Fun Facts about Lombok Indonesia
The island of Lombok is about the same size as neighbouring Bali and yet it’s glorious, untouched beaches, pristine rainforests and unique local culture have for some reason attracted far less attention. Which means now might the perfect time to learn a little more about this “untouched paradise” and get a greater understanding of this fascinating part of the world .
1. Primordial Beginnings
The first thing to know is that despite their closeness to one another, Bali sits on the eastern end of a tectonic plate, known as the Asian plate, while Lombok sits on the western edge of the Australian plate. So, while they both display the beautiful, lush tropical vegetation typical of equatorial regions, in Bali this is due partly to its rich volcanic soils but also to the fact that beneath the surface it is made up purely of limestone, immensely rich in nutrients but originally part of an ancient coral reef that was pushed up and out of the ocean by subduction, that is, the Australian plate, moving underneath the Asian plate and forcing it skyward.
The island of Lombok on the other hand has been formed, over tens of millions of years, through the gradual build up of volcanic material.
2. Climate
The most immediate consequence of this tectonic divide is that while both Bali and Lombok share equatorial similarities in terms of weather and vegetation, all the islands to the west of Bali are distinctly tropical, whereas islands to the east of Lombok become less so and in fact start to show flora and fauna more closely associated with Australia.
The climate of Lombok is also slightly less humid than Bali and Lombok receives less rainfall.
3. The Lombok Trench
Although separated by only a thin stretch of water, the sea between Bali and Lombok reaches to a depth of around 850 metres, effectively marking the fault line between the Australian and Asian tectonic plates. It is also one of the major passageways of water flowing, at times turbulently, between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
In 2021 an Indonesian submarine was lost in these waters, possibly the victim of a powerful underwater wave. There were no survivors and an international salvage effort was abandoned once the enormity of the operation became clear.
The Lombok Trench has also proven to be an impenetrable barrier for the migration of land animals.
Asian elephants, tigers and even rhinoceros were once common from India to Indonesia but they never migrated further east than Bali.
And while many varieties of Australian native fauna have spread through the eastern islands of Indonesia, none have ever been seen west of Lombok.
4. The Wallace Line
This bio-geographical dividing line was first noted by and named after, the British naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace. While the Wallace line neatly follows the Lombok Trench through Bali and Lombok, knowledge of how the natural world was formed was still in it’s infancy and next to nothing was known about tectonic plates and the underlying forces that shaped the planet. Wallce’s observation then, that Bali had, irrefutably, been pushed up out of the sea, challenged the centuries old belief that the world was created, (in seven days no less!), by the hand of God..
Wallace travelled the length and breadth of Indonesia over an eight year period in the 1850’s and he collected more than 125,000 different animal species, many of which were completely new to science. His findings were first published in 1868, in a book entitled “The Malay Archipelago”.
During his time in Lombok he noted, amongst other things, the presence of cockatoos on the island. (Now rarely seen west of Papua.)
Later on in his journey he would sit down and pen a letter to Charles Darwin to share his observations on the origins of the natural world and, history shows, both men arrived independently at largely the same conclusions.
Darwin would go on to acknowledge Wallace’s contribution to his own ground-breaking work in, “Origin of the Species”, but the observation that Bali and Lombok mark the border between two distinct biological zones is Wallace’s alone.
To this day, “The Malay Archipelago” is regarded as not only one of the most authoritative natural history works ever published but one of the first and most fascinating travel journals ever written.
5. Original Inhabitants
Although Austronesian and Melanesian races moved through the islands that make up today’s Indonesia, arriving as far south as Australia, up 60,000 years ago, there is absolutely no record or trace of early migrations to Lombok. Similarly, very little is known about precisely when Lombok’s present-day inhabitants, the Sasak, arrived or indeed, where they originally came from. It is generally agreed however, that they are part of the Malay race of people who travelled out of Asia sometime in the last three to five thousand years, spreading through Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Phillipines.
It is possible that the Sasak arrived in Lombok before the Balinese had settled in Bali but there are few recorded interactions between the two groups prior to the 17th century. What is known is that while the Balinese developed sophisticated rice cultivation techniques and had a multi-deity belief system 1,000 years before the arrival of Hinduism, the Sasak practiced simple farming methods and believed in ancestor worship.
6. The once mighty Mt Samalas
Rising an impressive 3727 metres above sea level, Lombok’s Mt Rinjani is the second tallest volcano in Indonesia. But it is the crater lake, Anak Segara, on the trek to the summit, that reveals what remains of a once even taller volcano, the mighty Mt Samalas.
Samalas erupted in 1257 in what was one of the most powerful eruptions of all time. Volcanic matter from the explosion has been found in sedimentary deposits as far afield as Greenland and the Antarctic. The amount of volcanic matter that was ejected into the atmosphere caused disruption to world weather patterns for years and led to crop failures and famine in parts of Northern Europe and Africa.
Lava flows covered most of the island and the ancient capital, Pamatan, lies buried to this day, somewhere on the island. Lava also crossed the sea and reached the western side of neighbouring Sumbawa. Parts of Bali were also rendered uninhabitable for many years as a result of lava that was ejected from the mouth of the volcano.
The lake that today sits in what remains of Mt Samalas sits at 2000 metres above sea level, roughly half the height of the original peak.