June 2018 - La Colina Project

Spider Eyes and a Chicken Nunnery

June 22, 2018
by Beave

So I’ve been banging on about the rains coming for weeks and they finally arrive early and in style. Last night was the second night of rain. We have spent a very sedate day sweating and both recovering from my man flu. We mostly watched Netflix and waited for sleep to take us. No rush. The nightly chorus of tin whistle bugs is done and at midnight we drift off. At 1 am I am awake. The jungle is in instant shadow as the whole sky lights up in flashes. It’s chucking it down. Real tropical rain. The roof is holding up well and the ground is soaking it all in (for now) so there is little to worry about. Then the frogs kick off.

Considering how dry and water free it has been up to this point it is illogical in the extreme that all of a sudden a few hours of rain can create all the frogs. Where have they all suddenly come from?? I can’t count how many but the noise is deafening. Can’t hear the rain for them. I spend the next 4 hours in my man flu misery reading and listening. Amongst many others I identify a “base cello’ frog, a “scooter with a bad battery trying to start” frog and a particularly irritating “everything is hilarious and I’ve just huffed some helium” frog. The rains reduce by 5 am and my book is finished. The frogs care not and are still having a good old sing. I pass out.

The frog orgy has left without cleaning up. The evidence is everywhere. Frog and toad spawn had filled the previously dried up jungle pond. The sight of the swimming pool is shocking. There are about two dozen large frogs in there. I manage to rescue the few survivors and then start the body count. I fish them out of the pool and arrange them on a rock for curiosity purposes. It’s carnage.

I arrange the dead frogs on a rock beside the pool and return to the tree house. We are somewhat surprised by a high pitched scream. The local pool company has turned up for a visit and the girl who is examining the pool has just discovered my frog rock display. She is loudly unimpressed. Her colleague is highly entertained.

Curiously this whole frog rave lasted only two nights. They are still out there being irritatingly loud but this is an after party crowd. They now sound like clowns with bike horns and give it their all for about 20 minutes then shut up for an hour… then start again. It’s better than it was….

We now have lots of water. The well is filling up again (just in time), we have three out of five full tinacos, the pool level has improved, all the plants and herbs are thoroughly watered and the solar panels are washed. These are all good things.

Last week we wondered why our solar batteries were low. A brief examination of the panels showed that in just over a week the entire solar array had acquired a thick coating of twigs, leaves and muck from the shedding trees. How we had any power at all was a mystery. As our ladder was being used elsewhere an enthusiastic, brave and acrobatic friend who was visiting climbed up with broom and removed all the crap. Battery power renewed in no time. It was on our list of maintenance jobs to do this regularly but now there is no need. The rains have polished them to a sunbeam friendly gleam.

It’s time for planting stuff out. We have bougainvilleas to place on the fence line. Also a spontaneous planting of sunflower seeds has produced a dozen or so competing shoots that need a home. We have collected orchids in dormant state and tied them to trees. Theoretically these will suck up the moisture in the air and flower in a month or two.

I have had a nagging request for some time. Someone wants chickens. The opportunity presents itself when we get a call informing us that a local vet-student has chickens to rehouse. Our friends are bringing her and her family over to meet us on Friday… with chickens. I spend a day building a chicken nunnery tractor. A nunnery because it will NOT be housing any bloody roosters. Sorry girls. The purpose of the tractor element is to allow the chickens to eat all the scrub and insects underneath their home and then we move it along. In this way the jungle floor is fertilized and cleaned progressively and the chickens are safe, dry, fed and producing eggs. Chicken safety out here is something we need to understand better. Pretty much everything eats chickens. Eagles, snakes, jaguar, ocelots, us. They are famously delicious. Have to see how that turns out. The process of building all day in a ginger puddle has left me exhausted. I have been fooled by a few cooling showers and protective afternoon clouds and managed to get dehydrated.

I recover with pints of homemade Jamaica (pronounced “hamica”), AKA cold hibiscus tea, which is a red plant base that we boil up to make a concentrated syrup. Added to a heap of water and ice with lime juice it is as refreshing a thing as we have found. There is an endless jug of the stuff in the fridge.

My recovery is somewhat disturbed by the sound of the cat fighting with one big fat cicada type bug. It’s the ones that make all the racket at night fall. Now they are loud enough half a mile away but having one being chewed by a cat a few feet away is deafening. I drag myself up and grab a cloth. My first attempt at rescue only manages to scare it into a limping flight with its one remaining good wing as it attaches itself to the window screen. It’s bigger than I thought. A good handful. I make my move but it’s too quick and noisily collides with my face and disappears in silence. It’s nowhere to be seen. Mausetrappe and I look at each other in confusion. I feel a scratching sensation and am then startled out my wits by a massive noise in my ear! The little sod was hiding on the back of my neck!! I grab him and throw him hard onto the floor. The cat pounces and diverts the thing under the sink. He is silent again. Not for long. The cat gets him in her mouth. The sound is unbelievable. I grab him. My whole hand is vibrating wildly as it screams. On the balcony I shake the cloth in my hand and I see him shoot directly upwards into the trees. Gone. It’s raining and very dark. Around me there are slowly moving majestic lights. The fireflies are back!!

Mango season is upon us. I was put off mangos by spending a lot of time in Montreal. There was a phase of putting mangos on everything. It was trendy to have eggs and bacon with a lump of mango. Bugger that! I am , however, seduced by the laden local mango trees. Each mature tree produces up to 250 kg a season. We had to consider that when looking at land with a dozen mango trees. Thats literally tons of mangoes to deal with. The little ones taste better than the big ones.

Another welcome return is that of the toilet paper butterfly. This is unlikely to be the scientific name but they can best be described as a lump of toilet paper floating around in the wind. They are bright white and huge. The wings are far too big to be efficient so they kinda flop around randomly and somehow stay in the air. Inelegant but stunning to watch.

The chickens arrive. They are an ugly bunch. Dirty brown with bare arses. Tail feathers are optional we discover. The chicken nunnery is placed outside our balcony so we can keep them under review for the first few weeks. The ground is uneven so we create a rockery around the nunnery to discourage beasts from getting in. The chickens are installed and we decide to keep them locked in for a day or two so they learn this is where they live. Not necessary. Despite the door being left open all day the chickens don’t move from their luxurious perches in the shade. We learn that organic free-range chickens are mainly conceptual. Despite acres of lovely range to be free upon most chickens prefer to stay inside and view the outside from the inside. Despite being agoraphobic & antisocial our five chickens appear happy enough. I have decided to name our nunnery inmates. Sister Kwafi, Sister Pybus, Sister Bricklebank, Sister Allenby & Sister Bland. Any comparison with anyone with similar names is entirely deliberate. Eggs are in our future.

There have been a few nights now of heavy to very heavy rains. In retrospect many things have indicated rains were coming. The lime trees started to bear fruit again and we found a heap of bananas appearing the week before the rains came. We found a tomato growing wild next to the house, the last flower on the vanilla orchid appeared and was pollinated and the roof got fixed, all the very day before the rains came.

The ground is alive with bright glowing red beetles. We spend some hours at the waterfall pools and they are everywhere. Individually they are fascinating but they have a trick. They gang together and make balls of themselves. A bright red shape the size of a golf ball. I have no idea why. It doesn’t seem an efficient love in and there is no feeding frenzy going on. See how long they last. They are harmless and very, very pretty.

There is a phenomena that I was convinced was fake news. If you shine a torch or headlight at a certain angle into the jungle thousands of tiny glowing lights reflect back at you. Every one of these lights is a spider looking back at you. Well I had these lights shown to me a few times but refused to believe the spider story. This was until the tinaco above our tree house sprang a leak and I needed to change out a fitting immediately and the sun was setting. It’s not something you would chose to do without daylight but I had no choice. On the way up the hill my headlight caught a mass of reflections, which I ignored until the tinaco was fixed. On the way down the hill in the dark I decided to explore these tiny lights close up. Unbelievably its true. I got close enough to confirm that the closest dozen lights were indeed spider eyes reflecting back at me. They were only tiny spiders but they shone like diamonds. Spooky.

And with the rain comes the crabs. It’s a famously strange and wonderful sight here in Nayarit to see hundreds of thousands of large pink crabs heading a kilometer for the sea after hibernation all year. If you are in the way it’s described as biblical. There is no avoiding them! We have avoided them as we are just far enough away from the sea. Just. The run to the ocean is over now but the bodies of those that didn’t quite make it are everywhere.

The bugs have changed again this month. We had weeks of tiny little buggers that felt like grains of sand when you caught them trying to nibble on you. More recently there is a medium sized loudly buzzing night time arrival. It’s a good job we have the nets on the bed. You hear them first and then see them head butting the fabric screen loudly. It’s impossible to sleep with these antics so I have taken to punching them off the net. They cope with this tactic rather well. Despite getting a full knuckle punch in their face they come back at you! They have heavy armor that looks like a nutshell. It can take two or three well placed punches to put off a “nut bug”. The cat is far more efficient and crunches them loudly and leaves them in a pile for me.

The Summer Solstice is upon us. The longest day. Tomorrow in the UK Christmas cards start appearing in the shops. It is also the anniversary of the burning of an effigy on Baker Beach in San Francisco over 30 years ago from which the Burning Man event evolved. One of the founders of the event died recently and there is a worldwide acknowledgement of gratitude for the connections this event created. My life would certainly be very different if those guys hadn’t decided to burn something on a beach that day. So to mark the occasion we gather with friends both new and old and knock up a “palm man”. We collect mango margaritas and head to the beach. It was all rather beautiful.

The rains have held off now for a week. What appeared to be the rainy season coming early was actually the back end of Hurricane Bud. The first of the season. The real rainy season is due soon enough. We are preparing slowly.

There is no doubt that Mexico is now a great footballing nation. It only takes a single goal but timing is everything. We watch this goal live from our friend’s restaurant packed with locals. We also endure an hour of waiting for the Germans to equalise but incredibly it doesn’t happen !! Torture to ecstasy. The place goes nuts. Moscow will be out of tequila in the morning. We have the might of glorious South Korea next. Despite the dull as ditch water England performance against Tunisia Jayne’s footballing needs are satisfied. We are, however, asking ourselves if getting up at 6 am on Sunday to watch England v Panama is worth the effort… probably.

Jungle Journal

Ginger Puddles

June 5, 2018
by Beave

It’s all getting very different. The tropics have two seasons. Wet and dry. Right now it’s absolutely dry with the exception of the air, which holds a consistent 30-degree heat and manages well over 80% humidity most of the time. By the afternoon it is pretty much impossible to move. I am effectively a ginger puddle from 2pm. Every day.

The light fades down at around 8.30pm as the sun hits the ocean. In the past couple of weeks full volume creatures accompany this event. These tiny bugs are the sound of the wet season rains coming to turn our dust into mud. The rain is due about 20 days after they start we are told. It kicks off as a kind of throat singing and morphs into the noise that a couple of dozen three year olds would make with a crate of tin whistles. It’s loud and tuneless. There is no other option but to stop and wonder how something so small can create such a bloody racket. The noise travels for miles and ends as abruptly as it begins when the dark sets in.

There has been a few recent Coatis sightings. They have been using their properly fingered hands to open sealed containers and scoff or re-distribute anything remotely edible they find in the outdoor kitchen. We have been tidying up after them for weeks now. These monkey/bear/raccoon type creatures are fearless and we now know why. The local dog packs chase them up to the very top of the tallest trees but they had a surprise when they cornered one last week. One particularly terrorized Coatis decided that enough was enough and deployed its claws. One dog ended up with a significant hole in its neck and poor old Tripod has had his face horrifically rearranged. How these scratty dogs heal so fast from what are no doubt serious injuries continues to impress. We won’t be cornering a nice cute Coatis anytime soon.

Jayne’s mother has not survived the journey from the UK well. Despite feeding her daily with the requisite flour and keeping her in the fridge there was not enough feedback to justify the effort. So we said goodbye and started another one. Sourdough bread is a process. New mother has faired better. The yeast in the air here has produced what has turned out to be a far more useful substance which has produced, with some effort, a pretty impressive and delicious loaf.

Lulled into a false sense of security we tried to reproduce the event. Despite hours sitting beside the outside oven and fantasizing about warm sourdough slices dripping in butter and marmite it was not to be. Our first attempt turned out to be a Frisbee shaped brick of solid dough. Even the dog wouldn’t touch it. Not to be put off we persevered. After further hours swatting bugs and staring through the oven door our second attempt appeared. It sort of defied description but a sourdough loaf it was not. It was more of an oversized hockey puck heavy weapon. It took a great deal of effort to throw it into the jungle. I’m sure it will be there for a very long time. Our bread making adventures are suspended. It’s not her mother’s fault apparently.

Ironically it was Mexican Mother’s Day (Thursday) and US/Canadian Mothers Day (Sunday) that very week. Our mother here remains well fed and refrigerated and ready for when the need for a marmite butty exceeds our reluctance to invest further hours staring at an oven. There is good bread in our future.

Big news. Our first pineapple crop is ready. Ok so it’s only one but it’s a start. Smells amazing.

My Spanish is coming along but way way too slowly. I understand most of what is said between Gringos and locals as this is a slower paced and more basic version of conversation. When two Mexicans add tequila and start an enthusiastic chat I’m lost in no time. This is a result of quite spectacular prevarication on my part. If there is any job that needs doing it takes priority over me spending time learning Spanish. Now this is very good for the ever ready composting loos, washing up and general house tidiness but vastly extends the time I can confidently and effectively converse with our growing number of Mexican friends. It’s so important. But here I am writing this blog about my need to learn Spanish rather than actually learning Spanish. Me bad.

Our good friends have bought a lovely house in the next town and we are helping them with getting the garden sorted out and overseeing some building work. I have always had great respect for my friends who are architects and structural engineers and always considered this an alternative path should I ever have the funds and motivation to re-train myself one day. What I have realized over the past weeks is that stress levels when building things for yourself is a different world that building things for someone else. What if something goes wrong? Are the boys doing everything right? What am I missing? It’s not my house! The responsibility! Thankfully all seems to be going very well and in a few days there will be a magnificent palapa on the roof to compliment all the new hand rails and neatly groomed garden. I will ask permission to publish some photos when it’s all done. Mightily relieved. We also get to nick their Wi-Fi whenever we go over so that has helped fuel our new habit of binge watching series on Netflix.

The Ceveceria (pub) has shut for the season. This is hard to take but our great friends who dedicate themselves to keep us all in pints deserve a break. It’s interesting to note the difference between a beer serving establishment and a pub. It’s all about community. The place we all get to know each other and meet up. The font of all knowledge and gossip. There is so much creatively, socially and economically that comes about from creating a space like this and drinking beer within it. That said we have to find an alternative social venue for the next few months. There are enough of us crazies around here that intend to sweat out the rainy season. We decide to have a pool party while we work it out.

So the pool finally becomes more than a sanctuary for one overheated ginger person. Many many friends arrive and after a very long and successful night it is clear that we need to continue to make the effort socially. It’s so worth it.

When a bunch of us get together there are recurring topics that arise. Real Estate is one of them. Our own experience in going through the performance and drama that is buying property in Mexico makes us think we know a little bit about it. In truth we know a lot less that we think we do. It’s an extraordinarily complex process and there are so many trips and hazards on the way that it takes a great deal of effort and good fortune to get through unscathed. We have been asked by a number of people to help them get through it all and the more we learn the more we need to. Finding out who owns the land (Ejido land or otherwise) and what you can officially do with it should you be able to buy it , and what permissions you need and if a great bleeding highway will be built right next to it are all pretty much a mission to find out.

There is a large Cuota Toll highway scheduled to be completed between Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta over the next few years. We were told about this a year ago and it was a real consideration for us when we looked at buying our land here. By some good luck and slight of hand we acquired the GPS coordinates showing exactly where the road is planned to be. Many of the local estate agents don’t have that information.

The highway is scheduled to cut through the bird sanctuary and many miles of protected forest and jungle. It will skim past the entrance to our land about 200m away. The construction will require a 60m wide corridor being cut through unique and irreplaceable natural environment. It is a travesty ecologically but this is Mexico. Payments have allegedly been made. Money has allegedly been washed clean. Politicians have allegedly been bought.

In practice the road will be too expensive for most people to use. It costs at least a day’s wages to use the road, which saves between 2, and 3 hours driving compared to the alternative free road that exists now (the infamous route 200). There will be tourists and the wealthy, some buses and a few trucks using it but few others. This is the same with other Cuota (toll roads) in Mexico. We have used them and there is practically no other traffic on them. You can travel for many miles and not see another vehicle in either direction. Massive waste of money and resources.

The government has paid off the compulsory land purchases already so much of the money has already been spent. Lots of locals with new pick up trucks. The road is already built up to about 40 miles away. The construction crews are due to arrive with us in a year or so. It’s pretty much a done deal but there is a chance of stopping the route through the protected jungle. It’s not a big chance but it’s a chance.

The current government in Mexico is right wing and the last two elections have ended controversially. We are told that the first time they got into power they did not get the majority vote but declared themselves the winners and that was it. The last election the vote count was called off at midnight when they were slightly in the lead and all other votes were not officially counted. If they had been they would not be in power. The next election is next month. The opposition party is standing on an anti-corruption ticket and want to make Mexico “work for the many not the few.” If they get in they will have a much more sympathetic ear and could overturn decisions made where corruption is proved. Lets see what happens.

Leave No Trace : Leave Art . My mantra for the past few years. Entire civilizations have come and gone and left no other history except their art for us to judge them by. Art has arrived!! We have been blessed with the arrival of mural artists who have transformed our orange block and inspired me take brush in hand and practice. If you are inspired in any way to leave us some art in any form then please get in touch.

Our roof has been a worry for some time. It looks pretty and functional from the inside but the outside is buggered. It has had numerous trees and plants growing out of a thick layer of compost that the palm leaves that were installed 8 years ago have now turned into. When it rains there is a mad rush to cover vulnerable areas of stuff with plastic and deploy buckets to divert and capture the brown water that seeps through the compost. It’s not a good thing. We need a new roof.

Budget constraints and our reluctance to move out of our home for a week or two have lead to a compromise. We have a large 6M x 9M sheet of industrial plastic, a roll of wire and 40 huge palms leaves. In the hands of our man, his Dad, his son and his mate this is sufficient to create a waterproof roof in under 3 hours. I attempt to help but end up covered in ancient compost to the amusement of all. I helpfully pass around a few beers and brush away the fall out. We have a functional roof!!

Mexican man flu has descended. I again have a near fatal dose and am suffering in peaceful silence and equanimity. Jayne has a very mild dose of girl flu which is best cured by activity such as cooking and caring for me. This makes her very happy. I might yet survive.

It’s 3 am and I wake up in my ginger puddle of man flu. It’s raining hard. First time in over 6 months. I get up from my sick bed and wobble onto the balcony and get instantly very wet and cold. I return to my damp warm bed. The roof is holding up. I don’t have the energy to be buggering about with buckets and am very grateful. Mausetrappe makes a loud and dramatic entrance. She is entirely unimpressed with whatever this is. We remember that she is probably less than 10 months old so won’t remember rain and certainly not the heavy, cold, get you wet instantly stuff. She decides that my puddle is better place to be and settles in for the night.