It was never Asaro’s intention to become a hotelier. The former diver tells us he stumbled upon the vocation by chance. “I fell in love with an abandoned property in Tioman. It was derelict. It looked like a scary place, but I thought it was just amazing. As it turned out, I went to school with the owner. I found him alone at the resort. He had no guests and his family had put him out there to look after it. While we were having a chat over tea one morning, he said: ‘I’m looking for a sucker’ — those were his exact words — ‘to take this place off my hands’ and the first thing I did was to raise my hand and say, ‘I will be that sucker’.” And that was how Japamala was born a decade ago. When it opened, it had just four rooms and four villas. It has since been completely transformed and the resort is about to open its 14th villa. Japamala is targeted at the European market, for the Westerner who wants a rustic Asian experience. As Asaro sees it, “A Malaysian will not spend that kind of money to sit in a kampung house because he was probably born in a kampung house and he can go back to his grandparents’ and have that experience without having to pay for it. “But a Westerner wants to feel what it is like to be in a Malaysian setting. So it’s become very popular with the Western market and we’ve been expanding and remodelling the rooms, making them bigger so the prices keep getting higher. We’re basically upping our luxury experience.” A room at Japamala costs about RM850 ($284) a night. The early years
How did the Italian end up in Malaysia? When Asaro was eight years old, his father, who worked for an oil company, was transferred to Malaysia. Over the next 40 years, the family moved around, including to the Philippines and Australia. But he was most comfortable in Asia. “I’m a bit of a rojak. I would like to think I have the best of both worlds. Maybe I don’t, maybe I have the worst of both worlds, I don’t know, but I can think from a Western perspective and I can also think and understand the Asian perspective.” After completing his studies, Asaro worked as a commercial diver in Borneo, even living on a boat there for 10 years. After that, he conducted dive cruises for tourists in Sabah as well as parts of Southeast Asia.