Blog - La Colina Project

A beautiful lotus growing in our pool

Currently more of a pond…

Jungle Journal

The Art of Doing Nothing

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023
by Beave

We are still here. Living a mostly peaceful life in our fabulous wee house in this beautiful Mexican jungle. It is difficult to comprehend sometimes. How did this happen? It was never in any great life plan. We never dreamt of this outcome.

This level of *mostly peace* was never in any grand plan.

As it gets hotter we inevitably get slower. The air is getting thicker and my wanderings around our jungle pretty much always result in delightful puddles of sweat and the need to stay still for a while afterwards. Although there is always something to do, there are growing numbers of opportunities to stop, take a breath and avoid filling the space with endless nonsense from our laptops or phones. The ability to be still and untethered by life is both a challenge and a blessing. It’s not so easy being inactive. It’s not useful to judge oneself lazy or unproductive but it often feels like that. If you call it meditation it’s much more socially acceptable to do bugger all. We are getting better at it. Doing absolutely nothing. Just being. Guilt free. Takes practice.

We are now living far enough away from the treehouse that we have taken our eye off the vanilla. It was an abundant year last year so we are not expecting too much this time around. We have seen evidence that we have missed a few flowers which have remained un-pollinated. There are even fewer flowers appearing than expected so we might have a fallow year. In anticipation we have taken cuttings of the mother plant and are attempting to introduce new growth on a number of trees around the new house. They are effectively air orchids requiring no soil. We have them hanging from the knarly Copomo trees around the house. It would be great to have vanilla babies.

Luca hanging out in jungle as Jake takes a trip to LA to see a girl

There is a now a famous end of season event on the local calendar. We are invited once again to join around a hundred friends who gather earlyish and are bused to the marina where we all embark on a cruise boat catamaran for a day on the water. Free food and an open bar is provided. The cost of the whole event is very generously covered by our friends who have gifted this day out to the community for the past few years. A great chance to catch up with everyone and keep the bar staff fully employed all day while practicing doing nothing on a boat.

Practicing the art of doing nothing on a boat

The pool has not had much attention recently. We haven’t had it clean and ready for use for a long while. It takes a heap of chemicals to keep it clear and constant attention to remove all the drowned leaves, dust and occasional beasts. As it has to be baking hot to persuade Canadians, with an aversion to cool water, to get wet so the actual days of pool use are very few. We spend more time cleaning the bloody thing than using it. It is decided that we will transform our existing set up to a natural organic version. We will add the correct balance of plants to do all the work for us. It might end up more like swimming in a lake or river than a pristine gleaming tiled pool but it’s maintenance free and ready to go at any time the need takes us. There are a number of options. We have had a few folk (that claim expertise) out to have a look. They have all offered to help us, for a price. We are considering our options.

Stunning new murals have appeared in the town square

It’s very early but we have had some rain. Not the rain that smashes us and tears away roads and trees. This rain came for an hour and left with the dust beautifully suppressed. It’s been noticeably more humid in the past few weeks so this is welcome. It’s just a taste but it’s the first we have had for six months. The weather sages are predicting a very hot summer with the El Nino affect hitting us later in the year. So more heat than usual and more storms forecast. That’ll be fun.

There is an all-night party organised at a posh event space on the beach in Punta Mita which is but a taxi ride away. It’s another fundraiser for the Mayan Warrior which is the extraordinary Burning Man art car that is fully stocked with mind bending lasers and sound weapons. Tickets are purchased and a series of reasonably appropriate costumes are created in anticipation.

Friends of ours in town have had the nightmare of waking up to find their dog had died in the night. The grumpy old twat had been with them for very many years. His age finally caught up with him. He is already missed madly. We offer to bury him in the jungle and that is arranged very quickly. We bring him from a freezer in town to a quiet, beautiful area where they dig a hole and collect a good pile of large stones. We lay him to rest in a glorious arrangement of jungle flowers and rocks. We then conduct a reasonably respectful wake to honour him. Born on the streets of Compton and buried in a Mexican jungle. Not a bad life. RIP Grocerito.

We hear rumours that the Mayan Warrior has caught fire and is no longer. It takes a while but we verify that at some point on the journey to Punta Mita a fire broke out and completely destroyed the entire structure and all their laser and sound equipment. The party is still going ahead but that is the last of the infamous Mayan Warrior. That will mean a big chunk of sky is forever without lasers and a heap more dust undisturbed by dancing.

Much loved art, energy and hardware up in smoke

A dubious group assembles to paint up and pimp themselves. A taxi is booked and we head South. Despite the absence of its’ star attraction, the party is well run and a large group of us spend the night surrounded by light & sound before gathering on the beach for sunrise. A grand farewell.

The sea is warm again and waves are rising. The sunsets are showing off and life is taking a new pace. The past few months we have had a load of our folk passing through and staying around for a while. The jungle has been full at times. We do like having our favorite idiots staying and playing here. We also like it when they bugger off and it’s quiet again. It’s been a while. This is the first time since October that we have been out here by ourselves. The balance between doing things and releasing oneself to peace and calm is just about perfect right now. We try and balance knocking things off the to-do list interspersed with periods of more doing nothing practice.

Final touches : Wood staining, sanding and varnishing many doors and many shelves

All the building and moving around and other more pressing stuff have distracted us from growing things. The gardens we have previously attempted to fill with good stuff have been left feral and most are barren of anything except the usual mix of normal jungly growth. We do discover a few healthy looking pineapples and even a few wild tomatoes. We even discover a tree with a good amount of satsuma oranges. Our own attempts at creating food have been poor this year. The exception is Thomas, our heirloom tomato plant, grown from a seed. It sits just outside the front door so we remember to throw water at it. Tom is doing well. We are excited to see a small green lonely tomatina appear. First of very many we hope.

So BBC world news reminds us that the island we left six years ago is getting itself a new king. Charles is getting his fancy hat and it’s an excuse to have an end of season get together. There only needs to be the merest hint of an excuse to dress up a little here so the decision to host a Kings & Anarchists Coronation pool party takes things to a new level. We bring together head costumes, beverages, food and a DJ deck . Over the course of a splendid afternoon many strange anarchists are joined in the pool by a stranger troupe of Kings. God save the King or indeed stuff the monarchy. You choose.

Jungle Journal

Newest New Things

April 4, 2023April 4, 2023
by Beave

It’s happened. We are in our new wee house and it’s remarkable. All the time, effort, tears, sweat, learning and adventures have come together at last. We have moved our cat and a few essential essentials out of the treehouse which has been our home for over five years. With luck and persuasion and maybe a little bribery it is my intension to transform the treehouse into my own sexy man cave in the trees. Jayne may have other less perfect ideas.

There are a few endless last minute jobs which will extend that last minute for a number more weeks but we (she) is beyond ready to move in. We have moved in.

Things are different. We now , eventually, have a massive four poster bed with stunning views of the tree filled jungle and a have the added attraction of a mattress like I have never known. It envelops us in soft delicious comfort cuddles and makes the prospect of moving much less likely. It is often impossible to tell if Jayne is even in the bed. This is entirely different from my usual reality which is being shoved and battered all night by a wall of cold arse.

The shower is extraordinary. The purple tadelakt finish is cold and stone like and quite beautiful. There are two nozzly bits where a forceful stream of warm water appears at speed getting into all the nooks and even the crannies. I have never been less mucky for longer.

We have a fridge freezer that is big enough to be useful and a new posh oven stove that not only works but lights itself. No need for lighters and damp matches. The kitchen is functional and clean and pretty. Amazingly we can now drink water and brush our teeth with our tap water. An involved UV filtration system removes all the froggy and grotty bits and delivers pure stuff we can use. All in all, after the treehouse, it’s a lot like living in a boutique jungle themed hotel.

It’s all rather pleasant but certainly different. We lucked out when the stars aligned and this bizarre and unlikely project became possible. It’s taken a few years from when we produced some sketchy plans on the back of envelopes. Our crew started in July last year and after a frustrating but exciting nine months of gestation period, here we are. We have zero plans to be anywhere else for a good while.

Our stock of life’s absolute necessities is not in bad shape. We have had many mules deliver large amounts of good cheese, marmite and Yorkshire gold tea. We haven’t, however, any breakfast beans.

Now Mexico is, if course, a world leader in the production and consumption of beans. Sadly, British breakfast beans are not a thing here. Jayne is motivated by the challenge and after much research and a few beany experiments she manages to reverse engineer the contents of a can of Heinz baked beans. They are perfectly excellent with eggs and sausages and bacon. Large bubbling pots of the “nearly the same” beans are created and frozen. We are much comforted as our essentials are restored.

Jake and Luca have moved to a quite stunning retreat center in town where they are making themselves useful and are rewarded by living their best life. Lucky buggers.

Our ability to use all our vehicles here did not last long. Before he left us for the frozen North, our savior mechanic gave everything a good look over and made educated guesses which bits would fail next. We are handed a list of parts we need to find and start the process of recruiting mules.

Within a few days of his departure, spookily, all his prediction come to pass. On the way back from town the front wheel on the Razor decides to part company. It is clear that the large bag of bearings and shafts and bushings will all be needed.

Over the past (and coming) weeks we have had (and will have) many friends travelling down to spending time here. It’s high season and the weather is perfect. That works out well for us. Parts start arriving on various flights from many places and are, thankfully, fairly unmolested by customs. By exploiting as many mechanical skills as we can discover and pulling in all the favours we, somehow, are able to re-press all the balls and bearings and replace the shafts. Huge communal effort. We are back to three vehicles again, but not for long.

Our friends, inevitably, bring new friends and we now have quite a mob of folk all wanting to get places and either do (or avoid doing) things. It is decided to look at buying a car that is roadworthy and jungle appropriate that we can lend out to our guests and mates to offset the cost.

In no time we get a call from a car auction in Tepic up North. We are persuaded that a little bright green Suzuki 4×4 is just too good a bargain to miss. We take the bait. After a short amount of buggering about finding insurance and going through the Mexi-document dance we now have four vehicles. It’s small and green and Japanese so we call her Edamame.

There is pretty much always a good reason to get together. It takes the slimmest of excuses to gather a bunch of folk and end up somewhere unexpected. When this happens there is often a requirement for tequila. It’s cultural. We are blessed with having the town of Tequila within travelling distance so there is very often someone visiting and prepared to stock up and deliver direct from source to us. We are fortunate enough to have discovered a great opportunity to acquire large amounts of the good stuff at a ridiculously low price. A country singer superstar in the USA sells his own brand mexi-liquor at (we are told) up to 150 bucks a bottle. We now know the producer who sells us gallons of the same stuff for a handful of pesos in handy plastic jugs. San Pancho is now thankfully awash with excellent tequila.

Good friends are celebrating their Wedding Anniversary and have offered to create a South African Braai (BBQ) at our place. They arrive with a bunch of blocks and in no time we have a huge wood pit ready to cook. There is great meat heating , face paints and a penis piñata full of condoms and femidoms. We now have drawers full of both!?!

Termites are greedy little twats. We are discovering our rustic railing around our yoga deck and shower block are delicious. In just a few months, when our attention was distracted, they have chomped the lot. It all needs replacing. The wooden stairs up to the Selva Vista apartment are also making us nervous. Between mold and termites there is the growing sense when you climb those steps that they have a fair chance of giving way at any time causing an irritatingly serious injury. It also needs replacing. Jayne’s brother’s family are on their way down with kids so it’s probably not great thing to roll the dice.

I am carrying a heavy box of stuff up the stairs to the apartment with both hands and leaning on the banister to prevent me falling. It doesn’t quite work like that. My weight shifts a bit as I balance on the banister, when it decides to head jungle wards. Thankfully there is one bolt that holds it to the top of the stairs but the rest gives way, delivering me upside down slowly but unceremoniously to the jungle floor with a box of heavy stuff on top. It hurts a lot and my plight is not helped by Jake seeing the whole thing and finding it just too funny to ignore. The decision is made. This staircase is history.

It takes a few weeks but eventually the old termite bitten stairway is replaced by a new bespoke metal staircase which is expertly welded in place. Looks great.

It is somewhat surprising to know the new highway, over the hill behind us, is open. This is a very good thing. Our fear after listening to them build the bloody thing for three years was that it was going to attract big lumps of antique Mexican trucks that fart along in-between screams of air brakes. Thank the gods that this has not come to pass.

It’s expensive. It costs 12 US dollars to travel a little bit faster from the exit 10 miles north of us to the exit about 20 miles south. We are in the middle so it doesn’t help us at all. 12 US dollars is a lot of money and so it is pretty much empty most of the time. The small number of posh modern quiet cars and buses who can afford it can hardly be heard at all. This is really good news. We were only able to buy this place because the rumours of the highway actually coming through our land put people off. We are proper fortunate it’s worked out not bothering us at all.

My birthday jumps up at me suddenly. Another one. We are again fortunate enough that the Cirque du Soleil project Cirque de los ninos is performing again to celebrate me. Full troupe of well-trained kids and a perfectly receptive audience makes for good circus. Bless them. Fabulous job !

The Coconut Lady Burn crew are all close by and there are a number of keen visitors who have good experience building things to burn in various venues around the planet. It is decided that it’s about time to do something on the beach again. It’s been while since the last one for all the reasons. We are also blessed with two large piles of spare wood bits from all our projects. We can knock out some scorpions out of them.

It doesn’t take too long to create all the bits we need. A dozen baby scorpions that will sit on the back of a mother beast of claw and tail which will carry the Coconut Lady Man on her back. We have also sparked the creative juices of one of the world’s very best kinetic sculptors who we are lucky to have live close to us. He is the brains and the sweat behind the extraordinary fire spurting octopus El Pulpo Mechanico and his newest touch of genius El Pulpo Magnifico. We are all excited to see what he comes up with.

There is a gathering of around eighty people who have turned up to the beach to watch our little group of sculptures light up as the sun goes down. And then it arrives. A real piece of art. A Duane Flatmo original piece. A scorpion made from all the bits we tread on every day. Palm fronds and bits of fallen detritus. It’s ugly as sin and twice as beautiful. It is decided that we can’t bring ourselves to burn it. It follows us home to find a more permanent home in the jungle.

The rest of our collective art is happily put to the flame. It was a splendid night.

Jungle Journal

Almost Possibly Maybe

February 15, 2023February 15, 2023
by Beave

After a good feed we and most of San Pancho spend new year’s eve at our friends beach bar with the lovely ladies from the world famous Freakbaby DJ’ing us through the night. We and our many guests are blessed to be part of our funky and fabulous community here. It’s going to be a good year.

There are way too many people asking us (completely reasonably) when we are moving into the Scorpion Temple, our new house. We are close. The massively intimidating list of things to do is now a little shorter. There is a strategy to deal with everything except the unexpected.

One major project is the making of our bed. We have designed a solid Amapa four poster with some sexy features. The massive chunks of Amapa have been delivered. After lots of epic joinery magic and a good amount of swearing our wood whisperers create and assemble a uniquely beautiful but extraordinarily heavy bed. When standing on the tapanko platform where the beast will sit it becomes apparent that the floor is not build to take the weight. It is decided that we will not compromise on the bed design and the floor must be strengthened.

We are thankful that it appears that the problem is resolvable by the addition of a 13 foot long 6 x 6 viga (structural wood beam) carefully squeezed underneath the existing structure and held in place by custom heavy duty metal brackets secured to the concrete support beams. The fun bit is that both the supports are at opposing eleven degree angles. I apply my limited school boy technical drawing skills to designing the brackets. I am helped by traditional tools. A pencil, rubber, pencil sharpener and a shatterproof ruler. I can’t find a protractor anywhere. This is the antithesis to CAD design.

Somehow after a few false starts we somehow manage to get this done. The beam is found and delivered. It weighs a ton. It has to be sanded, stained and cut to fit the brackets that eventually come in at fourteen degrees. The viga ends are cut at an offset of three degrees to adjust. We manage to man handle the thing onto our light scaffolding. We use muscle and car jacks to raise the beam very slowly towards the roof. The extra height is taken up with random lumps of wood and janky stone blocks. It is obvious to anyone that this is just too dangerous. Drills and bolts and straps are applied. This reduces the chance of death just enough for us to soldier on. Still not sure how but we now have a floor strong enough for us and our bed.

My phone has finally decided that humidity and my grotty pockets are no longer survivable and is expressing its displeasure by sending messages and photographs randomly to the poor buggers on my contact list. It has also decided to rest up every few hours and refuse to work. I have two weeks of juggling two phones and attempting with little success to save photos and contacts and messages from vanishing forever. I am now in the midst of trying to employ my famous patience to tame a new phone. It is not going well. My new phone is somehow becoming more unpredictably confusing by the day. This may take some time.

Even the best of our lovely traditional mexi-mechanics make a quizzical and slightly scared look when we present them with our wee Polari. They won’t touch them. The Polaris Razor hasn’t moved now for nearly a year. The gear cable needed replacing and the six month drawn out process of nagging our third “specialist” mechanic to fix the thing appeared to have created a long list of new issues and we have lost the will to nag further. Our Polaris Ranger is recovering from the last time our fourth “specialist” mechanic fiddled with it. And then our mate Geoff arrives.

Geoff is a handy bugger. He’s a self-taught mechanic living off grid in Northern California and required to work out how to fix endless deteriorating machines on his property. Within days he has cheerfully inflicted his skills on our stubborn fleet. Both our Polari are now running like champions. He just “put them together right” he tells us. Geoff also insists we replace some highly buggered bits on our Toyota to make it safe for the highway. This is helpful. That highway is dangerous enough without us adding any additional peril. First time we have had three vehicles running for an age. Long may that continue. We shall see.

It continues to be part of my daily routine to pick up Jake and head to the gym way too early. By nine in the morning I am already tired, sore, sweaty and stinky. I used to start my day with a bucket of tea and a lovely lie in. Not sure this is an improvement. I may decide to accept a wobblier body and more sleep.

Jake and Luca living their best lives together

For the third magnificent year we are called to celebrate our lovely friend Emma’s birthday by participating in “EmmaOlympics III: the return of the idiots“. We all gather on the delightfully picturesque north beach in San Pancho to compete. To add to the traditional silliness of welly boot throwing, tug-o-war and the banana buttock, backward three legged, and inserted balloon racing there is some additional events. One requires spoons to be suspended from one’s waist and thrust towards one partner. Every spoon that touches another spoon is a win. The image of dozens of folk thrusting groins towards each other made for some unique and spectacular wedding photographs. Unknown to us (or them) our event was scheduled at the same time as two rather posh and clearly expensive white weddings on the same part of the beach. Wedding guests were partly entertained but mostly bemused at our antics. Despite being nobbled with a banana I am now the prize winning chucker of welly boots. Officially the biggest tosser.

It is hard to fathom that our new house is almost ready maybe. It’s been a remarkable few years of imagination becoming reality. Pretty much everything we thought of when we first considered our designs have not only appeared but have exceeded our expectations. We are incredibly fortunate to have been able to do this. There have been so many decisions and choices to make. It can be said that Jayne and I have very different ways of doing things and at no time have we ever properly agreed on much. Despite the constant collisions of alternative opinions we haven’t been too close to killing each other. This is quite an achievement under the circumstances. So as our new home appears from the future you will forgive us banging on about it for a wee while longer.

Scorpion Temple at it’s best 5 years ago before it fell down.

Our new toilet area is complete. The parota wood has been buffed to a sheen and our bucket and sawdust installed in a rather pleasing way. We do require a screen of some sort as we have discovered that toileting is not the best of spectator sports for our guests. The tadelakt shower has dried and the effect is a stone-like pale purple sheen. Our dark wood backdoor is complete with locks and cat hole. We drilled various size test holes and inserted Mausetrappe into them until we found one that she could just squeeze through. We don’t want to encourage too much cat nonsense in the new place.

Our open staircase is backlit with LED lights to add a little wow factor and assist with late night stumbles. Under the stairs , however, it creates something of a funky shape. This is taken as something of a challenge. Our woody heroes fashion perfectly shaped drinks cupboards for junk , glasses and booze.

The two arched windows we dragged from Sayulita over a year ago are now looking fresh and proper. Custom made amapa and parota trimmed. They could do with a good clean but, then again, so could I most of the time.

All our cupboards and drawers have had a good rub over with vinegar. This seems to be fending off the effects of the humidity. With luck they will stay mold free.

The desk support is ready and in no time doing its job. The groundhog days of endless polishing, sanding, re-polishing and varnishing a huge slab of sexy wood again and over again are done. It’s turns out to be a pretty fabulous desk. This extraordinary lump of Parota will last a millennium. Jayne will soon move from her four poster office bed in the treehouse to her own bespoke workspace. It will be like having a proper job.

Our bloody earth floor has had its last chance to impress us. It has been impossible to have a floor of earth and poo not create all manner of mold. Some super strength mold killer has been smuggled down to us. After another hand wash with vinegar the new stuff is added to linseed oil and the final final coat brushed on. If we see another new strain of mold appear it has been decided the next coat will be applied with a sledgehammer.

The final scorpion iron mongery has also arrived. Custom made scorpions are built into the banister around the bed and two more will be mounted on the lower panels of the stunning parota front door. We found some small metal scorpions which will be used for operating secret places (if indeed secret places exist).

So it’s now all about our massive heavy bed. The back will be built into the bannisters that will hold our metal scorpions. It’s so close. Some fancy electrics and a strategic window have been built into the headboard. There are a few things to finish before our brand new mattress is dropped in, but not that many. It is a possibility that maybe, one day soon, there is a chance, we might move in. But don’t quote me on that.

The canopy above our treehouse is attracting a variety of birds. They are feasting on the fresh Copomo fruit and dropping nuts loudly on our cars and painfully on our heads. The commotion has attracted forest falcons. Despite their ridiculous call (like “a lady in the throes of orgasm”) they are the biggest predators here and potentially aggressive. We have lost chickens to them previously. Their appearance has coincided with the absence of our second favorite cat. Gargoyle. This wee chap can’t leave food alone and hasn’t been seen or fed for over a week so there is a fair chance we won’t be seeing him again. Bless.

In the pub with shoulder cat the day after he was rescued from a dogs mouth

Shockingly our dear friend Sasha has had a bloody awful accident. There a was an unexpected shower of rain that lasted only a few minutes but made the cobbles on a comically steep banked hill (leading to the house he was looking after) extremely slippy. He attempted to make it up to the remote house gate on his motorbike but lost the backend. Somehow he is pinned under his bike unable to move for over five minutes with the hot exhaust pressed into his leg. By some miracle he was seen and rescued but not before his leg was cooked. Along with cracked ribs he has 40 percent third degree burns to his inner thigh. After a great deal of urgent expensive medical attention he has avoided getting the wound infected. He is on a very long and tough road before he can function again. It doesn’t bear thinking about the amount of pain and patience he will need to endure to recover poor bugger. You can throw him a few quid if you are feeling flush here.

Jungle Journal

Footy, the Colour Purple and an Adoption.

December 30, 2022December 30, 2022
by Beave

The aftermath of my scorpion stings is awkward but not too bad. My right foot is still numb after 6 weeks or so. It’s coming back to life very slowly but I have had to endure the inelegance of a dead foot limp and the occasional confusion when someone actually stands on it unnoticed until I try and walk away. This never happened before. Must be that I just don’t know it’s there and leave it lying around, in the way, and forget to move it. Whoever may find themselves standing on my carelessly discarded foot, would , to be fair, naturally expect any body part they happen to crush to be pulled out the way instantly. It’s all a bit odd.

Driving has also been made more interesting. With a dead accelerator foot it feels rather strange speeding up and decelerating by means of shifting weight rather than ankle motion. This became a factor in a very near miss on our terrifyingly dangerous highway. A large modern Pacifico bus was overtaking a stalled dump truck. Before the bus pulled out, the road was clear ahead, so I sneaked behind and followed him past the stricken vehicle. Rather than slowly and smoothly returning to the correct side of the road the bus suddenly swerved away leaving me facing an enormous concrete lorry heading right at me very fast. My reaction was to instantly lean right. I accelerated fast and swerved right at the same time. Somehow I missed the bus and the stationary truck but more importantly the concrete truck which flashed past me. It was close. Closer than I feel comfortable thinking about. I still have images of that big blue and white concrete truck, head on , that I can’t forget. It has made me highly aware of my exceptionally good fortune to still be here

Football is a great healer. My trauma is eased considerably by spending an indulgent few weeks watching the World Cup with a large number of equally deluded fans. England do OK again. Just well enough to spark the damp tinder of long held painful hope that rises to entrap your heart and mind in the fantasy of some magnificent victory. But as the hope was torn away once again we were able to marvel in the overall standard of the football which at times was truly breath taking. We have a number of viewing venues depending on kick off times. The 9 am matches are a great excuse to eat chicken wings and drink cold beers for breakfast while cheerfully engaging in traditional over excited shouting of encouragement and abuse in equal measure. There are a large contingent of both French and Argentinians in San Pancho so the final was a pretty big deal. And what a final!

There have been a series of developments with our new build project. It’s getting tantalizingly close to the time we move in. This in itself will be a major change for us. We are actually moving house (albeit 300M away). We have spent the past five years in our beloved treehouse. It’s 6m x 6m of our own unique space and it has suited us very well. It will be a more than a little wrench to leave it behind so my own plan is not to. My own vision is that the treehouse will become a man cave (even if 4m higher than the ground). Jayne has vetoed moving a great deal of my prized possessions (or crap as she calls it) to the new house. This gives me a place to house my crap and enjoy the solitude and engage in boy type activities. Jayne’s vision is slightly different. She either wants to rent it out, use as a guesthouse and/or use it as a dog house should I ever be naughty and need somewhere to “think about what I have done”. Don’t see the need myself.

Before we can make such decisions we need to finish the place. There is a great deal in progress. Jayne’s mega desk is now cut to shape and awaiting application of specialist resin varnish so it will last eternally. The final flush of drawers are made and awaiting installation. For some reason it has been decided that we need dozens of them. Our upper banister that will prevent us (me) falling off our raised sleeping space is being jointed expertly into place. Our newly designed four poster bed will form part of this structure and awaits being created from a pile of freshly delivered lumber. When the bed appears we will consider it time to actually move out/in.

Our time and attention over the past weeks has been sucked up by our two most labour intense projects. Our shower which requires the application of Tadelakt (Moroccan style lime plaster) and our rammed earth floor that requires drying out perfectly before the application of a blend of linseed oils. It had passed us by that drying anything out here is nigh on impossible. The humidity is often 100% and there are times when you can hang a towel out to dry and it gets wetter!? Now if it is a very thick layer of clay you are waiting on, it appears to take forever. We have applied a number of fans 24 hours a day and (after closing all doors and windows) deployed a large dehumidifier. Despite all efforts there is almost no perceivable improvement. The floor stays damp.

It is with some desperation that we agree its time for more aggressive tactics. A blowtorch. We find that by carefully moving across the floor directing the hottest part of the flame onto the clay it changes colour in a way that suggests it’s a little bit less moist. Jayne does a few dozen passes and things seem to be changing very slowly. I decide to help. What I have not taken into consideration is that I am a pretty much constant sweaty mess. Despite using towels to stand upon and my delicate ballerina type skills to move across the floor, my guts twist as it becomes obvious that I may have in fact made matters slightly worse. The sweat that was previously in me is now distributed over the floor highlighting the occasional spot where my delicate feet have left prints. Jayne is less than cheerful as she repairs the floor and we start the process of drying it out all over again. My help is unappreciated.

We have worked out that the Tadelakt application is going to be a beast of a job. The finish of our shower will require many hours of layering and hard polishing with a special purpose hard polished stone. We recruit a friend to stay with us overnight to help out. She has no idea what she signed up for! The girls have taken on the task of managing the project and myself and Jake will be called in to help as required. The Worlds Cup is in its final agonising stages so this works out.

Day one is spent in creating a single huge lump of mixture which needs to be the perfect colour from our stock of lime and dyes. When we start we cannot stop. The whole of the shower area has to be done at the same time or the finish will be inconsistent. The existing rough grey lime finish is covered with a white base coat and our recently smuggled specialist dyes are expertly mixed by complete amateurs into enough paste of deep purple Tadelakt to complete the job.Its already late and the following day is going to be hard so the girls call it a day.

Day two and the task ahead became terrifyingly clear. The first layer of purple is spread as smoothly as possible and worked with trowels as it drys. After about an hour it is set enough to start polishing. Our black shiny stones are rubbed over the surface. It takes effort. The task is to close up all the tiny holes that emerge from the drying process and prepare for the next layer. The next layer is a mix of water and soap. The soap dries very quickly and then the fun starts. If you polish hard enough and long enough it takes up a shiny smooth stone like finish. Looks great. Then the second layer of soap is applied and polished into a final layer. The polishing technique is to apply the stone flat to the wall with enough pressure to make a difference while moving it in small circles. It hurts. There is much complaining about the burning pain in my shoulders and my arms after only a few minutes of strong rubbing. Jake and the girls seem a lot less complainy. Clearly they can’t be doing it right. I am convinced this was going to be a long day. It was.

Day three arrives and we realise two things. The shower needs finishing and we are a long way off and of equal importance, it is the World Cup final. We have already kidnapped our friend from her family and effectively chained her to a shower for an entire weekend. We make a plan. The girls will layer the tadelakt and when the game finishes we will join them for further torturous hours of polishing. It was a day of two half’s. The World Cup final was a joy to watch.

So we now have a rather unique and beautiful shower. Three days of solid graft. The girls are happy which is crucial and we gain some comfort in the fact that we may never have to rub a purple wall with a shiny black stone ever again. We find out that the word tadelakt means in Arabic “to rub until ones arms fall off” (or something like that.) Jake and I now have arms like bags of achy rocks.

EntreAmigos is our community center which has an excellent reputation. It has even been blessed by the Dali Lama. Volunteers arrange (amongst many other projects) food banks for local families, recycling for the town and encouraging local kids to read and engage in educational activity. There is a constant need for fund raisers. The latest of which is a drive to raise a lump of cash to support the library for the kids. Teams are invited to enter the Great San Pancho Scavenger Hunt. Each team must raise a minimum amount of donations and engage in a series of activities that must be photographed in order to win points. The team with the most points will be declared the winners and their wisdom and beauty immortalized in the hearts of all forever and a day. We are persuaded to join in.

We have decided to call ourselves the “Scavengers -End Game” after a movie franchise I haven’t seen. We gather the evening before to talk cheating strategies and allow the girls to dress us up as superheroes. That morning we are greeted by a dozen golf carts with eager teams keen to get started. We appear to be one of only two teams that have dressed up for the occasion. There is a jolly but certainly competitive atmosphere. I start by wander around introducing ourselves to the other teams while stealing their golf cart keys. This goes rather well until I am spotted and forced to return them all.

Our tasks are varied in their ridiculousness. We must find an old woman born in the town and all of us have our photos taken with her while she is smiling and one of us is upside down. We need to find someone to take the shot and extra points are added for any horses and chickens we can add. I draw a series of horses and chickens on cardboard and hold them up over the bemused old lady wondering why we are holding our friend upside down. She sorta kinda smiles.

We are required to all be on a skateboard, or playground slide or beach or stage or tree (always with one of us upside down and getting someone else to take the shot. There is a lot of fun had. We return late to a victory BBQ. We have all raised way more than expected. The library now has a book budget of 20k dollars. The best news of course is that The Scavengers are declared the team with most points. We are suitably humble as we bask in our collective glory.

It is time for the Americans to outdo their Northern neighbours in thankfulness. Canadians are thankful about a month earlier but the Americans make a bigger deal of it so consider themselves higher on the thankometer. We get the benefit of being invited to two competing thanksgiving feasts and are grateful for both.

Having my son, Jake, living with us has proved, in general, a very good thing. There is an issue, however, with his bizarre need to exercise at stupidly early hours of the morning when any sane individual should be unconscious. I am not sure how this has happened but somehow I have been roped into joining him. As the sun hits the sky, six days a week I drag myself to the car and drive us both to the old prison in town that has been converted to a sweaty, old school grunt gym. Here there are small stacks of huge tyres, ropes hanging from the ceiling and what look like ancient lumps of concrete attached to metal bars. There are racks of hand weights and enough mirrors on the wall that it is almost impossible to ignore how bloody exhausted you look. It has been about a month of this nonsense. That’s a long time to feel tired and sore.

There is a new addition to jungle life. Luca (new name) is a street puppy that wandered into our friends’ restaurant in Lo De Marcos. Distressed to find that it was a vegetarian place he made the best of a bad job by adopting Jake. They are now inseparable mates. Sometimes the levels of cute became nauseating but we are getting used to it.

So Christmas somehow sneaked up on us again. The only festive effort we undertook was for Jayne to make a Christmas cake. This required particular effort as things like candied peel (why?), glacé cherries and molasses are not things that Mexicans recognise and certainly don’t sell. So we arranged for friends to travel from Canada and stay with us for a month to help with our building project and importantly smuggle us in some molasses and something revolting but essential called Swedish Berries??

Jayne finds the time and motivation from somewhere to make her own peel (why?) and cherries. The cake is made. I have never really been a great fan of Christmas Cake. The addition of candied peel (why?) is a mystery to me. This cake, it has to be said, turned out rather well. It needed the traditional Yorkshire touch of a block of strong cheddar cheese to go with it but it worked! So that was Christmas done. Apart from about a hundred friends new and old descending on us for our now traditional pot luck feast, jungle white elephant and after party till late.

We wish you a splendid New Year.

May 2023 bring you everything you need and something to share .

Jungle Journal

A Hurricane, Scorpion Fun & Dead People.

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022
by Beave

Our stress about the lack of rain and delight about the lack of weather related destruction this year comes to an end. Hurricane Orlean thankfully missed us but was soon followed by Roslyn. She started as a tropical storm but gathered guts as she moved slowly up the coast and hit land a little North of us as a category 4 hurricane.

It starts raining about midnight but at 4 am we are woken by earth shaking thunder. The rain becomes thick, heavy and loud. The canopy lights up as the lightening hits close and often. There are distinctive noises echoing through the jungle. It sounds like fireworks but we recognised the now familiar noise. This is the unique sound of tree trunks slowly announcing they are splitting apart before they fall. Our treehouse is safe although there is now a river flowing underneath. The road down to the gate is effectively a waterfall.

Our friend Emma is staying with us as she looks for a less jungly and more permanent home in town. My son Jake has also bailed on the UK and moved back here in search of a healthier and less financially stressy existence. We have had intermittent issues with internet so have invested in walkie talkies to make communications easier between the four of us.

It’s 4.30 am when we hear from Emma. The plastic sheet that we attached to her roof in anticipation of a few minor leaks has blown off. After being dripped upon and hearing the trees fall very close by she is now huddled in the brick shit house toilet/shower block. Her cabaña is surrounded by huge trees. The concrete roof gives her the best chance of staying dry and not getting squashed. The rain is coming down in dramatic amounts.

I throw on a rain poncho and grab a rather fetching pink flowery umbrella and brave the downpour. Somehow I negotiate the highly slippery stone waterfall and arrive to the rescue. She is dry and unsquashed but forced to share this small space with her precious computer bag and at least one snake who is also avoiding getting drowned. Before we both brave the journey back to the treehouse I try and get to see how Jake is faring but the front road is now a raging impassable river and the path to his place is completely blocked with a thick ten foot wall of branches and thorns. He is on his own for now. We are all completely cut off.

There is little sleep achieved and so after the rain subdues and I imbibe the appropriate amount of tea I sharpen a machete and head out to assess the situation. It is surprisingly easy to take the upper path to the solar panels that we assumed would be wrecked. This is good news as I am able to check in with Jake who is suitably stunned by events but safe. The river is still too high to cross but from the gate we can see that it has diverted down our access road which now is earth free and looks like a lunar rock fall. That is going to be an issue for sure.

I double back to approach the blocked path from the opposite direction. Within 20 yards is the first downed tree. A huge Copomo previously over a hundred feet high. It’s a lot of wood. It is perched upon an even taller palm tree that it has snapped in half on the way down. I can get underneath it easily. Then another. An even larger Copomo with two huge twin trunks. One I can also get under and the other I can climb over. I am then confronted by the wall of debris. It’s a dozen feet deep and thickly entangled. It takes about an hour to cut my way through.

It is with some relief that after waiting for the first river to drop we are able to make it to town. Our belovedly robust yellow submarine Toyota FJ somehow rock hops over the crevasses, roots and large stones and makes it to the biggest river. Jake and I spend an hour getting wet and avoiding getting washed away. We move all the newly deposited heavy river rocks out the way and take down lumps of overhanging tree to make a suitable path across.

Despite being theoretically able to, we avoid bashing up the FJ negotiating the road and stay put for many days until we can get a machine in to fix things. It has not rained once since the hurricane so we assume the rainy season is over and we can begin the process of repair and preparation for a long dry season.

Irritatingly our internet is out again and this time they have the hurricane excuse so it’s a full week offline. Three out of the four of us require internet to make a living so all impose ourselves daily on our delightful neighbour (she has way more sky than us so has starlink to steal). Her generous and patient nature is fully tested.

Our apiarist mate in town calls us to see if we have a spare bee hive. He has a colony that needs a home. We explain that the lightening appears to have driven off all our bees so he can help himself. We should have three empty highly desirable jungle hives to chose from. We are not correct. We meet him on his way back from installing the new bee home. Unexpectedly he found two fully occupied hives and only one empty. The incumbents were not delighted to see him and were apparently “bloody aggressive” Despite being a highly experienced bee bloke and being in full protective suit he did not want to hang around. We have been warned.

We are very lucky to have a highly organized and effective system in our small town for recycling and rubbish collection. It is the very best I have ever seen anywhere. There are regular collection spots on the roads around town where there are cages to collect plastic, cardboard, glass and aluminum recycling and big blue bins to accept the rest. We only have to bag up our stuff and drop them off. Collections are regular and it is a relatively clean and stink free process.

Jungle rubbish builds up slowly. Most of our food waste ends up directly in the jungle or compost. Most of the rest is recyclable so the garbage can spend weeks in place before it is removed. This attracts a number of interested visitors. Emptying bins is always a fully disgusting process. Maggots and massive grubs make it a living moving mass of part digested horror goop. The smell is memorable.

I prepare myself with gloves and gin to make the monthly run into town. I am confused by my inability to remove the black bin liner from the large black plastic bin. Somehow the rains from the hurricane have found a way in and created a very heavy bin liner full of a grotesque fermented elixir. I am more terrified than curious so leave the bag tied and sealed. By tipping the bin over on its side while applying a lot of force I manage to dangle the corner of the full bag over the balcony outside the front door. I use a knife to cut the corner off and allow the juice to pour out. The smell is neck snappingly foul beyond description.

Jayne’s online work meeting is interrupted by involuntary gagging. Our mosquito mesh windows do not prevent the noxious fumes filling the treehouse. Half a dozen incense sticks lit in a blind panic add a thick perfumed sweetness to the mix which doesn’t help much.

I struggle to maneuverer the offending bag into another and seal it tight. I drag the whole thing down the stairs but it’s clear that everything within is sodden with garbagy maggoty soup. I throw it into the Ranger bed and push a machete through the bottom to allow it to drain properly and dry out. I move myself far enough away so I can breathe without throwing up. It’s confusingly a lot further away than I thought. I realise that in this process some of this unspeakable smelling juice has ended up on me ! I unfortunately can’t get away from me. I stink. I hold my breath to prevent throwing up as I march quickly and directly to the shower.

Our jungle fleet is now down to a single operational vehicle. After its extreme 4×4 adventures the FJ requires work on its suspension but is working and getting us all where we need to be. Long may that continue.

The Ranger runs (sorta kinda ) but the little sugar lump is still unable to cope with driving through water and as we have five rivers flowing between us and our town right now so it’s not useful. Thankfully we have lovely mules coming down from the USA now in Mexico) who have with them a bag of highly useful parts that should help us.

The Razor has been stuck in place and effectively disassembled for months now. Our newly enthusiastic mechanics who promised to get her going again ran out of enthusiasm. Finally after weeks of heavy nagging they turned up to put the thing together again and it’s running. It sounds like a bag of rusty spanners but it’s running. With luck our latest mechanics will have both Ranger and Razor back on form again in the next few weeks. That will be a massive relief.

Complacency is not the best. Having been here for five years and avoiding getting stung by any of the numerous scorpions I share a home with has made me a little complacent. I have bemoaned on many occasions the irritation of tick bites, the various paralysis by spider venom and annoying stings from bees and hornets. I will never forget the pain of a manta ray tail or my head wrapped with the tentacles of a jelly fish. I can, however, now attest that none of these compares to a proper going over by a scorpion.

It’s 11.30 at night. I’m close to our bed and very suddenly there is a pain on the side of my foot. The intensity of the pain takes me entirely by surprise. I sit on the bed and swear eloquently. I have been attacked and my first reaction is to retaliate. This has to be a scorpion. I increase the swearing and launch myself towards where I suspect the little twat is hiding. I am correct. As soon as my injured foot hits the ground she stings me again. The first must have been a warning to keep away. This one must be the “I told you so” shot. Somehow the pain intensity is greatly magnified and takes my breath away. I return to the bed feeling stupid and defeated. She is nowhere to be found and I have lost the will or the energy to find her. I am totally distracted by the pain.

It is impossible to tell where exactly I have been stung. My lower leg and foot feel like they are in a fire. There is irritatingly nothing to see. It’s tough for me to talk but increasingly foul swearing remains easy. I can feel the toxins moving up the back of my leg. That is not a good feeling. It does not improve. After ten minutes the pain is worse. The strange burning sensation has moved over my bits and up my back. My jaw feels tight. My lips are numb. My hands are buzzing. My vision has new sparkly bits added. It is decided that it might be a fair idea to go to the hospital to acquire some anti-venom.

The journey into town is a trip. I’m not quite in my right mind. I’m not fully hallucinating but my whole body is tingling strongly in waves. The incredible unaltering pain is preventing me enjoying myself. I arrive at the hospital and a relaxed staff nurse smiles at me and diagnoses scorpion toxicity immediately. I am guided into the A&E area where a young boy and his mother are sitting on the only gurney. He smiles at me and looks concerned when he is told I have been hit by a scorpion. He has also been stung! He is calm and holds his mother’s hand as he smiles at me and walks away. I slump down. The pain is stunning. No let up at all.

Our relaxed staff nurse looks at me. He has limited professional sympathy. I have a line put into my hand and anti-venom is applied. Pathetic noises are coming out of me as the pain gets unbearable. In my mind they are soft and gentle moans but I am corrected. Apparently they are irritating and the very ill people that surround me are unimpressed. I am unhelpfully reminded that I am clearly not as brave as the little boy. I am also cheerfully told that although it can last up to 24 hours there will be no pain relief as they need to assess my condition. Everyone (else) laughs out loud. I manage a weak smile and some better repressed moans.

As soon as it is decided that the anti-venom has slowed my demise I am released back to the world. I am off my face but that is expected apparently. The full pain experience lasts for four hours straight. When it reduces to moderate agony I can relax a little. A few medicinal whiskies and I collapse. By morning the pain has gone entirely. As well as all feeling in my foot. I cannot feel any of my toes . Nothing at all. It’s very odd. It is common for this numbness to last at least a month, I am told, so I better get used to it.

The following day I arrive at my dentist for root canal work. Compared to the previous night it is a breeze. Almost enjoyable. What is strange is to have the left side of my head numb from anesthetic and my right foot numb from toxin. I now have a strangely disturbing creepy smile and a limp.

A period of goldilocks weather (not too hot, not too cold) is upon us. No more rain. Barely filled rivers drying up already. This is remarkably early but none the less welcome for the short term. The tropics is an area of the world where climate has been broadly predictable. This is clearly changing.

We take advantage of the surprisingly breathable air and lack of rain and head out to a rather remarkable stretch of river that runs through untamed jungle. By following the ancient pathway and bouncing across the river boulders we arrive at a stunning waterfall with pools to soak in. The unique attraction of this spot is the abundance of 4000 year old graffiti carved into the rocks faces. These petroglyphs are world famous. The region was originally home to the Tequectequi native culture dating from approximately 2000 BC to 2300 BCE. The site remains sacred for the Huicholes who still leave offerings and perform ceremonies here. It’s a very special place.

The new house is looking better and better. Our beautiful section of rammed earth floor is drying out slowly and awaiting the addition of linseed oil to toughen it up. The clay wall is awaiting a layer of cactus juice to smooth it out and offer a little protection. It is looking excellent already. Our wattle and daub upper sections still await our round windows to be added. The latest delivery promise for windows is ”sometime next week for sure”. So we have no idea but are hopeful it will happen this month. We are very much looking forward to seeing the kitchen, upper balcony and our impressive bespoke parota doors all complete with windows.

Our kitchen is done. Our stunning quartz worktops expertly installed. Our superbly crafted cabinets completed. Our sink and sexy tap in place. The new oven cut in. It all looks so very very good.. The water is flowing too. Only one leak from a damaged fitting which was easy to fix.

Our expertly designed access stairs are done. Our fabulous bookcase is installed. We’re are few windows a desk and a bedroom away from being finished.

Halloween is celebrated by a fancy dress party at our friends’ house that they have expertly transformed into a haunted house for the night. There is a huge amount of effort made by so many. A friend and myself are slightly stuck for a suitable costume until we realise that the we both have a striking resemblance to our host. Pam is a tall , slim very attractive blond so we shouldn’t have to make too much of an effort.

Day of the Dead November 1^st is the day to celebrate with children who have died. November 2^nd is for adults. It’s a time for celebrating with the dead. To interact with them. Large Mexican families visit the highly decorated cemeteries to spend time with loved ones. Separate to the graves are alters . They are adorned with marigolds, food, salt, incense, photographs and elaborate artistic collages of beans and sand. At midnight we join a procession of hundreds which arrives at the cemetery in Sayulita to huge loud fireworks, and a Mariachi band playing traditional folk music. The locals sing along to every word. Graves have marigolds, photos and candles. Most have families sharing food and tequila.

In the evening we watch sunset on the beach along with a band of a hundred stylishly coordinated drummers from around the world who unite to synchronise and celebrate. We eat great tacos and return to the jungle where we have created our own alter. We light candles and incense and connect peacefully with the people we have lost. It’s emotional.

Jungle Journal

Summer Lovin

October 7, 2022October 7, 2022
by Beave

We have been jungle dwellers now for five years. It is long enough for it to be not so easy to remember life when we were living in a more conventional house and had somewhat more normal jobs and lives. We decide to mark the occasion by leaving Mexico and experiencing other things for a while. Jayne has essential purple stuck in her hair and we are ready.

Our plan is to visit Jayne’s entire family who have all arranged to be in Vancouver from where we are to embark on a week long voyage aboard an unfeasibly vast cruise ship around Alaska. After this we will travel to San Francisco to stay with our good friends and assist each other to go to Nevada. We are again to be part of the vast crew who construct, participate in and pack up the Burning Man event in the harsh remoteness of the Nevada high plains desert.

So after a week of food, family, intensely beautiful Alaskan green nature & all the weather that goes with it we find ourselves in the salt and dust and intense heat of the Black Rock desert for nearly three weeks. As uniquely surreal an experience as Burning Man clearly is we had our hands full this time. The temperatures during the day were ridiculous and the dust storms were severe and frequent. Nothing much knocks the energy out of you quicker than overheating with lungs and eyes full dust. Except maybe Covid. Which we both contracted again. It was definitely harsh but also remarkable. (photos borrowed from various sources including the amazing John Curley & Erica)

So after a long six weeks away we are back home. Our good friend stayed in our treehouse to make sure the cats didn’t eat all the jungle beasts while he worked on our new house. He happens to be a Master Carpenter and is producing high quality bespoke cabinets, drawers, doors, steps and Jayne’s sexy parota desk.

In our absence the wattle and daub upper walls are complete and await large round windows that we have commissioned. Cabinet frames are completed so we can bring in the marmolero who is the craftsman who can cut and install our slice of Italian mountain into sexy quartzy countertops. The front doors are built and need to dry out while awaiting windows. We have the final layers to complete on our earth walls and floor. We also need to complete all the other window installations and our specialist Tadelakt finish in the shower……and then we only need to build our bed and move in. We are getting there.

In the meantime the jungle is offering us just enough challenges to keep things interesting. This time of year you can actually see the vines growing and without attention the bush grows six feet high and takes over everything surprisingly quickly. It took a few hours of macheting to make it possible to move around the land freely again. In the process I managed to disturb a few unreasonably grumpy hornets that took exception to being hacked. They decided to dissuade me by stinging my head a number of times. It’s an effective strategy. I immediately return, chastised, to the treehouse via the newly cleared pathways with a dull machete and a throbbing head.

We are preparing very slowly for our day when we notice a commotion in the treehouse. It feels like the cats are racing around crashing into things and making the sarongs that hang around the place move around. Confusingly the cats are motionless and quietly ignoring the world. This, we discover, is apparently the effect from a 7.6 magnitude earthquake 400 km away, 15 km under the sea. The predicted tsunami didn’t happen but the surfers loved it.

We are passing our front gate heading to town when we noticed a strange shape in the road. On further inspection it was the back end of what looked like a good size snake. It was thick and long and black and lifeless. No sign of damage but no sign of movement. This was exactly the same type of snake that scared the life out of me when it emerged from our pool full of frogs a few years ago. I was curious as to its size so I braced myself and took hold of the tail and pulled. The snake (ex-snake) that emerged was indeed a large specimen. Despite it being smaller than the one from the pool it was a good deal longer than I am tall and also shockingly heavy. Very glad I didn’t get to meet him when he was alive and hungry. I left the body next to the road on a large rock. This was not the best idea. A couple of days later the stench of rotting snake was overpowering !

The weather this year is highly unusual. There are rains nearly every night but the water in the rivers is only just flowing. Our well is currently full but if the aquifers are not fully restored this will not be good for our community. By this time last year I had replaced our road that was completely destroyed four times. This year there just hasn’t been anywhere near the amount of storms, tropical depressions or hurricanes. The past 24 hours, however, we have been hunkering down due to hurricane Orlene heading straight for San Pancho. Thankfully, for us, the grade 3 storm headed North and missed us. Our tropical jungle releases warm air out to sea that had the effect of diverting storms. Much as we can use the water we would rather not lose trees, roofs and roads at the same time.

Since our return we have, however, had some impressive thunder storms. Last week we had seven inches of rain in one night. The lightening hit very close to the treehouse and the resulting thunder claps shook our world. The result was that the lightning took out our well pump and also appears to have frightened off the bees again. We just installed our new replacement pump but, so far, no sign of the bees returning.

I am outside our local mini-store in town trying to get my keys to open the car door. This is not easy as I am carrying a collapsing box of groceries while balancing a drooping open tray of fresh eggs. Suddenly the sky falls in with the noise of a bomb. Twice. I instinctively duck down. The eggs do not. Somehow in an unrepeatable and instinctive display of juggling skills I catch them all before they egg-wash me. I had completely forgotten that it was the start of Saint Pancho days.

This is the infamous week where the patron saint of animals is celebrated by scaring the living shit out of every dog, cat, bird (and egg carrying human) in town by regularly setting off the loudest possible fire works for “religious reasons”. Further traditional celebrations in the town square (when it stopped raining) include dodgy roulette, shooting stalls manned by dogs, deadly fireworks, deafeningly awful live banda music, dancing horses and dozens of aspiring gymnast kids accompanied by their parents consuming jugs of harsh margaritas and a few hundred cans of Corona light.

The whole of the area has a different feel and look this year. The lack of water destruction is very welcome. In its place are acres of plants we haven’t seen before. There is a quick growing fine grass that produces bright yellow flowers that has carpeted large areas. Contrasting the yellow are swaths of stunning red fire blossoms. It’s a stunning look.

It is also, however, distracting. There are a number of golden web spiders that have suspended themselves from golden threads between trees and larger plants. These structural strands are strong like wire and if you are making your way through the jungle mesmerised by the pretty colours you will inevitably be clotheslined by them. Feeling (an admittedly very beautiful) golden strand hit your eyeball is unpleasant.

We are settling back in to our jungle routines. Jayne is back to working from her four poster office until her new desk is completed. I am preparing long list of jobs we need to do and accomplishing just enough of them to keep from being swamped.

We are rewarded by the extraordinary firefly show every night. It’s that time of year. A loose swarm of fireflies will flash their lanterns in their abdomens randomly. But when the swarm reaches a certain density, the fireflies begin to blink in unison. It is almost perfect synchronisation, with rhythmic, coordinated waves of light. We are so very lucky to be right in the heart of it. No plans to leave here again any time soon.

Jungle Journal

Blue Buttons, Bees & Froggy Nonsense

July 20, 2022July 20, 2022
by Beave

It may not surprise you to know it’s bloody hot here. There is, in fact, record breaking temperatures throughout Europe right now so we expect little or no sympathy. It is true that the UK is really not set up for hot weather – bless them. The whole country has been on red alert ‘threat to life” status. I remember how grossly uncomfortable it is in the UK’s air conditioning free cities, homes and offices even at 35 degrees. This week the UK has had over 40-degree heat for the first time ever! Despite me continually struggling along in a pool of hot sweat I will, therefore, attempt to take a short break from moaning about the temperature for a change.

One of the gifts of being close to the ocean is the chance get wet and float around on a whim. Most times of the year this is a refreshing change but during these hot times the water temperature is that of a warm bath. It was one such whim that did for me. I’m at the bar on the beach that we have named “the office”. It is often that we arrange an urgent meeting with friends at the office. The beer was cold but not cold enough so I decide to strip off and dive into the waves.

San Pancho waves are strong and mostly break quickly close to the beach. The trick is to get past the breaking waves to the calm water out back. This is often not as easy as it sounds. I negotiate the fast moving walls of water as best I can. Some I dive under, some I float over. It was at the top of a rising wave above water when from nowhere I get hit on the side of my head. My ear felt like it had been suddenly struck by something hard and hurty. My immediate thought was that I had been stung by a hornet. I remember how much that hurts but in retrospect that was not the smartest assumption (being in the ocean, a long way from any hornet nests). I instinctively dive deep under the waves to get away from any flying hazard and swim hard to get some distance between me and whatever that was. The side of my body suddenly hurts, a lot. My ear is stabbingly painful and the discomfort is now all around my head and neck. It is only then that I see them. All around me in the water are bright blue bubbles. Blue button Jelly fish!

I make my way out of the surf swearing warnings at the oblivious swimmers frolicking around me. There are lines on my body where the tentacles have wrapped themselves. My ear and neck feel on fire. At least one of the little buggers has clung to my head and the cnidocytes along their tentacles have released harpoon-like structures full of venom, called nematocysts all over me. These things are not fun. Back at the office, everyone has a helpful opinion about how to assist me. There are offers of soaking my ear in hot coffee. A couple of people enthusiastically suggest they pee on my head. I take the decision not to accept their kind offers and try my best to scrape off the tiny harpoons as best I can. It is a number of days before I can forget about my wounds and some weeks before the skin around my hairline settles down.

Although the rains have started and we are getting rainfall most nights, there hasn’t been a storm of any note so far. This is good news. Our access roads are passable and although the jungle is growing over us as fast as it can we are just ahead of the game. It takes at very least a full day of swinging machete a week just to hold the green stuff back. We, thankfully, have just the bloke to help us out with that. If he doesn’t turn up we are stuffed. Around the treehouse are a load of palm like plants that are shooting up. Some that have just appeared in the past few days are already many feet high. It’s a project!

The fireflies have arrived and that is always a blessing. There is a dozen or so clumsily crashing brightly around the mosquito net every night. They are staying close to the ground at the moment which makes walking around at night somewhat magical. The trees glisten and flash. The undergrowth sparkles like glitter.

The nights are scattered with rain and lightning and the occasional loud smash of thunder. The jungle orchestra is on full song and we get to drift off to the calming music of nature. If it wasn’t for the frogs!

This year the frogs have changed their game. Every year up to now we have had to endure listening to a rain fuelled frog orgy in our pool. It is usually a two-day, two-night affair. By then the frogs have kept us awake for 48 hours but have concluded their wild sex party duties or have died trying. This year they seem to be more aware of social distancing. Smaller groups (bubbles) are declining the mass orgy option and getting it on whenever the mood takes them. The result for us is weeks of nocturnal non concentual acoustic abuse. We don’t need to hear that. They are clearly having way too much fun.

Our bee neighbours have been confusing the hell out of us recently. Around six months ago I went to check on the bees and didn’t find any. We have three hives. All were active until they weren’t. One week we were down to two active hives and then only one. It is a disappointment that the last of the bees have decided to move on so we take advice from our wiser apiary mates who suggest we move the hives and try another spot.

The day comes and I have arranged to make a new sexy bee home area close to our solar panels which is more sunny and open. Should be a lot of pollen and water around so this seems a good move. I approach the first hive and immediately get stung! On closer inspection, the bees have decided to return and seem to be fully occupied and content making honey and stinging me. I abandon the relocation task for the time being. The following week the second hive somehow springs back to life. It is highly confusing but they seem happy enough. Our friend calls us and asks if we have a spot for a homeless queen and her cohorts that he has rescued from someone’s house. We now have three fully active and productive bee houses. Honey in our future again!

Our house in progress is looking remarkably like a house. The stunning boveda roof has been matched up with a palapa roof. This week our wood whisperers will be building the tapanko loft where we will sleep. There are stunning stairs, there is an outdoor/indoor bathroom, there are bright tiles and polished concrete floors. Our tasks now are to find tiles for the shower floor…. now. Lights for inside and out…. now. Decide on finishes and details … now. No pressure!

We are a week or so away from the builders completing all the buildy stuff. The electricians and plumbers are well on their way to finishing all the sparky and plumby stuff. We have ordered windows and doors. Our master carpenter friend is set to move into our place for August and apply his skills to the piles of Amapa and Parota wood we have had delivered. We have cabinets and stairs, a bed, wooden doors and other secret things planned. It is going to be an interesting few months turning this remarkable space we are creating into a fully functional home! It’s a splendid job. We are grateful for all the massive effort by so many to get to where we are.

There is the issue of water. The mornings these days are often cloudy and that severely restricts our ability to pump water up from the well and to our tinacos. Feeding the tinaco on the build site has been a mission and so keeping it topped up for the new house is going to be a challenge. The new water system we have is reliant on our large cistern which we built underneath the front porch. We have a rain catchment topping it up. All the water to the house will be treated by traditional filters and an Ultra Violet (UV) light disinfection unit that removes most forms of microbiological contamination from water. Our plan is to keep the cistern topped up by 10 000 litre pipa truck when the rains stop. This gives us the chance to use our high power water pump to back-fill our tinaco from the cistern if water is scarce. This is a huge bonus.

There is the issue of power. The Scorpion temple is a good distance from the treehouse and, we discover, over 250M away from our solar powered fuse box. There is no real way around it we need to run a conduit and a single 250M length of high quality, high grade cable from the box to the site. We manage to find the right cable and acquire a massive heavy reel of the stuff. Our chosen conduit is bright orange and corrugated. It comes in 50M rolls so we have six of those. All we have to do now is to mount the reel and lay and connect up all the conduit, find a way to run it all under the stone driveway and 250M through the jungle to the fuse box and thread 300M of twin cable through the whole thing. This is a day we will not forget in a hurry. My Covid recovery is frustratingly slow and I have been running on 30% power for some weeks. Add a bunch of extreme heat and humidity and it really adds to the fun. It is great news that Jayne is motivated and we have help from our mate from town. Somehow, we manage to get this all done in just six hours. It takes me three days to recover.

There is the issue of the fuse box. Our existing fuse box is far from weather proof and is now four years old. It looks a lot older than that. The wires to it have been pulled and tugged by jungle growth for years so it’s a janky box with over tight connections attached to a tree and protected from the elements by a plastic container that I cut up in a way to function as a rain cover. Our biggest issue is that the tree it was connected to fell over. The box was cast into the jungle but somehow still works. This is not a sustainable solution to our power needs. A new posh waterproof box is found and we mount it a few feet above the ground on plastic bug proof poles that we set into the jungle floor. We are desperate for power. It’s unbearably hot and humid and we don’t have any way of running a fan!! Jayne takes on the very frustratingly fiddly job of wiring the bugger up. Theoretically it should only take an hour or so but it is fully dark and I am lighting up the jungle with a torch before it is finally up and running. We retreat fully exhausted to the treehouse to shower and drink gallons of water and stare blankly and silently for a very long time. The feeling of satisfaction for a job well done will kick in later.

Jungle Journal

Hot & Wet With a Sexy Roof.

June 25, 2022June 25, 2022
by Beave

It’s notably warmer as I arrive back in Mexico with my jeans uncomfortably stuck to my legs with sweat. I haven’t worn long pants for years and this is why. The bloody traffic light system at airport customs for once decides that I shall not pass. My main bag is absolutely stuffed to the gills with liquorice all-sorts, chocolate bars, cheese, fruit pastilles and many cakes. There is at least 10 kg of sugar which will be a bugger to explain away. Somehow, I have managed to confuse the bored custom bloke with my pot of newly rediscovered USB sticks he has found in my hand luggage. I try and explain the concept of digital photo storage to him while looking as innocent as I can muster, while sitting protectively on my bag of sugar. He doesn’t quite know what to make of them. He calls in his supervisor, to show off his find, who pretty much slaps the bloke and tells him to let me go. I’m saved from the indignity of trying to explain away pots of Marmite, boxes of short bread biscuits and a bunch of Bakewell tarts and Jaffa cakes.

Jayne’s best mate from Quebec has been here for a while. It’s good to meet her and her friend who still have a few more days left before they return North. Jayne has successfully survived my absence by having a lot of fun with her mates. We have a good few days getting some surf hours in. It is my first time back in proper surf for almost a year. My knee injury is healing but at a frustratingly slow pace. It is good to catch a few waves but it is clearly going to take some time before I’m back to my bouncy surfy-self. It’s not a good time to surf here when the rains start and the sea water quality gets icky. Next season I need to make some time to get me more waves again.

My dear homestead is being transformed. When I left, the boys arrived, to start building our new house. There wasn’t much to see two weeks ago but now, from the humble ruin that was the scorpion temple, there is an actual house taking shape slowly. This crew work hard and quick. So far so good.

The pace of the build is driving things along steadily. The list of things that we need to decide upon is long and rapidly becoming urgent. Doors, windows, drains, tiles, wall finishes, lighting, fans, electrics, cabinets and bathroom fittings. We also need to attach the entire site to our modest electrical grid. There is a lot to do.

There are also a lot of decisions to make. Now Jayne and I have very different and passionately held ideas around interior design and colour schemes. Very different. Life has become a constant negotiation. I can have my palapa roof if she gets a strange colour on a bathroom wall. She can have her strange front door if I get my round windows. Somehow, we have agreed on colours, tiles and finishes that neither of us hate. We are keeping faith that it will all work out in the end.

It has always been core to our intentions for this build to become part of the jungle rather than separate from it. Our thinking is that we live on large clay deposits and the build site itself has a rich supply from the land into which we are building. We are keen to look at using this clay as the external wall coverings so the building matches it’s surroundings. We are also interested in creating rammed earth floors and polished plaster Moroccan style walls, and even a few wattle and daub areas made from a clay/sand/straw mix. We are lucky enough to be offered a training course by two very well-respected specialists in natural finishes. It is arranged that they travel to stay here for a week and put on a master class to train us and most importantly our build crew in the dark arts of natural finishes.

Jayne requires a wisdom tooth taking out. She has been putting it off but our dentist is leaving town for a while so she books herself in. Tooth was dispatched within half hour and everything went pretty well. Face mended quick and the whole operation cost us around $25. Our friend was recently quoted over $500 USD a tooth in California! We are very lucky. Dental tourism is a real thing here. Getting your face fixed is one of the best excuses to come see us.

The young chaps who arrive to teach us all things natural are interesting and clearly experienced. One is Mexican and the other French. It’s a full-on week of daily classes. We learn how to mix building materials by dancing on clay and water and sand and straw. We create rolls of the stuff at exactly the right level of sticky and build a wall. By removing straw and adding more sand we create the perfect mud pies that when bashed with a levelling mallet are compressed into what appears to be a solid floor. We used much care, a lump of soap and some polishing stones to create the highly impressive Moroccan style Tadelakt polished plaster. There are buckets of soaking cactus to add to the mixes. There are pigments and various clays added to lime plaster to find us a colour that is in keeping with the earth around us but also doesn’t look too shitty or pink. There is much to be learnt.

It is extraordinary how fast the build is going. Round windows and columns and stunning stone walls and steps. It’s starting to look like the real thing. The biggest issue we have is that the build is thirsty. The concrete has used many thousands of litres of water and the finishing plasters will need a heap more. The sun has decided to make a break for it and has hidden behind clouds for many days. It’s impossible for me to pump enough water every day to replace what they are using. We even have a water pipe syphoning off pool water to keep them going. Despite the well water levels holding up nicely we are almost out of water on the land. It is a blessing that the large cistern we have built underneath the front of the house is finished and should be able to hold water. We order a pipa truck that delivers 10 000 litres into their empty tinaco and the new cistern which does not leak. Problem is solved. Now to try and replace the water we have used, that will require some sunshine for our solar pump.

We have a full on weekend booked. Our friend has a birthday dinner booked, we have a DJ night at the Mezcaleria, Lucha Libre wrestlers are in town and it’s Pride weekend in Puerto Vallarta where the annual drag queen street obstacle course is happening. It is pretty excellent to have some time away from the build and catch up with folk.

Finally, after three Covid cancellations, my daughter Suzy is arriving with us. At last she has taken two weeks out of her hectic life. She has suffered through working on the front line as a Covid nurse and currently in Leeds, West Yorkshire, managing an overstuffed case load of sex workers who she helps to manage drug and alcohol dependency issues. Girl needs a rest. It was fantastic to see her when I was in the UK but now she has nothing to do and two sweet weeks to do it in. There is no sun still but this is taken as a blessing as it’s still oppressively hot. Opportunity to acclimatise from the delights of West Yorkshire.

It has become clear that the issues that persuaded me to go to the UK are different and it is perhaps not as useful to return as planned. I’ll reschedule when it suits everyone better. My son, Jake, however has found himself with an amount of time between projects so has decided to join his sister and a good friend (already scheduled to be here) for a short visit. Having both kids here is an unexpected blessing. Neither of them drink alcohol now so it’s an opportunity to be a touch healthier and less hangovery. It’s been a very long time since we all spent more than a few hours together.

We have also arranged to host a few highly skilled boys to drive in from Guanajuato who will transform a pile of bricks into a stunning boveda vaulted roof. There was going to be six of them for a week but we are now expecting four of them for four days. Who actually arrives are two blokes. One boveda master and his mate. They both want to get everything done in three days because they want to get back to San Miguel Allende where they have a footy game to watch. If they can do a good job we are absolutely up for that. The rains are threatening and getting our roof on in time is crucial. We give them a few hours to settle in then go for a site visit to see how they are doing. It’s remarkable what one skilled bloke can do with a pile of bricks. Our guy is slapping bricks masterfully into the rapidly appearing roof that seems to have its very own gravity. It’s going to look extraordinary.

June bugs are here. It’s a sign the rains are upon us. They really are the most stupid animals. Their entire existence seems to be to clumsily fly directly into your face and get caught up in your hair. They are solid little buggers so it’s like being constantly hit in the head with a handful of nuts. For this reason we call them nut bugs. Thankfully they only last a few weeks.

It’s great to have the kids here. It’s been a while for Suzy so she gets to see all the changes we now pretty much take for granted. She settles back into a new pace of life beautifully. There is surfing and relaxing. No sun but all the food. Jake and our friend arrive. The sun returns and it gets sticky hot. Our place is alive again with people for the first time in a very long time. We do all the things and eat all the food and rest well. It is sadly and inevitably no time at all before they are due to fly back to UK. Before they leave we get to see our newly finished boveda. It is stunning work. Only in Mexico could we afford to be making such sexy roof decisions.

The mighty kick ball league of San Pancho is taking its Summer recess. It’s hard to get the numbers these days as large amounts of folk are leaving as the air heats up and it becomes interesting to breathe. It’s only June but the hot stuff is upon us. We were introduced to kick ball only a few weeks ago. Two teams, of varying ambition and competitiveness, pitching and kicking and catching and running until it’s time for another cold beer. It has been the source of group competitiveness and minor sports injuries for a number of Saturday mornings at the local football field.

In anticipation of powering up the dehumidifier and air conditioning units we have acquired there needs to be a few upgrades to our power grid. There is a lot of buggering about and nerd wizardry employed to add the fourth and final new battery to our system and fiddle with the layout of the solar panel to maximise voltage from sunshine. There is much technical help from our team of super solar ninjas (Alan, Jayne’s Dad and Ray, our solar guru in Hawaii). When these guys start talking technical speak together I must admit to being a little (lot) lost. Glad Jayne has the skills to translate and patience to get stuff done.

The rains have come. We have just about made our new roof waterproof but the clay finishes we have chosen are far from dry or sealed. It looks like we will have to wait out the rainy season before we know exactly what colour our exterior walls will become. The palapa roof is happening fast so in about a week we should be fairly weather proof. The rains, however, are not waiting. Every night they come hard. There have been a few thunder storms already and the rivers are showing signs of coming back to life.

Electrics are in place. Tiles have arrived. We have a master carpenter who is making a plan for all the cabinets. We are designing windows and doors. The stairs are being built. It’s all happening at pace. If we are not washed out we are close to having the building work completed in a month or so. It’s shocking how far along we are already.

Well finally it’s my turn. After a modest night at the Mezcaleria I find myself waking up at 6 am with what I assume to be a surprise hangover. It is irritatingly rare for me to ever suffer from hangovers so I am confused. I pretty much behaved myself the night before but my body feels poisoned and my kidneys ache like I’ve had a proper kicking. I stagger to the bucket and have to hold myself up. I’m not feeling at all pleasant. Jayne shuts up my moaning by launching a Covid test into my face. It’s an instant positive. Bugger. I hole up in the treehouse for a miserable week. Thankfully my woes did not include coughing or breathing issues for which I am forever grateful. Have to respect how bloody awful this thing makes you feel. I’m taking my time and everything seems to be returning to its usual state of strange normality again.

Jungle Journal

The further we go the nearer we are

May 11, 2022May 11, 2022
by Beave

It has come to my attention that I have been happily ensconced in my jungle bubble here for years. Jayne has had a few trips North to Canada but it has been many a moon since I have left Nayarit. We have had loose plans to visit much praised areas of Mexico and expand our horizons. We have had looser plans to perhaps visit family in the UK or head up North to Burning Man again. This, for all the reasons, hasn’t happened. A mix of lethargy, laziness, a pandemic and the fact we live in such a spectacular place has pretty much removed our motivation to go anywhere.

We are, thankfully, surrounded by more motivated, organized and adventurous folk. A few of them have spent a lump of time and energy organizing exciting things in temptingly remote places. In the unique environment of our local Mezcaleria where our good friends are hosting a night of DJ nonsense, we learn of one such exciting plan. After a strategic quantity of Mezcal we invite ourselves along.

The plan is to take a number of flights and taxis and end up in San Miguel Allende. We know of many who have lived or visited and all wax lyrical about its delights. The purpose of the trip is to support a fundraiser for the Mayan Warrior. The Mayan Warrior is a huge art car in the form of an ancient spirit animal, built on a truck body. Along with a world class sound system it has installed upon it the most spectacular (and barely legal) lasers available to man. In remote places such as the Black Rock desert at the Burning Man event in Nevada it offers to those that make the journey a treat of truly stunning lights and sounds. They are selling a few thousand tickets to dinners, parties and a late-night event to raise the money to take the beast back to Burning man this year. This is deemed a suitable enough excuse for us to make the trip. We are in.

It’s March and for the first time in a few years the Cirque De Los Niño’s is putting on their show. Gilles Ste-Croix (the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil) steps up and works his magic again. Thanks to his world class training, costumes and production skills the kids again put on a truly spectacular night once again.

Our planning for the Scorpion Temple build is at an end. Materials are bought, builders chosen and deposits paid. A troop of boys are descending on our site every morning and making satisfyingly loud buildy noises. It’s going up fast.

We have our brand-new fridge, sink, taps and oven in our new bodega awaiting a place to be. Our list of stuff to acquire is long but we have some months to get it together. On the list is to choose a thing to become our new kitchen counter tops. This is not something that I was expecting to get excited about until we arrive at a warehouse filled with shiny bits of stone. Out the front was as extraordinary stunning lump of mesmeric beauty. It looks like a massive three-dimensional satellite photo of a storm over a grey sea. I am smitten. We are now the proud owners of a very unique slice of Italian mountain.

There are flowers on our vanilla vine. We have only just processed last season’s harvest and here we go again ! The pollination ladders are ready. We are on a roll. Irrigation tests are a clear success. Sun and water makes for crops. Who knew ! Our first bed is now full to burst with rocket and lettuce. A ton of salads are in our future. We spend the time creating more water lines to the other two beds. Seeds are planted and expectations are high.

It’s time to leave. Our mate moves into the treehouse and we head to the airport. We are away for four days. It’s been a long while since I got on a plane. In my past life, I took up to 50 flights a year and I really don’t miss airports at all. This is the longest time I have ever been required to wear a mask. It’s not at all comfortable but everyone conforms. We arrive on San Miguel Allende as the sunsets. It’s a stunning old town built in 1542 full of colonial and Mexican buildings. Our initial oversize Airbnb is both large ( colonial) and dark (Mexican). A bit too dark due to no electricity. After a late night explore to find the roughest bar in town we camp down for the night and arrange to move to another place in the morning.

We absolutely score with our new gaff. It is a mansion of a place in the guts of town. A huge wooden door opens into a courtyard lounge and bar area with four huge bedrooms and a large kitchen. It’s a short walk over cobblestone to the neo-Gothic church Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, whose dramatic pink limestone towers loom above the main plaza. All around town the sun lights up bright purple blossoms of the Jacaranda trees. We meet up with friends and find out that the thousand or so tourists here for the weekend of events have an enemy in town. The new major has decided that he is not a fan of large sound and light events. He has cancelled the weekend. San Miguel Allende now has a large contingent of over excited ravers with nowhere to go.

It’s not good news but we all make the best of it. We eat everything and drink some things. The place is crammed with culture, shopping and art. We are in good place in good company. We find a couple who invite us to an art exhibition opening in their shop and the DJ they hire invites us to his place for a late-night house party. We dress up and turn up to find a massive house filled with music and hundreds of people who were expecting to be jumping around an over sized spirit animal instead of some generous random bloke’s massive front room and courtyard. Everyone is grateful for the chance to dance. Eventually we leave San Miguel Allende inspired and exhausted.

On our return, we slip back into jungle life. It’s all rather splendid and we are glad to be home. We meet a new stranger from Canada who tells us she is looking for a place to put some of her art. She stays for a few days at the Casitas and works on a mural for our retaining wall then leaves for further adventures. We are grateful she found us.

A few unexpected things are happening in UK . I haven’t seen my mum or my brother’s family since my Dads funeral. It’s been years. Our recent trip has me in travelling mood. Jayne is heading into a few weeks of intense deadline stuff so the timing is entirely unforeseen but perfect. The internet offers me a one way direct flight to London for not a lot and I buy it. I leave in 48 hours.

Our mad English friend Karl who is a skilled chef and born horseman is coming back to town. He has a wife and home in Durango state but has spent the last few years in our area. A year ago, he left his restaurant here to start an adventure. He found two rescue horses and set off to travel the 255-km length of the last river to flow through the Western Sierra Madres. The San Pedro Mezquital is the seventh biggest river in Mexico but almost unknown. It connects vast areas of some of the most challenging land Mexico can muster. it sustains thousands of people, unique wildlife and four indigenous ethnic tribes who mostly consider it a water source only. Karl’s mission has been to visit and integrate into the communities along the whole length of the river and educate them as to its importance to their very survival. He has lectured to schools and town meetings for many months. He has inspired a group of river guardians who have now committed to conserve and honour the river for future generations. We have been following his progress for over 6 months and sending supplies and money to feed and shoe the horses; and Karl occasionally. He has arrived back in one skinny sun-bleached piece with many stories to tell. Thanks to excellent care, his horses survived the journey well and are now loving the slower life of beach side Nayarit with a lot more food. It’s great to see them all alive and well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MavNbfnw4Z4

I have packed light with a heap of room in my bag to bring back stuff. There is clearly going to be a lot of stuff. The plane is packed with slightly pinker and slightly fatter package holiday tourists who have spent two solid weeks trawling the buffets and bars within their 5 star all-inclusive resorts that splatter the Puerto Vallarta shoreline. On the plane, there is a thick atmosphere of hangovers, farts and heartburn. I am disappointed that I am not encouraged to wear a mask. For a treacly slow 12-hour flight, I fail in my attempts to sleep. A cold wet morning at Gatwick Airport awaits us all.

It’s bloody freezing. I have gone proper soft. Mexico has ruined me for weather. I drag my bags onto a train to St Pancras where I will hop another train North and be back in Darlington for the first time in 5 years by early afternoon. Potentially. I have friends in York who I might well meet with on the way. It’s been way too many years since I had a pint of real draught Guinness and York is full of pubs. I’m finding the glorious anticipation of that first black sip seducing. Imagining the cold glass and the white fresh creamy head hitting my top lip as the deepest and darkest of all heavenly delights pours over my tongue. It’s like a dream. Maybe because I am asleep. Then my phone rings. I’m struggling to gain consciousness and find the source of the phone noise. My mate who is currently in Barcelona has chosen this moment to call me. Good timing. It’s my stop. I nearly miss it. I manage to leap onto the station platform with my backpack in one hand and my phone in the other. It’s stopped ringing. The doors close and the train moves off to Cambridge. With my bag.

It’s a bit of a stress finding staff to help my thoroughly jet lagged moron of a self. I make all the calls and fill in all the forms but it’s the UK. We are not good at this stuff. I decide after a few futile hours of navigating Transport for London’s insane lost and found rabbit holes that I will never see my bag again and I’m just to get over it. I console myself by finding a Greggs bakery and demolishing two steak bakes. Bliss. Two hours and twelve long minutes later I arrive in York station with a 3 year Guinness thirst. It is splendid to see mates and just as splendid to finally make my Guinnessy dreams come true. Four times.

My first job when I arrived in Darlington was to find some clothes so my newly delicate UK person didn’t freeze to death. It’s a barmy 15 degrees in Darlington which is effectively local bikini weather but I’m nithered!! I am wrapped in layers of local supermarket clothing for men. Despite this my knees are achingly cold. My knees?? Who am I???

My dear mate has spent lockdown building a rustic wooden cabin at the bottom of his garden. He has done a splendid job. I spend my first few days living there in absolute comfort. Only a few weeks earlier they had yet another big post pandemic “clear out” and I am presented with a dark wooden pot that I recognise. It’s from Zambia and older than me. They decided not to throw it out but didn’t know what it was. It’s a stunning moment. My entire music and photo life was transferred and stored onto hard-drives and brought to Mexico where they were a victim of our break-in. I have had to accept the fact that all my photos of every feature of my slightly bizarre life were gone forever. Every single one of the many hundreds of CDs I burned onto hard drives were gone forever. What I forgot was I backed them all up on a bunch of USBs and stored them in an old pot. This is the pot!! Having my digital history back is absolutely worth this trip. Everything else is now a bonus.

There are many bonus things. Jayne gets an email in Mexico to tell me my bag has been delivered to the lost property office at Cambridge train station and is available to collect. I rent a car and set off at 7 am to arrive in Cambridge, thanks to old roads and all the traffic, around midday. I confidently and gratefully present myself to the customer services desk at the station and show them the email inviting me to collect my bag. We all know that the concept of customer service is certainly differently understood in various parts of the world. At a train station in Cambridge it takes on a new level of irony. There are no words spoken as a dazed looking girl in a “customer friendly uniform” leaves her desk and vanishes behind glass doors to presumably retrieve my lost bag. She returns with a slip of paper. With a tone of voice that has contempt mixed with intense boredom she explains that it’s not there and these people have it. There is no name on the paper, just a number. Who has it? I ask. She nods unhelpfully at the paper. On it is a telephone number that I have rang a dozen times over the past few days. The telephone number eventually takes you through to a long drawn our menu where you chose number seven. This eventually takes you to a recorded message asking you to explain why you are calling, describe any lost item and leave a number that they will only call if they find something. I have had no calls. I explain to the impervious idiot that this is no good to me. I can’t wait here for a few days just in case they call. She then states that she feels uncomfortable with my attitude. I request she calls security. They may have more sympathy with my plight.

I leave the station to regain my composure. I have to make sense of what is happening. After a few deep breaths, I return to the station and walk up to the bloke who has the best uniform. He must be important. I tell him my tale and he takes pity. He tells me the name of a company he “thinks” takes care of lost property but in order to find out I have to ring the useless number. With a little help from Google and a few other random employees I bother, I work out that it is possible my bag has been kidnapped and is now held in Welwyn Garden City. This is only a couple of hours away.

Welwyn Garden City is one of 30 garden cities in the UK. It was founded in 1920 by Sir Ebenezer Howard as a planned town to provide for both industry and pleasant living conditions. I’m sure in 1920 it was lovely. The industrial estate I find is less than pleasant but I’m happy to see the storage warehouse. I knock on the windows and the door is opened by a confused looking girl. I explain that I’m searching for my bag. I hand her the paper with the useless number on it. I think she recognised the number as the one she has been ignoring for days. I spotted a flash of pity and guilt in her eyes. She told me that for some reason that she was uncertain of, I was absolutely not allowed to come and collect my lost things from their lost property warehouse. Despite that she finds my bag and returns it to me within 3 minutes. I am deeply grateful to be dealing with a real person again. I thank her effusively and tell he she will be responsible for my happy noises all day. She seemed good with that.

On my way, back North I pop in and see my Mum in Lincolnshire. I arrange to return the next week when I get to see my brother and his family as well. The likelihood of them coming to Mexico is not high so it’s important to be here. I get to see my daughter who I haven’t seen since she left our place pre-Covid days. That seems like a lifetime away. I even got to interview her new boyfriend. He already has the job but it was good that she made me feel like my opinion mattered. Suzy is due to visit us in a few weeks which is excellent news. I also get to stay with my son who I haven’t seen since he left our place 9 months ago. It’s been far too long

I am collected by my mate who was given the task of dumping all my stuff that I had failed to sell or give away before I left. He has a van so I slipped him a few quid before I left for Mexico to gather all my bits and bobs and chuck them in a skip. The ultimate release of past things to make room for new. Well that was the theory anyway. As it turned out my good buddy took one look at my pile of crap and decided that it all had a future. When I asked him to chuck everything he actually chucked nothing. Bless him. I’m taken to a warehouse at the local airport where his brother has a business. There is a ladder resting next to the office. I climb up and in front of me, laid out neatly is about ten cubic meters of my life in boxes. It’s sorta kinda emotional. There are a lot of treasures here I’m glad to see again. There are even love letters from lifetimes ago when my ex girlfriends used to like me. I spend days in that warehouse carefully putting strange and ridiculous things aside while throwing out most . I find thousands of actual real life photographs. I put the good ones aside and take snaps as best I can with my phone . There are so many. I have a lot of fun distributing handfuls of the most embarrassing ones to old friends who are now less hairy, less skinny and less pretty.

There are hundreds of books. Some my daughter will take but she will have to invest heavily in shelving. Most are earmarked for charity. It is very likely that all the rest of the clothing, DVDs , CDs and bootlegged cassette tapes from 80s Bangkok will end up rejected by charity shops.

Another friend that I know is a musician and vinyl maestro. He has thousands of old school LPs in his house. He has been spending lockdown helping a friend open a shop in the centre of Darlington that is a treasure trove of nostalgic classics. Alongside a fair selection of vinyl albums there are DVDs, Video games, Old comic books, an entire floor of old books and a large selection of Airfix model kits. Its a great space to hangout. It’s always a pleasure to see the bugger but I am compelled to warn him I have a the hundreds of books and DVDs along with a heap of dodgy cassette tapes and CDs stored in a dusty lockup with his name on them . When we arrive unannounced in the middle of the day and unload a vast quantity of mildly interesting and mostly obsolete crap into his shop he takes it very well. He may not be as pleased to see me next time.

The unique delights of black pud, thick bacon and egg on a buttered crumpet with brown sauce. PERFECT !

Darlington, it has to be said is a more depressing place post COVID. There are too many shops and gathering places closed down. It’s a ghost town during the week. No-one goes out. In the process of walking to my favourite Indian restaurant around 8 pm every night, 6 days in a row (don’t judge me ) I saw how deserted the town has become. The few pubs that are open throw people out before 10 pm. I meet many friends and they all tell me similar tales. They haven’t been out or socialising for years. Everyone’s gas and electricity bills have trebled so it’s like having two mortgages. No one has any spare cash, no one goes out or sees each other much. The last time my previously super social friends were together was for my dear friends’ funeral last year. It took one of our finest to die to get people together again. It’s hard enough to get folk out to the pub. The chances of them getting on a plane to Mexico are looking slim.

The simple delights of the Sunday Paper, a mug of tea and a crumpet with Marmite XO.

My visit was a catalyst to get a number of folk out of their new routines and into curry houses and pubs again, even for a short while. It was extraordinary to instantly reconnect with friends after 5 years apart. Seemed like yesterday and forever at the same time. I buy myself a flight home. It has been special to see my people but it is an undisputed real thing that my home is now the jungle we share outside San Pancho in Nayarit Mexico.

Jungle Journal

New Power, Scorpion Stairs & Logan’s Run.

March 15, 2022March 15, 2022
by Beave

It makes a proper change, but can’t complain about the heat or humidity or much else these lovely days. We have had a number of mates finally feel safe enough to fly down to spend time with us without getting Covid-trapped. Having fresh eyes and minds here always makes us even more grateful to live here. Our life continues to be blessed with challenges and endless opportunities. Thanks to some begging and generous luggage allowances our stock of liquorice all-sorts, tea, whisky and reading glasses are also entirely restored.

We have had a few permaculture victories. Jayne has commissioned the first of our planter beds with her irrigation system. The planter box is getting a full five minutes of water (automatically via our water timer) every morning. The result of regular watering is dramatic. For the first time, we have healthy shoots of lettuce, rocket, cabbage and asparagus appearing from the seeds we planted. This is the first time we have had such a result. Our failure to propagate seeds may have partly been down to the quality and age of the seeds but most likely neglect. Watering “when we get around to it” is not a good strategy.

Jayne’s mushroom bucket suddenly bears fruit! A stonking great oyster mushroom appears and is harvested. This is not only a very attractive variety but also has a surprisingly strong and delicious mushroomy taste. We await many more but they don’t appear. After a week or so we give up and throw the remaining straw over the balcony. Not sure how but the next day the smashed straw bundle in the jungle has produced a flush of new mushrooms. Result.

Our vanilla vine has now been completely plucked of beans and most of these are now in the latter stages of becoming perfectly sticky and stinky. They are wrapped in a blanket for the cool nights and released to sunbathe on the balcony by day. Our afternoons are punctuated by welcome breezes carrying the unctuous odor of vanilla through the treehouse. It’s delightful.

Our friends being here has given us the impetus to get ourselves out and about a little more than usual. We get to introduce our favorite restaurants and hang outs. It’s also been a great excuse to jump aboard on our mate’s sail boat chasing whales. This time of year, there around 1500 Humpback whales mating, fighting and having babies. They rise close the boat and regularly breach the surface entirely. It’s a spectacular sight to see a massive female (cow) teaching a baby (calf) to leap out of the water. Jayne however has taken to steering the ship! She’s even nicked the captain’s hat. Typical.

Our community here in San Pancho is impressively creative. A friend of ours who used to be a wild punk rock guitarist has redirected his passions in later life to painting. He is now a renowned and very productive artist in the town. He has rather impressively developed the concept of painting-by-numbers murals. The latest of which is the changing rooms/toilet block on the local football field. He does his artistic magic on the building and then encourages as many people as possible to fill in the numbered areas. It’s very effective.

Our batteries arrive in Puerto Vallarta. There are four individually boxed batteries that each weigh around 35kg/75 pounds each. They have arrived at a distribution warehouse and I go to collect them. It’s a simple process with no questions asked. I check the paperwork which confirms that each massively heavy box contains import-tariff-free children’s clothes and shoes (of course).

The process of replacing our last dying nano-carbon batteries and commissioning our new, extremely expensive, high specification lithium batteries is mind twisting. Thankfully Jayne is highly motivated and excited enough to get this done. She has on hand two very helpful solar battery whisperers. A new friend she found online on a battery forum where folk with time and insane amounts of technical knowledge share their wisdom with the world. Her new solar angel, Ray, lives in Hawaii and knows his stuff. Her Dad who is famously smart when it comes to such things and Ray message Jayne highly detailed instructions. Within a number of opaque technical hours our dodgy intermittent power is replaced with a long life, reliable version. Our fridges can be turned on. I am not required to go out into the jungle in the dark resetting stuff. Brian our trusted generator is effectively put to pasture. I won’t have to fill him with fuel every few days. It’s a big win for us.

The fun fair is back in Sayulita. After a long Covid break it is now possible once again to ride on inherently dangerous fast spinning lumps of metal held together with rusty bolts, string and hope. There are blunt darts to be chucked, balloons to be popped, and balls to be directed in tiny holes. Prizes of plastic dolls’ accessories and tins of tepid beer are to be won. Folk line up to throw rocks towards lines of thick glass bottles. Should a rock actually smash a bottle rather than, more usually, bounce off dangerously, you are rewarded with a warm tin of Corona light. The price you pay for such fun is about twice the price of a tin of Corona light. Despite this slightly illogical financial transaction it is surprisingly popular. My guts are turned backwards by the thick pungent stink of hot rancid butter that is poured on everything and down everyone. The girls loved it.

Our friend who had the stroke has had a strange old time. The hospital here managed to stabilise him but could do little else. His blood starved brain affects his ability to think, speak and understand. His left side paralysed. We are lucky enough to have an extraordinary beautifully skilled doctor with extensive stroke rehab experience living close by. She visits daily and assesses what rehab is possible. Her positivity and care help enormously to keep tired and overwhelmed people optimistic and focus their minds on making things better. There is progress but painfully slow. It is a blessing that his insurance company agrees to medvac him to the USA. A team flies in from Mexico City to transfer him and his amazing partner by ambulance to his very own plane and fly him to San Francisco. He spends some difficult time in hospital under strict Covid restrictions before being transferred to a specialist facility in the bay area. He is finally in the right place getting the best care.

Our friends Emma & Rosie have birthdays close enough to be dangerous. They have decided to revive last year’s beach based Emmalypics. They create a new event. EmmaRosilympics. This to be followed by a birthday party in the jungle. This is a terrifying prospect. My arse has never quite recovered from last year’s over clenching while attempting to run on sand with a banana up it.

The day arrives and a there are a large number of participants. On a very sunny afternoon on a reasonably deserted beach to the north of San Pancho there are some rather strange sights to behold. There are relay races where teams launch themselves forward with balloons between legs or bananas clenched between buttocks. There is a welly toss. Turns are taken to throw a Wellington Boot as far as possible to establish the absolute biggest tosser on the beach. The now infamous tug of war is the highlight. We all take it far too seriously. There was a fair amount of blatant cheating which I facilitated and encouraged. When the games were played and the fruit and sand removed from our bits, the entire troupe of beach athletes then reassembled at our jungle bar. There was much rehydration till very late in celebration of wins and losses and two nutty women’s birthdays.

Thanks to the wonders of VPNs and the glorious BBC my Saturday mornings have become a great deal more exciting. I am now able to live stream The Six Nations Rugby and have supported my beloved Wales through what is turning out to be a frustrating season. Despite the lack of actual victories, it’s always emotional to watch the boys and sing the songs. My Dad and I used to contact each other after every single Welsh International. It was perhaps the time we communicated the most.

Our new Bodega has emerged from the jungle and is now ready to be filled with all the stuff we need to build our new little house, The Scorpion Temple. We have made the roof a funky shape and strong enough to build a casita on top should we ever decide to. We found a source of strange water pipes which have iguanas attached. They are installed to direct all our water ground-wards. There are concrete shelves and a workbench build in.

Our favorite feature turned into an opportunity to add some art. Jayne’s tactic to get me to be creative is crass and obvious but no less effective. When we were deciding how the stairs to the roof would look she very cleverly made a proposal which was so awful that I had to pitch in and “save the day”. Our proposed new iron staircase now has a sexy tribal scorpion design featured. After many janky sketches and refinements and weeks of iron work they now exist. We are very happy with our new Bodega.

This year has already thrown us a few googlies that have not passed us by. I am loathed to use cricket terms after the bloody Aussies stuffed England in the Ashes. I continue to avoid my less than sympathetic Antipodean mates.

Leaving our friends’ regular heath scares aside we have been told our war on Covid is at the beginning of the end leaving room in our group consciousness for an unbelievably atrocious war in Europe. We have the benefit of being way out of the direct firing line but also are left with a deepening feeling of separation. Living our best lives is an achievement but being disassociated from real world emergencies is extremely unsettling. It’s hard to relax when bombs are falling on innocents and millions of families are being displaced.

It is true that genocides, war and man-made famines are a constant in our world. Post 9/11 wars have directly caused close to a million deaths. The largest sub-section being civilians. Somehow, we have managed to push our outrage aside and get on with our lives while this has all been happening. One notable difference with the Ukraine war is that the potential to affect every one of us is so very real. Not just paying more for fuel. The doomsday clock, which is a concept designed to warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own, is currently set to 100 seconds before midnight.

What is encouraging is the amount of kindness this situation is bringing out in people. Polish, Hungarian and German families amongst many others taking in entire refugee families into their homes indefinitely. Humanitarian volunteers helping as best they can. Jayne and I spent an amount of time in the refugee “jungle” camp in Calais. It was home to over 1300 migrants, mainly from from Eritrea, Somalia and Syria. In 2015, during the peak of the so-called European migrant crisis, the numbers began to grow. Migrants arrived from Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq and other conflict zones. it was destroyed by the French authorities in 2016. We helped build and repair shelters and create a youth centre amongst the chaos. The people we met and their stories they told us will remain with me forever. We are not sure how you measure how much difference we made but we were there. Doing our best. Making things just a bit better for as many people as we could. The draw to fly out to the region, engage more and do something more useful is very strong.

Our extraordinary mate in California is making progress enough that he is released from his rehab facility to his house in Pacifica on the Pacific Ocean coast near San Francisco. We are blessed with a vast tribe of caring and useful people who have made themselves available to help. A bunch of handy buggers have transformed his multilevel house by installing ramps for his return. His much beloved adventure dog, Logan, has, however, remained in Mexico since his stroke. Another good friend of ours has been looking after her and his house here. This is very useful but Logan is much missed and can’t be on her Mexican sabbatical alone for ever. She is a big old dog. A French Pyrenees that looks to the untrained eye like a couple of sheep bonded to a mid-size hedge. A plan is hatched for a couple of very kind, slightly bonkers friends from the bay area to fly down and drive his car and his massive dog North.

The crew arrive on Sunday afternoon and plan to load up dog and luggage into their car and set off the very next morning. It’s a long drive. Joe (the builder now actor) and Yvette (dog whisperer) arrive with us and are taken to eat well, imbibe just enough tequila and watch a turtle release on the beach before they leave. Eventually, after what has been a quite incredible journey for both of them, John and Logan are reunited. There is not a dry eye in the house.