Tuesday morning Tom went into San Ignacio and ran into the seller on the street. The seller said, “I got your offer, and the answer is no, but I’d still like to be friends.” No counter offer, and when Tom asked what offer he would have accepted, his only response was that he thinks the asking price is already too low. He’d said the same thing to Noah, who found it very frustrating because this was the second offer he’d taken to the seller, and the seller had done the same thing before – just said no, without even offering a counter.
Tom and I were actually less frustrated than Noah, both because we hadn’t really expected the offer to be accepted, and because when we had been working on the comps to get a number for our offer, we’d almost talked ourselves into liking another place better, which happens to be just a couple of miles up the road – so we probably will be neighbors with the first seller. We stopped by Noah’s office, told him we’d already heard the answer on our offer from the seller, and asked him to get a map and pick a time to take another look at the comp property, which we did on Wednesday.
While they’re on the same road, the properties are very different. The first property was almost 74 acres, with 15 acres of producing orange grove, and the rest in jungle. The house is a cement house perched on the top of a hill with beautiful views. It has a rainwater collection system for water, and it had been wired for solar electricity but never hooked up. Part of our consideration in developing our offer had been that while we don’t mind roughing it, if we want to open a B&B, our guests might expect amenities like running water and enough electricity to power a few lights, so we’d worked in the costs to get those systems running. This property is also about a half mile off the main road, at the end of an unmaintained feeder road that gets pretty slick and muddy when it rains, so we figured we’d have to get a four wheel drive vehicle and/or a tractor, and probably pay somebody to grade and gravel the road
The second property is 50 acres on the main road, although the main road isn’t exactly a super highway. It’s the road to a number of tourist destinations, but there aren’t any towns past either of the houses, and “tourist traffic” is a relative term in Belize, since five or six 10-person van loads of people a day is heavy traffic. There are also a couple of lodges and hotels up the road, so they generate some traffic, but the kids that live along the road can play a pretty complete ballgame in the road without having to move to give a vehicle room to pass. The lack of traffic is probably because it takes forty-five minutes to an hour to drive the nine miles up the road; Tom says not only is the road not a superhighway, but he wonders what planet he’s on as he snakes and bounces through the ruts and potholes. But, being on the main road rather than a feeder road meant that getting a second vehicle or a tractor wasn’t an expense we had to figure into the property; although it’s slow, the road is passable with 2WD, so we’re okay with Tinkerbell. This property also has a public water supply pipe on the property, so water isn’t an issue. The property has two wood Mennonite houses, cabins really, that had been wired and plumbed, although the plumbing was chopped out and the generator is long gone. So, we’d still have to deal with electricity, but wiring a wood cabin is a lot less complicated than trying to hook up somebody else’s plan for solar when the walls are solid concrete. And, the asking price on the second property was half of what it was on the first. You can see how we almost breathed a sigh of relief when the first offer wasn’t accepted – even though we really liked the place – since it looked like a better deal was just up the road.
One of the cabins
This is about where the rollercoaster reached the top of the big hill. We went out to look at the property on Wednesday afternoon, and found a truck pulled up to one of the cabins. The thing I haven’t mentioned so far is that this property was a rehab center for large cats No, not large housecats, but wild cats like jaguars, cougars, margays, jaguarondis, and ocelots. About fifteen or twenty cat cages are scattered around the property – real zoo cages. They’re all made of two inch welded steel (like small hog wire) sunk into cement on the ground, oval shaped, about 15 to 20 yards in diameter, about 30 feet high, with roofs made of the same welded steel, and with safety rooms so the handlers could lock the cat out of the cage to put the food in, then open the hatch after the outside door is closed. The truck parked in front of the cabin had Belize Zoo bumper stickers, and when we went to investigate, we found a crew of three men dismantling all the cages in one section of the property. They were cutting the wire off at the concrete, then cutting the panels into sections of about 5x15 feet. Noah asked what they were doing, and the leader of the group produced a letter that said that the Belize Ministry of Natural Resources had authorized the Director of the Belize Zoo to send a crew out to dismantle the cages to be picked up and delivered to the Zoo.
One of the partially dismantled cat cages
We also noticed that some pretty serious scavenging had happened on the property between the time we first looked at it two weeks ago, and Wednesday. All the boards from one small outbuilding, all windows from both cabins, a kitchen counter from one cabin, steps from the other, and some bathroom fixtures had all disappeared in two weeks. The place had been pretty well picked over prior to our first visit, which didn’t surprise us since we knew it had been empty for at least a year. It did surprise us, however, that the scavenging was still going on with such intensity.
This caused some concern with Noah, since as far as he knew the property was owned by an individual in the US, and that individual had not given any permission for the cages to be dismantled and donated, or for the buildings to be dismantled, although the Zoo workers claimed complete ignorance about anything other than the cages. We returned to the office, and Noah called both the Zoo Director and the listing agent for the property. The Zoo Director was unavailable, and the listing agent knew nothing about the Zoo taking anything from the property, or about anything else disappearing. Despite what we found, we had also discussed an offer price with Noah prior to the phone calls, with a contingency that nothing else disappear and the Zoo stop the cage dismantling, so Noah told the listing agent our offer, and the listing agent promised to call the owner with a verbal offer and tell her what was happening to the property so they could either accept or present a counter offer over the phone instead of faxing documents back and forth from Belize to the US. Since it was already 4:00 Central Time, we didn’t expect any responses that day, so we promised Noah we would stop by in the morning and went home for the night.
We were back to Noah’s office by late morning, and he said that while the listing agent had not been able to reach the owner, he had taken the local police to the property to determine what was going on with the cage dismantling since he was pretty sure that the owner had not authorized the work. We figured that would take most of the day, so we went back to the campground and relaxed for a few hours, and told Noah that we would stop by again towards the end of the business day since we had to go back into town to make another attempt for a BTL cell phone, since new phones with SIM chips that could be used in any phone were scheduled to be delivered around 4:00.
At about 3:30, we were sitting under the palapa checking email, trying to decide if our offer was good, and guessing at the odds that BTL would actually have cell phones, when we heard a car slow down in front of the campground, looked up and realized it was Noah. Noah pulled up, commented on how relaxed we were and how that was about to end, and asked us if we wanted the good news or the bad news first. The news was, in the order we heard it:
• Our offer was accepted, as is.
• The owner had not given the Zoo permission to take any of the cat cages, and the Zoo was required to return everything it had taken from the property.
• Since the Zoo had to return the cages, they wouldn’t be cleaning up the mess they made dismantling them, which included leaving 1 to 2 inch spikes sticking up out of the concrete bases where they had cut the wires.
• The owner had not given anybody permission to take anything from the property.
• The listing agent, Noah, and the owner, wanted us to get to the property ASAP to prevent anything else from walking away.
Tom and I had discussed our move to the property, pending us actually owning it. We had decided that we would probably go up and make sure we had water, then get a generator, then unload the truck and camper to drag them over the very bumpy road to get there, and then use the truck alone to haul our stuff up there. And, we would also remove the spare tire from under the front of the trailer, along with the black waste tank to prevent another broken connection like what happened on the Cancun topes. In other words, it was by this time about 3:45, it gets dark here about 6:15, and if we were going, we had to make a few quick decisions and get ourselves packed up and on the road.
Since it seemed to be a unanimous opinion that we should get up there, and since after thinking about it we had an idea of the minimum we needed to do to have any chance of making it, Tom and I looked at each other, shrugged, and decided to do it. We decided that if we drove really, really slowly, and if we went on the San Antonio Road rather than the Georgeville Road, we might be able to make it without bottoming out on the trailer. And, if we could get on the road pretty quickly, we might even make it before dark. We still, however, had to remove the spare tire and the waste tank, because they would not clear all the bumps, so as Noah watched, Tom grabbed some tools and went under the trailer, and I went into the trailer to put everything in the “bumpy-road-travel” position. Noah chipped in and filled our water tank, turned off the electric, loaded the spare and the waste tank into the back of his truck, and made lots of encouraging noises about our efficiency. Tom backed the truck up to the trailer and I directed, and he lined it up perfectly on his first try. Noah commented that the two of us had apparently worked together before, because that was the last step of our packing process. The entire packing took a total of about 25 minutes. We had a brief, somewhat hysterical giggle about how we could pack up our whole life in less than a half hour, and hit the road, armed with Noah’s spare machete. We stopped at the Chinese grocery for water and ice, since we didn’t know if the water worked at the property and we knew we wouldn’t have any electricity to run the fridge (maybe we should have kept the old one and rolled it periodically!), and we were on the road heading to the Mountain Pine Ridge at 4:25.
It was a long drive, and it took almost two hours. Once we were on the San Antonio Road, which starts in Santa Elena, our maximum speed was about 15 mph, and most of the drive was 5 mph or less as we crawled through potholes and balanced through ruts. The only saving grace on this road was that it’s paved through Cristo Rey and San Antonio, so we had a couple of miles of fairly decent pavement, and we didn’t have to go through the police checkpoint where they might have noticed that our trailer didn’t have a license plate since the Ministry of Transportation was out of them when Tom registered the trailer. Even with all the gravel road, the trailer only bottomed out once, and the only really tense moment was near the top of a very steep, winding, potholed hill where Tinkerbell’s wheels just started to spin as we crept towards the summit. The only other problem we had was because we were driving so slowly, we had almost two hours to talk about the foolhardiness of our actions. We weren’t sure if we would make it by dark, we weren’t sure if the place was still being looted, and we were doing something we swore we’d never do in moving to a piece of property before we actually owned it. We decided that if any of our friends or family had told us they were doing what we were doing, we would have told them we thought they were nuts, and used all of our powers of persuasion to convince them not to be so incredibly stupid.
We made it to the property at around 6:15, just before dark. Fortunately the place has a wide driveway with a couple of branches, so we managed to turn the trailer around and park it on a flat spot so the truck was heading out, just in case we had to turn the headlights on towards the road during the night. I started dinner while Tom disconnected the trailer, grabbed a tow chain and a padlock, and headed to the end of the driveway to talk to the neighbors and tell them what we were doing, and to lock us in on his way back. During dinner we determined what we needed to camp on the property, and how we could get a start on getting one of the cabins habitable without spending too much effort or money on the property before we actually owned it. We decided one of us should stay on the property so the looters would know it was now being lived on, and the other would head back to civilization on Friday to get what we needed. Since most of what we needed involved hardware, we determined that Tom would go to town, and I would stay at the cabin. By the time we had finished dinner, the lights were starting to dim after running on the battery, and we were exhausted, so we set the alarm for 6:00, went to bed, and surprisingly slept quite well without any interruptions, enjoying the lack of traffic and lights.
Another Belizean grocery shock! I bought a whole chicken, and when I reached in the cavity to pull out the giblets, I felt something like a finger. After recoiling initially, I pulled the bird open so I could see, and found a chicken foot. Just one – I don’t know what happened to the other, or what I was supposed to do with the single foot, but I dumped it in a pot with the liver and gizzard and cooked it for the dogs. Unlike whole chickens sold in grocery stores in the US, the neck was also still attached.
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