Indonesian cemetery mixes fun and funerals

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KARAWANG, Indonesia (Reuters Life!) - Visiting a cemetery is usually a sombre, painful experience, but an Indonesian real estate firm wants you to have fun instead.

The company, PT Lippo Karawaci Tbk, is offering mourners a lake with rowing boats, a convention hall, a posh restaurant and a swimming pool in what it sees as a lucrative new concept.

"If the word cemetery came to your mind the visual association right away would be those upright tombstones and the dead rising from the ground," said Manny Francisco, the Philippines-born marketing and planning director of the 500 hectare San Diego Hills.

He said that from his 20-year experience working in cemeteries in Canada and the United States, relatives normally stopped visiting loved ones buried in the cemetery after a year.

The San Diego Hills Memorial Park and Funeral Houses, set in green hilly countryside an hour's drive east of the capital Jakarta, is modelled after the Forest Lawn cemetery in California.

It offers an artificial boating lake the size of 12 soccer pitches, a 200-seat Italian restaurant, a 250-seat convention hall, as well as an Olympic-size pool and a cycle track.

A basic package for an individual plot costs between 10 million rupiah ($1,111) and 12 million rupiah, a huge sum for an average Indonesian.

WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL

Next month the first wedding will be held at the Forest chapel, which is also used for funeral services, Francisco said.

A 300-bed dormitory will be built starting next year for religious retreats and there are also plans for a soccer field.

"We are focusing on the consumer, from the cradle to the grave," James Riady, CEO of the Lippo Group, told Reuters in Singapore. "San Diego is a memorial park. It's a place where there is life."

But one Indonesian blogger criticised the Riady family as being "callous" for building such an expensive cemetery in a country where millions live on less than two dollars a day.

Francisco said there were no extra charges for security and maintenance, and a buried body would be left undisturbed.

Most public cemeteries in Indonesia are managed by the government and families have to pay every three years to renew the lease otherwise graves will be recycled.

The operation generated nearly 23 billion rupiah in sales as of the end of June, according to company data, even though construction had yet to be fully completed.

He said in one part of the cemetery, which has areas representing the main religions, a Muslim family had bought a 200 square-metre plot worth 4 billion rupiah.

Francisco said the market potential for cemetery property in Indonesia was "fantastic" since, unlike in the United States, buying cemetery space in advance was currently an alien idea.

Francisco said some early customers had bought plots to be sold to others for profits, a practice illegal in many other countries including the United States.

Religious groups could also profit by selling the plots they bought at a discount to their members.

Adriana Tulaar, a 61-year-old widow, said she had bought seven plots for her and relatives. She planned to move the remains of her husband to San Diego Hills so that they can be buried side by side.

"As a mother I don't want to trouble my children after I die. They don't have to renew the lease every three years or pay maintenance fees every month," she told Reuters.

"I just hope they will visit us more often," she said.