Around the next corner – buying land in Indonesia

At Christmas time I was lucky enough to go to England to spend it with my amazing daughter, Hope. For a year now she’s chosen that cold country as her place. It was wonderful to see her and her new life – her home, workplace and especially to meet her friends there.

She’s living in Chester. It’s a beautiful town still surrounded by the ruins of ancient walls and steeped in medieval history. Tudor buildings house quaint pubs, and now also trendy cafes and hundreds of modern shops. Hope works in a part of the university that is dedicated to startups, so the environment is energetic, collaborative and proactive. Chester is surrounded by green undulating countryside, and just a stones throw from Wales. I loved the open spaces and vast beaches and mountains of north Wales.

I say I was lucky, but geez it was cold over there! Hope prefers cold weather; she’s always loved wearing layers. I love the cold too – sometimes! Sunshiney, crisp, subzero days like you get on snow fields. Or invigorating winds that you enjoy for a moment on headlands that have lighthouses, in the far north or southern seas.

But my last two visits to England have been during cold, grey, dismally damp weather that also dampens my spirits. Urban England seems a place where the weather is so bleak that its people walk at a perpetually fast pace in order to hurry up and get back inside. Chins tucked in. Shoulders hunched over. Elbows in close. Often they can’t even look left or right for the layers of collars and scarves around their neck.

And what is it with cold countries and their toasty interiors? For two weeks I suffered hypothermia when outside, as my nose and toes froze, even though I wore 5 layers (plus stockings under my jeans, thermal gloves, a scarf and a beanie). And yet if you walk into a shop or cafe, which we did quite often given it was Christmas time, it’s darned uncomfortable. Sweat ran down my back and I found it hard to breathe even though I removed four of those five layers. To me, it felt like indoor central heaters were cranked up to be warmer than a tropical island in the midday sun!

And who said it was just Asian countries that are full of crazy mayhem? In England people drive on the left, but they walk on the right, and god forbid if you walk on the ‘wrong’ side in all your confusion and get in their way (the Brits are good at tut-tutting). And they drive their little cars like they walk; super fast. Even along small country lanes. Like most people, they’ve no time to stop and smell the roses.

And when they want to park their cars, they drive across the road and wedge themselves between two other tiny cars, on the opposite side, facing oncoming traffic! Then there’s traffic lights in the middle of roundabouts (sort of defeats their purpose methinks)? I’ve had oodles of practice driving in traffic in Australia, but after all this time on my little island where there are NO cars, I found it all a bit too much.

Everyone knows the English drink copious amounts of tea, and yet why is there a noticeable shortage of loos in shops and parks? What with the cold, and tea, the whole combination makes walking around darned uncomfortable for middle aged women like me! And don’t get me started on their “royal” postal system. Before my trip I had something posted from Australia to England rather than risk it going astray in notoriously inefficient and corrupt Indonesia. The parcel reportedly reached England, but it seems it then became lost somewhere in their system, and almost two months later they still can’t say where it is 🙁.

During the past couple of years I’ve sometimes wondered if I should’ve ventured farther afield than Meno. You know, when I escaped the past…. People recommended I explore, adventure, see more cultures of the world to give me “space” before coming “home”. Spend time in an ashram in India, some said. Or with a sharman in South America. Or spend a chapter of my life in the cultured, historically rich, and comfortably ‘civilised’ European countries we’d dreamed about living in… Salzburg, Berlin, London.

Travel was recommended to be the panacea for me to seek solace, seek new horizons, find comfort, find an escape… (find myself?). But my anxiety was too great. My noise-sensitivity was very real. And to be honest, I was simply too broken and exhausted. India’s sheer intensity scares me. And I’ve always felt I’m way too straight and chicken to try psychedelic experiences (and maybe not a good idea when one is super fragile). And, even though I love skiing and the beauty of a clear sunny day on virgin snow, the cold wet of England has shown me that living through European winters is probably not my cup of tea.

During my time as an equine vet I worked a few stints in country Victoria and around Sydney. There, too, the cold didn’t agree with me. I remember one visit getting off the plane early in the morning in Tullamarine and driving straight up to Bendigo to do a colt castration. It was so flipping cold I couldn’t stop shaking and I could hardly get a hold of the poor fellow’s testicles with my frozen fingers let alone do the job!

So the option of moving to England to work as an equine vet and enjoy the land of childhood loves like Black Beauty, National Velvet (and the Thelwells!), or for that matter horse loving countries like Holland, where I was born, or Germany, is no longer on my radar.

It is no accident that I stayed on in Gili Meno. I headed here with an urgency, desperately seeking peace and quiet and white sandy beaches after nearly two months in Bali in the increasingly hipster haunt of Canggu and the crazy-busy seeker-filled new-age haven of Ubud. The retreats I did there were life-saving and life-changing, but the rest of Bali didn’t appeal to me for a long term stay. I believe I was guided to Meno. Within 20 minutes of my arrival, as I hobbled on my painful foot (I still had stitches in the sole from a particularly horrible incident in Bali), dragging my suitcase in the sand along the beach to my “hotel”, I knew I wanted to stay.

Later, when I met Made, I almost changed my mind, because I didn’t need that sort of complication. But I believe that we were brought together also, and I decided my desire to stay on Meno was greater than any theoretical concerns I “should” have, so I took a chance on him. Anyway by that stage I had more or less abandoned myself to fate, my guiding angel, and my gut feel.

For 18 months now we’ve worked and lived as a pretty darn good partnership. We’ve hosted guests from all over the world and enjoyed doing so. It is a slow, gentle lifestyle that gives me plenty of time to swim, snorkel, chat, do yoga and… write. But one can’t live off savings forever so it’s time to turn this little good-thing we’ve got going into a slightly bigger little good-thing.

Luck was on our side in December when some really lovely, decent folk from Australia decided to sell their bit of land on Meno. It’s not perfect, but the price, size and location ticked most of our boxes and it was the best I could afford. We’d been looking for a while, and had tried three times to buy the land I’ve been renting, without any luck. Buying from locals is fraught with challenges.

And so a new year has begun. The next stretch of this long and winding road.

When I was in England, for the very first time ever, I experienced a bit of homesickness. Homesickness for Meno, not Australia. Despite my beloved family and friends living there, and despite how much I love Australia, the disconnect I feel with my old home and life is still real. So while I was shivering in England, I was also reflecting and taking stock, and reassuringly I had the overwhelming feeling that I’ve made the right decision.

With Made, my gentle, calming, funny, supportive partner-in-life, we plan to build a few bungalows and a small, laid-back health cafe. We’d like to continue hosting visitors from all around the world and try to help them enjoy some much needed down-time. Provide a place for them to unwind, regather, take a break from the everyday craziness of their different lives.

I look forward to working with ‘clients’ (guests) who are in a good headspace, happy to be holidaying or travelling. Not the super-stressed clients I used to have, always worrying (naturally) about their sick or injured or poorly performing horses. I’ve left that profession, with it’s privileged middle-class attitudes, and its first-thing-in-the-morning crude cussing that wafted over stable doors to greet me on my routine visits to racing stables. The sounds of “you F’n C…” or “you useless dog” were not the words my ears signed up for when I became a vet. Of course, I’ve left the comfortable salary also. But I am no longer equipped to handle the constant stress that came with it.

I guess this new stretch of road should be daunting. Neither of us have built anything apart from our lego style kitchen, nor had a business before, and by all accounts doing both in Indonesia will come with plenty of challenges! Plus there is quite a lot of competition for accommodation on the island and, apart from the high seasons, it’s mostly super quiet here still. But one or two bungalows like we have now isn’t enough to make a living, and we’ve been doing pretty well so far so let’s just hope that continues 🙂.

Ideally I hope we make enough so I can start donating again to my preferred charities. That would be great. Prince Fluffy Kareem in Egypt, The Cambodian Children’s fund, the African Children’s Choir. And now especially to the important grassroots foundation “Lombok’s Forgotten Children”. God knows, there’s plenty of animals and people who need help, but just kilometres from this tropical island, where visitors from around the world come to rest, explore and party, there are local people suffering and dying in their villages every day from easily preventable diseases because of their poverty, isolation, and ignorance.

Despite a great deal that there is to dislike about Indonesia, Gili Meno is my home for this part of my journey. Its year-round sun and simple lifestyle is a blessing. It warms my soul and is melting back together many of the pieces of my heart. I appreciate the gentle way the island has allowed me to feel some hope.

Seems my chosen place on this planet now lies far from both Gus in country Victoria and Hope in Chester. I hope my visits back, to Australia and probably England, become easier over time. I hope my kids (and family and friends!!) can take time off from their full-on careers and lives to take a break and come to visit me here from time to time!