The flight from Sumbawa disgorged a planeload of small businessmen, missionary families with young children, a few white-veiled nuns, a smattering of French and Dutch tourists, two Australian surfers and myself onto the tarmac of West Sumba's Tambolaka airport. We rode through a dry countryside of steepled churches atop hills, fields of galloping horses, clusters of stone slab graves, roofs of riotous bougainvillea blossoms, and rows of scraggly shops and squealing pigs being loaded into pickup trucks. In the late 1990s, I remember seeing loin-clothed wild pig hunters carrying spears along the road with their dogs, but not this time.