Nias Island, Indonesia

Nias Island is located off the northwest coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatera. Nias is famous for its waves for surfing and a lot of world champion surfers come to this place to take pleasure in surfing. Even though I’m not a surfer, luckily my pervious job at an NGO brought me to Nias. I was assigned to lead a capacity building training for the local staff at the Nias Office which located in Lolowa’u.

When I arrived at the airport check-in counter to head to Nias, I was queuing with a lot of Caucasian guys with their big and long surf boards!! I had to duck down and moved aside a little bit here and there everytime they moved. Haha!

I could tell they must be serious surfers because Nias Island is considered a small, remote and undeveloped island in Indonesia. If those surfers could almost kill me to go to Nias Island, that means there is something special about this island. Being there myself, I have to tell you that Nias Island offers world class waves for surfers. The well-known beach for surfing competition is Sorake and Lagundri Beach.

The venue of the training workshop I led was at Moale Beach. It is only one of the many beautiful beaches in Nias. The training was a fun learning process and everyone seemed to really enjoy the activities.

Besides better known Banda Aceh, Nias was also affected by the earthquake and tsunami in 2004. One thing that I found was a lot of dead corals around the beach. This happened after the earthquake and tsunami since the water level is now lower than the corals on the beach. It made me so sad that this natural disaster not only destroyed human life but beautiful nature as well.

*Something I never forget about Nias is in the morning I left that Island, I saw Nias kids wearing their school uniform to go to school and they used banana leaves to cover their heads because they didn’t have umbrellas. It was such a heartbreaking moment in my life and I couldn’t hold back my tears*