forest. Ocean Tents look out across the bay and stand only steps from the sand. There are no villas or houses with several bedrooms, and with so few tents the camp can be reserved in full by a single party.

Dining

Meals are served in an open-sided pavilion at the edge of the beach. The menu sets Indonesian dishes beside western cooking, with fish landed in local waters. Dinners can also be laid out on the sand, on a boat or near the waterfall, and the bar in the pavilion is where guests gather as the light goes over the bay.

Location

Much of Moyo's appeal lies underwater. The reefs along its coast drop away in walls of hard and soft coral, and the camp runs its own dive centre with daily boat trips. Snorkelling starts from the beach in front of the tents.

Longer outings cross to Satonda, a small volcanic island off the Sumbawa coast whose crater holds a saltwater lake, ringed by forest. Beyond it rises Tambora, the volcano whose eruption in 1815 was the largest in recorded history, and whose ash darkened skies across the northern hemisphere the following year. Closer to the camp, boats carry guests along the shore for the walk inland to Mata Jitu, where water spills through a series of pale blue limestone pools shaded by trees.

Sumbawa itself lies in the Lesser Sunda chain, between Lombok to the west and Flores to the east, well away from the main tourist routes of Bali. Reaching Moyo is part of the undertaking. Guests take a domestic flight from Bali to Sumbawa Besar and continue by road and boat across the channel to the island. The dry season, roughly May to October, brings the calmest seas and the clearest water for diving, and the forest is at its greenest after the rains.

The scale is the point. There is no village of shops, no road to the camp and no other hotel in view of the bay. Days follow the tides, the dive schedule and the heat, and most evenings end on the sand.