The volcanic island of Sumbawa lies within the Pacific Ring of Fire, located in the middle of the Lesser Sunda Islands chain. Lombok is to the island’s west, Flores to its east and Sumba further to the southeast. Sumbawa’s 15.448 km² covers three times the size of Lombok and boasts a population of some 1.5 million people. An interesting chapter in the Indonesian historic journal involves the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, which is said to have been the most destructive eruption in modern history (exceeding the 1883 Krakatoa disaster between Java and Sumatra by four times the quantity of magma spew out, reducing the mountain’s height by 1.250 meters). The massive explosion polluted the upper atmosphere with 100 km3 of dust blocking the sun’s warmth and is known to have caused New England’s ‘year without a summer’ in 1816. Sumbawa is a lucrative mine with its infallible resources of gold and copper. The island’s scenery is mountainous and the local economy is based on wet rice farming and livestock rearing. Export products include teak, honey, sappan wood for producing red colorant, horses, and sandalwood used for incense sticks and medicines. Sumbawa is known to be agriculturally highly productive. Bima is the island’s main port and city and is popular as a gateway to other Indonesian islands such as Flores and Komodo. The main attraction to the 390 km² which is Komodo is unmistakably the Komodo dragon. The island’s striking fauna and heritage of banished convicts, who have given life to a distinct group of people by pairing up with the Bugis from Sulawesi, most likely come second on the list of appeals. Komodo’s 2000 inhabitants primarily adhere to the Islam, yet there are some Christian and Hindu minorities.
The evolution of the world’s largest living lizard, the Komodo dragon, started with the ‘Varanus’ species, an animal that lived in Asia about 40 million years ago and later migrated to Australia. 25 million years later, Southeast Asia and Australia collided and allowed the giant lizards to relocate to what is now the Indonesian archipelago. An adult Komodo dragon in the wild weighs around 70 kilos, can measure up to 3 meters and may live as long as an astounding 50 years. Due to their size, Komodo dragons dominate the habitats in which they live. It has been recorded that the lizards hunt and ambush prey such as birds, mammals, humans and the most lethal of species, even though they mostly eat decaying flesh. The Komodo dragon is protected under Indonesian law and the Komodo National Park was founded in 1980 to preserve this endangered gem extraordinaire.