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A beautiful lotus growing in our pool
Currently more of a pond…
Jungle Journal

Armadillo in the fridge & a techno handbag

  • January 18, 2019January 18, 2019
  • by Beave

A

The New Year is upon us all and we get to look ahead with the benefit of looking back.  Making loose plans to make our lives better, happier, easier, more fulfilling Working out what is working and what can be improved. No pressure. We can all prevaricate easily for a month and if nothing changes we will be well into 2019 so can drink just as much and settle into the same comfortable bad habits guilt free.

We have identified a missing element that we have not prioritized enough in 2018 and is a game changer.  There is a lack of excellent music in our lives because we haven’t invested in a reliable music device that is practical and impressive enough. We are motivated to fix this issue quickly.  During a rare visit to the big city we are tempted by a huge Mexican electronic box with the promise of loud Mexican style music delivery with a microphone to further irritate the neighbours. We are seduced and buy one. The big black box of promise lasts an hour of blue-toothed tunes before picking up some random clicks, farts and whistles that don’t really add to the experience. Our $28 USD investment is perhaps not the value we were looking for. 

Our mates who run the Cerveceria in town use a rather sexy single box of tricks to ply excellent quality tunes upon its customers. We identify one and return the big black box of promise and exchange it for what looks like a high tech handbag. It’s sound is amazing and we now have no excuse to trawl our endless supply of obscure and classic tracks hidden on endless devices. Over a three month period during 2017 I transformed my entire CD collection of thirty years into a tiny plastic box. This box is now delivering a frightening amount of music through my laptop to the techno-handbag and into our jungle. It’s fab.

Our new sexy techno handbag

These past days have been a rolling feast.  Xmas Eve we were presented with extraordinary freshly caught fish and other white food. Our friends who have one of the most impressive homes in the town and a strong Norwegian heritage feed us their traditional white pre-Xmas fare.

The Beef Wellington Xmas day get together goes swimmingly. Great food and company till just late enough. Lots of help with tidy up in the morning. Again our free bar created considerably more booze than we started with.  We again are reminded of fairly significant impracticalities when creating four Beef Wellingtons in the jungle. The most obvious of these is that the only oven we have is a treacherous hike down a very slippy hill, a jungle road, and a contortion through a cow gate to get to it.  The secret to creating good food out here is mostly not dropping stuff. Our twin burner on which we cook pretty much everything has become a single burner and recently started to manufacture soot at an alarming rate.

Beef Wellington Xmas Day

We have succumbed to circumstances and taken a further plunge and invested in an oven for the tree house. It takes some rearranging of fridges and space to make room but somehow it all slots in. The fridge is cleaned out before moving it. The same fridge that only days before was home to an Armadillo that the neighbours were trying to keep fresh as a treat for their boss to eat. Bonus is we find some forgotten delights. Mustards and precious horseradish. The oven being so close does have the advantage of encouraging pecan pie and other delights to appear more regularly. It also means that I will not have to make four separate 20 minute missions in the dark to babysit one Beef Wellington ever again. Henry our new horno (oven) is installed. Let’s see how he works out.

Henry Horno

There are further additions to our lives which have been coming for a long time. I have been constantly and enthusiastically informed over many many weeks that there are two things that my life cannot be complete without. I am less persuaded by the argument but have a strong desire to change the conversation so I surrender and drag two of the heaviest chairs I have ever had the joy of owning up our many stairs and somehow squeeze them into our lives. She is very happy. As is the cat that is now permanently installed in one of them.

Heavy expensive cat beds

Sad news. Hey–hey our half chewed chicken became, as predicted, eagle food. Well a snack anyway.  We do miss the ugly little thug.  The culprit has been identified as the large evil bugger we spotted on the chicken house.  It’s a Collared Forest Falcon; the top bird predator out here. They are also called orgasm birds. At sunrise and sunset they make a distinctive high pitched sound that is often mistaken for particularly successful love making.  Oooo-OOoo-OOOoooo-OOOOOoooo-AAAhhhhhhhh…..  We have heard them often but didn’t associate the noise with such a beast of a bird.  It’s an endangered species our remaining chickens will be pleased to know.

Collared Forrest Falcon full of chicken.

Worrying news. Pinto/Tripod (the dog that adopts us when it suit him) is AWOL.  It’s been an officially worrying amount of time since we have seen him. Food on our balcony remains uneaten. No late night cacophony as he chases some beast up a tree. Our friend is missing. He is a remarkably hard arsed jungle dog and it would take a lot to bring him down so we have faith he is still around somewhere taking up a better offer. He is a tart for attention and food as known by everyone who has met him. This scruffy, stinky, battle hardened character is well loved and has an impressive international fan club. We await his return.

Our new president “AMLO” has certainly showed his intentions in his first month. It’s not going to be simple or painless to change the old ways. There have been highly disruptive propane shortages due to the government not allowing price increases. Hot showers are a rare thing these days in even in hotels. There is also a National fuel (petrol) shortage, which is grinding entire states to a halt. There is a previously accepted process where 48% of Mexico’s petrol is stolen and sold back to Pemex (the National petrol stations.) AMLO decided this was not going to continue so stopped the flow. Only official outlets are supplying fuel now. The Pemex stations that were forced to buy from the black market are shut off.  In Michoacán there are over 90% of petrol stations without fuel today. Thankfully we have a small stash of propane and our local Pemex is buying legitimately so we are not as affected as most.  Interesting times for Mexico.  We just hope and pray that AMLO gets his way and doesn’t get stopped by less democratic means.

I have been banging on about our soon to be yoga deck now for months. As with any truly yogic project it’s on its way in it’s own time and space.  Breathe and relax. Don’t stress. We found the necessary stuffs to keep the jungle out of our wood and make it the required colour. I have applied it to the main beams and will slowly work my way cutting to length, sanding and treating the 120 pieces of planking. We have the necessary tools and even the hardware. So no more excuses. My piles of wood look more like a deck every day. I’m hoping it’s own time and space converges with mine in the not too distant future. But no stress right? Just breathe in the varnish fumes.

Yoga deck part one.

 We now have deep bassey playlists in our background thanks to our techno-handbag.  Mixed in with our auto-generated lists of tunes appear short excerpts from Spanish language lessons. This is not a bad thing. Most recently we had Tom Waits followed by a 5 minute Spanish lesson followed by Rage Against the Machine then George Michael then 2 minutes of past tense grammar. These sneaky Trojan horses are helping my Spanish, which needs it.

We know a universal truth.  Paying guests means much laundry and thankfully we have a heap of them. The girls in town are loving the business and we are becoming aficionados at recognizing a queen sheet from a matrimonial. Skills you never knew you needed. Good to have an income and make ends meet at the end of the month for a change. It’s our first season so we have a heap to learn but so far so good. Had really cool guests from all sorts of places near and far. Very nearly everyone gets what we are doing and 5 star loves us. Long may that continue. Validation always feels good and is motivating to make things even better in a positive way.  Worth the challenge of the very few needy buggers and the endless loo buckets. Metaphorically and physically dealing with other people’s shit.

Pauly our Razor Polaris ATV is unwell.  There has been dodgy sounds coming from the rear CV joint for a few days. This has distracted us from the clunky steering. We try and make a slow turn near our house and the steering goes completely. We are immensely grateful we were not traveling at any speed and our only problem is having to fix the thing where it stopped in the jungle.  One of our fabulous  mates is going to California to see his folks for Xmas and we ensure that there is a shiny new rack & pinion under his Mum’s tree to smuggle back to us post haste. Another mule is recruited from Canada to sneak us in a tiny little CV joint axle. We are resigned to be without our beloved and exceptionally useful ATV for a number of weeks. Django our trusted and much loved big blue van is employed. We thankfully just replaced her transmission and she is running well. Limonada the pick-up is still too thirsty and unreliable and we make plans to replace her. Life certainly slows down without Pauly.

Pauly in bits in the jungle.
Django back at the helm

We receive news about Pinto/Tripod.  Despite being enormously well fed and medicated against fleas and ticks and in generally great shape our happy dog has been “rescued”. Some white woman “gringa” randomly decided to relocate Pinto the jungle hardened pack leader and find him a new less exciting suburban home. Bloody cheek!  I‘m doing some research to see if I can trace this irritating self-righteous idiot and return Pinto to his exceptional jungle life. The search is on.

Pack leader and protector.

New Year Eve we deal with a significant influx and exit of guests and finally and gratefully we head out to meet friends at our favorite restaurant in town.  The place is packed with familiar faces filled with excellent food.  The Chamorro is a thing of beauty.  Whenever my body needs energy or my heart needs to sing I have a 10 hour cooked Chamorro.  The boys take a whole shank of pork and cook the life into it with oranges and herbs and just the right touch of care. Carlos is the chef here. I tend to avoid the young wannabes and head to the oldest slowest ladies to cook for me here. They are magicians. They really understand how to make the simple, the spectacular. Carlos is a young pretender with epic skills and all the love. He must have the best Grandma behind him somewhere.  I love the Chamorros here. A large table of happy hungry heads share the last three with hot fresh tortillas and wash it down with complimentary truffle and mushroom soup left over from the posh menu.  New year arrives in a blare of excellent noise from a DJ in a tree , highly dodgy pyrotechnics,  tequila and many friends. Perfect.

It’s been another extraordinary year.

Jungle Journal

Onwards

  • November 28, 2018
  • by Beave

We dodged a significant bullet. Hurricane Willa moved North of us 50 Km as she hit shore. The jungle here cools the air slightly and creates a diversion for big storms, which saved us. We have the benefit of 36 hours of hard rain and being stuck on our land for day or two but that is the extent of our hardship. Those up North have not faired so well. Villages that have been there for centuries are no longer. Many small towns under water. Dozens dead. Thousands displaced with nothing but the wet clothes on their backs. There have been regular convoys of donated aid. The volunteers are doing traumatic work as best they can but return shocked and dejected by the scale of the crisis. It’s going to take a long time to restore even basic human needs up there. It’s humbling.

Our newest nearest neighbours are a young couple who have been employed to caretake the nearest ranch. She is 16 and has a 10 month old boy. They talk quickly and in country Spanish which I find very tough to comprehend. They are very keen to be hospitable and share what little they have. We & some of our friends have joined them for freshly made breakfast and Palomita (choco powder & milk straight from the cow with tequila frothed up and drunk warm). It is clear to us that visitors to our place love this experience so we are arranging to add it to the list of things to do. Make a few extra pesos for them which will be greatly appreciated.

We are not the last gasp residence out here. We are beaten by half a km by our friendly old hermit who lives in a ram shackled brick structure up in the hills with his cat. He and his brother share the building to sleep in and cook on open fires outside. They use the window as access as he lost the key to the door years ago. He walks into town everyday to give himself exercise so his smoking habit doesn’t kill him. His solitude makes encountering him a longer than expected issue as he finds it quite tough to stop talking. But he is the font of great knowledge as he sees things and knows things about the land here that no one else does. He can put his hands on 20 kg of limes at any time. He can find you a snake, an armadillo or a jaguar. On our last visit to his place he showed us a very good size snake skin curing in salt & sun to make himself a belt. He also knows where the water sources are. We are particularly interested in that. Our experience of 24V water pumps remains sketchy as we find the last one we installed buggered and had to build one from the bits of the busted three. Anyway gravity is a much more reliable thing so we employ our happy hermit and his visiting brother to run us about a kilometer of water pipe from the water source to the pools down to our land. We have on our shopping list a new 2500 liter tinaco which will be spring fed as back up to our current solar powered water well solution.

The pool, which has been a constant source of attention, gets a gift from our friends. They are currently without a pool but have brought with them from Canada a brightly coloured pool robot. Eric, as we call him, is made of day-glow plastic and looks like something from an early 80’s disco. His job is to run around the bottom of the pool like a mobile vacuum sucking up all the crap and goo and dust that it can find and ingesting it until we clean him out. This would usually require quite some faffing, some pumping and removing large amounts of water with the muck. We are somewhat attached to our new time saving day glow friend. He just gets on with it. Our lives are easier.

Miracle of miracles we have an egg. An egg from one of our chickens! I would love to wallow in the result of our perseverance and patience but I can’t. Our new neighbours, as young as they are, are old hands at raising chucks. They delivered three new chickens to our chicken nunnery last night to teach our remaining two what they are for! So the relatively useless Sister Bland and Sister Bricklebank are now joined by three big fat useful birds and we have an egg. Just the one but it’s a start.

There has been the issue of the new highway being build 200 yards from us hanging over our heads for some months. The construction crews are getting closer and the thought of losing so much jungle right in front of us is not a good thing to feel into. We see surveyors and forestry folk wandering around the hills and are waiting to see what happens next. Our contacts have suggested to us that there has been a slight change in the routing and there is a chance that we might be spared the worst of it. Just the thought of being beside major construction for up to a year takes the joy out of a peaceful jungle experience for sure. The thought of losing so much habitat for birds and beasts doesn’t bear thinking about. We are preparing for much guerrilla planting of fast growing bamboo to create a noise and sight barrier as soon as possible.

I talk to my brother who tells me the news we had been waiting for. My Dad has passed. His stroke in February took him from us and it has been a long tough eight months of hospital and care home visits for my Mum and brother. It’s expected but shocking non the less. I managed to see him the week before his stroke and again during my last visit for which I am ever grateful.

We visit the next town Lo De Marcos where we meet friends in the bar. News travels fast here and it becomes a spontaneous wake for my Dad. I travel home laid out in the bed of the pick up truck watching lightening between the clouds and stars and remembering my magnificent father.

It’s Dia de los Muertos in a few days and friends are creating a shrine for loved ones to be remembered. It’s a noble tradition to give one day a year to remember and honor loved ones who are no longer with us. Far from the spectacular scenes at the start of a certain 007 movie dia de los muertos is a time of reflection and a private family day. Graves are laden with flowers and families gather. If your ancestor was a musician music is played, if a dancer then there is much dancing, if a gambler then much is lost and won, if a drinker… you get the idea. For those of us wishing to participate without a graveside, alters are constructed with flowers and photographs, salt and earth and candles. There is a gathering in the town square and as children run around collecting sweets like Halloween I stand beside the picture of my Dad in the middle of the alter with a bottle of tequila and toast his life with everyone I meet. Friends and strangers. It’s a very cathartic experience.

  

It’s a strange thing that funerals in the UK are around two weeks or more after someone dies. In Mexico you are buried within 24 hours. It must be a whirlwind shock for the family to arrange everything and come to terms with the grief all at once. It’s a more drawn out process in UK with deaths having to be registered and formalities and booking churches and crematoriums weeks in advance. This does, however, allow us time to arrange caretakers for the land and arrangements for the properties we help manage and find flights.

It also allows us time to coordinate selling our beloved house in Darlington. It has been with me for 25 years and helped me raise two kids, a business and a sack full of much valued memories. I love that house but it’s time to let go again. Neither my son nor daughter wants to move back to Darlington and I have realised that I don’t either so it’s time. My kids’ inheritance is moving to Mexico and will soon be transformed into a yoga deck and many other sexy structures. It does mean flying to the UK for a week to say goodbye to my Dad and my house. A challenge.

It all starts rather well. Wales give us the great gift of beating Australia in the Rugby for the first time in 18 years the weekend before the funeral. Dad just loved his rugby and wherever we were in the world we spoke after every International. At full time, after a few brace of Guinness, my brother and I treat the pub to a loud rendition of Guide me O thou Great Redeemer (Cym Rhondda). Everyone gets an earful – Bread of Heaven at full volume. Lucky buggers.

  

The funeral in the idyllic rural village of Folkingham in Lincolnshire has been beautifully arranged and is very well attended.  My brother and I stand next to the coffin and do a joint eulogy and say out load how we feel about the magnificent bugger . As emotional as it gets but we both got through it. There are Welsh hymns to get all the feels going including a more tuneful version of Cym Rhonnda . My son helps carry him, my daughter does a poignant reading and my niece sings an aria like an angel. Not a dry eye in the house. Just my brother and I rode with him to the crematorium. He tells me that he considers the wicker coffin looks more like a bread basket which lightens the mood. The girls have smuggled in a few cans of Guinness into the funeral car. We toast our Dad , Derek “Taff” Beaverstock.  One last belt out of Cym Rhonnda sung by Welsh male voice choir and we are taken to the pub. Our journey is made all the more memorable by the appearance of the strongest and most spectacular rainbow spanning the Lincolnshire fields guiding our way. I appreciate all the support and love from everyone. I am left with the feeling that my Dad is far from gone but with me always.

  

We bid Lincolnshire and family farewell and travel to Darlington to meet a lovely chap who used to live in our house. He called us out of the blue and asked to meet up. He arrives in a tweed suit carrying photos and flowers. He has done very well for himself over the years but had humble beginnings in a couple of rented rooms in my house around the 1940s. We saw the place where they hid from the bombs during the war and the room where he was born and slept in a sock drawer as a baby. It was great to be so nostalgic with him sharing memories of the spaces we all shared at one point in our lives.

So onwards to our solicitor to sign it all away. Then back the house to donate the last of the furniture and tools (too big to fly with) to charity. Much lifting stuff into vans and saying farewell to empty rooms.

Our good Greek friend and super-chef opens his restaurant in Darlington to us to feed us magnificently and welcome friends who have helped us so much selling the house. A thank you and further wake awash with organic Greek red wine. Then to friends in Manchester via the apple store where our genius sees what Mexican humidity can do to technology. We reload on tech and good food and good company and fly home. Something of an emotional blur.

We return to find the highway chainsaw crews have already arrived and started taking down the 6m corridor of jungle where the road is going to be built. They have been working everyday we have been away and are now well advanced in their destruction. We look from every angle of the land and can’t see any change. This is a good thing. We have workers coming to us for water and to borrow tools. They tell us that although their vehicles are parked next to our gate they walk over 2km before they start work. It looks like the highway is 2000m away not 200m away. You can’t see it and there is a hill in between. This affects the value of our land (not that we are wanting to sell it) and our future plans significantly. It’s not for certain yet but this is potentially the best news we could get after a tough week.

The rains have stopped. We swim in the ocean and see whales passing by from the beach. We have good friends staying with us and we all have been invited to our first US Thanksgiving Dinner. The jungle is now considerably cooler and less humid even in the short time we have been away. The cash from the sale of the house is on it’s way to fund our next stage of creation. There is a lot to do.

It’s good to be home.

Jungle Journal

Snake Tricks & a Flying Robot

  • August 19, 2018August 19, 2018
  • by Beave

The trees are magnificent. Empowered by rain they wrap around each other for support while extending branches of thick foliage across the sky. Perfectly lovely if you are not a solar panel trying to avoid shade. A group of electric guest fans, a couple of fridges and some cloudy days have taken their toll on our batteries. The fact we have a very limited sunshine window and growing tree shadow is less than helpful. Our heavy generator is brought into the battery house and plugged in to top them up. The trees around the panels are getting careful attention as we decide which of the branches 150 foot off the ground are going to get it. There is lopping in our future. We put the word out for someone brave and daft enough to take this on.

We have been gifted a number of obscure objects over the months. Amongst the haul are two very distinctive shaped machetes from the Revolutionary Army in Columbia. They are considered less tools than considerably effective weapons. Originally they were part of the FARC armory before there was a weapons amnesty. Subsequently and corruptly the collected weaponry piles were sold on to buyers in USA. We were gifted them as an American friend headed north. We have found an alternative use for them. When sharpened the heavy multi-faceted blades are very effective in destroying the endless growth that is overtaking us. Our standard machetes will take off the leaves and shoots but leave the roots. We are effectively pruning the buggers and making them stronger! Our FARC versions take the whole of them out in one go and scatter them elsewhere. Brutal but effective. Good luck coming back from that! Everyday I carry one with me wherever I go and, poco a poco, the paths are clearing up and the jungle is, for a very short period of time, tamed. False sense of achievement I suspect.

During one of my slow journeys through one of the jungle paths I am slowly clearing the worst of the greenery that is right ahead of me. I scatter a few tiny palm start-ups into the bush, which in the corner of my vision moves in a very familiar way. A few feet away from me is a dark green snake of significant size. Its black and white head is a foot above the ground and very still while looking straight at me. In contrast there is a whip lizard flicking its body wildly around as it vanishes at great speed down the snake and is rapidly fully swallowed with the exception of the very end of it’s tail that stick out the side of the very contented snake’s mouth. We stare at each other motionless apart from the odd twitch of the lizard’s tail. I reach for my phone to take a picture but I don’t have it with me and for a fraction of a moment I divert my eyes. The snake vanishes. It was right there and now gone. The bush moves slightly directly in my vision and the snake reappears like a vision. Exactly in the same place and in the same position. It hadn’t moved but had vanished and reappeared right in front of me. A snake with an invisibility cloak?? How do they do that!!??

I have watched snakes do this a number of times here. I found a modest size python curled up in the pool house and because I had thick gloves on and was hot and sweaty and in no mood to be buggered about by a snake I picked him up and threw him out into the bush. I then watched as the thing uncurled itself to its full length and make a slow movement by which it dissolved into the ground and vanished. I looked for it for a good while before giving up to extraordinary camouflage.

I am at the pool and I hear Jayne making noises from the tree house that sound a little distressed. Nothing too panicked but certainly some form of unhappiness. As I get closer to the source I hear the word “snaaaaiyke”. I get to the balcony armed with traditional long machete and see a good size green, blue and black snake poking its head out of the plants with a surprised looking frog in its mouth. Half the frog has turned a disturbing yellow colour so the snake is most likely poisonous. I put the end of the machete blade under the frog and lift the snake’s head upwards. I follow its body through the plants and can see that most of the snake is hanging over the side. By lifting its head its weight shifts backwards and both snake & frog fall off. I instantly look over the side and see absolutely nothing. I return to underneath the house exactly where it fell. No sign at all although at all times my machete is very much at the ready.

Bananas have ripened and we are ready to create all things bananary. Jayne is less than delighted.

It’s officially over 25 years since there has been so little water falling from the skies in mid August. In 3 weeks time we will have been in Mexico for a whole year. At that time last year San Pancho had a foot of water flowing down the streets and the arroyos (rivers) were full enough to stop us getting out here to our land for a month! Today there has been no rain at all for nearly a week. No gut wrenching thunderstorm for many weeks and all the rivers are dry. There is ground water. Thankfully our well is full enough and our new pump delivering up to a tinaco full a day (which for us is outstanding). For everyone without a well this is not good news at all. Unless we all start the dry season with full wells and good water flow in the rivers there will be huge issues down the line. We are dancing for rain right now.

  

While we make good with our water and fill up all our tinacos there are some repairs to do and some pumps to install and general maintenance stuff on the to do list. There are many thousands of large biting ants in endless marching lines that criss cross the jungle floor. They regularly chose to march exactly where I am working and bite my feet to make some territorial point. It proves how humid it is that even the shortest climb into the jungle is so completely exhausting. I return from very light work completely bitten and scratched and mucky with sweat. I have found an added fun experience to avoid. The ground has hidden within it large and very strong thorns. I managed to get one to go entirely through my sandal and half and inch into my foot mid jungle climb. If a ginger man screams abuse in the jungle and no one is there to hear does he make a sound?

Sister Allenby has followed Sister Flowers into the chicken jungle black hole. We are down to three jungle chickens. Jayne insists they have both fallen in love with local roosters and eloped. My theory involves slightly more violence and a snake and/or an eagle. The remaining brood are properly freaked out so have likely witnessed something traumatic. We need to encourage the survivors to nest in their house and not the trees. It’s safer and I’m not climbing trees to collect eggs that may or may not appear in the future. We relocate the house in a clear open spot and after much buggering about mange to get them locked in. A few days of house arrest should reeducate them, google has told us.

There is a common effect of coming out here and staying with us for a while. Be warned. Folk don’t want to go home. It’s slightly more than end of holiday blues. The space and pace here are seductive. Returning to an overpriced, overworked society where ones values can’t be expressed and ones expressions are undervalued is not easy. The politics above the wall doesn’t help with motivation either. So we get a good amount of good people wanting to be our neighbours.

The search for land/property is a well trodden path here but it’s not easy to navigate. Almost everyone has a story about buying land and some of them are sadly pretty tragic. There is a real need for independent honest trustworthy guidance to get through the red tape of owning property in Mexico and not get screwed. Estate agents work on USA style commissions. They get a whopping 4% of the value of the sale from the seller and a further 4% if they act on behalf of the buyer too. That’s a big lump and so the temptation to get sales complete at any cost is strong. There are many locals (Mexicans) who do not trust the system and sell directly. Anyone can act as agent in any sale in Mexico. No training or qualifications required.

In our time here we have been offered many plots of land and have quite a portfolio that had developed without trying. We also have a growing list of potential buyers that know and trust us. We also have very effective contacts that we trust in the industry that can get us all the information any buyer needs (but doesn’t know they need) faster, cheaper and more accurately than by any other means. A team of us are in discussions about how to offer these services that we are finding are greatly needed.

This coincides with a change in the way things are generally administered by officialdom. In the past week the six officers in charge of agreeing building permits in our area have all been fired. It’s not uncommon for building permits to be agreed with the help of a donation and the paperwork issued but not registered. In these cases the building work does not have genuine permissions and the documents are useless down the line should there be any real inspections. Expensive business corruption. The new AMLO anti corruption promises appear to be happening. Proper officials are being employed to do official properness in Mexico! Now it’s not who you pay donations to but more who you know that’s important. It’s a well needed and popular change.

Drones bloody drones. Drive me nuts. Whining, buzzy, oversize flying pests invading your privacy unannounced, without permission and unwelcome. They appear on the most deserted beaches and idyllic spaces just to make the experience worse for everyone except the entitled twat who is making his video.

That said with extreme reluctance I have to accept that they have become quite amazingly evolved bits of robotic engineering and they can take images that are highly impressive. Our mate arrives from South Africa via the rest of the world on a very large motorbike with very limited luggage and a brand new drone. It’s compact, sexy mate black, sleek and has anti collision lasers and remote self steadying probes installed in every orifice. It has the invaluable added feature of being reasonably idiot proof . It takes flight and hovers in our faces a few feet from the balcony. It won’t come any further as it has sensed idiots and won’t land at our feet. I reach out and grab it to pull it in. It’s motors and rotors rev aggressively and the thing pulls away from my grip in an escape pattern. Idiot proof.

It takes a surprisingly short time to use up all the battery life and the SD card with images taken from a few feet to many hundreds of feet away. We respect the thing for its elegance in flight and for clearly being a lot smarter than any of us. With a good number of edits and a search for un-copyrighted music we can use in the background (there are algorithms on social media that catch you using copyrighted music they tell me !!) our mate creates for us a short video introduction to La Colina. We like it a lot. I still want to train hawks to take drones down on every beach but this little flying robot was a lot of fun for while. https://vimeo.com/285364199

Digging in 90% plus humidity is a short lived activity. I get motivated to create or modify a drainage trench and set about it with shovel and pick with as much energy and enthusiasm as can be mustered. It’s usually about 10 minutes into smashing the rock filled earth that the dizziness sets in. The warm soupy air that I’m gasping for seems to contain more damp than oxygen. I breathe the wetness hard into my lungs as all the fluids pour quite literally from my body soaking the ground around me. Enough. I stick my sodden shirt to the balcony to dry and limp to the shower where I exchange my sweat for fresher stuff. I put a towel on the bed and lie down aware of the itchy burning heat on my skin mixed with the entire lack of energy or enthusiasm. Mausetrappe jumps up and grabs my legs while chewing at my feet. She is also overheated and slightly crazy. The largest electric fan we have is directed at the bed and revives us both very very slowly. This process can be repeated many times a day.

We hear again of a dear young friend who has passed this week.  Died at his home in California of a seizure after a weekend surfing with friends. It’s very sad. Counting our blessings everyday.

Our favorite pub/bar that is currently open closes next week till mid September. Endless Summer is a  bar in Los De Marcos about 10 minutes up the highway. It’s a Canadian branded place with lots of TVs showing all the sports the Canadians care about (hockey) and does a passable Poutine. For non Canadians that is the posh French name for a plate of chips and gravy with cheese. Authentically cheese that squeeks audibly when you bite it but that is a rare thing outside of Montreal. It has a dartboard with terribly bent darts with loose flights so that’s traditional. This bar has the major advantage of having a very high concentration of good people so the lack of draught Guinness and premier league football is forgiven. We are on our way there now to offer our support and assist with reducing the stock levels.

 

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