It’s July 2019 and I’m standing with my wife, Dewi, out the front of an old, rundown Balinese style house on the edge of Mataram City, which, (you can be forgiven for not knowing), is the capital of Lombok, Indonesia. I’ve been living here for the better part of a year but am commuting regularly to Melbourne, Australia to keep in touch with business and family there.
Dewi moved here about 3 three years ago, to be with her family. But her family have now sold up and moved back to Jakarta. So we are looking for a place to live.
Dewi wants to rent this house and it’s cheap – about US$2000 a year and, although it needs alot of work, you can see that it really could be very pretty. It’s got French windows off the main living area, terrazzo floors, timber window shutters, plenty of bedrooms, (most with bathrooms!) and a backyard big enough to build a tennis court…
Or a swimming pool.
Endless possibilities…
Too many really.
In all there’s over 1200sq metres of land.
Actually, 1200sq metres of dust. And a good dose of neglect…
Fast forward two years. Did we rent the house? Of course we did! We’re both romantics at heart and we couldn’t help but try and bring this faded beauty back to life.
In fact, we decided that it would make an excellent guesthouse and went to work on it straight away.
Did it nearly break us? Well, not yet but let’s just say perhaps we should have gone travelling!
Nevertheless, we were ready to open before Christmas and within three months we were turning people away, such was the demand for rooms.
Then the pandemic hit.
Not the most ideal position to find one’s self in, being the owner of a guesthouse as the world goes into lockdown but hey, there’s not one person on the planet who isn’t being affected by this bloody virus and I am way more fortunate than most, not least of all my friends and family in Melbourne, Australia who have now spent the better part of six months in hard lockdown.
The dust bowl we rented two years ago is now 1200sq metres of tropical gardens and we’ve managed to make the most of our time in limbo by building a house and a swimming pool. (It’s really too hot for tennis!) I won’t be self promoting too much here but Dewi and I have put too much of ourselves into this project to ever consider letting it go, so if you ever find yourself looking for a place to stay in Mataram, you will find us on all the major booking sites. (Just look for the place with the French windows!)
The recurring theme of this blog will revolve around the idea that, in spite of our success as an apex species, nature holds the key to our ultimate triumph or our untimely demise. In the midst of a global pandemic, the challenge we face, now more than ever, is to acknowledge the enduring power of nature and, ultimately, to make our peace with the each other and the planet.