The Rain Keeps Comin' Down

The road repairs have continued with the crew digging trenches and filling them with rocks for drainage, and putting in "sleepers" to give support to the clay and hold the road together.  This is one of a few trenches, before it was filled in.

Tom and Dave filled the front end loader with stones brought up from the creek...

...and Jose dumped them over the log in the trench, before putting clay and sand on the top of the roadbed.

This process has turned out to be slower than Tom expected, mostly because of the time it takes to get all of the materials together.  It doesn't help that the road down to the quarry and the river for the rocks is a muddy mess, and it is impossible to move quickly.

In the meantime, it just keeps raining.  We are the blue dot, and it looks like we are in for a very wet afternoon.

This comes after a night of torrential rains, which caused all sorts of damage between here and San Ignacio.  The bridge in Cristo Rey washed out, and we have heard rumors that the Georgeville Road has also washed out, which means we are essentially trapped in the Mountain Pine Ridge.  For us, this is basically an inconvenience since we were lucky to have gone out and shopped yesterday when the roads weren't too bad so we have plenty of supplies, and if the roads don't open before the crew goes home on Saturday, we can always schedule a pickup on the other side of one of the washouts to get them home.  However, we have also heard of all sorts of damage to roads and homes due to the flooding, so we are hoping for the best for everyone.

In the meantime, back to road repair...

Road Repair

We had a brief respite from the rain for the first few days Tom and I were back from Guatemala, and then it started raining again the middle of last week.  Tom and the crew were planning on doing road repair anyway, but when the culvert in front of the farm started washing out and making the crossing unsafe, that project quickly rose to the top of the heap.

The first part of the project involved communication.  Fortunately M is home, so she called Hidden Valley and told them that if they wanted to get out, they should get vehicles on the other side of the culvert and prepare to run shuttles with the passengers walking across.  We didn't see any activity, so Tom went over to talk to their manager in person, who then realized that their driveway out to the main road was also flooding, and suddenly this project was their top priority too.  We sent out emails to tour companies who go to 1000 Foot Falls and the Mennonites who own a large tract of land east of here and tend to use the road on weekends, and told them that it was unlikely they would be able to pass.

With the word out, the crew went to work.  This is what the road looked like at the beginning of the week, after the first round of flooding.

After another few inches of rain that morning, the washout had crept another foot or more into the roadway.

They took the backhoe down to dig trenches (this was Tom's virgin introduction to using a backhoe since our heavy equipment operator was out sick for the week) to bury some logs in the roadway to prevent the loss of more of the roadbed, divert the water running down the hill towards the culvert, and to pull the loose dirt away from the washout.  Back at the barn, they constructed boxes of cage wire to be filled with rocks to build a wall.

Three dump trailers full of rock were collected (thrown by hand into a dump trailer hauled by the bulldozer) from one of the streams that washed out in the flood.

After they dug down to where the roadbed was still solid, they put a couple of long poles under the dirt to form a temporary bridge.

They covered it up, drove back and forth a few times to tamp down the mud, and drove metal poles on the side to both mark the edge and hold the poles in place.

Next week they will fill the cages with rocks and build the wall around the culvert.  But for the weekend, this temporary crossing seems to be holding.

A positive spin on sad

We received word that the little oily bird died.  We had hoped for the best, but we understood that most birds in that situation don't make it, so we weren't surprised.

What did surprise us was how much good has come from this situation.  To start, we were very happily surprised that the guys even gave us the oil soaked bird.  First, they were taking a risk because they had to admit that there was an open pan of oil, which isn't good.  Second, it would have been very easy to just throw the little bird in the bushes because it was "just" a little bird.  Instead, they risked our wrath and brought the poor little soul to us.  Big kudos to the crew!

Second, this made us realize how excellent the Belize wildlife network is.  I called Nikki at Belize Bird Rescue, who talked me through first steps with the bird.  Within 10 minutes, I had a call from Dr. Isabelle at Belize Wildlife and Referral Clinic, who gave me more advice and explained the bird's chances and why we should try to get the bird in for professional help.  Agreed!

Third, when we had trouble getting the bird down the hill to BWRC because of serious flooding up here, Rony and Jonathan of the Peregrine Fund stationed at Hidden Valley, and Roni, the conservation officer at Blancaneaux, drove out through poor and detiorating conditions to get the bird to BWRC.

Finally, when the bird died, Dr. Isabelle was inspired to start a new campaign to educate the public on how to not endanger and save wildlife.  All over a teeny-tiny little oil soaked bird which we all knew would have to beat some major odds to survive.

I can't even begin to thank all of these people for taking time to do something that would seem futile to most people, and to restore my faith in humanity, and to use this situation for future good.  Gracias!

Poor little thing

Yesterday afternoon, Tom came in the house and dumped a 5-gallon bucket with a small black bird in it next to me.  I picked the bird up, realized it was covered with oil, and found out that Tulio had found the poor little thing fallen into a pan of used motor oil.  Knowing I'm a softy, he picked it up and had Tom bring it to me.  I called Nikki of Belize Bird Rescue, who called Dr. Isabelle of the Belize Wildlife & Referral Clinic and had her call me.  Dr. Isabelle recommended that I get the little bird into the clinic, but with our flood problems up here, I didn't have a car.  M was planning to go to town this morning, so she was going to take it, but then we had more rain last night and the road really washed out.

BWRC called me and told me that some of the conservation guys from Blancaneaux and Hidden Valley were heading down for an outreach program, so I called them and they picked up the little bird and took him to the clinic.

So, I only had to take care of him for one night, but I was happy to try to help.  I tried to wash some of the oil off him.  It would have been very satisfying to just keep scrubbing until he was clean, but I found that after wiping him for a few minutes, he would start to shake, so I would have to wrap him up for a little while to dry and get warm.  I am really hoping the good people at BWRC can get the oil off of him before it does too much damage.

We missed the flood, but...

While were vacationing in Guatemala, it was pouring rain at home in Belize.  Before we left on October 19, we had been getting at least some rain almost every day, so the ground was pretty well saturated.  Mid-week after we left, it started to rain in earnest as a large area of moisture got stuck over Belize, and Belize got about 15 inches of rain over the next four or five days.  We were keeping in touch with people at home between the farm and the B&B, so we knew what was happening.  We knew roads were closed, we knew bridges were covered or washed out, ferries weren't running, and generally it was very, very wet.  However, where we were, we were getting some rain at night, but most days were actually pretty nice...just about the way Belize was when we left.  So, we had a hard time imagining the destruction.

When we got home, the first thing we saw was that the road in front of the house was washed out.  It is passable by vehicles and small trucks, but we could see where the sides had washed out, and Dave had stuck flags into the ground to mark the new edge of the road.  The solid part is pretty narrow, and while Tom watched a large truck cross, he said it was pretty scary.  The first order of business this week has been to work on getting this bridge fixed.

We talked to Tulio, and he suggested that we take a ride around the property to view the damage.  We didn't realize it, but Tulio has a definite flair for the dramatic.  We started at a washed out dirt and stick bridge, which had sustained some damage and wasn't passable, but didn't look too bad.  We then looked at an unbridged stream crossing where the water had been high enough to completely clear the brush from the sides of the stream, so for the first time we could see what the stream actually looks like where the road picks up and leaves off on either side.  We then drove to the first bridge that looks significantly diffferent pre- and post-flood.

Here's what this crossing looked like before the flood:

Here's what it looks like now:

The entire approach washed away as the river rerouted itself.  We jumped back into the truck, with Tulio driving, and expected to reverse back up the hill to turn around.  Tom and I were both a little surprised when Tulio put it in first gear and drove off the edge of the bridge and into the river, through the water and over the rocks and up the bank on the other side.  The Land Rover did it without difficulty, but it was definitely a dramatic moment.

We then went to another concrete bridge which crosses the same creek further downstream.  I couldn't find a "before" picture of this one, but it had the same kind of washout issues as the one pictured above.

Sticks and rocks jammed under the bridge, which then served as a dam, forcing the river to wash out the far side of the bridge, and to widen the river below the bridge.  What was a small sand pit is now a fairly large sand pit, although it is no longer accessible from the other side of the stream.  We did not try to drive across this part of the river.

The coup-de-grace of the tour was the charming palapa and dock at Orchid Falls, which had been almost completely submerged.  Tom and I rode the horses there for our anniversary in August, and took this picture:

In the flood, the water completely flowed through the palapa, knocking down part of the wall, ripping out the screens, and taking the screen doors off their hinges.

Part of the roof was unsupported, but it was easy enough to put up another support, which will hold until repairs can be made so long as we don't have another flood in the near future.

The water was so high in the changing room that this bench, which had been on the floor, was lodged about 5 1/2 feet up the wall.

Fortunately for everybody at the farm, the damage was isolated to spots on the waterways.  We had some water running into the ground level cabin, but with effort, it was swept out and no major harm was done.  The bridges need to be fixed prior to fire season so the fire fighting crews can get to the property on both sides of the waterways, but most of the fixes involve only filling the washed out areas, and hoping that we don't have any more big floods in the near future.  The crew is actually looking forward to sparring with Mother Nature, and running the backhoe and the bulldozer, but everybody recognizes that in the end, she will always have the last say.

Antigua to Guatemala City to Melchor to Home, Wednesday to Thursday

Tuesday night we packed, and after running out to breakfast on Wednesday morning, we were ready to go.  We got to the bus station in Antigua shortly after 9AM, and jumped on a bus to Guatemala City.  After doing the route from Panajachel to Antigua the day before, with three changes, this was EASY...just get on the bus and go.  Because we got on at the station, we got good seats, and although this bus did what they all do and filled up on the way out of town, it wasn't a bad ride.  It was a bit like an amusement park ride as we headed up the hill out of Antigua with the bus going at warp speed and everybody swaying back and forth like they were on a roller coaster, but it wasn't uncomfortable.  Tom and I were laughing because the day before we had been on a bus where a preacher got on and the bus driver turned the music off; on this ride, a preacher got on, and the bus driver made the music louder.  It didn't stop the preacher, who then went through another strange-to-us ritual where after preaching, he went down the bus aisle handing the passengers something in a small package - maybe candy, maybe cookies, we don't know because we didn't take it - and after he got to the back of the bus, he went back to the front and either collected money or took the package back.  A woman was sitting next to me with her two young children, and when I gave her a puzzled look, she just rolled her eyes, so apparently this is a common occurrence on these buses.  She returned the small package to the preacher.

We got into Guatemala City, and weren't sure where to get off the bus, which was stopping at almost every corner.  Tom had pinned the location of the shop where we had to go to pick up Land Rover parts on his iPad (have I mentioned how much we love our iPads?), so as the bus was going through Guatemala City, Tom was watching to make sure we were still heading towards where we wanted to go.  When it looked like we might be heading past where we wanted to get off, Tom talked to the conductor (easy because the bus was getting empty at this point), and gave him the paper that had the address of the Land Rover parts shop.  The conductor gave him the signal to wait just a few minutes, and after another turn, he gave us the eye, stopped the bus, jumped off, and hailed a taxi for us.  The conductor had a quick conversation with the taxi driver (have I mentioned how much we love Guatemalan bus conductors?), gave him our bags and the slip of paper with the address where we wanted to go, and we were on our way to the Land Rover place.

The taxi driver was very nice, giving us a brief history of Guatemala City, Guatemala in general, and talking about relative population rates in Guatemala, Central America, and the USA.  Before we knew it, we were pulling up in front of the Reyca, S.A., the Land Rover parts dealer.

We had told Raymond, the British owner of the company, that we would be there in the mid to late morning.  We got there at 10:45, which we think qualifies as mid to late morning.  Raymond, and his entire staff, were great from start to finish.  From the time we got there until shortly after 1:00, he and Tom went through the list of what we need for the farm Land Rovers, and refined what was already in the box with what we actually wanted to take back with us.  By the end of the official lunch hour, we had our boxes packed.  Raymond took us to his lovely home for lunch, which was delicious, and we chatted about this and that and made plans for Raymond to visit the farm.  Prior to becoming a Land Rover parts dealer, he had worked on tea plantations throughout the world, so he has an interest in forestry and is very interested in, and knowledgeable of, what we are doing here.  We didn't set a date, but we are pretty sure that he will visit us in the future, just to see what we are doing and probably to offer good advice on tree farming.  We left his house and went back to the shop, where he wrote up the receipts for what we were buying, and collected payment.  When everything was done and all the parts were packaged, he took us to the bus station in Guatemala City so we could get a bus back to Peten and Belize.

As we pulled into the Fuente del Norte parking lot, a big bus pulled in behind us.  This ended up being the bus we would take to Melchor.  Raymond had had his office manager call about bus schedules, and we had found that there were a number of buses we could get between late afternoon and Wednesday evening.  When we got to the station, we had the choice of the 5PM bus, which was the one pulling in behind us, or a 9PM bus.  The 5PM bus was not as nice of a bus as the 9PM bus, which was the same as the one we had traveled on from Santa Elena to Guatemala City the week before, BUT it went all the way to the Belize border at Melchor.  So, we had to make the decision if we wanted to take the less-nice bus all the way to Melchor and not have to transfer the six heavy boxes of car parts, or if we wanted to wait until 9PM and take the nicer bus to Santa Elena, and then have to transfer the boxes to a Santa Elena to Melchor "local" bus.  We elected to put the parts on the bus and not worry about it until we got to the border.

We think that was a good choice, although we don't really know.  The straight-through bus definitely wasn't as comfortable as the bus we had taken from Santa Elena to Guatemala City and we didn't really get any sleep, which hadn't been an issue on the way down when we had actually slept okay, if not great.  However, we didn't have to move six heavy boxes in the middle of the night, which was a good thing.  We got into Melchor a little after 4AM, and fortunately met a nice taxi man who not only took us, our bags, and the boxes to the border, but waited for us until 5AM when the border opened, and then helped us move everything from the Guatemala border to the Belize border.  As it was, we think we did good; if we hadn't been met by the nice taxi man and had had to figure out a way to get all of our crap to the border on our own, we might not have thought we made such a good decision.

With the taxi man's help, we checked out of Guatemala and into Belize, and dumped all of our stuff on the customs counter in the Belize immigration hall.  The customs officer there was nice, but she said that she would charge us about 50% duty, which put us over the limit of what they would take in cash, so she said we had to wait until 8AM until the customs brokers opened their shops.  We left the six boxes of vehicle parts at the customs counter, and found a comfortable bench outside on the Belize side of the border.  There, we killed about 2.5 hours, reading, playing Mancala on the iPad (have I mentioned how much we love our iPads?), talking, dozing, and checking our watches about every 10 minutes.  At 8AM, I stayed with our stuff on the bench, and Tom went to the broker's office, which is down the road towards Benque from the border.  He found a broker who was willing to deal with us, but it involved a lot of talk, and multiple trips back and forth to the customs officials in an office closer to the border between 8AM and about 9:30AM.  I sat on the bench and watched him walk back and forth, with both of us rolling our eyes.  The situation became even more ludicrous when we realized that because of accusations of customs officials at the border pocketing money, all customs payments now had to be made through a bank in Benque Viejo, the border town...and the bank isn't our bank.  That meant that they wouldn't take our company checks.  Somewhere in all this running back and forth, Hanna and Matt had showed up with the vehicle to pick us up, so they started running us back and forth between Benque and the border to try and get the the customs bill paid...even though it was now much less than the original 50% estimate.

This whole process was very frustrating.  For one thing, we were tired.  We had basically been up since 5AM the previous morning, and it was now approaching noon the next day.  For another thing, we had not contested any of the payments anyone had demanded.  We knew when we bought the car parts that we would have to pay duty on them coming into Belize, and we just wanted to do it and get it done.  However, Belize doesn't make it easy for you to just pay for what you're bringing.  You run from office to office to customs desk to office, and back and forth to the bank in Benque, which is about a 10 minute drive.  After a lot of backing and forthing, we finally got a bill from the broker, took it to the bank in Benque, got money out of our personal account, paid the bill, and got a receipt to take back to the border.  The broker told us to pull up to the door outside of the customs/immigration hall, where we were immediately hassled by officials who told us we couldn't park there because it was an illegal parking spot.

At this point, we had had enough and weren't taking any of it.  For starters, we think the taxi drivers in Belize have got such a scam going that it's a wonder they haven't demanded that all other drivers have their licenses rescinded so nobody can drive on the roads or park in the towns other than taxi drivers.  It's bullshit.  Taxi drivers keep getting killed, and while the dead taxi drivers probably aren't bad people and don't deserve to get killed, we have difficulty summoning up any feelings of sorrow for them since our experience is that the local taxi drivers are, by and large, a colossal pain in the ass.  So, when the "official" told us we had to move, Hanna and I both professed our inability to drive a vehicle with a standard transmission (out and out lies for both of us), and told the official that we had been told to park there by the broker (true), and we weren't even going to find the driver (Tom, who had wisely taken the keys so we couldn't move it anyway) to ask him to move.  The official wandered away two or three times, and came back to us, telling us to move, a number of times before we finally had the six boxes released from customs.  It got to the point where Hanna and I were just glaring at him and shrugging, basically daring him to call a tow truck.  In the meantime, the customs officials were taking their time going through the boxes, and at this point we didn't care.  We weren't trying to do anything wrong, we were willing to pay whatever they wanted, and as far as we were concerned, they could just stuff it.

Finally, customs cleared the boxes, the boxes were put in the truck, we went back to pay the customs broker, and we were on the way.  We had to make a couple of stops on the way home, but we were finally in Belize and heading home...to our own bed and a nap!

Santa Cruz to Antigua, Tuesday

We went with our "be brave" (or maybe it is "be cheap") plan and took the chicken bus back to Antigua from Santa Cruz, Lago Atitlan, this morning. It wasn't the most comfortable ride, but it didn't take any longer than the shuttle since the bus drivers all drive like crazy men, and since we were just reversing our route from Friday, it was much less stressful since we knew where we were going and where we had to change buses. We had talked to Rosa and Nicole, the hotel owners, about paying our bill in the morning, so we got up around six, packed our bags - not a big deal since we travel light, but we wanted to be well packed to make the bus trip as easy as possible - and went downstairs to talk to Rosa and Nicole by about 7:30. We made chitchat, comparing notes on being hotel owners in Central America and exchanging contact details so we can refer guests back and forth in the future. Somewhere in there, we paid our bill, everybody hugged everybody, and we were on the lancha to Panajachel right around 8am. We found a place to eat breakfast and dumped our bags, and I sat with the bags and place our order while Tom went to find an ATM to get cash so he can pay for Land Rover parts with as much cash as possible. We had a good breakfast - not so good as the cooking school breakfast but better than the breakfasts at Rosa's - and then wasted a few minutes while a different kid than yesterday shined our shoes, for $5Q each. My hiking boots haven't looked so good since they came out of the box! We wandered up the street to where the buses load, and got on a bus to Solola for $3Q each at about 9:30. One of the very back seats was missing, so we had a perfect place to stow the big backpack and we rode in comfort up the windy hill. In Solola, we changed buses to Encuentros. This time the pack got thrown of the top of the bus, but It wasn't a long ride and it wasn't raining, so we didn't care and got to the next change, which we recognized, for another $3Q each. We got off that bus, and were very nicely directed towards another bus that was leaving shortly for Guatemala City, but that would stop in Chimaltenango where would could change buses for the final leg to Antigua. We knew this was a long ride on a windy road, so Tom watched the conductor clip and tie our bag on the rack on top of the bus, so we knew we didn't have to worry about that.

Even with not having to worry about the bag, this was a long and uncomfortable leg of the trip. More and more people got on the bus, and what started as a full bus turned into a can of sardines as the driver stopped at every little crossroad to pick up more people. Two-kid seats on the refurbished school bus were holding three adults, and sometimes more if a small person could fit on laps. The aisle was completely packed, and at one point the conductor had to get from the back to the front of the bus, so he went out the back door of the moving bus, climbed the ladder to the luggage rack, made his way to the front of the bus on the luggage rack, and swung in the front door of the bus...which was probably going a good 50mph during this whole back to front transit. At one point he had to make his way through the bus to collect fares, and he walked on the backs of the seats, picking his way over people's shoulders. It was, at least, a good show, which somewhat distracted us from the discomfort of being squashed and the assault on our eardrums of the the Spanish music blaring from the speakers, which is on all of the chicken buses. The only time the music was turned off was when a preacher got on the bus and started yelling in Spanish at the whole bus. We figured that if the bus went over a cliff, or got caught in one of the many mudslides we had to detour around, at least we would have been recently blessed. When he finished preaching, the man squeezed his way through the bus selling cookies. We speculated that this was some sort of bizarre communion ritual, although the preacher was accepting money for the cookies, and his sales weren't all that great. Gracias, Señor.

The change in Chimaltenango was much easier this way, and we only wandered back and forth across the busy street a couple of times before finding the bus to Antigua. It was blessedly uncrowded, the music was at a tolerable level, our big bag fit behind the back seat, and we had an uneventful ride into Antigua, arriving at 12:45, just 3.25 hours from Panajachel, and in about the same time as a shuttle would have taken since we didn't have to wait for any of our connections. We decided that we really like taking the chicken buses. Despite some level of stress, it is great entertainment, and always interesting.

We had written down the names of a few suitable hotels before we left Santa Cruz, so we wandered into Parque Central to see if we could figure out where we wanted to stay. We decided that we needed to put more thought into it and that we needed lunch, so we found Viejo Cafe, where our guide Oseas's mother works, and took advantage of their good food and wifi to get addresses for our potential hotels list. The lunch was delicious - more pork tacos and we each had a good salad, mine in a very yummy Parmesan crust that I am going to have to make - and they had wifi so we took a map and marked a few of our potential hotels. We found that our first choice, Hotel San Vicente, was just a couple of blocks away on the same street, so after lunch we went to see if they had a room. They did, we liked it, so we checked in for the night.

 
In a way, we are kicking ourselves because the room is as nice as El Hostal's room and it has a private bath, plus an awesome rooftop terrace with a 360 degree view of the hills and volcanos surrounding the town, and the cost is about the same...but they don't offer the great breakfast, and since it was raining most of the time we were at El Hostal, we would not have been able to enjoy the rooftop terrace anyway. 

And, after two nights camping in the mountains, even the shared bath seemed pretty nice, and we are still hoping that the bed here is as good as the bed at El Hostal, which was excellent...so at the moment we are declaring it a wash, but thinking that where we come back to Antigua, we are more likely to come here. We are about to head out for dinner, which is causing us much stress since there are so many places we'd like to eat but we only have one night - but I am sure we will make a good choice and be happy. Tomorrow we are planning to get on the chicken bus to Guatemala City around 9 to meet with the Land Rover parts dealer, and then get on a overnight bus back to the Belize border, where we hope it stops raining enough that we can make our way home through the flooding.