Last days in the jungle

Day 12: Our last day coming to the jungle we took it easy, doing a little here and there. The main thing we did was build a nursery for sprouting fruit trees. With Jorge's help we constructed a big table for our flower pots, and then built a roof with cohune palms to provide a bit of shade and protection from heavy rain storms. Before we left we signed the volunteer board.

That night was the much anticipated Benque town fair, which drew people in from all over Belize. We played a few of the carnival games, and Alan won Jam a rainbow caterpillar by popping a balloon, then Jam won a beany baby jaguar (one of his spirit animals) by catching a fish with a magnet. Cardu followed us around and stayed pretty close while enjoying the sights and smells. When we came across the caterpillar rollercoaster ride that we had been stuck behind on the drive back from Spanish Lookout, Cardu went nuts barking at it and chasing it around. I bet that scared the kids on board more than the ride itself. Later, right in front of the main ferris wheel, Jam took out his lighter fluid in the middle of a big crowd of people and started fire spinning. The average Benque resident is by now quite familiar with this white hippy Jesus-looking fire spinning jungle man, and it's clear his presence is much appreciated.

Pictures from Day 12


Day 11: Today at the jungle Alan, Simon and Jam headed off for the caves armed with rope and head-lamps. Alan pulled a big log out of the first one and climbed down. It was about 10 feet deep when you stood in it, and there was a hole going deeper that would need to be widened to fit through, but we didn't have short handled shovels so we couldn't dig. The next cave was right next to the upper milpa, and was by far the most interesting. Back in the day the Mayans used the caves for storage and ceremonies. This cave is much larger and you could actually walk inside a ways. You can see from the pictures the two little bats trying to ignore our flashy lights. What you can't see is the massive stalagmite of bat guano piled below them.

The last cave we went to had actually been uncovered by the road excavation just recently. We brought the rope with us because we knew we'd need it to pull some giant pieces of limestone out of the opening. We were pleased to discover the cave went down quite a ways into some larger chambers underneath the road. We suggested he find someone who could use sonar to locate and map all the caves on the property, as there is likely to be quite an extensive network yet to be explored that would be a great asset to the eco-village community.

That night Jam drove Alan and Alyssa into San Ignacio to pick up some things we needed and catch a bit of the night life. We bought some more rainforest rum bitters and some souveniers, and we met the Rasta who makes and sells the amazing banana wine we'd been enjoying our whole stay. Then we drove out to Jam's friend Sayid's house to buy some bamboo. We needed pieces of bamboo to build trickle charge wind generators that Jam plans on installing all over the eco-village. If you cut the bamboo tubes into half-pipes and arrange them pointing out from a central vertical axis (so the cross-section looks like the arms of a galaxy) they will catch the wind and spin in the horizontal direction, hanging from a tree on a ball-bearing joint. You put rare earth magnets at the top ends of the spinning half-pipes, which pass over fixed copper coils which generate current that you send along wires to the positive and negative poles of a 12V battery. There's a picture of a roughly drawn diagram in the photo album for Day 12.

Sayid was cool, and offered us some home-made noni wine that he had made by fermenting noni fruit, one of the most nutritious and potent fruits in the tropics.

Pictures from Day 11


Day 10: Alyssa stayed home because the welt on her leg was too itchy for the hot sun, so she was able to get her Jagua art done by Aisha on her back and hand. Jagua is like henna, just a different type of plant is used, and is more blue in color. Today was also Alan and Alyssa's 4 year anniversary, and Alan brought home a bouquet of jungle flowers for Alyssa. In the jungle, Alan, Jam, Simon and Candy did a lot more work landscaping the upper milpa, creating more stone walls, and designing a future flower bed. Later, Alan transplanted some banana trees, and Candy and Simon worked on signs to label the various trees of the milpas. Candy also took on the task of setting up a volunteer board for all volunteers to be able to leave their mark.

Pictures from Day 10


Day 9: The end of our second week went by really fast. On Tuesday Alyssa Alan and Jam searched unsuccessfully for some stashed trail-building tools that had been buried (if not stolen) by the road excavation crew during road excavation. We also worked more on the hut for the lower milpa, and began work on the upper milpa, whipper-snipping weeds and landscaping the entrance way by clearing out rocks and roots and building stone walls.

Pictures from Day 9

Rainy Day

Day 8: The night before, in addition to the new volunteers, one of the two main investors of the Better in Belize project, Looey, arrived with his good friend Geoffry and his two sisters Candy and April. Looey and his sisters are from Canada like Jam, and Geoffry is from Barbados. Looey is a real estate agent, and is the head of the Belize division of Remax, the largest real estate company in Belize. It's nice to know that the person in that position is so eco-conscious. If you want to buy some property down here (it's pretty inexpensive), or even better-a lot on the eco-village, go to the Belize Property Center website.

Looey arrived with a lot of things he wanted to get done on the eco-village, and we were ready for our first day of real work. Unfortunately, it was also the first day of real rain. All the volunteers went down to the lower milpa with our machetes and started clearing all the plants that weren't supposed to be there, leaving the banana trees, corn, breadnut, macal, pineapple, papaya, almond, cashew, chili, obel, yuca, mango, lemon, orange, avocado, and grapefruit trees. After lunch, Alan, Alyssa, and Jam went back down to the lower milpa and started gathering materials to make a little shelter for people working on the milpa. We chopped down huge cohune palms for the roof thatches, and give and take trees for the posts. Both are types of palm trees. The cohune produces cohune nuts, which are used for their oil. The give and take tree grows tall and straight, and the trunk is covered in sharp, somewhat poisonous spikes, which we had to strip off before using them for posts. In the process, Alan learned the true meaning of the name "give and take" tree. While stripping the spikes, he pricked his finger pretty bad on one. Luckily, Jam knew that the reason they are called give and take trees is that although they can "give" you a pretty nasty prick that will hurt for days, you can also "take" the remedy to the poison out of the top part of the tree where the palms come out. Since we had chopped the tree down, we found the remedy, pink fuzzy stuff, and Alan rubbed his cut on it and the pain subsided almost immediately!

That night after coming home from the jungle, we all had a lot of fun drumming and dancing (Geoffry is quite an excellent drummer, and Jam busted out his flute collection and Vietnamese mouth harp). Later, Jam treated us all with some fire spinning, both staff and poi, and Geoffry used his lighter fluid to blow fire! Later, Mathias wowed us with his juggling skills, and Geoffry was doing sword dancing and generally being his crazy self. Fun night.

Pictures from Day 8

Tikal

Day 7: The night's sleep at Los Amigos wasn't bad for hostel dorm beds; good thing we were planning on getting up early because these cute little mini pheasant birds were scuddling around the ground chasing eachother and making strange, really loud squalking noises waking everybody up. After a rediculously good breakfast served at the hostel we took a bus to Tikal and got there around 10:30. The site is huge and deep in protected jungle. As such, the place is teeming with wildlife. Just walking from the parking lot to the ruins we saw a long-nosed raccoon-like creature called a coati, I think. We also saw a number of giant woodpeckers. They looked like Woody the Woodpecker, about the size of hawks but with much bigger, bright red tufted heads. We did our best to plan out a route that would take us to most of the major archeological sites, but before long we realized we had vastly underestimated the sheer size of Tikal, and there was no way we'd be able to see everything. We did manage to see most of the major pyramids, and ate lunch on top of one, overlooking the Grand Plaza. Dispite the great number of excavated temples, ampitheatres, etc., much of Tikal is still yet to be uncovered. One of the four largest pyramids, in fact, is still a good deal buried. Climbing to the top you have to take wooden stairs, and on our way up we came across some howler monkeys hanging out in the trees eating leaves, only a few arms lengths away from where we were on the platform.

The photos will do most of the talking for our visit to Tikal. Around 3:30 we returned to the entrance area to check out the ceramic museum. After an ordeal with our drunken bus driver that I won't get into, we were back to the border by nightfall. When we got back to Belize, we were surprised to meet two new volunteers, Woofers, who had arrived earlier that day and would be staying at the house as well: Simon, from Germany, and Candy, from Australia. Good people.

Pictures from Day 7