Hey Cintaku, let's check out Lombok, sounds nice.

Building our container house in Takar Akar, Lombok

This is the longest blog post you’ll see from us, so please bear with us! Take comfort in knowing the rest will be short and sweet—besides, who needs to read all this text when there are pictures to look at in the next post anyway?It all started when we decided to visit Lombok for a quick three-day trip to check it out, with a view to maaaaaaybe settling here. By the end of our brief look around, the decision was made. On our last day—just a couple of hours before sunset—we stopped at a real estate agent. After a 30-minute drive to the southeast of the island, we found our future home. That was back in 2014.Fast forward nearly seven years: we packed up, moved from the UAE, and found ourselves in Kuta on the south coast of Lombok. If you’ve never heard of Kuta—or Lombok, for that matter—you’ll be hearing a lot more about it soon, and not just from us!Kuta was just a temporary two-month base for us while our actual spot was being sorted half an hour away. If you look for Bumbang—a location that used to encompass five or six small hamlets—it was split up a few years back, and our little hamlet was named Takar Akar. I was perfectly happy saying I lived in Bumbang (it has a nice ring to it!), but I’ve grown used to listening to Acca Dacca in Takar Akar, even if you still can't find it on Google Maps.So, why a container house?Back in August 2018, we visited Lombok to meet up with family and friends and show them around the island we now call home. With seven visitors arriving in the morning and plans for more later, we settled in for our first night back on the island.We got a rude wake-up call at about 8:00 AM with the windows rattling in their frames. Ani was already up and looking outside. I got up thinking the wind was blowing hard on our first day—pretty exciting for a kitesurfer! I looked out expecting to see palm trees blowing in the breeze... but nope.It was the first of two deadly earthquakes to hit while we were there, followed by a month of a hundred traumatic tremors. Sadly, hundreds of people died that morning, and thousands more in the second one. The epicentres were in the north of the island, flattening entire villages, and those communities still haven't fully recovered. Speaking to a local great-grandmother, she told us these were the first major quakes to hit the island in living memory—there weren't even old stories passed down from her own great-grandmother. We were traumatised, but thankfully, along with everyone else in the south, that was the extent of it for us.Because of that experience, our long-term plan for a "tiny house" on stilts (with an open kitchen and living area underneath) got completely quashed. We pivoted to studying earthquake-proof earth-bag buildings full-time, while designing a container kitchen and workshop combo to go alongside it.Now, let’s go look at some pics, hey!