How we got to Lombok

A bit of a personal story

Let's start with a bit more of a personal story. We arrived to Lombok with my mother in law, as she had traveled from Peru to Bali to see the grandkids (and us, of course). Through Facebook we found a small villa (as they call free standing houses here), in Kuta. Kuta is a town in the South of Lombok and is often the starting point for many travelers. In Kuta you find the bigger supermarket, most restaurants and tourist services. Our villa is slightly away from the main road and is just a simple house with an open living and two bedrooms on the second floor. The biggest asset to the house is not a swimming pool but a mango tree, it turns out. The kids love climbing the tree and we have hosted several meetings in the last month where families came over to our place. It's what we love and seems to happen everywhere we go. Naturally we end up in a house that is inviting and then fill it up with happy people as often as we can.

The biggest asset to the house is not a swimming pool but a mango tree.

Meanwhile we did our research before arriving and the kids joined a summer camp a few days a week at one of the schools in Kuta, complemented with playdates at the nearby outdoor playground Milo's Village, where I wrote a good part of this page while the kids were playing. Daniella, as an art director, was working on a few editorial projects at the time, so we split our time with the kids.

The last few years

I will shortly take you through the last years in case you are new here and wonder where this all came from. Daniella and I met in 2013 in Daniella's home country, Peru. After traveling the world for two years, and celebrating our "world wide wedding" on 6 continents, we started a stationery business in Peru. It started as many stories from a bedroom and ended in 2024 with our top 5 stores and a team of 35 people. Meanwhile we built 4 businesses, of which 3 were related to stationery (corporate + import) and the 4th was focused on bicycle accessories. Some worked, some didn't, but in general we created a beautiful community around our main business doing events, workshops, product launches and even a festival during our 7 years.

As much as it was fun, going from starting a creative business to running a large team and having lots of responsibilities changed our roles a lot. It also made us get more "stuck" in Peru, which is kind of the opposite of what we had in mind starting it all, so at the end of 2023 we decided to shut it all down. Over 7 months we sold one business and closed down the others. We found our team new jobs and sold our house. With only 3 self-built glamping sites left, we started traveling with only a one-way ticket to Aruba. While traveling the Caribbean we found a camper for sale in Las Vegas and ended up traveling the US, Canada and parts of Mexico. Meanwhile we bought another camper in Europe to travel lots of Europe.

After the first year of intense travel we realized we and the kids needed more community, and we signed up for Traveling Village, which is a concept of 20 families traveling together, in our case for 4.5 months, staying 5 weeks in each location with 10 day breaks in between. This would give us 4.5 months with the same friends, a slow pace and 3 new countries to visit. Before the program started we still had about 10 months to fill, so we exchanged our campers for a caravan in Europe and ended up living in Sicily for 7 months. Meanwhile, in need of new challenges, I started working for a real estate company in the UAE. As I always prefer to see things first hand on the ground, we decided to spend some weeks in the UAE to actually see the projects on the ground.

In January we started Traveling Village in Vietnam, followed by Taiwan, a brief detour through Japan and then finished in South Korea. Meanwhile the war in the UAE changed the circumstances and the company I was working for stopped funding my project, which led me to starting my own research into interesting places to invest our money. This led me to Lombok. In my free time I started doing lots of research into investment opportunities around the world, and where lots of investors are looking at Bali, I found that many experienced people in the field have moved their focus to Lombok. Curious and sometimes skeptical as I am/we are, we decided to move temporarily to Lombok to find out what is really here. That leads me to the idea of this website. While on it, I might as well share what I find on my way, sharing subjects we have already tackled where others are still trying to figure it out.