Scorpions Archives - La Colina Project

Newest New Things

April 4, 2023April 4, 2023
by Beave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jungle Journal

Vampires & Ice Cream

September 11, 2018
by Beave

We have our small freezer full of devil fruit (nanas) and I am under some persuasive stress (nagging) to do something with them as there is an urgent requirement for more ice cream space. Thankfully a suitably qualified friend in Montreal had the genius idea of prison wine and I’m up for it. Wine making is an art and requires precision and skill. Prison wine requires none of that and it’s success is reliant on a good bucket and lot of luck. I boil up the offending fruit in a little sugar, limes, honey and raisins. It then cools down and ends up in the bucket with I suspect far too much yeast. The true prison method I am told is to add a slice of bread. I cover the brew with a loose lid and cloth and ignore for a few days. I can report that it currently smells bloody awful and tastes absolutely grotesque.

We found lamb in the back of a freezer section in a supermarket on special half price offer because it wasn’t goat. This is rather exciting and we decide to make great efforts to deliver the best jungle Sunday lamb dinner possible. I slow cook the lamb as roast vegetables and Yorkshire puddings are created followed by thick dark gravy. Yorkshire puds in the jungle is one of our finest achievements to date. Now as Yorkshire puddings are a gravy delivery systems we find out that a full lamb dinner is a red wine delivery system. Apparently it was a very memorable and delicious dinner. It ended up with a slightly tipsy (smashed) bunch of well fed folk in the pool. Lamb dinners give you hangovers. Who knew ?

We have had a number of days travelling to and from the delightfully surreal immigration office about an hour away from home in order to extend our temporary Mexican resident immigration status for another 3 years. The amount of fannying about is legendary. The administration for administration’s sake is astonishing. This place must produce forests of paper. Endless signatures. Online forms filled in to be printed a dozen times to allow for all the blue ink stamps to go somewhere. We are photographed and fingerprinted again just in case our faces and fingers have changed since last year. Compulsory waiting time is in days and weeks depending on the mood of the staff. Eventually, after some weeks of this, we arrive to deliver our final dozen signatures and are presented with our cards. Theoretically we don’t have to come back to this place until September 2021. Don’t believe that for a moment.

When in line (waiting in silence as is customary here) we see the effects of poorly communicated and complex administration. An old girl in her 70s with no Spanish has arrived back from seeing grandchildren in USA. She is retired and living here in Mexico. She has lost her temporary immigration card and wants it replaced. Without it she cannot get free medical services or apply for cell phone contracts, bank accounts and other day-to-day administrative things. It really is an essential for long term living here. On her way back from the USA the airline staff told everyone on the plane (no exceptions) to fill in the tourist immigration card and hand it in to officials as they arrived at the airport. Unbeknown to her, by doing this she has cancelled her temporary resident status and she must now go back to a Mexican embassy in the USA and start the torturous and expensive process all over again from the start. No exceptions. She is stunned and understandably distraught. This is not an uncommon story. No one really can understand all the rules and hoops of the immigration process (that change all the time) least of all airline staff. It is common for aircrew to insist on every passenger filling in forms that will cause serious issues down the line. We have a number of friends that have abandoned their immigration process in frustration. Easier for them to leave the country a couple of times a year and forgo any benefits of citizenship. Can’t blame them.

Aside from the immigration office there is another candidate for the honor of third circle of hell. The Telcel office. This is where great masses gather to wait for many hours to deal with their mobile phone issues. The floor is highly polished white tiles which show up every spec of muck. My first visit there directly from the jungle I left an impressive trail of muddy footprints. I stopped walking and found I was being followed closely by the angry cleaning lady with her wide footprint mop. As she was glaring at this particularly mucky gringo mud was dropping off me onto the floor in a pile. The queue behind me stared and tutted to add to my discomfort. We were then faced with desks full of clean cut, homogenous looking, highly made up, suited girls with limited training and teenage attitudes whose sole purpose in life is to make the process of having a mobile phone service unintelligible. You get a ticket and wait in line for maybe an hour or two to see which one of these girls gets to screw with you. If you don’t have a residence card your hours of waiting are for nothing. Even if it’s being renewed in immigration and you have a lovely photo of it on your phone. Even with a residence card the astonishing complexities which are applied to the most simple of processes test patience beyond male human endurance. Thankfully female endurance is sometimes a touch more resilient to bright red patronizing smiles, dark empty eyes and outright stupidity. After what seems like a week we leave with phones that work and a Wi-Fi box that gives us better service in the jungle at much lower cost than we had in UK. Having unlimited speedy quick Wi-Fi to offer guests and abuse ourselves is a great bonus. Almost worth the trauma. Theoretically we don’t have to return to this place until September 2020. I don’t believe it for a minute.

We have a breach in the water system. Despite the rain we have had, we now have two empty Tinacos so we set about refilling them so we can track down the leak. The water does not appear to be flowing from the pump so we measure current and check solar panels and our new check valve and all appears OK. We then decide to pull up the pump to see if there is an issue. The issue soon becomes clear. It’s an easy problem to diagnose. The pump has gone. Some twat has made off with it.

The well is close to our access road and the temptation to pinch an undefended pump was too much. It’s a 24v DC unit, which is absolutely useless to anyone but us so it’s not a good score. We need to re-enforce the well head, get our mate to bring a new pump from UK and get a good chain and lock on the thing. We have been too complacent. Good job we don’t have guests right now. Bloody bandits.

Our newest friends here have bought a beautiful house near by and we have a key to their spare rooms should we need them at any time. We stayed over last week after one too many tequilas and the next morning found a dead scorpion in the bed. It might have been our breath that killed it. Since that night our friend was stung four times in one go. Good immunity, a trip to the hospital and all is well. Another tequila fueled scorpion hunt with our black light and machete is planned. We were suitably sympathetic to his plight until our man calls us. He has been bitten by a vampire bat while sleeping in his house! The wound did not stop bleeding due to the anticoagulants in the bat’s saliva. A messy trip to the hospital later and a series of rabies shots are prescribed. Vampire bats are the primary carriers of rabies in the tropics. It’s a serious thing. Tens of thousands of cattle fall victim every season as well as a worrying number of people. We have made double extra sure our house is secure from bats. There is also a vaccine that we will investigate.

It’s a year to the day since we arrived in Mexico. We feel the need to mark the occasion so head out to a much recommended Thai restaurant about an hour away. There have been dreams of Pad Thai. We combine the trip with a visit to our favorite wood suppliers to price up the wood needed to rebuild the raised deck on the white house. It’s not cheap but achievable within budget if the rentals start coming in November. The Thai place, despite assurances on its website, is closed for the season. We have fasted all day so are not best pleased. Jayne’s disappointment at not taking down an immense Pad Thai is short lived as our favorite French place is open and nearby. We celebrate via the medium of outstanding food and wine.

We leave walking very slowly and contentedly with the memory of lobster tortallini and almond crusted red snapper with the lingering taste of the entire dessert menu. As we drag ourselves into the truck we notice the top of the palm trees bending and the sky darkening quickly. There should be at least an hour of light left so we take a chance and make a quick supermarket stop before heading back. At the check outs the clouds break and it chucks it down. We run to the truck but are already soaked. The slow drive down the bloody highway 200 keeps us wide-awake. The wipers are not quite fast enough and it’s suddenly dark. The high beam lights in our eyes and reflections from the wet road surface blind us. We make it to our road and across the first three arroyos that are all flowing. We are then faced with the front end of a lumber truck that has broken down blocking the road. It’s pitch black and the rain is coming down hard and fast. The lightening is close and bright and shows us the way. We brave it and help tow the truck to a less inconvenient spot. We break a ratchet strap in the process but end up using jumper cables as a tow rope and surprisingly that worked. The driver is grateful and we head for home. Arroyo number four which is fed directly from the mountains has other ideas. It’s a raging torrent and there is no chance of getting a truck across it. We back up and head back to town. We will blag a bed for the night and try again tomorrow. Arroyo number three has other ideas. Since we crossed it 20 minutes previously it has become deep and fast flowing. I’m already soaked so I wade out and all too soon end up in thick mud and water well up my legs with a very strong current trying its best to carry me off. I’m only a few feet from where I started . No chance of getting across that even by foot. We are stuck.

No let up in the rain at all so it’s going to be a long night. The truck is moved to higher ground. We are stupidly unprepared. No torch. No shoes. No real food. No blanket. We are in our “going out” lightest clothes which are soaked and stuck to us. Thankfully the air is still warm. Our stop at the supermarket included a bottle of wine and some rapidly melting ice cream. We sit in the truck cab and contemplate an ice cream and wine after dinner snack and then trying to sleep. We see torch beams coming from up stream. Only when the lights get right up to the window do we recognize our man and his wife. They too are soaked to the skin and like us they are trapped between the two arroyos. They jump in the back and we set off to investigate the situation. We all stand at arroyo four and survey the water lit up by the lightening and easily agree it’s way too dangerous to attempt to cross. We walk upstream and it just gets worse. Our man disappears downstream and we head back to the truck to get out of the rain. Some minutes later we see a torch on the opposite bank. Our slightly insane hero returns and guides us to a spot where the river widens and the water is less aggressive. He has attached a rope between two trees. We collect the essentials (melty ice cream) , abandon the truck and make the crossing one by one. The current is strong but the rope makes it safe enough. We are grateful that by chance we left the Polaris ATV at our man’s place on the bank in order to collect our truck he was borrowing. We load up, bid farewell and head for home. We easily make it across the first stream and then find the river next to our land is flowing strongly and has washed out big sections. The Polaris eats it up and delivers us home. The rain has reduced a little. We are not contorted half asleep in our truck cab. Never have we been happier to walk up those 17 steps, soaking wet, surrounded by fireflies and covered in melted ice cream.