That’s bananas

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When we first started building the project we were told that it was not possible to grow bananas here, that they could not handle the salt water coming up from the ground. That was wrong.

Now we have quite a few banana trees spread over our land. They grow for a while, they brake in half and then from the inside of the stem they shoot out new leaves. This is one of their ways of surviving in one place. Another is that they put spores in the ground around them that makes new trees grove.  There are places where we have big, middle and small trees growing in a triangle. Some of these places have even grown into what we call “banana clusters”.

The language

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In Indonesia there exists more than 300 native languages, most of them limited to smaller regions. This most likely comes from Indonesia being spread over more than 17.000 islands that had limited communication between each other in the past.

To cope with the problem of communication in the country, Bahasa Indonesian, Bahasa meaning language, was made the official language of Indonesia when Indonesia was declared independent in 1945. Bahasa Indonesian, or Indonesian for short, is a derivate of Malay, like many other languages in South East Asia.

Bahasa Indonesian has been influenced by a lot of other languages, especially the Dutch. And as part of the Dutch language is clearly built from other languages, as a European it can sometimes be easy to see the resemblance of words. For example the word for towel in Swedish is handduk, in Bahasa Indonesian it is handuk.

Most Indonesians don’t use Bahasa Indonesian as their primary language but most of them know it and use it regularly. Here on Gili Meno including Lombok and surroundings the regional language is Sasak, which is also the name of the people living here.

Upgrading our garden

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Couple of days ago we bought new plants – Clerodendron Thomsonae also known as Bleeding Heart Vine or Glory Bower Vine.
It has wonderful white and red flowers!

Clerodendron Thomsonae

What we read about this plant is that it needs good drained soil, which on Gili Meno and especially in Adeng-Adeng can be a bit of problem, but we will try to solve it to make this flowers happy.
Another problem with gardening here on the island is water salination. If plants don’t tolerate salty water they just die no matter how hard we try to grow them.
Becouse Clerodendron Thomsonae is a climber we hope it will feel good covering our Inkommerfar Bar which serves delicious ice cold drinks.

Happy New Year

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The year for Adeng-Adeng so far seems to end very well.

Today we finally finished the renovations of bungalow 2 so we now have three bungalows ready for rent. It took a lot of hard work from a lot of people but we manage to do it in the last second. All three bungalows are occupied from today until the 4th of January next year.

The restaurant and beach bar are open and we already today have had quite a few guests enjoying our cocktails and lunch. Tonight we gonna fire up the grill and have a barbecue on the beach and later in the night we’ll light up the sky with some fireworks.

What else? Two days ago one of our workers, Sam, came carrying a turtle. It had gotten stuck in a fishing net outside the island. We did get the honor of letting it back into to ocean. It seemed very happy :-)

Anja with turtle Anders carrying turtle over the corals Letting turtle back the ocean

Building it Adeng-Adeng

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Building a bungalow resort on a small island in the Indian Ocean has it’s own twists and quirks. We are a small team of swedes building a resort called Adeng-Adeng with bungalows, a restaurant and bars on Gili Meno. Gili Meno is a small island, approximately 5 km around, which is positioned in the middle of three islands just north west of Lomobok, Indonesia.

In this blog we will be posting about the work being done here.

By the way, adeng-adeng is Sasak and the meaning is doing something relaxed, slow and controlled.