I’m living in The Land of Three Months, aka Indonesia. That’s how long everything seems to take here. I’m told it will again take three months to get my next visa. It took three months for us to get a company registered.
And it took three months to get the certificate of title for the land we bought. We were told it would take 8-12 weeks – 8 if we were lucky – but the staff at the Department of Lands decided January was a good time to go on their once per lifetime trip to Mecca, so three months it became!
But that’s ok. In the meantime Made and Komang made a live green fence around the block, knocked down unhealthy and dangerously placed trees, tidied up all the dead branches and rubbish on the land, and moved a tonne of earth to make it more level. No bobcats or backhoes here. A hoe, shovel, wheelbarrow and a heap of grunt has done the job!
And I spent three months weeding (well sure, I’m using a bit of poetic licence here… it’s not quite three months yet, and it will probably continue for at least 333 months 😫). I guess you could say I’ve become obsessed, as I can’t walk past a weed now without doing a forward fold. The guys think I’m being completely unproductive. They think I’m loopy. Both, of course, could well be true.
It’s a tropical island and weeds spread like wild fire. Local people don’t pull weeds; they either leave them to grow into bushes or they cut everything, grass and weeds together. By hand. In fact, they don’t even consider anything is a weed; it’s all grass to them! So gardens looks green from a distance but when you sit or walk on them you soon realise it’s hardly a carpet of soft grass.
My weeding rewards are many!
* Once you pull weeds the wind and light fills the space so the rainy-season mosquitos pack their bags and choof off next door!
* My back – weak from injury and years of heavy physical work – could only tolerate being doubled over for a couple of hours at a time to start with, but slowly slowly it’s becoming stronger (plus my rice-filled belly is a little flatter, I think 😉).
* In some spots the good guy grass is winning the battle against the nasty weeds!
* It gives me valuable time away from my devices.
* Like the hours I spend snorkelling, or colouring-in, weeding is a great time to either zone out, or to think. And let’s face it, whether we are working 9-5 or 24/7, when we are busy doing any of the million things we fill our lives with or even when we relax with a book or watch tv, one of the problems with our lives is that we often don’t give ourselves enough time to think things through.
* And as a little bonus, I’m finding a heap of marbles (they just keep coming up from the ground 😊).
Apart from all this preparatory work, while we waited for the Certificate we also found a builder, had meetings and lots of discussions to plan our project, and an architect did the drawings.
Last week the Certificate came through, a day before the three month mark, and now the builders have hit the ground running. It’s great timing, as the wet season finished just a few weeks ago.
When it comes to construction projects in Indonesia, everybody I’ve spoken with and everything I’ve read has warned me that things will take twice as long and cost twice as much as expected. But I’m secretly hoping to be the first westerner lucky enough to avoid this phenomenon. We have our fingers and toes crossed!
On the other hand I sort of think a few disasters might make good stories 😜.
But so far all is good. Our builder Pak Saeun, from Lombok, tells us with confidence and pride that our house, three bungalows and our little cafe will be finished in… three months!
