Is Riverbend still for sale?

You have to live somewhere - it may as well be Paradise!

People keep asking me. And here's my answer: YES!

A neighbouring cottage, a converted fishing shack on a mere 1900m² of dirt, has just sold for $950,000. So what should be the price tag on a very substantial double-storey brick residence, plus all the improvements and inclusions, situated on over 7 ACRES of absolute waterfront land?

As stated on my website, I invite offers over $2million! You have to live somewhere - it may as well be somewhere expensive! ☺

According to my insurers' Home Buildings Calculator, the cost to rebuild "Riverbend" 's main residence plus Cottage plus Workshop plus Utility Shed plus plus plus is well in excess of $800,000. Add to this the Land Department's $850,000 for the unimproved land (their valuations are always woefully behind market values), and the 'total package' is already worth $1,650,000.

Why do we do it? Why do we encumber ourselves with possessions? We are born with nothing yet the moment we emerge into the light of day we begin to accumulate things as if the possessing of things was an essential element of human existence. Stuff, and nonsense, and more stuff.

Where are the days when all I owned fitted into what was then known as a portmanteau? A change of clothing, a few toiletries, my trusty Langenscheidt Deutsch-Englisch/Englisch-Deutsch Wörterbuch, and, acquired much later from Breckwoldts in Kieta, my OLYMPIA portable typewriter was all I possessed for well over twenty years until I returned from Saudi Arabia and settled down, i.e. started to accumulate things.

Have pen, will travel was my motto then; Have too much, can't travel anymore may well be my motto now.

What's at stake?

Tomatoes, that's what, and lots of them! So if you happen to be at "Riverbend" this time next month, be prepared for grilled tomatoes for breakfast and tomato salad for lunch. And ketchup. Which reminds me:

A family of three tomatoes were walking downtown one day when the little baby tomato started lagging behind. The big father tomato walks back to the baby tomato, stomps on her, squashing her into a red paste, and says, "Ketchup!"

Autsch!

The Mystery of the Missing Goldfish

Yes, you've counted correctly: eight!
The ninth is hiding behind the rock
But where is the tenth?

When I set up my aquarium again, I bought ten goldfish: fantails, comets, and a shubunkin. I limited myself to ten so as not to have to take my shoes and socks off every time I did a roll call (not that I wear shoes and socks much these days anyway).

I've just done a roll call and there are only NINE ! I counted again and again and left no pebble unturned: one goldfish is definitely missing!

???

Keep five years' living expenses in cash - then invest the rest as though you'll live to be a 100.

The GFC, the Eurozone bail-outs, this is just all so much static. Stay savvy, stay sane, and invest in Blue Chip dividend-paying stocks as though you'll live to be a 100.

Horst Berger's 16th Anniversary

Self (left) and Horst at the Mariner's Café in Pangai on Lifuka Island

 

In September 2006, I visited the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific where on the remote island of Lifuka in the Ha'apai Group I met Horst Berger from Austria (not Australia but Austria, that little country in Central Europe where they speak German with a funny accent), who had settled there eleven years earlier - click here.

He'd come to Tonga in 1995 at the ripe old age of 39, following a workplace accident in Vienna which gave him a small pension to live on. Today, sixteen years later, he has fully succumbed to the siren song of these remote and soporific islands which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life will count for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered.

He doesn't seem to be ever struck by homesickness. And why would he want to leave? He subscribes to Louis Becke's sentiments - of whom he knows nothing - who once wrote about life in the South Seas, "Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?"

If you would like to contact Horst, write to this address

Horst Berger
Felemea, Uiha Island
Ha'apai
Kingdom of Tonga
South Pacific

but be patient as mail to and from the islands is very slow!

Oh, and by the way, when I write to Horst, I always enclose a small (and sometimes not so small) dollar-note to help him with the return postage and let him share a beer with me ☺