Their trip to Bali was going to be a month long. But they fell in love with the island and built a house near the sea, giving up city life for good.
17.06.2024 - 12:03
/ insider.com
Tanguy and Lucie Yu first visited Bali together in 2018 for a monthlong vacation.
That year, Lombok, a neighboring island, experienced a 6.9-magnitude earthquake that could be felt even in Bali, which was 40 minutes away by plane.
"We couldn't travel much to the other islands because the boats weren't working, so we rented motorbikes, and we did road trips to see all the different parts of the main island," Lucie, 35, told Business Insider.
The couple, who was living in Paris at the time, was blown away by the simplicity of life on the island and the generosity of the people they met.
"Farmers whose houses were damaged by the earthquake still invited us over for coffee. They had a smile on their faces and were just happy to be alive," Lucie said. "It was a sign that this place had some magic."
A year later, in September 2019, the couple packed up their lives and moved across the globe to Bali.
Initially, they planned to use Bali as a base to travel around Asia. But six months later, the pandemic hit and derailed their plans.
Around then, Tanguy cofounded Astungkara Way, a regenerative travel company. That spurred the couple's decision to put down more permanent roots in Bali, so they started looking for land to build on.
During their first year in Bali, the couple lived in Kerobokan, an area sandwiched between the bustling, tourist-filled neighborhoods of Canggu and Seminyak.
"It was very busy, very loud, and a lot of traffic," Lucie said.
They knew they wanted to be somewhere quieter, and a friend introduced them to the property 10 miles north in Kediri, where they now live.
The only criterion they had was that the land couldn't be a rice paddy since part of the travelcompany's mission is to protect rice paddies.
"We thought that it was too far from things likehospitals and shops. But when he took us here, and we stepped on this land, we felt this was the place we wanted to be," Lucie said.
They had viewed three other plots of land before they found this.
"The land was basically the village dump and the soil was full of trash. It took us two weeks to clean everything up," Lucie said.
She added that back in 2020, there was only one local village in the area, although things have changed since.
"We were like the last point before the rice paddies started and we were promised that it would stay that way," Lucie said. But two months later, a new 160-home development broke ground on the land just beyond their property.
In local measurements, their land spans 15 are — about 16,145 square feet.
The couple says they paid 4.5 million Indonesian rupiah per are each year for a 25-year lease, which amounts to about 1.687 billion Indonesian rupiah in total, or about $103,500 in today's currency.
Building the home