Bees Archives - La Colina Project

Hot Bees, Fire and Water.

June 4, 2021June 4, 2021
by Beave

We are currently being wooed by cuteness. The huge man-eating Rhodesian ridgeback couple that live in the ranch nearby have just popped out a litter of a eight pups. Now even the most bitey beasts trained to take down lions are cute for a while. Our friends are very keen that we take a few of these mini-monsters to live on our land and protect us from pretty much anything we can think of. The cuteness is tempting but these are pedigree dogs and valued way too much to consider. We have a number of semi-feral dogs that have adopted us and gratefully mop up all the bones and leftovers we toss over the balcony. They very usefully howl and make an appropriate fuss when they smell jaguars coming out of the jungle to hunt. If we were to take on a jungle dog there are large packs of more ugly rescue street hounds constantly in need of short or long-term homes to choose from. We again decide to defer committing to a full-time dog just yet. I’m sure our dog will eventually find us.

Our well is dry and that’s a problem. I dragged our sad water pump 20 metres up to find it clogged with a four foot long beard of grass and debris. The whole area is in drought. It’s proper dry and dusty as hell. There has not been enough rain in the mountains to fill the aquifers so we are buggered. The tinacos are low and running out fast so we need to do something. After a bit of research and a few outings kicking large plastic containers we buy a big blue 5000 litre cistern and have it delivered. We hire a machine and have a 2.5m x 1.5m round hole dug. We then refine the area with shovels so the cistern drops in level and true. We dig it in next to our turtle well and then spend some days trying to find a pipa water truck that will come out and fill it up. They are few and far between at this time of year when everyone is out of water. We can then drop the well pump into it and fill the tinacos. That should get us by until the rains come. There is a tropical storm forecast so things may change sooner than we think.

So, the rains they are a certainly a-comin.. In preparation, we survey where the arroyo will soon flow past our gate and urgently bring in the machine. We realise that if the floods come down the mountains it will cut our access road to the treehouse in two and we would be driving into a plunge pool if we needed to get out. Much moving of earth later the river now has a clear route safely past us and the dirt has been piled high enough to create a road which theoretically will not wash away immediately.

If there’s rain then a roof that works is always a good thing. Ours does not and we need that to change. Our treehouse palapa roof is the more robust and expensive Palapa Royal. These are tufts of palm leaves that are woven together with sheets of plastic to create a waterproof seal inside and a huge fluffy roof up top. The bugger is, that in order for us to have our old knackered leaky roof removed and a brand new sexy one installed, then we need to move us and most of our stuff out.

It’s a crap job but we have put it off long enough and resign ourselves get it done. We move most of our stuff under the bed and create a few strategic piles of boxes and cover the bed and everything else in tarps. All breakable stuff is boxed and stored outside in a highly useful temporary shed we were gifted over a year ago but never took the time to collect.

We are lucky enough to move into a beach front air conditioned room at our lovely friend’s house for a week. It’s really not so bad. We take time to enjoy being in town as Jake looks after the jungle. I’m at the house every day making sure the roof doesn’t go on upside down but the crew are great and do an extraordinary job and somehow don’t leave the place a mess. It’s a full week away from our beloved treehouse but it’s so worth it. The roof not only looks fabulous but we are safe in the knowledge that when the rains eventually get here we can smugly prance about without getting dripped on. Our first fully operational tree house roof.

Our highly useful Razor has stuffed up again. The bracket that holds the gear stick in place has snapped off. Without it it’s impossible to shift gears and it’s stuck in park so can’t be moved. The only gas welder in town has broken and we don’t have the power for an electric welder so we are out of options. The Razor stays parked up outside our house for a few weeks. We attempt to get enough power to a welder from our generator tied solar system a few times but with no luck. In desperation, we find our old portable generator which Jayne’s Dad had modified to give double the amps before the fuse blows. Despite spluttering and groaning in clear distress, somehow, we manage to extract enough juice out of it to get the welder to melt the bits in place. Thanks to our metal whisperer the welds hold and our Razor is back in service.

It’s not just us who are feeling the heat. Our bees have been active and appear happy enough. We have checked and there is a lot of honey being produced out of our four hives. Although shaded from direct sun, mottled sunlight has heated up the hives to the point where many of the bees have relocated to outside the hot boxes. They cling to the outside of the west side where the entrance is. It appears to offer the most shade and catches the most breeze. It’s completely understandable.

Our cow proof gate is ready. It lands at our place for two days so we can degrease it and add undercoat before it is hung. Jayne has extended the electric wires from the pool house and has prepared all the power we need for our automatic remote control hydraulic gate opening arm to function.

The day arrives and brackets and frames are bolted into our walls and the gate hangs, swings and closes. We are one side. The cows the other. We are delighted. After some buggering about we have the added benefit of pushing a remote-control button to instruct our newly installed robot arm to elegantly and slowly open and close the thing on demand without us having to jump in and out of the truck half a dozen times a day. Our plants are now safe. Looks sexy too.

Because it doesn’t seem like we are doing enough at the moment it has been decided that we need to rip out our kitchen countertop and sink. It is true that the sink is set in a badly warped and rotten wood frame which leaks. It is also true that the kitchen counter has not been replaced for three years. The termite eaten wood is covered in a dirty old plastic leather material and perhaps not the most hygienic of surfaces. Our architect has gifted us a number of large ceramic tiles which has been a catalyst to action. Old damp termitey wood is torn out and new wood is found, treated and cut to shape. A new sink is acquired and Jayne sets to work tiling and grouting for all she is worth. The result is a new shiny sink, posh taps that work (and don’t leak) and a respectable work surface that now shows all the dirt rather than hiding it. An improvement I am assured.

It’s getting proper hot. All the spring leaves have fallen and lay on the jungle floor in a thick carpet. It’s impossible to move around silently on top of the bone-dry covering. The whip lizards that usually go about their business unseen are now obvious as they flit about noisily through piles of leaves. There are hundreds of them attracting all sorts of predators. They move at lightning speed and drive the cats insane.

The lunar eclipse came and went very early in the morning. Too early for some but our intrepid photographers were dedicated enough to get up early, drink enough coffee to capture it beautifully.

Photo credit: John Curley.

It’s that sweaty time of year again. Even a simple job requiring me to be outside for anytime means I am soaked. I rehydrate, hang my shirt and pants on the balcony railing and lay on a towel for half an hour until they dry out. It is true that I am a muck magnet but now I’m working in this dust laden humidity its getting ridiculous. My general state of being is pretty much always damp and filthy. I’m having about three showers a day but that doesn’t seem to be helping that much. For reasons I don’t fully understand my finger nails cannot stay clean for more than a few moments. I am clearly a joy to live with.

June is here. It’s the month of the stupid flying June bugs. Weeks of avoiding the hard shelled idiots flying into your face. I have a friend in town who entertains herself by putting a light on in the evening, opening a window. As the June bugs fly in she swiftly returns them to the night with a badminton racket. Hours of fun.

The annual cicadas are back too. They have started performing their invasive droning whistle as the sunsets every night. There are a few hundred of them at the moment soon to be joined by thousands more. It will become a deafening chorus for about 20 minutes every night for weeks.

It’s late in the afternoon and as we are walking towards the treehouse there is a peculiar sound that takes our attention. It’s coming from the hills that surround us to the South. It’s a series of cracks and what appear to be small explosions. We find a good vantage point on our balcony and watch as thick dark smoke appears over the rise of the hill directly above us. The noise gets louder and it becomes clear that there is a forest fire heading our way. The wind is light but in our faces and fanning flames that are now visible. They are at least 40 feet high. Some bigger than that. There is a gently but sinister fall of ash in the air. There is a line of flames now at the crest of the hill busily devouring the dry trees and scrub as they start to head down the slope towards us. This is not good. We have no way of stopping it.

We are blessed. As the sun gets low in the sky the wind changes and moves off shore. We can see the glow of burning scrub along the horizon but it has stopped moving, the flames are much smaller and the noise much less aggressive. It takes a while but we start to relax again, confident that without the wind assistance the fire has burnt itself out. There are a number of highly experienced retired Californian fire fighters living locally. They have seen things they can’t talk about. They have often suggested to us that the humidity levels we live with here protect us from forest fires. This may well be generally true but the current drought and a little wind have made us think again.

The long-awaited pipa water truck arrives. Much celebration. The town water supply is almost done for the season and these trucks are in massive demand. A number of them have broken down so getting one to venture out this far is a result. The new cistern has been sitting for a few days and when we fill her up we find a few visitors have found their way in. With the help of a flour sieve I manage to reach in and rescue two fair sized lizards and a small snake. They are half drowned but grateful for the reprieve. The rest of the water goes in the pool. We are going to need that to survive soon.

Just about as soon as the pipa truck leaves tropical storm Blanca appears out at sea. We are subject to 24 hours of cloud which prevents me pumping our new water to where we need it with the solar well pump. In anticipation, we take down the hammocks and put everything else that won’t appreciate getting wet in safer places. It’s midnight and there are light sounds of rain in the trees, then the muffled noise of water pouring off our new roof, then it comes.

The rain, lightning and thunder are loud enough to keep my attention all night but it’s the sound of over vocal horny frogs and toads appearing from hibernation and getting at it in our pool that keeps me from sleeping. The roof holds up. We have indeed smugly pranced about and have not been dripped on. Amazing.

It’s a pleasure to experience the morning after. Petrichor (the smell of rain on dry earth) infuses everything. I reluctantly fish out of the pool the few over sexed exhausted frogs that don’t have the stamina to save themselves. Nature is alive and well after a long night. The rivers are still dry but the plants look vibrant after their welcome soaking. The storm has passed and we told we are due another few weeks of sun and dry. Raining season is not here yet. With our new river road, new gate, new roof, new kitchen top, newly repaired Razor, and new water store we should be prepared. We are not worried.

Jungle Journal

Touch of rain

October 30, 2019October 30, 2019
by Beave

In the past months, we have dealt with a high number of infrastructure issues, the jungle jeep, the burglary and its aftermath. Whatever has needed attention since Jayne left in the past months has , of course, been down to me . I’ve spent what I considered was a surreal time in Toronto until I spent the best part of a month at Burning Man. Most of the time in-between I have been dealing with preparations for what comes next and firefighting what nature has decided to throw at me. It has become apparent that I have been considerably busier than I have realised. I have made a pact with myself to slow down a bit. Smell the jungle. Watch the butterflies. See more sunsets.

I let myself down pretty quickly. The solar system is running terribly and keeps cutting out during the night. It’s 4 am and I’m awake. I’m hot and sweaty and breathing in the thick warm air. It’s impossibly humid and pitch black. The lights are out but worse, much worse the fans are off! The sweat flows slowly and constantly down my body. I am miserable in a warm puddle of myself for long enough to realise I’m not sleeping again and grab torches and clothes and head out to put on the generator.

It’s a good rule that we don’t walk through the jungle at night. We are too low down the food chain when the sun goes down. My understanding of this is overruled by my need to sleep and breathe. Walking very slowly and carefully through the overgrown pathway to the solar battery house focuses the mind beautifully. I can hear every noise and my eyes are straining to catch any movement. There is no moon. It’s very dark. I manage to walk into a few spider webs. The webs here are vast and sticky . They cling to your head glueing their contents into your hair and face. I spit the bits out and carry on. The ground is soft from the rain. Thin strong vines are everywhere and wrap around my ankles in an attempt to pull me over. It is with great relief that I arrive at the battery house door without being eaten.

I pull out the dead weight of the generator and fill it with fuel by the light of the torch between my teeth. Everything is plugged in and ready to go. I grab the starter cable and give it a strong yank. My arm flies backwards and I end up on my arse in the jungle with the handle in my hand and my torch some feet away in the dark. It’s somewhat disorientating. The starter unit is busted. I recover myself and work my way down the steep slippy hillside to the Bodega to get tools to fix it. When I finally work my way up and over the hill again I am soaked to the skin with warm sweat, covered in vegetation and a good quantity of fair size bugs attracted by the torch light. I remove the starter cover and duck sideways as a long strip of metal fails to hit me in the face by not much. My motivation to struggle on in the dark is leaving me. I gather all the parts I can find that are now scattered far and wide. I struggle to lift the fuel filled generator back into the solar house and head for home to better assess the situation.

Missed me by inches this horrible thing.

Dawn is an hour or so away but the air is no less thick and warm. I try and rewind the sharp metal strip spring into its plastic housing with absolutely no success. It’s effectively impossible. I give in and take a series of showers to survive the heat until daylight.

The morning is spent finding a generator starter-unit fixer. There is tell of such a bloke outside La Penita and I drive up to find him. I find a ramshackle shop stacked with mowers and generators and chainsaws. A very tiny, dirty young guy called Alan greets me nervously. He explains in great detail that the handful of part I have brought him are stuffed and he needs to see my generator. This is communicated mainly but the medium of mime as his Spanish accent is unique and delivered at incredible pace which I use as an excuse for not understanding a word. In the weeks since this first meeting , he and his identically tiny, dirty young brother have fixed two generators, a chainsaw, a mower, a water pump and two weed whackers for me. All for a handful of beans. Alan is my new superhero.

Caitlin our Australian caretaker has moved on. Probably the inability of the Australians to beat Wales at Rugby again that finally did it. It’s not the easiest to follow the Rugby World Cup in Japan from Mexico. Kickoff is usually 3 or 4 am so you have to be keen. After the match, it only took her a week to find the strength to leave Mausetrappe and head South.

She has somehow managed to ingratiated herself very effectively into the local community and a band of mates turn up in the jungle to give her a sendoff. It starts to rain hard and we all congregate in the palopa next to the bar and around the orange block. The trees are lit up and there is a DJ playing till the solar system finally gives up. Inside the tightly packed palopa a large piñata shaped as a beer bottle emerges and Caitlin lays into it. To her and (almost) everyone else’s surprise the whole thing explodes and covers the damp, tequila filled crowd in flour.

September has been unseasonably dry. The good news for me is that the roads & rivers have been passable so getting in and out has been as easy as it ever was. A year previously we were crossing raging rivers on ropes. I have been quite concerned our well would not fill and we would have to make contingency plans to gather enough water to get us through the dry season. I need not have worried. October started with hurricane Lorena followed by a tropical depression Narma. Much as Lorena came close enough and dropped a steady 20 hours of moderate rain upon us Narma properly moved in.

A tropical depression sounds like a tough day after too much tequila rather than a scary hurricane so we didn’t really have the usual precautions in place. It’s about 4 pm. I’m pottering around when it starts. It’s a sunny beautiful afternoon filled with bird song and butterfly’s then the sky darkens almost instantly. Within minutes blinding lightening is striking very close all around and the intense crashes of thunder are shaking the treehouse. The amount of water than is dumped is impressive as hell. For the next many hours, I can see only a few meters out of the windows through what looks like a vast waterfall. I can just make out a proper brown torrid river flowing down our hill. The noise is deafening. Despite my best speakers on full bore I can hear little else but the rain hitting the roof. This is as much rain as I have ever seen in one go. I didn’t think that was possible having been through monsoons in India and Thailand. Mexico for the win.

It’s not till much later the next morning that the intensity of the rains stops enough that I can leave the treehouse to assess the damage. There is a full-on new brown river running past the house. I am wearing rubber wellies to my knees but that’s not good enough. I’m slopping around ungracefully with wellies full of water in no time. I’m nearly taken off my wobbly feet a number of times. I struggle to reach the casitas that have thankfully survived well. Somehow I stay upright in the fast-moving water. As I move past the casitas I find my water trenches overflowing with silt and half the road down towards the gate washed out. Deep striations filled with new foaming river. The tiny stream that was dry a week previously and usually meanders slowly in front of our gate is now unrecognisable. Its meters wide , fast , deep and raging. There is no way across. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

I work my way to the gate side and note a large number of broken branches scattered around the place. The lights that were suspended above the round parota tables are on the ground and are in a sorry state. I look up. The landscape has changed. The orange block roof is covered in huge branches. The outdoor shower is completely obscured although clearly in many pieces. Something dramatic has happened and it’s hard to work out what exactly. There is no way up the hillside which is covered in downed trees. The ground has a coating of leaves that reach above the knee when I try and walk through. The big clue is that there is a significant lump of brand new sky visible at the top of the hill. A 20-foot shard of wood has appeared pointing to the sky. I manage to climb around the mass of downfall and reach the hill top above the solar panels.

The first thing to greet me is our internet cable that was previously buried beneath the path . It is now entirely pulled out of the ground. The huge new wooden shard is in fact a root from a massive tree that has toppled down the hill landing just a few feet from the orange block. Our cable is now attached to the highest point of the root. Way out of reach. This beast of a tree is lying on the hillside. When it stood it was around 100 feet high. Its size and mass has destroyed half a dozen other trees on the way down. Some of these are big enough to have had their trunks smashed in half but still stand. Others are on the ground with branches contorted at all angles. There are two that are worryingly sizeable that are suspended many feet above the ground. It’s not a safe place to be.

Thankfully its only me trapped out here. If this had happened 24 hours earlier then this would have landed on Caitlin’s party. Doesn’t bear thinking about. Tragedy averted. No flour dipped bodies to recover.

Orange block battered and shower smashed

I share photos of my little incident and the raging river outside my gate with friends in town. In return, they send me images of San Pancho entirety underwater. People literally floating down the main street! I am lucky enough to have adequate stocks of essentials and settle in for a few days of solitude.

It has taken a couple of weeks to chainsaw my way back to relative normality. The flattened shower is uncovered and awaits repair. The damaged water lines are fixed and internet has been restored. The hillside has been cleared enough to get access to the solar panels and batteries. The solar rig has been refigured after finding a few dodgy batteries buggering up our system and is now working well again…….time to relax ?… maybe?

It’s October in the tropics. It rains pretty much every night. It gets horribly hot . The humidity is famously inhuman. There are however many distractions. Dozens of fire flies dance around the mosquito net at night. Impressive to even the most jungle weary . The quantity and variety of butterflies are stunning. They follow me around apparently attracted by the salt on my skin. On the other hand, I’m coming across the occasional less sexy creatures. There are snakes coming out of the wet undergrowth, a few large hairy tarantulas crossing the path in front me, remarkably huge scorpion eating whip spiders and hornets. Hornets. My least favorite of beasts. I’ve spotted quite a few hornet nests and dealt with them but the sneaky buggers have had their revenge.

Stunning varieties of butterflies follow me around . Found a number of this type in the treehouse.

‘Canklays” Whip Spiders: Our Scorpion eating friends

Bad news. The lightening has scared away our bees. The hives are located in a clearing a few hundred meters from our house close to the casitas. I have had lightning strike very close to me a few times and embarrassingly have dived for cover (far too late) more than once. A friend from town has asked to relocate two swarms at our place. I check out the area and all seems well. Happy bees. We arrange to meet up and add to our bee stock. Two days of storms later and I get a call to say both his swarms have vanished. At least twice I have seen hits very close to the hives so I go and check them out. They are abandoned. Not a single bee left.

There will be other swarms in our future so I take the hives over to the parota tables and spend some time slowly preparing for new residents. I clean out the wax and repair the wires. It’s a satisfying job only made painful by being stung by a hornet in the leg. Hornet stings hurt. A lot. They only sting if threatened and almost always protecting their young in their nest. If you stay around the nest they keep stinging you till you get the message. The correct strategy is to run as soon as you are stung to get out of the sting zone. I leap from my chair and start the hunt for the nest. I check under the table, around the bar and scan the trees. Nothing obvious. Slowly I retake my seat and carry on with the job in hand. My leg throbs.

I get up again to reassemble the newly renovated hive. This time I’m stung twice. In the same leg. I swear loudly and swat the general area with my hand and connect with one large hornet. There is another on my foot. Another circles menacingly around my head so I limp away as fast as I can. I return cautiously and kick over the chair I’ve been sitting in. There it is. An active nest under my seat. For the past hour, I’ve been sitting on top of a hornet’s nest full of hornet grubs. I deal with it aggressively.

After considering my luck that I have not been more seriously attacked (or lack of it having sat on a nest in the first place) I set about cleaning up the bar area of broken branches, leaves and weeds. A few minutes into the job I am stung four more times. Too quick for me to hop away. Two on my good leg and two more on my sore limp one. I use my machete to upturn all the dozen wooden chairs around the tables. There right in front of me, under another chair, is an even bigger nest again full of hornet grubs. I make my way to the Bodega and collect a poison spray that I save for very special occasions such as this. My legs are dysfunctional. They carry me around like broken candle sticks. I deal with the hornet nest without mercy and call it a day. The hornet poison is making me feel very odd.

The signs are there. I need to slow down . The hornets stopped me for a day or two. I’ve had over a week out of sorts with a irritating ear infection & the added joy of food poisoning that felled me. It’s the first time I’ve had to deal with Mexibum for a long time. Our Jungle jeep is threatening to be ready soon with new roll cage and bull bars and even seat belts. Everything important here is working again. I can’t do much more now till the rains stop. I’m allowing nature to set my agenda which in many ways is a blessing. Let’s see what she has in store for my immediate future. Hopefully not a lot. Jayne is back in one month’s time. That gives me a month to stop charging around so much, deal with the oppressive heat and rest up. It’s what October is for …. I am learning .. slowly.

Jungle Journal

UK Surf & Stings

February 9, 2018
by Beave

It’s been five months since we first arrived from Manchester airport and only four months since we bought the land and started this project. All things converge and conspire to humble, surprise and delight us in equal measure pretty much every day. We have had, as expected, a hectic January with many comings and some goings. February is bidding fair to be equally mental.

Jayne’s parents arrived middle of January to join her sister and they have all been dutifully deployed ever since. They drove all the way down from Calgary pulling a tent trailer packed with all the stuff Jayne left at their house before she left on her motorbike 4 years ago. Our house now has posh cups and plates. All the notably jankier bits and pieces have been replaced with things from Jayne’s time in her flat in London. Proper upgrade.

For the past few weeks there has been much cleaning and fixing and creating delivered with great enthusiasm and skill. They head on the long road home again next week in time for us to have a couple of precious essential days of space to ourselves to restore our aching sanity and make plans for our next influx.

We get a sudden instant booking for the jungle cabin. She arrives the very next day. We kick out the current tenant (Jayne’s sister). Much busyness cleaning and making good all the things. Gas is plumbed and sheets are laundered and floors are swept. Cushions are sewn and counter tops are lined and lights are hung. We await the arrival of the girl from Bristol. She doesn’t show up. Much confusion until we check and discover the booking is for next month. Not the best start at hosting… Anyway the place is in good shape for our next lot of visitors arriving the next day.

We acquire a number of outdoor tables and chairs from town. They are much needed but are bright red and coca-cola branded . We de-brand them & deploy cans of Copper and a CP3-0 gold spray paint . Works rather acceptably. They are much used.

Jayne’s brother, who she shared her motorbike adventure with, arrives with his girlfriend and insanely cute one-year-old daughter SnakeJaguar. I will leave the story of how she got such a kick arse cool name to Jayne. I’m sure she will get the time and energy to blog soon.

There is a strange legacy that is manifest on our land from an experiment to introduce citrus fruit to this area. In the 70’s the Mexican president who had great affection for San Pancho (and his mistress who lived there) made a deal with a large Japanese company to introduce orange , lime and lemon trees to the area. At the time the local crops were predominantly Mango and Palm Oil. The Japanese built a series of warehouses that still exist (now community centers) and started growing citrus trees. What happened in those warehouses is not fully explained but things got a little mixed up. The result is that we have trees here that bear strange fruit. Oranges that taste and look lemony. Lemons that look like limes. Limes that give lemon juice. There are advantages. A slice of orangey-lemon-lime in a gin and tonic works a treat.

As the Swiss family Davidson contingent here expands further we are also joined by an Aussie couple on the same motorbike journey Jayne took with her brother. Alaska to Argentina via La Colina. Both are engineers. He is a civil engineer and she is clearly an uncivil one. Poor sods park their bikes and are dropped right in the thick of it.

Our solar frame needs concreting in at exactly the right angle of the dangle for the maximum photon catching efficiency. The ground on which it sits is at a different angle in all directions. The frame itself has legs at 3.6M to 2.6M all of which need to be dropped into accurately placed holes of different sizes and secured permanently at an angle of 17 degrees to the sun. All this and leave enough room underneath to hang hammocks in the shade. They agree to take this on and create sums, drawings, formula and numbers, string lines and marks. We bring in our concrete guy who now has the whole plan translated for him. Chances are this might just maybe work out OK. Perhaps.

Our Romanian friend arrives in the night. He lives in Switzerland. We have known him for many years from the Nowhere Festival in Spain. He brings me Slivovitz in a plastic water bottle smuggled from Eastern Europe. This stuff is an extraordinarily efficient plum brandy that has been known to considerably shorten many of my favorite days (in a good way). I’m saving most of it for when there is a smaller more appropriate audience. He delivers Swiss Chocolate to an excited Jayne and pitches his tent. We spend some good days balancing work and sunsets. He and our Aussie bikers are inspired to dig up a mountain of rocks behind the cabin and create an outdoor en-suite toilet area that we designed but hadn’t quite got around to building yet. Looks fab and will make staying there a whole heap easier.

Our concrete guy is still finishing the concrete floor of which we are now unable to speak about without making a bad face. It’s taken a huge amount of time and money and stomach lining to get it this far. It’s level and brownish but we are over it. So very over it. Our man spends 3 days cleaning the thing and sealing it to make the best of what we have. Stairs are reinstalled and we move on.

Concrete man’s wife is very grateful that we have taken her man on. She has a number of his ten or eleven children (he is not sure how many he has) and so any income is greatly appreciated. News is that she has been making cookies and edible Mexican delights for us for days. She arrives with some of the kids and delivers boxes of cream, strawberry, pineapple & chocolate treats. She and the kids stay a few days on the land happily sleeping on the shelves in the battery house (cell). We count 15 people living on our land tonight.

Excitement. We find out that one of my favorite photographers ever has arrived in San Pancho. We have met a few times briefly at Burning Man so I make contact and agree that he and his girlfriend visit us here. He is retired now and looking around for further adventure. We spend a great day inspiring each other and I have a spot of hero worship as he brings out the camera and starts capturing what we see everyday with his unique eye. This blog includes many of his photos. If it’s a good one it’s almost certainly one of his. Going to see a great deal of each other in the future. Good news.

I spoke to my Dad on the phone. Good to talk to him. Afterwards I make a sudden and important decision to take a flight home. The week in the UK was stunning for a number of reasons. The first was the January cold that came as a considerable shock to my now soft and timid constitution. My furriest and warmest of bikinis are no match for January in the UK. My clothes that we put aside to cope with such an eventuality are packed in a hurry and I soon discover they are 50% mould. I do not smell the best.

I am collected from airport in Manchester and after an essential top up of Guinness for breakfast I’m deposited with an especially naughty friend who I have arranged to cut my hair. I have been cutting it myself and I think I’ve done a great job. She does not agree. I am told that I stink and must immediately have a bath and only then will she mend my head. My first bath of the year. Absolute bliss.

I have a few jet lagged happy days in Darlington. I visit my house, which is rented out, to prepare for new tenants and collect essentially important things we did not have space for first time around. These things end up being lots of art, some shoes and a hat. I notice that my love and attachment to my old home in Darlington has faded. It holds all the memories and still a load of our stuff but now is just a house.

Really good catching up with so many proper friends in such a short time. I visit my brother, my nieces and my folks and go to my first ever funeral. I stay with my daughter and more proper friends before heading home. I have two new mould free shirts that were hurriedly bought for me while I was in the pub as the mouldy look apparently just wasn’t cutting it. My poor mother has spent many hours removing every last spore from all my remaining things. I have managed to squeeze in a further two baths and my suitcases are full to burst with my full luggage allowance of art, shoes, a hat, Yorkshire Gold Tea, Marmite, Strong Cheese and HP sauce. I’m sorted.

It is somewhat interesting to note that I do not feel that I have been home for a visit. I feel that I left home on a visit. After only 4 months here that is a surprise.

Home again and straight back to it. I am immediately in a Materiales buying lengths of steel to strengthen the solar frame. I arrive back to see Jayne’s brother carrying a lump of metal across a field onto our land. I have gatecrashed a project to raise the water pump solar panel up high on a gate post. One of the bigger jobs on our list. The old solar frames in the neighbouring land have been taken down, dragged away and recycled into something that will work. Task achieved and tested. We have a functioning water pump and we now don’t fall over the solar panel propped up against a rock.

Jayne’s brother and clan are leaving for a few days down the coast. Back for one day later this week. While I was away the truck broke again and he thankfully fixed it. We now have a hand brake and the gearshift sort of works. Result. The truck is now officially called “Limonada”. When life gives you a lemon ….

Couple of friends arrive from Calgary for a week in the jungle cabin. They are also engineers. They also are dropped right in it as they arrive. The solar panels were concreted in nearly correctly. The nearly bit is costing us a heap of cash in additional leveling bits to fit the panels. The solar panels are now in the battery house (cell) where our concrete guy is no longer. They require a perfectly flat space to land on. Our frame has one leg two inches too high and that is not good enough. Our new engineers and I set about cross bracing what is there and repainting it to look as sexy as we can. We also repurpose some 25 feet lengths of water pipe we found in the jungle and plan to trench through the rocky ground to create conduits linking the frame with the battery house (cell). Solar panels will be launched in just a few days time.

The casitas are coming along really well. The BrickS*House is plumbed in with a shower and sink on it’s way. That whole area is going to be stunning. The casitas are rustico but rather pretty. Their shaggy drying out roof fringes overhang the palm bark walls and large mosquito screen windows. The views are beautiful. A new walkway through the jungle from the BrickS*House area to the front gate has been cut. We will build composting areas here next week. We have met some new friends from Oregon who have just moved down here who get what we do and are keen to help. Not sure they will love us so much after digging rocks out of a composting hole for some hours. There is a phenomenon here that whenever you dig a hole 2 feet deep you get 10 feet of rocks out of it. Magic.

Had a surf this morning in Sayulita with Jayne’s brother. So good for my mind and soul and perfectly timed. I’ve been living at such a pace that taking the time waiting for waves and feeling the ocean again was a real gift. We both caught a few good rides. I arrive home irritatingly self satisfied. That did not last long.

We decide to suit up and burn some cow poo and go collect honey from the hives. We go back to the source of the bees to collect more hive parts, pollen traps and other beekeeping useful things. I am, this time, all in white and armed with cow poo smoke and a real head cage. I approach the hives confidently even after being warned by our man that the bees were feeling “brave” today. Brave indeed they were. Each of the very many tiny black grip-dots on my whitish gloves had a bee on in in full attack mode. I am stung a dozen times on each hand in no time at all. It hurts. I bugger off.

I make it back to the pool and remove my head cage and soak my swelling hands in the water. I take a breath and watch Jayne and her sister both suited up in pro-bee suits walking past me and both covered in bees. The bees are not getting through the suits and decide I am a much easier target and attack. I am instantly surrounded and stung countless times. They are in my hair and my head is getting very sore. I move for the smoke but this just pisses them off and they go for me again. I make it up the hill in a smokey cloud of poo and bees and into the house quickly. Inside I find sanctuary behind the mesh doors. I remove the remaining bees from sleeves and hair. I take an anti-histamine, reach for the Mezcal and declare no further interest in honey. They can keep it.

My son Jake arrives from Dublin with his mighty girlfriend and a grand mate very soon and we are preparing as best we can for that. The diary is getting packed. Our modest little cabin has a number of Airbnb bookings now, and we have a fairly continuous stream of visitors booked through to April. We will be adding three casitas and the apartment onto our Airbnb portfolio very very soon so that will make for extra fun and games juggling friends and paying and non paying guests. This is what we have created so there is no moaning about it that anyone wants to listen to. It’s a touch overwhelming but it will be good moving into the guts of a tourist season to see how we fair. We have a lot to learn .

Jungle Journal

Bromeliads from heaven….

December 31, 2017December 31, 2017
by Beave

The end of another year. Thank you for all your support with donations and adopting trees, bats and bee hives. It’s a considerable help to us and we appreciate it greatly. As do the bees and the trees and the bats.

Strange days continue to happen. It’s Monday and I’m at Oxxo, which is the Mexican 24 hour chain store that appears at every petrol station, and elsewhere. Oxxo do a half decent coffee from a gurgly machine and are useful for milk and ice. The rest of the store seems to be shelf after shelf of biscuits and cookies. It is also where everyone tries to top up their phone on a dodgy touch screen till. It is often a long process followed by disappointment. This makes the queue last enough time for coffee to go cold and ice to melt.

“Juan Juan The Slow Concrete Man“ is not there for his 8am arranged Oxxo pick up. I drink my coffee and wait a while. A guy walks over to me making direct eye contact and talks in a slow drawl of Spanish. I pick up the words for floor and concrete and practically nothing else. I later find out that no one much understands what he says most of the time. We have an odd gesture based conversation and I agree to take him to look at where our concrete floor should have been 3 days ago. I give up on JJTSCM with the idea that maybe he has sent this guy in his place. We arrive and our man is already there and greets this new guy as a good friend. I am confused. They look at me expectantly. I have not a clue what’s going on. I practically drag translator Jayne out of bed to make some sense of it all.

First development is that JJTSCM texts to tell us he is feeling unwell and is hospitalized with chronic apathy. We are thankful we don’t have to fire him. The new guy is a friend of our man’s who we met briefly at a bus stop waiting for our solar frame to arrive. Someone mentioned the floor to him then. He recognised me at the Oxxo while he was on his way to another job for a local dentist. Well the dentist hadn’t paid him so he chanced his arm, sacked off the dentist’s job and jumped in with us. He agrees to return the next day with a crew and skill and enthusiasm and have the floor and tiling done by the end of the week for a fixed price.

We take a breath and recognise that JJTSCM effectively fired himself today and has been replaced with a much better option without us consciously doing a thing. All by 9.30am. We retreat for tea.

Our friend has arrived from Reno and we set out to show him Sayulita and meet up with our favorite Yoga/Pilates instructor who we met on the bamboo course. She meets us and a few tequila based refreshers. Later we go look at the surf. Our Reno friend tried surfing for the first time today and hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet. He blames the board which makes him sound like he’s been at it for years.

We watch too many people not catching waves as the sun sets. It is a glorious evening. I hear my name shouted. It’s definitely my name. I am confronted by an excited guy in hippy pants & sunglasses that I recognise as a friend that I met first in New Zealand, then Israel, then USA, then Spain, then South Africa. He is in Sayulita with his wife who has extended family who have been here since it was a village and own extraordinary seafront property on the hills around us. Sayulita is 10 times the size on San Pancho and packed with tourists so this chance meeting is very random. This day is getting weirder. We arrange to meet him and his wife later for dinner and take an adventure tour around some secret places we are introduced to.

The next morning starts early getting the new concrete crew set up and away. They are strong and fast and have already surpassed JJTSCM’s efforts in the first few hours. Good news.

Today we have a constant stream of visitors. I collect our newly found friends from their stunningly luxurious buildings above the Sayulita sea. We remove them from luxury and add more Rustico. Our favorite friend who smuggled us in shoes and my water pump from Colorado joins us. He brings 5 of his 6 kids, his wife and their St Bernard puppy, which is 9 months old, and the size of me. They bring cocktails and a good touch of disruptive enthusiasm that only a bunch of kids with machetes can do. We manage to remove the machetes from the kids, check them for obvious wounds and off they go exploring. I escape and head to town to capture our Texan friend who owns a restaurant near the beach. She has wanted to come out and see us for months and we have promised her own area of garden to nurture. In the process I collect a very welcome gift of accurate, proper and perfectly simple tequila glasses from dear friends.

We leave for dinner in town as the sun drops to discuss gardens and concrete and friends lost and found. We return to a dark tree house and try out the glasses. They work a treat!

Things calm down a touch but there is a welcome development. We have received our first rent. Our Reno friend has contributed to proceedings in appreciation of the place (and our loveliness clearly). It’s a strange and welcome thing to have a “money in” section in our books. And so it begins.

During the past mad busy few days our man has been noisily attacking our Parota chunks under clouds and mounds of sawdust. What has appeared is very impressive. The wood is now alive with smooth texture & deep colours. Our Parota kitchen counter is ready for the beaten copper bucket/bowl that will be the sink. Our huge round slices of tree/outside tables are ready for setting on logs refined as legs. There is so much beautiful drying Parota we are spoilt for choice. We were in PV stocking up and found similar wood lumps (untreated) for sale at stingingly silly prices. We done good. It’s all going to look epic.

It rained hard again last night. The bouncy splashy wet type for many hours. We are assured this is very very unusual for December. We were caught out and much is wet that shouldn’t be. The vehicles throw films of mud over everything including us. I have a cold. I probably have a touch of ebola mixed in too. I’m being very brave.

Our new concrete man has turned out to be a right character. He is often found a hundred feet up a tree he has climbed just because. He catches huge fresh water shrimp from our streams and juggles scorpions .If he gets stung by one he tells us the cure is to eat it. He has philosophies about pretty much everything and we have a strangely comfortable bond developing. His English is worse that my Spanish and he is, I am told, still fairly incomprehensible anyway. He is a good looking young man, exactly the same age as me, half my weight and twice as strong. It’s a touch depressing.

We are getting regular visits to the land from new people we meet in town and further chance meetings with old friends. We have had South Africans arrive I haven’t seen in years and a friend who I last met ten years ago in New Zealand. She just happened to be staying in town. There seems to be a heap of people from Calgary here too. The waterfalls are becoming a popular destination walk and we are easy to find on the way out so there is a steady stream of folk that happen across us and want to know what we are up to. Our tours of the land are getting practice. It is interesting to see the place through fresh eyes and new perspective. It gives us confidence that we are creating a place and space that others will love like we do.

Plans are afoot. Now the Bodega apartment (Selva Vista) is on it’s way to being finished the BrickSHouse area is our next focus. We can get water there from the top of the hill and revive the shower and install one of our newly built composting loos. We have researched acquiring a number of large glamping style bell tents that can be located on platforms and house queen size beds. There is a contact that has a supplier in China and the budget is not too bad. The idea gains some traction when we realise that our man is offering to build us small casitas with palapa roofs from locally foraged materials for much less and very quickly. We calculate that this gives us the best chance to offer something unique and funky and make decent rent in the shortest time.

We have lost our desire for concrete gate posts and that has moved things along considerably. We now have a gate. It was a tree and now, thanks to chainsaw and skill, it’s a fabulous gate hung between wooden gate posts. This gives us a boundary and entrance to our land for the first time. It’s located at the first entry point to the South side and is a great addition to the mix. Love it.

Our orange toilet block has been bugging us. We have revised our plans to revive the shower and tile the floor. It’s a large space. Too large we think for single loo and a shower. We have, therefore, applied a touch of rethink and have created an outdoor shower on a nearby tree. It’s surrounded by a spiral of palm bark planks from downed trees around our solar array. The remaining blocks of palm will be terraced into the earth to create planting zones. Palm wood does not last long out here and disintegrates quickly into fertile planting goodness. So we will tile the floor and chuck in a few beds and boom! … the orange block becomes another resting area for weary volunteers who need a budget option. The outdoor shower is looking very sexy and set to revive the hot and sweaty by dispensing authentic jungle temperature waterfall.

Xmas eve is spent borrowing an oven to cook pumpkin pies (strange looking squash pies actually) and watching sunset at our favorite beach bar. There was a set from a jazz guitarist & drummer from the town. A professional trombonist happens to be at the bar and joins them. They improvise on John Coltrane tracks. Perfect.

Xmas day comes and goes with minimal fuss. My present is a hand drawn card and I stun Jayne with a parody version of Merry Xmas everyone by Slade on the Ukulele. “And here it is …. our first Xmas in the jungle with a cat. If you’re looking for the perfect life it’s exactly where it’s aaaah-aaaah-aaat !“ …. I’ll save you from the verses. We eat well with friends old and new in town after a particularly lazy morning catching up with family on Skype.

The new bee location has been discovered by at least one Coatis. I saw one on these sticky pawed buggers this morning looking rather pleased with itself. These large raccoon type creatures get into anything and apparently like our honey. They have moved heavy rocks on the beehive roof and taken bites out of the honeycombs. We are repairing and securing them as best we can. The bees are unsettled and one of the smaller hives looks like its been abandoned. We are working on making the place more queen bee friendly and less a honey trap for Coatis.

We have had a very strange and shocking accident. We were in the Polaris returning back to the house from plumbing the apartment. It’s my son’s birthday and he is on face time with me following the journey from our phone. There is a sudden and startling loud crashing noise and something hits my head hard and bounces painfully off my leg. We come to a sudden stop and there are very huge chucks of wood everywhere. We check each other. We are somehow not injured. Jayne runs to a spot less likely to be fatal as I look up and around to assess what has happened. A huge branch has fallen directly onto the Polaris roof directly above my head, which was saved from being crushed by the strength and build quality of the roll cage. The bar above my head has a significant dent in it. The rest of the vehicle is bruised but in pretty good shape considering. The offending log of wood is lying in front of us covered in over a dozen quite stunning Bromeliads. It was probably the weight of them that sent it ground wards. When I’m sure nothing else is coming down at me I haul it from the road. It is very heavy and takes all my strength to move. There are smaller large logs all around us that have broken off the main branch. We look up and see where the branch started from and it’s very very high up. The chances of this happening are probably a fair bit less than being struck by lightening. Our luck being directly under this thing as it landed is questionable. Our considerable luck surviving with no injuries at all is not. We are grateful, humbled and both pretty shaken up.

My son and his friend have watched this happen. They are wondering if it was a set up just for them. We are all delighted that his birthday did not include seeing his Dad squashed flat live from the UK.

We take the rest of the day off. The sunset looks particularly pretty and the margaritas are just that extra bit delicious.

Our plumbing is done and waiting to be connected up to a tinaco and our new hot water shower looks well posh! The concrete battery house is nearly done and there is so much in the pipeline for the next few weeks. We have three new palapa roofed cabins in production and a crew from Sayulita (our first real work party) arriving after New Year to give us a full week’s work on the white house. The apartment is getting there and on track and we will be offering the “gypsy cabin” up for AirBnB as soon as the paint drys . Progress… poco a poco.

San Pancho is full of folk now. It’s in post Xmas full swing. Sayalita is unbearably busy we hear. People enquiring about renting the Polaris stopped us in the street. We are mending the bits that the tree broke and have added a “rent our Polaris” page to the website and are sorting out the web of knotted red ribbons which is Mexican commercial car insurance. It’s looking a lot more likely we will actually get a real live punter soon!

Amongst our discoveries when clearing up all the places here are filthy old note pads, drafts of books and a roll of various architectural plans for septic tanks and buildings. It is fascinating to read lists of costs and materials from 8-10 years ago that are so similar to the ones we are creating today. Amongst the bat guano stained pages are letters to guests/friends who have outstayed their welcome and hospital bills for treating Scorpion bites. This bonds us to the folk who were here before us. It reminds us that others had dreams for this place and some were realized. Locals have told us that when Richard (an ex NFL player) was building the tree house and the pool he made the whole place incredibly beautiful. All to attract his wife down to visit from California. He died here but left a strong legacy, which we greatly respect. His carpentry work that remains is outstanding.

We discovered that five years ago a girl called Mary setup a treatment retreat for recovering drug addicts here. It was based on the premise that taking a locally strong hallucinogenic called Ibogain cured addiction. There is much written in credible scientific journals about the effects of Ibogain C₂₀H₂₆N₂O (originally African in origin) to help heroin addiction. We continue to learn how that all worked out. It was a controversial venture that did not win unanimous local support or sympathy we hear.

We both are looking back at how our own lives have played out these past few days, weeks and months with some incredulity. This year we have been around the world at least once and have had some extraordinary adventures. We returned to UK in July in time for the Glastonbury Festival (my 27th time and Jayne’s first). We then decided to pack up our lives into 11 bags and a surfboard and move into a tree house in a far away jungle. This was not the plan when we woke in San Francisco, USA on New Years Day a year ago planning to build another temple at Burning Man. That feels like two lifetimes away. I have been in Mexico now for coming up to 4 months. This is the longest I have been in one place since I can remember. It’s a very good thing.

Happy New Year.

Jungle Journal

Christmas Buzz

December 23, 2017
by Jayne

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!! Sending you all our love, seasons greetings and a big hug. This post is jointly written by us both, so we’ve labelled the writer at the beginning of each section.

Jayne: We’ve decided to skip Christmas this year. No decorations, we are not sending any Christmas cards, or giving presents, and it has been stress free, uncommercial and very nice so far. We’ve been invited to eat Christmas dinner with new friends in town on the 25th, and I am going to attempt to make pumpkin pies. So far the only troubles I’ve had are not having pumpkin, pie dishes or an oven. It’s all going exactly to plan. I’ve still got two days.

To be honest it doesn’t feel a lot like Christmas here in Mexico. When we do see a decorated tree, or one of the very few houses with lights on them, they seem somehow out of place.

It probably has something to do with the weather…

Beave: Our ability to manifest continues to surprise. Jayne wants local bees on the land. They produce a deep dark honey which is divine stuff. We get a call from a guy who wants to meet up. He is from Chapala and lives close to our illusionary mechanic there.

He has some bees he wants to relocate.

We agree to meet up the next day and potentially collect three hives from somewhere not to far away. The location turns out to be a cornfield less than a mile from our house.

Jayne: I spend quite a lot of time trying to define how La Colina will be in the future. It’s a constantly changing vision and every day we have new ideas, or change course slightly or make a wild new discovery. A few things have been constant however:

We will manage the land according to permaculture ethics and principles.
La Colina is intended to be a place for people to take a break from their default world, get in touch with nature, and reset themselves.
La Colina is our home first and everything else second.
We will grow food.
We will have chickens.
We will have bees.

I am keen to have bees not only for their delicious honey and useful wax, but because bees are so important in keeping our planet alive and thriving, and without them so many plants would not survive. I want to nurture them and keep the planet happy. I was thrilled to hear that the bee man wanted to gift us some hives. However my only beekeeping experience is vicariously through my parents and sister, who have hives in Canada, and my very good friends Arielle and Jon, who have a honey farm.

Beave was nominated head beekeeper because he’s so strong, and the hives are heavy! I’ve seen my sister’s beesuit, and so I made Beave a bee hat by stapling mosquito netting around a straw cowboy hat, and duct-taping the holes shut.

Beave sporting my specially constructed hat

Beave: I have no experience of bee keeping at all although I do know a fairly large crowd of apiarists. Somehow this qualifies me to be appointed chief bee mover. Jayne staples mosquito netting around a straw hat and puts me into a white long sleeve shirt with work gloves and wellies. I am fully protected and ready to go they tell me. Bee man fills a smoker with dried cow pats and in clouds of poo smoke I am introduced to a large amount of fairly pissed off Africanized Mexican bees. They are mildly more aggressive breed and especially today as moving was not in their plan. We wrap the hives in blankets and I carry them to a wheelbarrow. The hives are heavy and vibrating strongly with countless complaining noisy creatures. The buzzing is so loud that I am unable to hear Jayne who is trying to tell me something. I have something on my head apparently. The bees that were not captured in the sheet have all decided the best place to hang out is on my hat. There are hundreds of them up there. No wonder the noise is so loud.

My hands are vibrating strongly. I have learned very quickly that bees do not like the colour black. My black work gloves are covered in stinging bees. A few of them are getting through and it hurts. Thankfully these stings are nothing compared to the hornets and are soon forgotten. I haul the wheelbarrow with one of the sheet wrapped hives across a muddy cornfield three times. With my lungs full of poo smoke and my hands full of stings I am positioned in the back of the truck clinging onto many thousands of angry bees as we head towards their new home. It’s getting dark.

Getting the smoker going

Old hive location

Preparations

Putting old frames in a new hive Jayne built

Corn!

Bee Sunset

Alex smoking the hive while its being moved

The Beehives new home at La Colina

The off load is many times more dangerous. It’s now entirely dark and the torches and lanterns we are using glare my eyes through the mosquito net and also attract bees who are in stinging mood. There are yelps of pain from the torch carriers. “Don’t show the light to the beasts” shouts our bee man helpfully. I blindly and very slowly carry the hives one by one along our jungle path to an area of cleared jungle down a muddy slope. I must avoid tripping on tree stumps and sliding off the path at all costs. The prospect of falling in the dark with a hive of angry bees is not worth contemplating. Finally we have them set and carefully remove the sheets and retreat into the darkness. We return to the tree house to lick our wounds and contemplate our future of abundant honey.

Xmas is approaching. No apologies for lack of Xmas cards and presents. Replacing all that with genuine feelings of connection to all our friends and family. We are truly blessed to know you all.

Feliz Navidad x

Jungle Journal

Well pumps and welly boots….

December 10, 2017
by Beave

We have become very used to waking with the sun and collapsing after sunset. At first light we were loading pallets from a corral onto our pick up truck to create composting areas. Our large screen windows at home means that outside and inside are pretty much the same place less a few hundred bugs. This makes us sensitive to the subtle changes in moonlight, humidity and temperature. We wear welly boots far more often than is fashionably acceptable, our finger nails refuse to remain unfilled with muck and we moan to anyone who will listen how skint we are . Have never felt more like farmers.

Our visitor diary is filing up. Soon we will have no time to ourselves till at least March. This is not a bad thing, as we need help and did make this move to share our space. Jayne’s entire family will have come and gone by February and then a load of lovely Irish and Jake. In the meantime we will have friends from many places arriving for a few weeks and some welcome randoms who have contacted us through the website/blog . So many people arriving from afar bearing gifts. All this gives me faith that I will not run out of the essentials to life, the holy trinity of Yorkshire Tea/HP Sauce and Marmite.

With the prospect of paying guests in the near future we will have our work cut out. We appreciate the help from everyone who comes here and warn in advance that due to paying guests taking all the best spots you may end up in a hammock under a mosquito net but that’s not a bad thing here.

All the equipment for the magic sun power is threatened to manifest soon so our “ to do now list “ is expanding. We have to create a secure house for our lovely expensive much desired batteries and a 6m x 4M by at least 3M high rack at precisely 17 degrees to the sun to house our photon catchers. No mean feat. There is much talking to over enthusiastic welders, builders and other keen sorts. As gringos our quotes are usually with the addition of a zero or two. We have had quotes for the racking that differ by a factor of ten (no kidding ). We arrange to meet an iron guy from Bucerias who we know (and more importantly is considerably cheaper than everyone else) at an Oxxo carpark. We do the deal over the truck hood and arrange delivery next week.

So along with everything else we are preparing to power up the near 200M of electrical cable that Jayne’s Dad has managed to wrap our house in . Not bad going considering the house itself is only 6m x 6m . There is an extraordinary little box of tricks that plugs into the truck that powers the entire house from the 12V battery ! Feels like cheating but gives us a taste of what is to come.

We have noted that our “ with nature” farmers life is being eroded with the introduction of such major developments as hot water and power , USBs on the wall and more than anything else light bulbs. When there is light around body and mind stays with it for a lot longer. When it’s dark you shut down pretty fast. Part of me already misses the candle light and an excuse for an embarrassingly early night.

Water remains an issue. 2500L Tinacos and gravity are the answer. Great big wide heavy Tinacos. We have 5 of then now. Tinaco 1 is nearest to the wellhead followed by Tinaco 2 at the start of the new path across the land. The idea is to pump water from well to Tinaco 1 or directly to Tinaco 2 . We then use a bigger pump to get water from there across the land 130M to the top of the hill to Tinacos 3 & 4. These use gravity to feed the brick-shit house and Tinaco 5 above our house that can also feed the pool. A very simple plan except there are no Tinacos at the top of the hill.

We collect the most recently found one (Tinaco 3 ) and decide to add some gravity and drag the thing from its current very low resting place to the top of the hill. We collect it in the truck and deliver it to the tree house and survey the path up the hill. There isn’t one. At least half is at a cliff like angle and the rest completely overgrown. If we scramble from tree to tree it is possible to get up the top. The Tinaco however is a different tale. Blunt force and humour are our only weapons but somehow it works. I am on the ground with feet wedged in the most grippy bits of root I can find heaving on the rope while our man pushes and steers and his son takes the rope behind me and wraps it around a tree so we don’t have the thing disappear down the hill with me attached to it. It is a very dirty, sweaty and grunty affair. Somehow we make it.

Tinaco 4 is above our house. Timing is perfect as it is all but empty. The tree house is switched to Tinaco 5. It’s currently the last of the water on the North side. We attach rope to Tinaco 4 and a tree and launch the thing down the hill to be manhandled slowly across the side of the cliff and then upward ever upwards. Maustrappe has got herself curious and followed us up. She suddenly and hilariously reconsiders her position as the Tinaco swings downwards towards her. She takes off at a speed that suggests she has been shot from a cannon. My eyes can hardly keep up with the blur of cat that has flown past the house and is still going. We may never see her again. How we laughed.

Much more sweat, tick collecting , boy noises and close shaves later Tinaco 4 meets Tinaco 3 up the hill. Now if we can get these buggers filled we are all good for water North side. I retreat to shower myself and remove the first dozen ticks. I meet Maustrappe in the house with wide eyes and half her body weight in jungle stuck to her. I spend some time giggling and removing trees and shrubs from her tail.

My good Catalonian friend has ruined me for Mexican Spanish. I had very few Spanish words in my vocabulary a few short months ago. One of them was Cerveza (beer) surprisingly enough. I have been somewhat discouraged to learn that my perfect Catalonian dialect is considered a speech impediment here. I have had many a sorry look on a number of occasions when boldly and confidently asking for a Th’erveth’a. Wiping spit from their eye they offer a “bless the poor boy smile “. Szervessa?? Is he actually trying to say Szervessa??

The Mexican food here is inevitably accompanied by three options of chili-based condiment. One green and tepid for the tourists, one red and tongue stripingly efficient and finally the local brew which is dark deep purple and is effectively napalm. The locals slosh the stuff down them fearlessly. This has lasting effects on a chaps taste buds and mouth nerve endings. Local oral hygiene products are , therefore, things to be respected I have learned. I made the mistake of taking a modest slug of the local mouthwash and it was an event. The fresh tingle one would expect from a mouthwash is replaced with a turpentine burn . Inhaling the fumes is not recommended. The resultant noise I produced was , I am told, not pretty. I found only a mix of straight tequila followed by a shot of Mescal got the taste out of my nose and allowed me to speak again. I ended up with an industrially cleansed mouth and slightly drunk.

There was a lunch. We are in the midst of crazy day of buying all the things for as little as possible in the searing heat of Bucerias. It’s a tourist town that is the overspill of Puerto Vallarta. The Mexican Government has encouraged and promoted the whole area as the Cancun of the Pacific for years . There is a great beach and lots of restaurants to service the high population of tourists. We come across a French one with a French waitress and a French menu. I am teased with six oysters and then felled by rare beef in exceptional bread with jus. Now jus is just posh gravy but what a gravy !! A 2003 Beaune or an icy Chablis would have made this a perfect moment but I am in Mexico so Dos Equis XX Larger will have to do. Gravy ….I clearly miss gravy.

Strangely my French has improved enormously now I’m trying get Spanish into spaces in my overfilled brain. I often break into French when I’m trying my best to speak confident Spanish. When I search my limited Spanish vocabulary for a word I inevitably remember the French version. Not entirely useful.

The doors are here. Our iron artist from Las Varas and his young son appear early and I help him carry the doors up to our house, as his truck won’t make it. Jayne’s Dad performs electrical field surgery on the generator to allow the welder to work without blowing the fuse. Very impressive skills. This allows a new lock system to be melted onto the Bodega so our stuff in there ( and there is a lot of stuff ) is safe. There are also two strong boxes that have been made for us to secrete our more valuable stuff inside. One for us and one for our apartment. These will be bolted somewhere not-obvious yet to be decided. We return to find the house fringe trimmed and the front door installed. It looks epic. The skull door knocker we were gifted our first week here is integrated into the design. The shower door is also installed with our logo at the centre and there is even a door for Mausetrappe. Previous grotty security curtain is removed and we now have natural light pouring into bathroom. Our house has transformed from open plan “help yourself” to effectively secure. Our first real unique art commissioned and installed.

There is a further delivery today. After some buggering about with officialdom and agreeing to further buggering about in a few days and promise of cash we have taken delivery of Jayne’s Dads Polaris. I’m sure his own blog will more than cover the many hours of drudgery with Mexican officialdom before anyone owns anything and his excitement of driving back and heading into town for lunch then off up the hills afterwards. There is no stopping him now. We have named our newly broken in & muddied machine Pauly. Pauly Polaris.

Another delivery today was all the way from Colorado. New best friend arrives back after thanksgiving in his restaurant and collecting mail for us ! Jayne gets two pairs of new shoes and I get a brand new 24V DC well pump. We both get a gift package from a friend and that is brilliant. We continue to have no mail service here. No Xmas cards in or out this year. Good news.

The last delivery of the day is attempted/ supervised under fading light from a huge tipper truck that skillfully reverses into our parking spot on the South side and dumps a small mountain of sand. It’s destined to be a brown concrete sexy floor next week. We have a “Maestro” booked for two weeks to do all the clever stuff that is beyond the skill set of the rest of us. Took some days of negotiation and the promise of a cement mixer to get him to sign on. I have lugged many 50kg chunks of cement in preparation for his arrival. A slightly larger mountain of gravel is predicted tomorrow. Keep this guy in materials and we should have a battery house , a sexy apartment floor and base groundings for our newly ordered solar frame and posts for a front gate that we intend to up-cycle from the white house floor boards. They need replacing anyway.

Found some bowls in the local market and bought them. First spontaneous art purchase. Couldn’t help it. They got me. Not sure how they will be useful but they make me happy.

Swam today. Forgotten how good it feels to float in the Pacific. San Pancho has some serious shore break waves that have dumped me a number of times. There is an undertow and a drifting current so you have to have your head on when you swim. OK for strong swimmers but not for kids on the main beach. There are good kid friendly spots not far away behind the surf break we are told. Further investigation required. Floating on your back and watching the fish jumping around you and being overflown by pelicans just a few feet from your nose is a great way to relax.

Pressure is on to get an apartment ready to rent. We have put great faith in the Maestro . Too much perhaps. Bugger is that Maestros earn fairly good money and are (in our experience of ours ) a bit precious. We have furnished him with a concrete mixer he refuses to use, two helpers, a lift at 8 am every morning, a lift home and all the time in the world. To be fair in the Polaris we have the trip into town down to a nifty 6 minutes without racing. However, our “two day” job is looking more like 10 days … we are biting our lips as we have an apartment with heaps of concrete in a small amount of places of a brownish colour and nothing in most. We are starting to regret this process more and more as it eats into our funds. The result should be stunning so we are holding back our frustration with the pace of things. We are looking elsewhere for another maestro for the other jobs. Life is too short.

Small changes make a big difference here. The large river rocks that did for my thumb nail and my dignity have been distributed skilfully around the garden. This has created borders and allowed the fruit trees to stand out magnificently. It’s starting to look proper.

Our photon catcher frame arrived today. We take the Polaris to the beginning of our road and lead the unsuspecting iron guys through streams and bush to the path that our man has created at the very back border of our land . With a machete, a 4×4 and mucky bravado we dump 6m x 4m of steel frame with legs and bolts onto our sun trap. If we can get a battery house under way all will be good.

Now I do check pretty much daily the Bodega for mice. There is a humane trap loaded with peanut butter under the workspace. I am distracted for a few days by life and check on the trap that is now obscured by sheets and paint pots. The cage has a dead mouse in it. I missed it, I am responsible and feel terrible.

The pool has a dodgy valve and in order to examine the even dodgier filter pump it needs replacing. This required someone (me) to saw through a fully loaded pipe that will shoot swimming pol at high pressure into my face. While drowning standing up in a small concrete box full of ants and unfeasibly large spiders I am required to attach new pipe and connections with a bolt screw and my glasses pressed onto my eyes with the force of water. I manage this eventually in time to avoid drowning. Meanwhile Jayne’s Dad helpfully takes photos.

I clean out the pool of the worst floating flotsam in anticipation of the filter pump working. I am stunned most days by having to fish out the pool at least one ex-frog. I thought frogs could happily swim for many hours and if not have the sense to hop onto the pool steps. Apparently not. Despite attempts to deploy floating rest areas our ex-frog count is pretty high. There is also the occasional ex-mouse. I see a mouse attached to a plastic outlet on the side of the pool. It’s alive! I reach down with a net to save the thing and it dives in. I follow him as he swims the entire length of the pool under water. I did not know mice could do that. He surfaces into my net and I flick him to the relative safety of the jungle. Makes me feel a touch less guilty about the Bodega ex-mouse.

Jayne’s Dad has returned home. He has left us with extra tools, better knowledge, a fully wired house, guest blogs, a rewired super hero generator, the first ever geocache in San Pancho and a rather lovely Polaris to care for. We are very grateful.

The filter pump is shot. The motor has been living with humidity spiders and ants for too long and is no longer useful. We are told it must be replaced at great cost. By some universal twist of fortune we randomly meet our solar guy with his pump man who directs us to his motor guy who rewinds the motor for a fraction of the cost. We like saving money we haven’t got. We rebuild the pump and connect it up to all the plumbing (eventually without leaks) and set it off with our super hero generator We lose a bunch of water somewhere mysterious and I get a good bolt of hair raising electricity through me when I touch the motor . Our pool is being cleansed at last. The cleaner pool water is , however, noticeably less than when we started. More attention is required to prevent further water loss and electrocution.

Mausetrappe has taken to sleeping on my feet. Not terrible except for the occasional teeth in the toes cry for attention at 3am. My attention was full on when the crazy beggar decides to have a 4 am dikkie fit and flip about the bed until I am awake. My torch uncovers a cat torturing a mouse at my feet. That’s Mausetrappe 3 : Beave 5 . Sometime later I recover the nearly ex-mouse. I dispatched him junglewards and returned to kick the cat. She cleverly avoids me and retires to the balcony.

When I finally get back to sleep and awake too early ( to pick up Maestro,) I find the usual amount of half chewed and totally pawed bug parts. A cat gift apparently, for which I am presumable expected to be grateful. I am not. Amongst the bits we recognise at least one scorpion. Wake up call. The cat is a good weapon but not as good as the spray muck that scared away the ants. We apply it to the bed legs and doorways. Now considering every beast we know dislikes this stuff it is a fair bet it is not good cat food/lick. We shut the cat onto the balcony with water and food and go to work and leave her safe.

We return and she had gone. No sign on the balcony and no sign of any bits of ex-cat on the ground or under the house. The mystery is short lived. There is a cat shaped hole in the mosquito net door. I continue to be sleep deprived and ungrateful for the cat while I set about mending it … again.

We head to town to collect laundry and ice. On the way we take the plastic recycling pile that has accrued over the months. It’s a foul mess of spiders and unspeakable fluids and muck. By the time we have it all sorted into the right piles at the local recycling yard we are covered from head to toe in horrors. I go to the local Pemex petrol station and wreck their bathroom washing myself. I am dirty, damp and tired. Time for tequila or two. We head to collect the block ice that has been in the freezer at our friend’s bar for days waiting for us. We bump into friends and more friends arrive and before we get a chance to eat we are a Canadian down. Tequila, fatigue and no food have done their worse. Somehow, with a little help from our friends, I manage to carry her home and drive the truck at the same time. She is going to be embarrassed and rather unwell tomorrow.

It’s an early start today. We have Mausetrappe booked into the free clinic they have a few days a year in San Pancho to remove breeding bits. One cat/kitten is enough. She is not happy and moans loudly while clinging to me on the journey into town. Reminds me of the journey home last night. We manage to get her into a box at the clinic and Jayne gets to be embarrassed as our friends who helped us last night are helping out there today. Mausetrappe is a grumpy No.41.

Jayne is unwell. There is most sympathy from our man whose birthday it is today. He is 33. Only 33. He used to be a National rodeo rider and fight bulls. He has given it up ( almost) as he has been trampled a few too many times and once spent 11 days in a coma after having a bulls horn thrust in his head. He is a small guy but as strong as two oxen. His Dad is another story. I have not been able to work out how he swings a machete so well or lift rocks like he does at his age. He must be late 60s or early 70s perhaps. He is on his 4^th wife we think. Turns out he is 58. I am staggered. Only 6 six years older than me!! Jayne likes this news very much and reminds me often just in case I forget for a moment. How kind.

We drive down to the river where the remains of the Parota tree still stand. We meet the guy who owns the tree and he tells us to take what we want. What we want is large lumps of wood to make outside tables. Left to us we would have happily made do with the 8 foot x 3 feet lengths left over from a previous wood snatch. We take these, of course, but our man then shows us a whole slice, of tree, which he wants to get into our truck. Now Parota is as heavy as concrete and this looked all but impossible. But we did it. The truck survived and so did we. We rolled it on like a massive tier and rolled it off the other the end (outside the orange shower block). It’s going to be amazing when it’s cleaned up. It will become an outstanding table and the other bits will transform into bathroom and kitchen counters.

We return to town to collect the cat. She is a great deal quieter on the journey home . Anaesthetic still very much in effect. Tripping her little face off. She gets home and staggers around with back legs splayed like a frog and eyes spinning. Another reminder of the night before…

Splitting bamboo is an art form. Ninja like our man and I set about the task. I orientate the bamboo lengths and angle it exactly as our 10 minutes of YouTube training showed us. He takes a machete and smashes it closer and closer to my face with a hammer. When it gets too scary we both take a side and pull as hard as we can and the bamboo cracks in half (ish). We have this process down to about two splits a minute but it is exhausting. We split enough to line the bathroom and shower then I paint them with anti-termite goo.

It has rained all night. Hard. I wake up and employ clothes for the first time in many months. I have long pants and socks and a hoodie on! The Polaris is fun in the mud , the apartment roof has had it’s first test and works amazingly well. We have a dry floor for “ Juan Juan the slow concrete man” to work with. To be fair the concrete mixer has had a workout and there is now a few extra tons of floor. The angle at which the current floor is tilted is requiring huge quantities of leveling. Thankfully the existing roof is well made and fully re-barred (as we found when trying to drill holes through for the plumbing) so will cope.

Friend arrives in a few days from Reno. Big push to get something to rent by Xmas. San Pancho is effectively fully booked January and February. Must take advantage of high season. We are making savings where we can to divert cash to building materials. Jayne has given up tequila apparently so that will help.

There now follows our first ( and probably not our last ) blatant self-promotion bit. In order to encourage a little cash flow to pay for concrete and sweat we are offering a few alternative Xmas present options for sale. Buy your loved one a bat, a bee or a tree. Check out our shop.