An Evening Visitor

Last night we were just finishing a game of cards when we heard a bang from the second cabin. I thought it was something in a tree throwing fruits or sticks on the roof, but Tom insisted that the noise was something being knocked down in the cabin. He took his machete and the spotlight and went to check it out. He called me just a couple of minutes later and told me to come to the cabin with the camera, because he had found the visitor. She parked herself in the peak of the cabin, wrapping her tail around a stud for support. We know it was a she because we could see the little babies’ butts and tails moving in her pouch; you can see one if you look just below her hand on the stud. Tom took his driving whip and whistled and cracked it until she unwrapped her tail and climbed down – headfirst – and went out the door, into the bush, and up a tree.

Barton Creek Pictures

This is the road between the swimming hole and where we went to look at horses. At the deepest spot in the crossing, the water came up to where the running boards would be on the truck. We suddenly see the benefit of training riding and driving horses to the water - it's not just to make it through the water obstacles on a cross country or marathon course! As we ran around Barton Creek looking at horses, we went through this crossing three times, and had to wait once for a wagon pulled by a pair which had stopped to drink from the creek, and once for two horses who were being ridden by two young women. These horses also drank from the creek - it looks like all the horses take water where they can get it when they're out and being used.

This crossing is on the road we took out of Barton Creek, and we felt it was definitely the lesser of two evils since the new road we took in from the village of 7 Miles was a series of very steep switchbacks down the mountain. Tinkerbell's brakes were really burning, and Tom found a level spot and stopped to let them cool about halfway down because he could feel the brakes getting mushier and mushier. Tinkerbell isn't making that trip again!

Marge catching the Spiderman basketball. Dennis, Jo-Lisa, and Wilton could all bounce it back to me off their heads when I tossed it to them. The two boys were good, but Jo-Lisa was great and never missed. All the kids learn to play soccer in school.

Hilda and Christalee

Wilton swinging into the swimming hole at Barton Creek.

Dennis swinging into the swimming hole at Barton Creek. Dennis is the brother of Jo-Lisa, Hilda's babysitter.


Selwyn with Christalee

Cabin pictures from the week

This yellow tree has looked like it was dead since we moved here. Everybody told us it would get beautiful yellow flowers, but we were doubtful since it looked so bare. But, they were right - it suddenly exploded in these huge yellow flowers. It's gorgeous, and the pictures don't really do it justice.



This is another yellow flowered tree in the jungle behind the second cabin.


This is the bathroom from outside. One and a half walls are up, and the box sitting on the floor is the sink top so we can see how much room we'll have when the fixtures are installed.


The view from inside the cabin's front door. The door on the left will be the kitchen, and the door on the right will be the bathroom. Tom plans to put a wall up the middle of the cabin this week to separate the bedroom/bathroom from the rest of the living space in the cabin.


It's hard to see, but the thermometer reads 100.6. This is perfect yogurt making weather! I just boil the milk, let it cool to 100, put a half cup of live yogurt in each container, and let the containers sit on the counter for the afternoon. By dinner time, I have perfect yogurt, no yogurt maker required!

Thursday to Sunday

Tom and Selwyn split the week between working like crazy on the cabin, and spending afternoons running to Spanish Lookout to get more supplies – truckloads of supplies. It’s been very hot, so spending the morning hammering and crawling around on the roof and then the afternoon in the air conditioned truck has made the heat very bearable. They’ve been starting the work day between six and six-thirty, so by lunchtime they’ve already worked most of a day. The bathroom/kitchen addition now has a complete roof, and the walls are going up. Tom managed to find all the wall boards for both the cabin addition and the tool shed in Spanish Lookout last week, as well as a kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and toilet. In Spanish Lookout, he met the guys who are working at the place across the road, and they had a trailer full of construction supplies for their projects. Tom needed to pick up some 20 foot sections of PVC for plumbing in the cabins, and was dreading having to bounce that up the Georgeville Road, so he asked those guys to strap the 20 foot sections on their load, which they did with no problem. Tom and Selwyn also used part of one of those pipes to fix the leaks in the water pipe which we caused when we burned the brush last week.

It hasn’t really mattered that we damaged the water pipe because the pipe has been dry for most of the past week and a half. Water was completely off from the week before Easter through most of the Easter weekend, it came back on for about two days in the evenings, but it’s been dry again since the beginning of the week. The rumor was that the source had already dried up because the main supply tank wasn’t filling, but we just heard yesterday that the river the water comes from is still fine, but the Water Authority suspects that the pipe is broken somewhere between the river source and the main supply tank in the village of 7 Miles. Even with all the heavy water users shut off, not enough water is getting through the line to keep the water running in the villages of 7 Miles and San Antonio and to all the other water users along the way. We’re doing okay because we keep both tanks full, but the village authorities have had to bring tank trucks in for village residents, and they run the tank truck through the town filling up buckets that people leave at the side of the road in front of their houses. All week we’ve watched people with pickup trucks running up the road with the beds full of tanks and buckets, heading for the river that’s the source of the water. We heard yesterday that they’re planning to trace the line from the main supply tank to the source this week, so hopefully water will be restored by the end of the week. In the meantime, we’re keeping our gate locked when we’re not around so we don’t become the water source for the village of San Antonio.

I spent the week making the best of the heat, using the morning to either do something outside like work on the garden patch or ride Esmerelda, and using the heat in the afternoon to make bread or yogurt, or just staying quiet and working on our future web page. Esmerelda is coming along nicely. [Non-horse people can skip the next couple of paragraphs; this will be really boring if you don’t ride. Look for the comment in square brackets for where you should start again.] She’s a little like my old horse Ricky; her solution to any confusion, fear, or problem is to just go faster. She’s a mare with opinions, but unlike Rick she’s willing to listen and if I can show her that there’s an easier way to do something, she’s very game about trying. When I opened the gate from her back to go down the road, the swinging gate would bump her and she’d take off jigging down the road. When we were heading down a steep narrow trail in the jungle, she’d get a little out of balance and start running down the trail. So, I put draw reins on her this week. She spent the first ride fighting them, although once I managed to put her together so she kept her weight back, she learned that it was easier to walk down a hill on her hind end. The second time I put the draw reins on her, I kept a hold on them, but as soon as I asked she’d reach for the bit and shift her weight back. The third time, I dropped the draw reins, and all I had to do was jiggle the regular rein and she’d lighten up and start using herself. She never did the thing where horses just put their chins on their chests and don’t change anything else; right from the beginning, she listened to the draw reins with her whole body. I was thinking that I’d skip the draw reins next time I rode her, when I decided that I’d use about a mile section of sand road between the trailhead and the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve gatehouse to go for a gallop. I asked for a canter, and she cantered. I asked for a little more, and she put a little more into it. I asked for a little more, and she started to gallop. She seemed like she was enjoying the speed, so I gave her another little nudge and she dropped down, pinned her little ears back, and flew. We came around a turn and I realized the end of the sand road was coming up fast, and I could hear a big truck using its jack brakes coming down the hill towards the gatehouse where we needed to slow down enough to make the turn and get around the gate without flying into the road. I stood up and took hold of the reins, and she just tugged back and kept going. I was really glad I still had the draw reins, since when I picked them up and shortened them a little, she almost immediately softened and started to listen. We came around the corner at a pretty fast trot, but managed to weave through the gate posts without any banged knees. I don’t really have an open space where I can just work her right now, but we’re going to continue clearing pasture so I have a place where I can start to set up some little gymnastics and see if she likes to jump. I think she will, since she’s very adjustable, and seems to like doing things like trotting down trails where lots of pine logs cross the trail. No matter what the distance is between the logs, she trots through without ever breaking her rhythm. Too bad she’s not even 15 hands and eventing is an unknown concept down here!

We’re continuing our search for another horse. We got lucky with Esmerelda, because she was already living here when we moved here, so we got to know her before we bought her, and if we hadn’t liked her we wouldn’t have bought her. When Burrito was here she went into heat, so we found out that she’s not bred, but we still think she was well worth $350US. There are lots of other horses for sale, but we’re having a hard time deciding if we want to get cheap little mountain ponies, or if we want to spend a little more money for nicer horses which are more what we’re used to. It’s a little silly, because even the nice horses are only $1000US, which is cheap by our US standards, but it seems like a lot of money when we can get a mountain pony for $200US or so. We went horse shopping in Barton Creek yesterday (Saturday), a Mennonite community about five miles down the road, and looked at a very nice mare. She’s about 15’1”, well built, sort of a TB type, and in foal to a big stallion (which means anything over 15’2” here), due to foal in July. She’s three, rides and drives, looks sound, and seems to have pretty good manners. They’re asking $2000BZ for her as is, and we both really liked her, but before we go buy her we’re going to look at a mountain pony for sale in San Antonio, and go talk to an 80-year old woman on the Western Highway who has a couple of part-Arabians for sale.

Horse shopping is a funny business here. Horses aren’t listed on-line, we haven’t seen any horse classifieds in any newspapers, and while we occasionally see a flyer posted at a store for a horse for sale, the only way to really find horses for sale is to drive around and start talking to people. Because horses are such a way of life around here and are used both as transportation and in the fields, everybody seems to know of a few horses for sale, and if you follow the chain, every additional person you talk to can refer you to a few more who may have something to sell. Fortunately Selwyn was responsible for buying some of the horses when he worked at Blancaneaux, so he knows where to start so the chain is a little shorter than if Tom and I just started asking around. No matter where you start, this means that you get in your truck with a full tank of gas and just start driving. And, you load your tack in the truck, because if you decide to buy a horse, there aren’t too many horse trailers around so if the horse is within 20 miles of home, you buy the horse, tack it up, and ride it home. The definition of a “good horse” is also very different. A good horse is a horse who is an easy keeper and will work hard all day. Soundness is a benefit, but since they’re used either for working in the fields or for toting tourists through the jungle at a walk, a little unsound is perfectly acceptable if the horse has a suitable temperament and is of a sufficient size to do its job. Tom and I are being forced to let go of a lot of our preconceived definitions of “good horse,” and we’ve received a few strange looks when we’ve reacted to something a horse seller says in a way that they don’t expect. This happened yesterday when we looked at the pregnant mare and asked what she was in foal to. The guy selling her said it was to a big horse, an appaloosa. I think I must have looked a little appalled, and he correctly read that it was the appaloosa part that appalled me and was quick to reassure me that the stallion only had small spots, and not too many! I quickly realized that spots don’t matter at all here, and that the temperament of the foal may be an issue no matter what the sire is, and my US preference for a plain brown horse is one of the first requirements I can throw out the window.

[Non-horsey readers, pick it up here.] Since we were in Barton Creek looking for horses, we used Tinkerbell as a bus to take Selwyn’s family and Damion and Olmi’s family to Barton Creek so they could go swimming while Tom, Selwyn, and I looked at horses. Barton Creek is the location of the Barton Creek Cave, which is a river cave full of Mayan artifacts. The river runs through the cave, and there are land owners on the creek at either end of the cave who will rent canoes, batteries, spotlights, and guides so you can paddle through the cave. Both ends of the cave also have great swimming holes, and the landowners have opened small restaurants so you can spend the whole day hanging out at the creek.

Both landowners are gringos, one from Ontario, Canada, and the other from Florida. Tom and I enjoyed meeting and talking to them because both families are very positive about their move to Belize, and didn’t bother to tell Tom and me how much we’re going to hate it in a few years; their attitudes were both that it was a good move for them, and it will probably be a good move for us. Both warned that there are lots of adjustments we’ll have to make, and we laughed over a few of the things we’ve already discovered, and both said that there are days they love Belize and days they hate Belize – but they admitted that like everybody else, they’d feel that way no matter where they lived. One of the landowners was a little more bitter than the other about doing business in Belize, because he has owned his land for quite a while. The Barton Creek Cave was discovered to have all the Mayan artifacts after he had purchased the land, which was about 500 acres including the cave. When the Belize government discovered that the cave was a national landmark, they reclaimed the property that includes the cave, which was about 300 of the 500 acres the man had purchased. They offered him even more land in another location, but he didn’t think it was fair that the government could just take his land, just offer him whatever they felt was fair, and he didn’t have any recourse. So, from the stories we hear, he apparently argued with the government for quite a while, would never accept any of their offers, and in the end they just took his land anyway and didn’t give him anything. Of course he thinks that’s really unfair, but from what we hear even he seems to realize that everybody knows the government will take your land if anything significant is found on it, and they don’t have to give you anything, and he now knows he should have accepted their offer and just said thank you. Tom and I realize that this can happen with any government, and shortly before we left Canadice we knew a few property owners who gained or lost a significant amount of acreage because the state redid some surveys while they were putting in a trail connecting two pieces of state land. Neither landowner paid or received anything from the state. So, Tom and I will listen to this man’s experiences here, and will take them for what they’re worth – and if we find a cave or a ruined temple on our property, we’ll just keep our mouths shut!

Monday to Wednesday

The future garden site. We will probably put sides on the chicken coop and use it as a shaded shelter for water tanks since the chickens are going to live in cat cages.


Two walls and two roofs framed on the bathroom/kitchen addition


Proper riding attire for the jungle dame montedora: Hiking boots with half chaps since rubber boots, the really proper attire, are too hot; chinos since breeches or jeans are too hot and lumpy; as little shirt as possible; no helmet because helmets guarantee that you will feel ticks in your hair; leather gloves for moving stickery vines on the trail; a machete for clearing the trail, chopping vines, or killing snakes; saddle bags to carry water; draw reins for a stubborn little mare who would rather run out of control down the mountain than walk down on her butt (and the draw reins fixed the problem - she discovered that she can use her hind legs going down the hill!).

Tom and Selwyn unloading siding for the tool shed

Oops


We’re told that the hot dry season has begun, and judging from the weather over the past few days, we believe the locals who have told us that this is the case. They say we might get another shower or two to help the cicadas hatch, but other than that we’re in for hot and dry from now until June. So far so good, as far as I’m concerned, but Tom isn’t quite so sure. Of course, Tom doesn’t want to let the weather dictate what his job list is each day, and we’ve found over the past few days that trying to do things like clear brush or install a zinc roof in the sun when the temperature in the shade is 100F+ can be very uncomfortable. I’m willing to do things that require cooler weather – like riding – early in the morning before the sun gets too high, and then do things that the heat helps, like making bread and leaving it to rise or making yogurt without the yogurt maker in the afternoon when it’s hot. Tom is starting to plan his day based on the knowledge that it will be too hot to do some things by lunchtime. Of course, our attitudes about the heat are a little different. Tom likes the cold and the snow, so this is difficult for him. I hate the cold and snow, so all I have to do is read an email from a friend in NY or check the weather page to see that it’s in the 30s and raining and snowing and I’m perfectly happy to sit and soak up the heat. The dogs seem to be adjusting, although Mel has been uncomfortable and has an upset stomach. The Jack Russells love the heat. They’ll be lying on the floor of the camper panting – and they’ve learned to stay on the floor because it’s a little cooler – and when I let them outside they find a spot where the sun has heated up the stones, and they flop down there and continue to pant like mad as they roast themselves. When I decide they’re too hot, I have to physically capture them and throw them back in the camper, and if they can get away from me in order to continue their sunbathing, they do. We’ve taken to calling Nock the Sun Goddess because she’d spend the whole day frying herself like a lizard.

Monday was a holiday, and while Selwyn had chosen to work on the holidays on Thursday and Friday, he came by Monday morning to ask if it was okay if he took the day off. We had already told him that we didn’t care if he took the holiday, but the deal with holidays here is that if you work you get paid time and a half, and if you don’t work you don’t get paid. So, Selwyn said he’d really rather work, but he had some stuff to take care of, with his first job being to go to the place where he’d left Burrito, his horse, to collect his tack. He was a little bothered because he knew that the barn owners had told him that it was okay to leave his tack there when he took the horse not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they wanted to use it, and when he got there he had to look all over the place to find everything – which had been well used and not cleaned – and there were still a few items that he couldn’t find – and which he suspects were out on a horse being used while he was looking. This really annoyed Selwyn, but it made us feel a little better to see that our difficulties with the mechanic weren’t necessarily because we’re gringos – Belizeans do the same thing to Belizeans.

When Selwyn went to get his stuff, he took Esmerelda because she’s a quicker walker than Burrito and he wanted to get his stuff and then take Burrito home to pull some logs out of a woodlot. Like Tom, I then had to replan my day, because the first thing on my Monday agenda had been to ride Esmerelda before it got too hot. I had to laugh to myself because I realized that when I’m planning my rides a few days out, I not only have to consider what I want to do and what I think the horse needs to work on, I have to consider whether or not the horse is needed to do a real job that day. Horses are definitely not just recreational here. When I went out this morning (Wednesday), I had to pull into the bushes on one of the government feeder roads because there wasn’t room for Esmerelda and me to pass a wagon pulled by a pair of horses that was coming at us, having just picked up three pigs. The whole family was out on the pig buying expedition, so I smiled and waved to the mother, father and three kids, who all looked pretty happy to be out for a morning getting hogs.

We’ve all continued Tom’s land clearing rampage over the past couple of days. Since Selwyn wasn’t working on Monday and Tom didn’t have some nails he needed, he took the day off from working on the cabin and we finished clearing the front fence line, and then started to clear in the pasture. The three royal palms are now clear, and stand majestically near our northern property line in the pasture. Tom had to go to Spanish Lookout to pick up windows and lumber on Tuesday, so Selwyn and I piled up all the brush and started a fire. As we had been clearing, we found a pile of brush that had never been burned and we wondered why. Well, we found out, and did a big oops. We very conscientiously piled the brush up away from the ridge that runs down the edge of the road, thinking that the ridge covered the water pipe. Nope. The water pipe was directly under the piles we created, which were on top of the old brush pile we found. Selwyn and I started the fires and came up for lunch. After lunch, while I cleaned up, Selwyn went to check on the fires and came back pretty quickly, telling me that we had a little problem. The little problem is two brand new ornamental fountains on our fence line where the heat melted the pipe.

The holes aren’t too big, and while some water is leaking out, it’s not enough to compromise the water supply for anybody else on the pipe. The San Antonio hardware store doesn’t have that size PVC, so the repair is going to have to wait until tomorrow when Tom goes into Spanish Lookout and gets the parts he needs. This is another funny comparison with how life differs here from life in the US. If somebody in the US broke the water pipe in front of their house, the Water Authority would have to be called and it would be a big deal with lots of men and trucks and flashing lights in the street. Here, the person who broke the pipe just gets the parts and fixes it. The Water Authority guy rode by on a horse this morning and told Tom and Selwyn that he’s supposed to charge them $500BZ to fix it, but when they told him they were fixing it themselves that was the end of the story. Of course, they could still slap us with a bill after it’s fixed, but at that point it will all be negotiable.

Selwyn and I also cleared a big area for a garden. It’s a yard outside of what we think was the chicken coop, and we suspect it may have been a garden when this place was the cat farm. It has most of a fence already around it, so all we have to do is replace a few poles, turn the soil up, and start planting. I’m told my timing is actually good because I can get things started while it’s dry, and then the rainy season will come along when the plants begin bearing so we should have a good harvest. I guess we’ll see. I also chose two old cat cages to use as chicken coops. We’ll probably get a couple of batches of chicks in the next few weeks, keep them in the old rabbit hutches until they’re big enough that they can’t get out of the cages, and then put them in the cat cages where the only thing that we’ll have to worry about getting them is a boa. The cages need some clearing, and we’ll have to put chicken roosts in both of them and egg boxes in the cage with the layers, but it’s work that can be done in a day.

Tom and Selwyn got another bathroom wall up, and Tom got wood for siding for both the bathroom/kitchen additions and for the tool shed. Tom is heading back to Spanish Lookout tomorrow to get more siding and interior boards for the wall and ceilings in the first cabin. He might have been able to get more on Tuesday, except he spent most of the day waiting for the truck to get new front brakes, which wasn’t a planned stop. Fortunately the mechanic in Spanish Lookout had the time and the equipment to do the job, although they were held up by about an hour and a half because the electricity was out and they needed the electric lathe to grind the rotors. But, that’s why there’s always manana! We should be lots of pictures of progress over the next couple of weeks!

Pictures!

The view to the junction, before

The view to the junction, after

Tom, the Energizer Bunny, clearing the fence line

We now have baby coconut trees lining the driveway. I gathered the sprouting coconuts from under the big trees, and Tom planted them on Friday evening.

A baby coconut tree, up close

Sour sap hanging right on the tree trunk. When ripe, people around here love to squeeze the fruit for the juice, which is sort of tangy sweet. I can't think of anything quite like it. Some people also just eat the fruit, but we've tried it and found that while it tastes great, it has a lot of seeds, and the texture of the fruit is something like raw fish - not very appetizing!


Sour saps hanging from the tree branches


Everybody at Caracol. Front row: Wilton, Zulmi, Daisy, Marixa. Middle row: Olmi, Damion, Iris, Ofelia, Marta. Back row: George, Ronald, Tom, Marge

Zulmi, Tom, and Marge


Iris


Zulmi


Iris being a Wish Willie, with Zulmi

Marge, Marta, and Olmi. We're laughing because Tom and Damion were above us, and just called us "las tres muchachas," which translates roughly to English as "the three chicks." Middle aged women who are married and have children aren't usually called muchachas!


Damion


George, Wilton, and Ronald on stairs to the top of a partially excavated temple


Daisy and Tom near the top of a temple

Damion, Tom, and Zulmi


Daisy and Marixa


George, Wilton, and Ronald in a tomb. George and Ronald are making Wilton tall!


The whole family on a bench at Caracol, left to right: iris, Damion, Ofelia, Olmi, Daisy, Sulmi, Marixa, Marta, Wilton, George, Ronald


Iris, Daisy, and Ofelia looking into a tomb at Caracol

The bathroom wall, framed.

Happy Easter!

We were up with the sun, as usual, on Easter morning, and it was a good thing because the honking at the gate started at about 7:15. This time, it was the guy from the Water Authority stopping to give us our receipt for last month’s water bill – a whopping $10BZ – and to tell us that the pipe water was running again. Apparently the pipe was broken, and although it would have provided some water to everybody up line from the break, somebody not too far from the break opened their valve and left it open, taking all the water that made it that far through the pipe. As of Sunday morning, the Water Authority hadn’t yet fixed the pipe, but they had capped the water pig’s line so he can’t bleed off any more water until the pipe is repaired.

About 15 minutes later Damion stopped by to see if Tom had a radiator hose since he’d driven his truck to San Antonio Saturday evening to pick up his Mother for Easter and found that his radiator hose had blown. Tom didn’t have any parts that would work on a Toyota, and we were glad that we’d decided to drive to Caracol on Saturday. Damion left, and was back a few minutes later, dragging gutters that he had noticed in the ditch. The gutters match the gutters we pulled off the cabins, so the three of us figure that whoever took the gutters when the place was being looted lost them off their pickup truck, and didn’t notice until after the brush by the road grew up enough to hide them – which makes sense, since most of the looting was being done at night. Tom had been clearing the front pasture line on Saturday evening (while I was exercising – he Nordic Tracks with a weed whacker), and didn’t notice the gutters since it was a bit dark to see many details of what was on the ground. We figure that Damion dragging the gutters back to us before somebody else saw them and picked them up probably saved us about $100BZ in new gutters.

The rest of our Easter Sunday was pretty quiet. The Honduran Marta family came over and talked to Tom for a while because they have a new solar panel and have been trying to charge their battery with it. They’ve been over with one problem or another almost every day since they got the panel, wanting Tom to reinstall the solar panel so it works, hook up the battery so it works, fix the battery so it works, etc., and their latest brainstorm was that the battery wasn’t charging because it needed more water, so maybe Tom could fix it. Tom has been resisting getting involved because he doesn’t want to be responsible for their electricity or lack thereof (and because I’m a witch and know that if he gives them one hour today they’ll want two tomorrow and I figure it’s better to not let them even start depending on him for power), but he finally gave in and went to take a look at what they had. He found that everything was okay – solar panel properly installed and hooked up, closed battery full of battery acid – and told them that their problem is that they never let the battery get fully charged, so they’re killing their battery by letting it get just a little charged every day, and then completely draining it every evening.

We talked about it later and figured out that the battery situation is probably symbolic of how they live and why they’ve been so intent on getting everything from us that they can. We figure when they find a source for something – food, housing, rides, electricity, or whatever – they suck the source dry. If it’s a fruit tree, they pick every piece of fruit off it whether they can use it or not, so when their store of fruit is rotting in a cupboard they’re out looking for the next fruit tree to strip. If it’s a battery, they run it dry and never let it charge so it will no longer hold a charge. If it’s other people’s help, they keep asking for more until all good will is gone. They haven’t yet figured out that if they only take what they need and try to plan ahead, they could keep getting fruit off the same tree, and power out of the battery, and help from other people before they’ve totally alienated them. But, because they don’t look ahead, their experience is that everything ends sooner or later, so they better get what they can while it’s available. Unfortunately, there’s no way we can explain this to them because of our language difficulties, and I’m doubtful that they’d understand the symbolism anyway.

On a more productive note, Tom continued his week whacking rampage and finished clearing the fence line on the front of the property, and started on the pastures. I had chopped around the fence line with a machete because it’s risky to go near the fence with the week whacker blade when there may be fencing wire in the vines, but Tom very effectively cleared the inside area of a large part of the second pasture. The plan is to completely clear the two small pastures in the front and leave the horses there for a few months while we clear the big third pasture and plant grass there. When that grass is ready for grazing, we’ll turn the horses out in the big field and plant the two smaller pastures. Within a year, we should have three fairly grassy pastures that we think should support five or six horses with a minimum of hay.

Notice to viewers

I have a mess of pictures to post, but Blogger seems to be experiencing technical difficulties and it's way too nice for me to be sitting in the camper getting frustrated with the computer at 3:00 on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. So, check back later for pics of improvements to the cabin and our trip to Caracol with the neighbors.

Caracol with the neighbors

We were up and just about ready to go around 8:00 on Saturday morning when Tom walked next door to see what time we were supposed to leave. He trotted back a few minutes later, and said we were leaving in 20 minutes, which threw me into a tizzy as I finished cleaning up our breakfast and started throwing things in our bag and cooler for lunch and for our stop at Rio On pools for a swim on the way home from Caracol. We had planned to take some green coconuts so we could drink the water from them for our lunch, and we ditched that plan, but other than that we were down the driveway in Tinkerbell the bus to pick everybody up in front of their houses, and we didn’t forget anything. Eleven of them were going: Marta, and four of her six children, Ofelia, Iris, Marixa, and Zulmi; Damion, Olmi, and their two children Wilton and Daisy; and George and Ronald, brothers of Marta and Damion. We drove because our truck is bigger, so George and Ronald pulled the benches out of the back of Damion’s truck so the men and the bigger kids could ride in back, we loaded up the food, and headed up the hill.

The entrance to the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Preserve is about a mile up the road from our driveway, and you have to pass through a gate to enter the preserve. The guard at the gate asks where you are going, and if you are planning to return that day, he takes note of the vehicle and the number of passengers in the vehicle, so at the end of the day they can make sure that everyone who was planning to leave the Preserve at the end of the day makes it out. They do this for two reasons. First, many people go into the preserve for a day of hiking, horseback riding, canoeing, kayaking, caving, or to tour Caracol, and they want to make sure that nobody is lost in the jungle at the end of the day. Second, there was a problem last year where banditos from Guatemala were coming over the border and holding up vehicles coming out of Caracol – which is the end of the road and very close to the Guatemala border – and stealing money, cameras, jewelry, and anything else of value that could be sold. Not everybody going up the road plans to leave at the end of the day since many travelers are tourists planning to stay at one of the resorts in the Preserve, but there are enough day trippers that the Belize government thinks it is worth it to track them.

Our first laugh of the day happened at this gate when the guard asked how many of us were in the truck. Three of us took a count and came up with three different numbers. We counted again, and still came up with three numbers, and all three of us were giving them to the guard in both English and Spanish. The guard finally laughed and just took the middle number – which happened to be the right one – and we were on our way up the hill. The reason we had to leave so early was that due to the banditos in the spring, the Belize Defense Force now provides an armed military escort to vehicles heading to Caracol. They obviously can’t provide an escort for every vehicle heading up the road, so they do a convoy run up at 9:30 am, and then bring the convoy back down at 2:00. Each vehicle has to sign in at the office where the convoy meets and note the number of passengers, and then they must sign out when they return. We had heard about this, and some people had said it was a little intimidating, but besides making the scheduling of the trip a little less flexible, it really didn’t bother us except for a brief moment of panic when we were lining up to leave and one of the buses had a flat tire. As we watched them put the people on the bus – a big school bus – and then get them off, and then start discussing what to do, we had visions of sitting in line until 5:00 and coming home in the dark, but then they decided to send the convoy down the mountain and just keep one BDF soldier with the bus to protect it on the way home.

We had a great day at Caracol, and really enjoyed visiting it with people who may have had ancestors living there, and who knew a lot about the history of the ruined city and the Mayan civilizations. It was also fun to visit it with kids, from Zulmi, who is about 2 ½, on up. Tom got to race the teenaged boys – George, Ronald, and Wilton – up and down the temples, and actually held his own, although I think the boys may have made a few trips up and down more than Tom. Zulmi had the eyes and hands of every adult on her at the tops of the temples, so she had no chance of getting too close to the edges. We were all laughing at 14-year old Iris, who was sunning herself on the big root of a tree, and everyone in her family was telling her she was a Wish Willie, which is what they call one of the iguana-like lizards in the area. We toured the entire site, which had been cleaned up some since Tom and I were there two years ago, and a lot since everybody else was there seven years ago, and headed out for our picnic lunch before heading down the hill with the convoy.

The picnic pavilion was already full when we left the ruins, but they’re building another pavilion near the visitors’ center, although it doesn’t have any tables. No matter; the guys pulled the benches out of the back of the truck and we found a corner where we could sit on the window ledges, and we made a square and set out the picnic of – what else? – chicken, rice, and beans, coleslaw, juice, bread pudding squares, and pumpkin bread. We all ate enough that when we were in the truck heading back down the very bumpy road with the convoy, Zulmi had a few of the older kids and adults joining her for her nap.

We stopped at the Rio On Pools on the way back. Everybody put on bathing suits or shorts and t-shirts and went in the water. I was about the biggest chicken, since I only went in up to my shorts. I think I’m really acclimating to the temperatures here, because I was cold because it was a little overcast and only about 80 degrees, and the river water is a little chilly. That didn’t prevent anybody else from getting in and swimming, although there were a few sets of blue lips and chattering teeth when everybody got out and got ready to go. We got home around five, and when we went to bed at 9:30, exhausted but happy, it had already been a good hour since we’d heard any signs of life from next door. Tom and I can't even begin to say how thankful and grateful we are that they included us in their family weekend plans!

Life off the grid

Tom left bright and early on Friday morning, heading to Spanish Lookout to get the part for the generator. He got there about 8:30, and found that everything in Spanish Lookout was closed for Good Friday. Tom was really glad that we’ve been doing a lot of business in Spanish Lookout over the past couple of months, and that doing business in Belize is such an informal, contact-based, friendly effort. Although the store where he had to get the part was closed, he had talked to the manager a number of times, and knew that the manager lived within a quarter mile of the store. He saw a farmer herding cows into a pasture across the road from the store, asked where Dennis lived, and was pointed to the house next to the pasture. Tom went and knocked on the door, and was trying to explain to Dennis’s wife who he was and what he needed, and when Dennis heard Tom’s voice he came to the door. Not only did he have no problem opening the store to get the part, he and his wife invited Tom in for breakfast and to meet their two children. They also invited him to stay in town to accompany them to their church’s pot luck lunch, but Tom declined since he had to get home to fix the generator.

While we’d normally be fine without the generator for the weekend, we needed the power because the pipe water had been shut off for the past few days, and with the holiday weekend nobody had any idea when the water would return. We keep 1000 gallons in reserve in one of our tanks, but in order to get it to the 200 gallon tank on the tower to gravity feed it everywhere else, we need the generator to run the pump to get the water from the ground tank to the tower tank. And, because we had water and our tanks were basically full when the pipe flow stopped, we had all the reserve water for the entire neighborhood. So, while the 200 gallons on the tower could last us for a week or more without even going overboard on water conservation, it wasn’t enough that we could share it with the families next door unless the generator was working.

That concept caused an interesting discussion with Honduran Marta’s family. Because Marta’s husband is working in the US, they come up our driveway fairly frequently – like at least daily – asking for assistance of some sort – a ride to somewhere, help with a construction or home repair project, homework help for the kids, fruit from one of our trees, and sometimes even more unreasonable (in our minds at least) requests such as asking Tom’s parents to sponsor their husband/father in the US. Not surprisingly, they were the first of the families next door to come asking for water. Friday morning, before Tom returned and before I knew if we would get the generator working for the weekend, Thelma and a couple of the younger kids came with two 5-gallon buckets, which we filled. Thelma asked if they could come back for more. I asked how much they needed, and she said as much as we would give them. I explained that I would fill their buckets up one more time, but that I couldn’t give them any more because we weren’t sure if we could get water out of the big tank, and because I wanted to keep enough water on hand that we could share it with the other families if they needed it. She tried to tell me that the other families wouldn’t need it, which I knew wasn’t true because Ofelia and Iris had told me the night before that even though they’d collected rainwater, their rainwater tanks had been dry before the rain and we hadn’t had enough rain to come anywhere close to filling the tanks. I thought she understood my position, until she returned with her mother and an additional sister – so two additional buckets – to be filled. Those of you who know me know that games like that just piss me off, so I had no trouble telling both Marta and Thelma that I would fill two of their buckets, for a total of four, but that was it. I was even more annoyed later in the afternoon when I was near their side of our property line, and I saw that they had used the water to do laundry. I wasn’t doing laundry until the water was back on in the pipe. Our other neighbors weren’t doing laundry until the water was back on in the pipe. I realized that they probably would have taken every drop of water in the tank, lived just like they live when water conservation isn’t an issue, and watched us and the rest of the neighbors – whose land they live on – make do indefinitely without any water. Tom and I have tried to help them since we’ve been here, but after this incident we’ve realized that although they’re in a difficult position with their head of household indefinitely out of the country, they put themselves in that position, they lived for almost a year in that position before Tom and I appeared on the scene, and while they may need help with some things, we’re being used. So, as of Friday, we’re no longer a [free] taxi service, alternative grocery/produce market, handy man shop, and reference library. We’re not sure how long it will take for the daily requests to dry up when the answer is always “no,” and we’re waiting to see how they might try to convince us they need help. When we were having trouble with the truck, the taxi service slowed down, and even then we noticed that if we said no a couple of times, suddenly the health and comfort of year-old Eduard would be the issue because they know we’re suckers for the kids. So, we’ll see. And, regarding the water, the other three families took a total of four buckets of water – and obviously didn’t do their laundry.

Tom made it home to fix the generator, but Selwyn had already started doing jobs that didn’t require electricity. Each cabin has 12 posts underneath it, and each of those posts needs to be capped with zinc to prevent the termites from crawling up to the cabin from the ground. Tom and Selwyn had capped all the posts on the first cabin, but hadn’t done anything with the second cabin in their effort to get us moved into the first cabin. But, thanks to a broken generator, five of the twelve posts are now capped. Once the generator was fired up again, they were able to saw, and also managed to get one of the kitchen walls up on the first cabin. Lots of progress!

We had made plans to go on an outing on Saturday with the family next door. We had been undecided about where we were going, but Marta II and Olmi wanted to go to Caracol. They hadn’t been to Caracol in about seven years and they wanted to see what’s been done to it. Their family is Mayan, and Caracol is the partially restored ruin of an ancient Mayan city, the largest in Belize. The trip involved packing a picnic lunch, so all the women, including me, spent Friday afternoon getting the picnic for Saturday put together. We all made…rice and beans. It’s funny, because I promised Tom when we moved here that rice and beans wouldn’t become our dietary staple, even though it is for everybody who lives here, and even though I’ve always liked it. But, somehow, we’ve slipped into always having a container or rice and beans either on the stove or in the fridge, and if filler is needed for any meal, or if we just can’t decide what we want for any given meal, out comes the rice and beans. Dry rice and beans can be purchased anywhere, and I literally mean everywhere, from houses where they have the rice and beans they’ve picked from their fields drying on blankets in the back yard, to the pharmacy, to the ag and hardware stores, to liquor stores, and of course at the market and in grocery stores. It’s cheap and nutritious, it’s easy to make a big pot of it, it goes with everything for every meal, it’s good hot, cold, or reheated, and it travels well. Of course, if you do it the right way and use the recipe that starts with “First you pick a coconut,” it can take a while to make, but because one coconut provides enough coconut milk to make a huge cauldron of it, it’s worth the time. And, you can use the shortcut and use the coconut powder, although the novelty of starting with a coconut right off the tree still makes it more fun for me to make it the right way.

Bread, ceviche, rain, no water

On Thursday, I went to San Ignacio and got the paperwork. It was worth the trip, since I also went to the San Ignacio market and bought enough produce until the beginning of next week, and some other basic supplies for the holiday weekend. Easter is a big holiday in Belize. Everything closes at noon the Thursday before Easter, and doesn’t open again until Tuesday morning. The kids are off school for the whole week before and the whole week after Easter, so families here do what Americans always seem to do over the Christmas/New Year holidays and plan trips. I took the money from the real estate agent and opened a bank account in San Ignacio, and the line at the bank was out the door as everybody was waiting in line to get the money they need for the holiday.

Since everything in town closed at noon, I made it home in time for lunch. It was very hot and muggy, to the point where even I was sweating just sitting in the shade. Tom and Selwyn continued working on the doors in the cabin, where it’s reasonably cool and shady, and I decided to make bread since it was a perfect day for the bread to rise. I also had to pick a couple of the last limes from our Jamaican lime tree and marinate a pound of conch I’d picked up in town for ceviche. In NY, I would make ceviche from shrimp or some other fish, but the first real ceviche we ever had was here in Belize, where it’s always made with conch, so in my mind real ceviche uses conch. Unfortunately, conch is pretty hard to find in NY, so I had to compromise, but here it comes fresh and cleaned and trimmed and all I had to do was chunk it up and let it soak.

The bread making plan turned out fine despite the heat, because around 4:30 black clouds rolled in and heavy showers started, which cooled the temperatures considerably. So, by the time the bread was ready to bake, it was cool enough to turn on the oven. Despite the fact that ceviche isn’t cooked, which you would think would make it a great meal for really hot days, heat still becomes an issue because ceviche is eaten with fresh tortillas, and cooking the tortillas involves turning two burners on the stove on to full blast and heating a cast aluminum griddle as hot as it will get, so that creates more heat in the camper than turning on the oven anyway. But, thanks to the rain, none of that mattered.

The rain also helped with another local problem. The water in the pipe has been off for the past couple of days, probably due to a break somewhere down line. Since we’ve been getting water out of the 200 gallon tank on the tower and keeping another 750 to 1000 gallons in the big tank, we didn’t even realize the water was out for a day. After the second day, the horses were out of water, so we had to fill their tub from the hose from the tank, and Selwyn told us that the water is off for the whole town. With the rain, most of our neighbors put out buckets and caught enough rain water for basic needs, but Honduran Marta didn’t do that. Just after dark, between showers, Thelma and Cindy came over with buckets to see if they could have some water. I was making dinner, but jumped out of the camper to help them. When I opened the hose valve, no water came out, so I assumed that the tank was empty. Tom was taking a shower, and he started giving me the lengthy set of instructions involved in hooking up the pump to pump more water from the big tank to the tower tank, and right about then the ants got me. The rain had driven the ants out of the ground, and they were all over at the back of the camper near the hose. I think I scared the girls, because I was yelling and jumping around and trying to get the biting ants off my wet legs in the dark, and trying to figure out what was going on with the hose. I ended up telling the girls to come back in a half hour, so I would have a chance to get all the ants off me, and Tom could get out of the shower and hook up the pump.

In the end, it turned out that the tank wasn’t completely empty, but somehow the hose had kinked about 20 feet out from the camper. Tom filled the tank anyway since he had the generator and the pump running. The girls never came back for water, probably because it started raining again and they got enough in their buckets from the rain. So, Tom and I started eating, and suddenly the generator shut down. We just figured it was out of gas, but after dinner Tom went to check on it and found that the glass vessel for the fuel filter had cracked so whatever gas was left in the generator at that point ran out on the ground. Tom says it’s my fault it broke, because I had just asked him how nice it was to be able to spend an entire week working on the cabin and not have to go out and run around doing errands – and the gods just wanted to let us know that they’re still in control, and Tom does have to spend at least part of a day in Spanish Lookout on Friday getting the new fuel filter vessel. I could have gone to get the part, but I don’t know the venders in Spanish Lookout near as well as Tom does, and since we’re not sure if they’re open on Good Friday or not, we figure it’s better for Tom to go so they won’t have a strange woman showing up at their home asking them to open the store for a generator part.

Going to see a man about a horse

Selwyn working on the door

Selwyn and his finished door

Easy up on the pony! And easy down, too.

Heading out on Esmerelda

A well-deserved bath after a long ride




Tom and Selwyn continued the effort on the first cabin. More doors installed!

I went to see a man about a horse – really. I rode 2 ½ miles down the road on Esmerelda. On the way there, I saw two cars, but seven horses being ridden. Three of those were a guide and two tourists from MET, a horse resort just down the road, but the others were just people like me, going somewhere. The horse was already sold – traded for a week’s labor to a guy who installed a fence for the guy selling the horse. I talked to David, the seller, because we know each other because we put an offer in on his house. As two Americans, we were shaking our heads over the difference in money between Belize and the USA. In Belize, the horse was worth a week of work. That translates to about $150BZ, or $75US. Seems like a dirt-cheap horse to us, but to a Belizean…it’s a week of work, and a week when the worker won’t have that money for food and whatever else he needs to spend to support himself and his family. But, he now has transportation for as long as the horse lasts, which should be a while since it’s not a bad horse.

I also made last minute plans to go to San Ignacio on Thursday. We received an email last week from the real estate agent telling us that he had some paperwork for us. We’d been planning to make the trip into town on Friday, but realized on Monday that this Friday is Good Friday, a bank holiday, so we thought we’d put the trip off for a week. However, I called the real estate agent just to see what was going on, and he said that he was leaving town for a week on Friday, so I decided to get the paperwork so we can make sure everything is in order over the weekend.

An uneventful day

This is our high tech command center: battery, inverter, stereo and MP3 player, satellite, wireless, DeWalt 18v charger, and lots of cables.

Tom and Selwyn worked on getting doors into what will be the kitchen and bathroom in the first cabin, and Tom outfitted both external doors with doorknobs and deadbolts. I did laundry, made yogurt, cleaned up the camper, brushed Mel, updated the blog and answered email…Basically an uneventful day.

This and that and more pictures

The tool shed before the new roof


The tool shed with a new roof



We found out today that the mail system works, although not the way we expected. We have a general delivery address in San Antonio, and we figured it was our responsibility to check with the post master once in a while to see if we’ve received any mail. We don’t have to do that; Selwyn showed up for work this morning with some mail – only a Belize cell phone bill, but it was a good test of the system. Selwyn said that as he walked by the post office on the way out of town, the post master came out, asked him if he was on his way to work, and asked if Selwyn could deliver our mail. Selwyn could and did, although even he was surprised that the post master knew who we were and knew that Selwyn ways working here.

Speaking of work, we’re trying to figure out how to explain to the neighborhood kids that even though we’re at home, we’re working. They’re off school for Easter break for the next two weeks, and we’ve apparently become entertainment for them. For us, since at the moment all the money is going out of our bank account rather than in, it’s easy to get up every morning and be motivated to work on the property so we can get the inn up and running as soon as possible and start making some money. However, as far as the neighbors can see, we’re just hanging out on our land, working on the house because it’s fun, and if the kids come over to play, aren’t they doing us a favor and providing a diversion in our boring day? For them, work is something that the dads get up and go out to do every day, and they prove they were at work because they come home with more money at the end of the week. We’re not going anywhere and nobody’s paying us, so what we’re doing can’t be considered work. We understand that it’s a tough concept. Even as adults living the situation, Tom and I recognize that he has an easier time than I do working for himself, working on a long term project, and staying focused. So, if I have trouble with the “it’s a work day even though I’m not going to a job” concept how can we expect the neighborhood kids to understand? I guess we could yell at them, tell them we’re busy, and to just go home, but we really like the kids – and their parents – so we don’t want to do anything that could be interpreted as mean or impatient. So, we’re trying to explain nicely, and when they come over we just continue to do whatever we’re doing, but we’re also going to have to factor in a little bit of a delay in our schedule for necessary social time.

Tom met his work goals yesterday, despite visits from the kids. The tool shed now has a roof, and both bathroom additions in the first cabin have floors. Tuesday’s goal is to get the doors in the frames and ready to be hung, and then to cut the door holes in the side of the cabin out to the additions. I managed to chop all the way around the fence line for the second pasture, and started on the chicken coop. Once I get the brush cut away from in and around the coop, the guys next door offered to come over and rebuild the thatch roof that used to be on the coop. When that’s done, we’ll get some hens and start having our own eggs.

I haven’t been writing about the weather because it’s been so nice I haven’t wanted to rub in the fact that we’re here in the glorious sunshine while most of our friends and family are in the cool, damp, and grey north. But, lots of people have asked, so I’ll tell you. The weather is beautiful. Almost every day is brilliantly sunny, low humidity, nice breeze, and about 85. Every once in a while we have a grey and drizzly morning, and that’s nice too. Everything is a little greener after a little bit of rain, and the rain holds down the dust in the road. We’re coming into the hot dry season, when we’ll really wish for rain, but right now we’re just enjoying the sunshine and the pleasant temperatures.

Besides requests for info on the weather, we’ve also had requests for more pictures in the blog. I’ll try to get more pictures, but I’m not making any promises because that will require actually taking the pictures, and having the blog site work well enough that the pictures will upload, which doesn’t always happen. But I’ll try.

Esmerelda has a friend now. He’s Selwyn’s old horse, Burrito. He’s a 12 year old mountain pony that Selwyn keeps around for his kids, and right now he’s hanging around to keep Esmerelda company. I’m going to go look at the other horse on Tuesday or Wednesday, so then there may be three horses in the pasture.


Esmerelda, looking a little fatter and fitter


Esmerelda and her new friend Burrito