La Colina Project
So you may have noticed a strange shift in the very fabric of things.
I’ve put it down to the effect of the impending move of the centre of the universe from it’s previous home in Darlington to a small treehouse in a Mexican jungle.
Strange days preparing to take the plunge. Leaving family , friends, house, Elvis, the wives and all things familiar to surf into the unknowable.
Overwhelming gratitude.
Here we go……….
Jungle Journal
Tomorrow we will be on our way back to Mexico to start our jungle adventure.
The past couple of months have been a whirlwind of leaving preparations. Our house is empty and ready to rent out and our lives have been reduced to 11 suitcases and a surfboard.
Leaving the house completely empty was more emotional than I expected.
It’s good to feel things deeply, the excitement, the sadness, and the slightly nervous anticipation of the unknown.
La Colina Project
Beave bought me a book called “Zen and Permaculture”
I had low expectations from this thin paperback, but was pleasantly surprised by how much inspiration I took from it.
The most important reminder it gave me is that permaculture (and everything in life really) must be based on having the right intentions, and understanding why we have those intentions.
We’re approaching our final weeks in the UK before we fly to Mexico, and I just found this page where I mapped our intentions for La Colina, with explanations why our intentions for La Colina include:
La Colina Project
We were just over three weeks into our Mexican roadtrip when our lives changed course.
The day before we had driven down the pacific coast from Aticama to San Pancho. Our friend Pedro had recommended we visit San Pancho because it was smaller and more chilled than Sayulita.
We couldn’t find San Pancho on the map, which was confusing because our map was very detailed and had even very small villages listed. We used google maps to find the San Pancho Hostel. It wasn’t until the next day that we worked out that “San Pancho” is what the locals call the town. The official name (the one on the map) is “San Francisco”.
It makes me smile imagining the confusion we would cause telling people we have bought 3.5 hectares of jungle in San Francisco.
It was while wandering down the main road in San Pancho that we passed a blue and white real estate office. We could tell already that San Pancho catered more to tourists than the area around San Blas that we had just been in, this was certain to lead to higher prices. In Todo Santos, a tourist friendly town on Baja, we had popped in to a Real Estate office and been shocked by million dollar price tags.
Curiosity about property values and the luxury of spending a few minutes in air conditioning lured us inside. We were greeted by a friendly lady called Mariel, who gave us a binder full of the properties they had listed.
We were about to find our new home, we just didn’t know it yet. We still thought we were just doing research for a future trip when we would come back to Mexico to find a property “for real”.
Here are the 10 ways we realised we’d found our perfect property:
We flipped through the pages of the binder, and while they weren’t as high as Baja prices, the first few properties were listed for between $250k – $1 million – in US dollars, not pesos! But we kept flipping and suddenly a picture of some trees rather than a building caught my attention. Then the price… Significantly less than all the other properties…
After the price, the next thing we looked at was the size. Most properties listed were 1000m2, some up to 3000m2.
We really wanted enough land to be able to build treehouses, grow a food forest, keep chickens – we need space! When originally dreaming about potential land, we said we wanted at least a hectare (10,000m2) but the past couple weeks of viewing land in Mexico had readjusted our expectations.
We were now aware that we may only be able to afford an acre (4046m2) or so if we wanted land that met our other goals too.
This property was over 35,000m2. Our eyes met with raised eyebrows and hopeful smiles. We kept reading…
We love trees. Our vision for treehouses, hammocks, a food forest, shade, and privacy all work best with established trees. There are plenty of things that you can buy or make happen quickly with hard work.
Old, big, established trees have to be there already or take decades to grow.
The first piece of land we looked at in Mexico looked like this, so to find a property with 1000+ big trees was a major plus.
I have always wanted to live by the ocean. I grew up near the Rocky Mountains and loved it, but have never lived close to the waves. Beave loves surfing, and doesn’t get much opportunity in the North of England. Being able to wake up and be in the water in 10 minutes will be a dream come true.
For example, this was our favourite campsite of the whole road trip, on the Baja coast just down from Mulege.
Down the coast from Mazatlan we viewed some remote beachfront properties. They were beautiful, some had some trees that had been planted years earlier, they were bigger than a hectare, and they were almost affordable. Seeing these properties, and not feeling like they were quite right, we realised how important having a community nearby was to us. We want to be an active part of a strong community, not squirrel ourselves away somewhere where we have to drive for ages to find a shop, a restaurant or a town.
We soon realised that in a binder full of expensive houses on small pieces of land, we had found one property which, on paper at least, met all of our criteria. We asked the lovely Mariel for more details and she disappeared and returned with Shannon, a laid-back American expat who has been living in Mexico for years.
Shannon introduced himself and brought us into his office (with even better air conditioning) to tell us more about the property. The second we mentioned that we wanted a property where we could practice permaculture, his face lit up and he said:
“In that case this property may just be perfect for you. Let me tell you the whole story.”
Shannon explained that the property is very unique, and has a very interesting history. The previous owner was a carpenter, who bought the property with the intention of creating an eco-community. He succeeded in leasing plots to at least four other people, and for a time there was a vibrant community. They would meet in the mornings to work in their communal garden, they ran on solar power and had a functioning well for water, and each resident was building their own homes in various ways. The owner wanted his wife to love it there too, and so he did things especially for her, the most notable being that he built a pool for her.
While we have no aspirations of building an eco-community, our plans for a natural space, with permaculture and art at it’s heart, are in keeping with what has been there before.
Why was a property of this size, in this location, affordable? We knew there had to be big challenges. It had been on the market for over a year and no one had bought it yet – we needed to know why.
Despite the property being just over a kilometre off the highway, it is not an easy road to travel. In the dry season it is uneven and covered in big rocks. Almost (but not quite) impassable for a standard car. (We later tested this in a VW Jetta, but that’s another story…)
In the wet season, the road traverses four arroyos (rivers/streams) of varying sizes. The last and biggest one involves driving into the arroyo, driving upstream for about 10 meters and then driving out.
We’re told that there is only running water in the arroyos for about 10 hours after it rains, so most of the time it’s dry. But a few times a year, for a few hours at a time, there is so much water that it will come up to the windows of a small car.
The second reason it hadn’t sold yet is the property is mostly protected forest. We can’t subdivide, we can’t build big houses or hotels, and we can’t chop down all the trees. Luckily we don’t want to do any of those things, and it means that the property isn’t attractive to developers.
Another possible reason people were reluctant to purchase the property is that there is a highway being built about 250 metres to one side of the land. We feel it’s far enough away, with enough trees between us and the road that it shouldn’t cause too much noise, and it might eventually provide us a route to town that doesn’t involve fording through a river. It’s all about turning “problems” into solutions (a core principle of permaculture).
We are becoming protectors of the jungle. Our role will be to manage the forest while also creating a place where it can be enjoyed without harming the flora or fauna.
The jungle has had four years to take over since the previous owner lived there. It will be a lot of work to restore, rebuild and improve what is already there. We’re excited to have a new challenge, and such a important responsibility.
The moment when Beave and I knew for sure that we were going to buy this property was a couple of days after we first saw the listing. Shannon had taken us to see the property and had given us permission to sleep in our van there overnight.
I woke early to the sounds of the jungle, and climbed out of the mosquito net we had hung in the van overnight. I sat in the shell of the stone cottage and felt completely at one with my surroundings. Beave emerged and saw me there. He looked around and said with absolute certainty:
“We’re buying this land aren’t we?”
I could only nod yes with a tear in my eye because I was so overcome with joy.
There in the middle of a Mexican jungle, in an old van and a half built cottage, we had woken up at home.
La Colina Project
Once we had agreed to move to Mexico there were a few hurdles to overcome.
The first was that the furthest into Mexico Beave had ever been was Tijuana.
For those of you who don’t know, Tijuana is the main border town between California and Mexico, and it is not known for being very salubrious.
We had to make sure that Beave actually liked Mexico, I had just finished my last contract at work, so the time was ripe for a road trip!
We’ve had an old van in the USA for a few years now, so we decided to fly over to the States, get in the van, and drive down along the Pacific coast surfing and checking out land in places we liked until we had to come back.
I just forgot how BIG Mexico is!
This is the route we ended up taking:
Once we had decided to go, many people reminded us how dangerous and scary Mexico is.
I remembered the same advice when Phil and I were about to ride through Mexico on our motorbikes, and I always smile and nod.
The truth is that Mexico is beautiful, the people are wonderful, there is delicious food, and so much to see.
Like all countries, it has parts where you wouldn’t go alone, or maybe at all, but I don’t think that is any reason not to visit London, San Francisco or New York, and it certainly isn’t a reason to not to visit Mexico.
While on the road, we viewed property on the Baja Peninsula – in Todo Santos, El Pescadero, along the coast of the mainland – South of Mazatlan, near San Blas and in the Sayulita area.
We found that if we mentioned to any waiter, shop assistant or friend in Mexico, they would immediately know of a property that was for sale that we should look at. In Mazatlan there was a waiter with a friend selling a 99 hectare mango plantation, in Todo Santos the owner of the restaurant we stopped in for lunch took us to a plot of land on a hill just outside of town. It was the first land we viewed, had no trees, but did have a view of the ocean in the distance.
On Baja our dreams of finding a large plot of cheap land covered in trees were quickly smashed. The number of gringos buying land there has pushed prices up, and trees don’t grow well in the desert conditions of Baja California. It was a great place to start viewing the possibilities and manage our expectations. Seeing smallish barren plots in great areas close to surf gave us a reality check, and we started to adapt our plans to this new reality.
Once we took the ferry from the Baja peninsula to the mainland the land available for sale started to be bigger plots for smaller prices. There was an area with long, skinny beach front plots, some of which had palm trees and a few small buildings. There were small plots near Atacama which would be perfect for building a house on, but just didn’t fit our dreams of self sufficiency and permaculture. We even viewed a mango plantation, where we preferred the adjoining lot, but when we contacted the owner, he wanted too much for it.
Seeing all these possibilities, and their surrounding communities and regions, was really important for us. It helped us focus on what was important. We wanted to be close to surf, but not on the beach, we wanted to live on at least a few acres of land, but still be close to a village and a community, and we wanted to be within a reasonable drive of an international airport, because we both have family and friends around the world.
Little did we know that we were about to find exactly what we were looking for…
La Colina Project
On the 14th of April, 2017 I wrote the following entry in my journal. It seems an excellent first blog entry for La Colina Project.
Jayne
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All of The life changing decisions I’ve made have been spontaneous and controversial.
As a teenager I left collage in Canada weeks before finishing to go work in India. When I was 30 I sold everything and gave up a high flying corporate job to ride a motorcycle across two continents. A couple years later I crossed an ocean to move in with a man 16 years my senior who I had met only months earlier – but had known from the moment we met that he was my soulmate.
Now, at 35, I have made another spontaneous and controversial decision.
We’re going to move to Mexico, and we’re taking the world with us.
I realised that this was my next step while in the bath not so long ago. We had been planning to build the “Temple for Peace” at Burning Man, and it came to me that while building and burning a sacred space for so many of our tribe was a very special thing to do, I want to go further, I want to build a place that can have a deeper impact on people who need it, that will also have a deeper impact on me.
It took no time at all to realise that Mexico was the place, and that now was the time.
I can’t clearly explain why – but then I never have been able to when I make one of these decisions. It’s just the right thing at that time.<
I told my chap/partner/lover Beave of this plan with some trepidation, not knowing how he would react. He’s adventurous and usually very supportive, but this was possibly taking things a little far:
“I want us to buy a piece of land in Mexico and create a place where we can grow all the things and where people can come and find themselves.”
Instead of telling me how crazy I am, he embraced the idea, suggesting that we should build treehouses and that the land had to be near great surf.
I am so grateful to have found someone with as adventurous a spirit as me. Who gets me, and embraces these “crazy” ideas.
So this is it.
The beginning of an adventure.