Our B&B is nine miles south of the Western Highway on a bad dirt road. We’ve had guests show up in tears because they felt that they were going so far out in the bush that they might never get back. While the property has water piped to it from the Village of 7 Miles, it is otherwise completely off the grid: no electricity, no phone lines, certainly no cable, and no municipal services like road maintenance or garbage pickup. However, we had a generator, some batteries, a small solar setup, satellite internet and a cell phone that worked off the electrical system, and a water setup so we always had running water with good pressure. We used battery powered lights and kerosene lamps at night, and if we had to do something that required a lot of light, we just made sure to get it done during the day. We had butane water heaters in our house, the guest cabin, and the kitchen, and a butane refrigerator and freezer, and a washer and dryer that we could use for laundry when we ran the generator. We just managed our resources and lived quite comfortably.
When we started telling friends and family that we were moving eight miles further south, further into the wilderness, lots of people thought we were crazy. Hadn’t we proved our point that we could live off the grid using our own resources? Didn’t we think we deserved a little more comfort? That’s the paradox. Moving here, we are now living like civilized people, and even though we’re not on the government grid, the farm has its own infrastructure and we have electricity, water, phones, and internet, and we don’t even have to work too hard to manage all of it. Our house has a big battery bank, so we have 24-hour electricity, and enough of it that we can run a 25cf refrigerator/freezer, keep our computers plugged in all the time, have lights on whenever we want them, and even run the washing machine when the generator isn’t running. The wifi is on all the time, and we have a real phone line that runs into the house. Cool, huh?
As we were gearing up for the move, we motivated ourselves by talking about the luxury we were going to be living in up here. And we are enjoying it, although we have to admit that we may have gone a little feral with six and a half years of living in the jungle, and there are a few things that we really miss. They’re little things, but we still miss them. Lots of them revolve around my beautiful, practical, B&B kitchen, which was a huge palapa with a thatch roof, and half walls. I never felt like I was inside when I was cooking, so I was able to combine two things I love to do at every meal, cooking and being outside, and the whole time I cooked in that kitchen I would get a big kick over having wild birds fly through, and sometimes stop to chatter at me or clean up crumbs. Here, I have a nice kitchen with my huge refrigerator and freezer with a water and ice dispenser and an automatic ice maker, but I’m not outside when I’m cooking, and the hummingbirds can’t buzz me because they smell the sugar as I’m stirring some pudding on the stove. And Tom misses griddle toast, since I dug out my regular old toaster when we moved here. I can just plug it in, push the bread down, and have toast pop out a few minutes later and I don’t even have to watch it. It’s getting better now, but when we first moved here the noise of the refrigerator running at night was enough to keep both of us awake, especially when we opened our eyes and saw the little water dispenser light on the front reflecting brightly enough in the kitchen that we could see it from the bedroom. In fact, all of the little lights of all the little things we now leave plugged in seemed very bright after six and a half years of complete darkness at night.
We’re not knocking lights; it’s really nice to come home after dark and be able to flip a light switch and have all the light we want. But, more light also means that sometimes the day never ends, and where without electricity we would give up trying to do anything productive and just sit around and play cards by kerosene lamp, now we keep working on whatever project didn’t get done in the house during the day. And with 24 hour wifi, we can be on the computer any time with no worries of running down the batteries, which is also good and bad since as we all know the computer can be a huge distraction. It seems that in some ways we were forced into a nicer quality of life by lack of the modern technologies that are taken for granted.
The other paradox is that we’re now part of a larger community than we were at the B&B. We had neighbors there, but we didn’t see much of them, and of course we had our guests, but they would come and go. Here, G&M and Dave are our fulltime neighbors, and since we work together, we see quite a bit of them. The staff stays here four nights a week, and our house is very close to their cottages, so we have close neighbors at least part time. We hear their doors slam, we hear them if they’re talking loudly, we hear each other’s radios, and if we’re out in our yard or they’re out in theirs, one of us will wander over just to chat. Right now, two jaguar researchers are staying in the cabin closest to us, so we have full time neighbors right next door for the next couple of months. This isn’t a bad thing, and in fact we’re enjoying it, but it’s different, and not what we expected of moving further into the bush when it seems like we should have been moving away from other people. I can’t stand naked on my porch to comb my hair any more…but so it goes. I’m also much more frequently a dinner guest rather than the cook and hostess, and that is quite nice, and well worth the tradeoff of having to comb my hair in the bedroom.
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