To eeach Thomas Despin, a traveler must fly into Luwuk, a small airport in eastern Sulawesi that almost no one outside Indonesia has heard of, drive five hours along the coast to the port town of Ampana, and board a speedboat for the last stretch across the Gulf of Tomini. Eight to ten hours after leaving Bali or Jakarta, a low green island rises from the water: 160 hectares of coconut palms, one resort, and, on the far shore, a handful of local farming families. The island is called Buka Buka, which means “open” in Indonesian. It is where Mr. Despin has spent the better part of seven years building a life he is quick to say he never planned.
He has gone further than most foreign hoteliers to stay in it. In 2024, Mr. Despin, born in Bordeaux in 1991, became an Indonesian citizen, a step that, because Indonesia does not permit adults to hold dual nationality, required him to surrender the French passport he was born with. His wife, Elvi, is Indonesian; their daughter, Athena, was born on the island in 2022, and one of the resort’s villas is named for her.
That renunciation is the emotional center of a story Mr. Despin tells, and a useful lens for a larger argument he has begun to make publicly: that Indonesia, a country of some 17,000 islands, has allowed its international image to collapse into a single overcrowded one, and that a different kind of tourism is overdue.
The road to an empty island
Mr. Despin arrived at island life by a circuitous and partly accidental route. He earned a science baccalauréat and studied psychology at the Université Bordeaux Segalen, completing the three-year licence and gaining admission to a master’s in social psychology that he chose not to finish. He was already supporting himself by then, writing copy for French blogs and running ventures aimed at Bordeaux’s students, including an events company and a city membership-and-discount card called Bordeaux Privilège.
In his mid-twenties he left it behind for a project he called Startup Cycling: more than 12,000 kilometers by bicycle across Europe and North America over more than a year, meeting startup founders and writing about them. The plan was to keep going into Asia. It did not survive Bali. In 2016, he has said, a card skimmer drained his bank account at an A.T.M. there, leaving him unable to afford a flight home. A Balinese family took him in; he built websites to get by. Within a year, he and a partner had grown an e-commerce business to roughly $750,000 in sales — and, by his telling, he walked away because the money felt untethered to anything real.
In 2018, a friend of a friend mentioned land for sale on a small island in the Togean archipelago. Mr. Despin went to look, and, as he describes it, decided almost instantly that he could live there. He wrote a Facebook post on the boat ride back; friends who had followed his earlier projects offered to chip in, and the first parcel was bought. (He adds that his mother later found a drawing he had made around the age of four — a small figure on a desert island with a single palm tree.)
He moved to Buka Buka full time in 2019 and started, he says, from a half-finished hut with a bucket for a shower. An initial architect’s plan for Balinese-style bamboo pavilions proved impossible to build with local materials and labor, so he scrapped it and rebuilt around what the island and region could supply.
Reconnect welcomed its first guests in 2020, within weeks of the world shutting its borders. With foreign travelers gone, he leaned entirely on the Indonesian domestic market, learning hospitality from guests who already knew the region and at a scale where mistakes were survivable. A visitor from a neighboring island tried a few dives off Buka Buka and suggested it would be a waste not to run a proper diving center for Reconnect; it opened in 2021, alongside snorkeling, kayaking, trekking, and other offerings.
Today, the resort has 20 rooms across eight accommodation types and a staff of about 25, nearly all hired locally. Rates start, strikingly, at a €60 per night baseline, full board for two, with all transfers coordinated by the resort — reflecting both the remoteness and the modesty of the operation.
Whatever the marketing gloss, Mr. Despin’s stake in the place is not seasonal. He lives there year-round with his family, speaks fluent Indonesian, along with a local Sulawesi dialect, having accumulated the kind of civic standing rarely held by a foreigner-turned-citizen in a remote regency.
Now he is trying to prove the model can travel. Reconnect was never meant to be a single island, Mr. Despin says, but a template — a small, locally staffed, low-impact resort that a remote community can actually sustain, and that a scattering of such places might do more for Indonesia’s image than another villa in Bali. He has begun extending the approach to other islands in the region, and increasingly spends his time helping others build their own versions rather than guarding his. If a different kind of Indonesian tourism is overdue, his wager is that it will not come from one man on one island, but from many people willing to copy what worked on Buka Buka.