It’s so nice to be close to heading over to Senaru again. As soon as we get back we’ll post some more images for you to look at, and hopefully a bit of video.

The latest challenge is trying to find a cheap PC or laptop to take over for Ayu to begin to learn using. I’m hoping I can find one before we leave or maybe pick up something cheap and cheerful while we’re in Java or Bali. But it’s great that Ayu is interested in learning how they work and wanting to set up a simple accounting system for her. She is also studying business management this year so it will help her on that front too.

Anyway, we’ll up date more news when we get back. There are still some images of where it all was last October if you scroll down.

Well, BB managed a quick trip over to Senaru last month and took these pictures. The restaurant has developed apace and as you can see is looking fantastic.

Here are some slides of the development so far:

As you can see our friends have done a great job in getting this building together for us. I can’t quite believe that the design I created with a software program late last year is now a reality. More credit to the locals for actually being able to realise this building from some basic drawings. It’s a very simple building that we hope will work well for diners and staff alike.

Here are some photos taken back in 2005 but they do give a lovely look at the mountain as we trekked up to 2,600m. Just press the play button to start the slideshow.

It’s been a long time since posting here, but at least we can report that we have made significant progress, and that is… significant progress. As you can see in the picture the restaurant stage of the building is nearing completion.

This photo was taken in June and the building is well advanced now. In fact, the restaurant had a soft opening on 29 July with around 100 locals in attendance. BB and Andy were sadly stuck in Sydney and so couldn’t join in the festivities. Nevertheless, the development continues apace and shortly building of the first small bungalow will commence.

So, while we haven’t been posting a lot, a lot has been happening in Senaru. I’ll try and update with some earlier events along this journey too but for the moment it’s taken all my concentration to get this post up. Pathetic I know! However, have a look at these photos below and you can see that it is all gradually taking shape.

This is the view from the lower terrace on the property. It’s quite a dominating structure.

And a view of the dining area complete with lovely white tiles. Hopefully home to many a happy meal for diners.

Here is another shot of the property. This one was taken in the morning and just as the sun was rising. I hope you’ll agree that the place looks beautiful.

We are very excited about getting there, it’s not long now.

It won’t be long now until we are back. We are furiously working on the plans for the new house and we’ll be discussing this again with our friends when we get there.

I hope you like the new look of the site, we have migrated from Blogger to Wordpress. Blogger was difficult to upload and buggy, so I decided to move across to the very stable Wordpress. If you want to blog and want it highly configurable, I suggest you have a close look at it.

Meanwhile here is a beautiful shot of our time on the mountain.

We are very excited. Finally we have organised a trip back to Lombok. We will be there shortly so we can talk through all of our plans with our friends and begin to get the project going.

We are so pleased to be heading back and look forward to us moving forward on this post haste. We know that they are all waiting back there for us to approve the building starting and so very soon we’ll be on the way.

It’s almost a year since we were in Lombok. We are missing it. Not to worry, we will be back there soon and I am working on getting the building plans over there as we speak.

In the meantime, here is another image of the area.

This is looking from the front of the lad down into the valley. The shouts and songs of the local farmers down in the valley come drifting up the cliff to the property. It really is the most magical place.

I’d love to be there right now, sitting on a baruga and sipping a coconut juice!

It’s not far away now, I’m sure.

Windows Live Writer is a great new tool for uploading to blogs. It has interoperability with a number of blogging tools. We use Blogger and set up was relatively straightforward. It’s a WYSIWYG editor that has the feel of a word processor. Meaning you can just type away and see how the page will look. On the page. Very neat. You can upload images very easily, a la… Resizing them is dead easy. You can get this neat little program at Windows Live Writer. The nay sayers on other blogs are moaning, but I’m happy, I just need a simple editor for the web that doesn’t have all the log in hassle of Blogger. See what you think and happy blogging (maybe this will mean I can get more blogs up here!)

We are still here. It’s just been an extremely busy year! When we have a moment, we cast our minds back to our wonderful friends and our lovely block of land in Senaru.

There has been so much happening back here in Australia that we haven’t had time to initiate our plans for the building. This is very frustrating but I’m happy to report I’ll be sending over some plans shortly. We have been procrastinating about the designs, I’m happy to admit that, but we do intend to send the plans over as they are. The locals will probably tell us that the plans are not practical anyway, which means will have to go back to the drawing board with plenty of more time for procrastination!

So we do apologise to all of you who may have been hoping for a faster, more aggressive development approach than that which we have undertaken. All I can say is a Rome wasn’t built in a day (although probably faster than we are going) and we hope there will be something there soon.

In the meantime, please enjoy another photograph of our little piece of paradise.