Back to the Jungle

Day 4: Each morning that we go to the eco-village site, Jam drives us in his red Cobra pick-up truck, and the locally hired workers, a friendly team of brothers, hop in the back to spend the day building what is the first house on the property, the geodesic dome type structure. The plan this day was for us to plant some seeds on one of the two milpas, but we didn´t get around to it. Instead we went to another newly forged road and found even more awesome crystals. Jam then took us through the jungle to see some of the more remote potential building sites, particularly the place he´s hoping to build his own house on, a jungle ridge with huge rocky cliffs with an area that would make a great ampitheatre for throwing jungle dance parties. On the way, while Alan had stopped to take a picture, he soon realized he had chosen a poor spot to stand, as an army of little black ants rushed up his leg and started biting like mad. In his attempts to brush them off, they jumped onto his arms where they continued their onslaught. In the end, the 30 or so bites had hurt quite a bit, although the little buggers didn´t seem too venomous, except that his whole right arm turned red and stayed that way for the rest of the day. Then a bit later, Alan nearly walked straight into a massive spider web, home to a giant multicolored spider that was most likely quite poisonous. Of course, Alan moved in with his camera for the close-up. After some more hiking, some vine-swinging, and more medicinal plant identification, we made our way down to a different spot on the river for some sunning and some swimming. The trail down was a bit treacherous, but Jam and previous volunteers had done some trail building a few months earlier which made it doable. Along the descent we ran into what must have been about a 10 foot snake, black with yellow markings. We weren´t sure if it was poisonous, but we didn´t take any chances. The part of the river we hung out at had a number of little rapids, one of which was tame enough to shoot our bodies through, which was fun. To shoot through, you had to let it pull you under water for a stretch, and Alyssa inhaled a bit of water, so later she was advised to eat some raw garlic as a precaution agaist ¨upset stomach.¨ Since we´ve been here, we´ve yet to have any kind of gastrointestinal turmoil. After sunning on the rocks like lizards, and a river rock power nap, we walked up the river a bit as Jam forged a new trail with his machete. We came across tapir tracks, the national animal of Belize. When we got back to the construction site and the workers were finishing up, Alan came up with a design for a seed-germinating flower pot using one sheet of magazine paper and two staples.

Pictures from Day 4