Who we are
We are Yan and Sitta, father and daughter. Yan is an anthropologist, a native of Siberut Island, and he enjoys sharing his knowledge about the Mentawai culture with his guests. His daughter Sitta is a Tourism graduate and has a great interest in sustainability and the Mentawaian island life. Together we speak Dutch, English, Indonesian and Mentawaian.
Meet the locals
Our logo
Our logo consists out of the symbol of a crab seen in ancient tattoo art. It is filled with a Mentawaian tropical island and jungle aerial view.
Umata literally means ‘our house’, which consists of:
- ‘Uma’, a Mentawaian traditional longhouse
- ‘ta’ from ‘sita’, Mentawaian word for ‘us’ or ‘we’ together
We would love to meet you!
Involving the local community
We love involving the local community into our operation and mostly work with locals on freelance basis. For example, in our accommodation we work with cooks who are in between jobs or high school kids who want to save money for school next semester. During our jungle tours we find our canoe drivers, carriers and cooks as much as possible within the community our guests want to travel to. This way the community in question gets the full financial support per trip and we also avoid any possible conflict between communities.
Myth
“Somewhere in the ocean lives a giant crab. It regularly goes searching for food on land, where it emerges from the water. This creates low tide. High tide is created when the crab plunges back into the depths…”