🌾 Wairinding: Where the Wind Remembers Your Name

There’s a hill in East Sumba that doesn’t try to impress you. It just stands there - soft, endless, patient.

Wairinding Hill, East Sumba.

When I first arrived (June 2014), the sun was gentle, and the grass was dry like whispers.

The hills curled and rolled like waves frozen in time, waiting to be remembered.

People often come for the photos — the drone shots, the golden hours.

But if you stay long enough,

you’ll realize the hills are alive.

They breathe with the wind.

They move with stories.

A child once told me the grass grows taller when someone truly listens.

I believe him.

Wairinding is not a tourist spot.

It’s a witness.

To forgotten battles, to herders’ songs, to lovers saying goodbye in silence.

If you come with loud shoes and a checklist,

you’ll miss it.

But if you come barefoot in your heart,

you’ll leave with something softer in your chest.

In Sumba, not all beauty shouts.

Some of it just waits to be seen.