Bali here I come?

 

 

We expect to be "stuck" here at "Riverbend" for a few more years as there aren't enough buyers with sufficient cash around.

 

Our last visitors were as enamoured with Bali as we are which made us think: why not buy a property in Bali and share it with four like-minded people (or couples)?

Is $100,000 too much to pay for a second home in Bali in which to spend three months of every year? Three months are just about the right length of time to really enjoy Bali and three-month visas are readily available on arrival.

$100,000 for a quarter-share in a property as exquisite as the one shown here is cheap: a large 130 square-metre main building, a smaller 40 square-metre guesthouse, a 90 square-metre 2-metre deep pool, a jacuzzi and several pavillons, and the whole lot set on a landscaped block of 4,430 square-metres which is large by Australian standards and huge in Bali.

And the property is in the north of Bali, away from the tourists, where Bali still is as Bali used to be. And it is in the hills at an elevation of more than a 100 metres where it is cooler and where there are no mosquitoes. And the views out to sea and neighbouring Java Island are something to die for! There is just one problem: three months a year may not be long enough!

Of course, everything would be legally drawn up. You might lose your pale complexion but not your shirt.

Interested? Email me! riverbend@batemansbay.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P.S. This is just a thought bubble. I could afford to go it alone but the thought of such a beautiful property standing empty for three-quarters of the year offends me. It's the sort of place that ought to be shared amongst like-minded people.

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Some random photos from my Bali trip in September 2010

 

The Night of Purnama

Click on image to read the first page

"Why the mountain came to own us as it dominated the life of everyone in its shadow you would understand the moment you saw the village. We had been told of the village by a missionary. He had never lived there, and indeed, he would have made no progress. His acquaintance with the house was confined to a visit to a painter who had once installed himself there and who, the good man remarked disparagingly, 'lived like a Balinese.' It was now five years since he had left, perhaps longer. The missionary held out no hopes of the house: nothing more than a roof could be expected, and he had heard that that was leaking. It was, he stated, the most beautiful place in the world. The name of the village was Iseh. ..."

 

Do good books come in pairs? Only a few days ago I discovered At the Top of the Muletrack, and today I found another rare Travel Book Club edition, The Night of Purnama ['Purnama' is Balinese for 'full moon'].

The writer, Anna Mathews, and her husband Denis chose to make their home in Iseh, a remote hamlet of thatch and bamboo houses set between palm-groves and rice terraces on the island of Bali. Their house faced the holy mountain of Bali, Gunung Agung, a volcano which had been extinct for longer than anyone knew. Suddenly, in February 1963, after they had been in Bali for just seven months, the extinct volcano Gunung Agung came to life. During the following six months it poured out ash, lava and volcanic bombs, burying whole villages, destroying rice fields, killing nearly 2,000 people, and bringing terror and famine to hundreds and thousands more.

The house the Mathews lived in, just eight kilometers from the summit, was of course what is today known as the "Walter Spies House". Walter Spies, a German painter who settled in Bali 1927, built in 1937 what he described as a "mountain hut" and lived there after he had grown weary of his increasingly hectic social life. His mountain retreat was to become the setting of some of his most beautiful and atmospheric paintings, including "Iseh im Morgenlicht 1938".

Iseh im Morgenlicht 1938

Despite his desire to escape from a constant stream of visitors, Spies still used to receive guests at Iseh, including the Austrian novelist, Vicki Baum; musician, Colin McPhee; and Swiss artist, Theo Meier. When Hitler invaded Holland in 1940, all German nationals in Indonesia were arrested as enemy aliens, Spies was interned for twenty months, before meeting his death in 942 aboard a prisoner-of-war ship that was sunk by a Japanese torpedo boat while crossing the Indian Ocean.

This book, apart from having this connection with a famous painter who so greatly influenced modern Balinese art, is a document of a Bali that is splendid, lavish, illogical, moving and maddening. Even more, it is a unique eye-witness account of a volcanic eruption and I am savouring every one of its 220 pages.

Back home at "Riverbend"

As I shiver through an early morning here at wintry "Riverbend", my thoughts go back to Bali and the expats I met there who chose to make it their home.

I am reminded of Louis Becke who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid they wandered day by day all unheading of the tomorrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?"

Life in Bali is gentle and cheap: $500 A MONTH affords you a comfortable Western lifestyle. Compare that to the $1000 A WEEK in Australia as suggested in this article.

Are you interested in living in Bali? Read this ebook, published by www.baliexpat.com, to get you started.