Say so long to the West and live out your days in tropical splendour.
You got a retirement plan?
You ever worked out how the harvest years are going to play out?
You going to be the old man who sits in the front room of his rendered brick townhouse in the heart of suburbia, an unresponsive wife ignoring your pawing at night, every dream you ever had so crushed you pray for the local teen hoodlums to break in and end your suffering with an iron bar?
A common retirement among the gung-ho, of course, is to take your First World money into the tropics, where your dollars buys palaces and endless indulgence.
It ain’t such a bad idea if you can take the suffocating heat and the feeling you’re just another in a long line of damn colonialists, spraying your cash, stomping over local culture, buggering the coolies etc.
Earlier today, I saw, and was rather taken by a beachfront site, with a development plan, on Simeulue Island, the next island up from Nias in North Sumatra.
The joint, which still has to be built, costs $US295,000, a number you’ll negotiate down by at least ten per cent, so let’s call it $US270,000.
It comes with five bungalows, an open air restaurant, a couple of beachfront gazebos, a boat, a van, a couple of scooters and enough land, or so they say, to build four or five more bungalows.
The only downside is it’ll only be sold as a land-and-building contract only, and must be sold to a private owner or syndicate.
Which means, you can’t run it as a commercial surf resort.
But who needs kooks and guests weeping about sunburn and the wind direction and too much and not enough swell when you’re the master of your little piece of surf heaven, anyway?
Important a few lovers of various stripes from Medan, bring your friends from the west and away you go,
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