Welcome back to another slice of my life here on the Ecuadorian Costa….

Roughly 11yrs ago, I re-defined a dream, turning it instead, into a future goal.

Around 6yrs ago, I bought some outside furniture & set it up on the recently completed patio area of my UK house, completing “phase 2” on the path towards the goal. Relaxing on said furniture, I visualised what I wanted to see when I opened my eyes.

A year ago today I broke ground on “phase 5”.

2 weeks ago, laying on that very same outdoor sofa, but now finally located in the space I designed for it, I opened my eyes to a new reality. A reality born of a hope, a dream, a wish & turned into an irrefutable  fact by little more than focus & effort, underpinned by the love & support of those around me.

As Sarah Connor said; “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves”.

So that pretty much says everything it needs to & Im not sure how much more I can add to those few simple sentences that summarise the last 20% of my life, but of course I will try 😉

It was seldom ‘easy’ & many a time I questioned just how badly I wanted this. In truth I didn’t know. There is an obvious limit to how much reality can actually match the imagined, but in principle, most things are achievable if you want them bad enough. Bitching about what coulda/shoulda been probably means it wasn’t wanted bad enough, or perhaps more likely, it’s simply getting used to the way things are & those things not being bad enough to force a change.

I only had a rough idea of what I felt a future could/should be, but a damn good idea of what I didn’t want it to be & that more than anything, kept me going when I questioned why I was doing this.

Like Morgan ‘Red’ Freeman said’ “ If you aint busy livin, you busy dying”

 

You’re Moving Out Today

My rental contract expired 15^th July, which conveniently was a Sunday, but Id spent the week packing up & taking over a few boxes as I “went to work”, so there wasn’t a busting lot left to do. The big ticket items though were the box of steaks in the freezer & of course, the cats. After much debate & discussion, Carolina & Enrique opted to let Gordo come with me & they would keep Michu. My lil one – she doesn’t actually have a name, she doesn’t need one as I never call her, but for ease of explanation on this occasion, her working title is “Yena”. My mother uses this & it was a pet reference of mine when she was born with outsize ears & brindle colouring – Baby Hyena – Hi Yena – Yena.

I wanted them to have as much time to settle in before the guys turned up for work Monday morning, so I opted to move Friday night. It was only afterwards I discovered it was also the 13^th…

I was prepared & they were both looking at me with “we know you are up to something” expressions. Yena possesses the natural inquisitiveness cats are renowned for & climbed straight into the first prepared box, so I just closed in the lids & got to work with the tape. Realising all was not as much fun as she expected, she defaults to Tasmanian devil mode & then suddenly just stops. I finish off the tape & look up as she saunters past me. She’d gotten out of the little hole they give you for your fingers. This was going to be tougher than I thought.

Amazingly she didn’t run away once Id re-cat-proofed the box, tho I did put a lil dish of sardines in there to help sweeten (fishen?) the deal. Yes she fought, but more because she’d had enough of the box than being afraid for her welfare. So pretty quickly she was back in the box. Gordo however had been watching this all unfold with rising levels of alarm. As soon as I looked in his direction, natural coward that he is, he was off like a shot, waddling as fast as his lil legs could propel him. After 20mins of failing to even trap him in a room with doors, I called it quits. Yena was wailing & I was beginning to worry for her. So grabbing my keys,  I took the steaks out of the freezer & into an ice box over my shoulder & a writhing cardboard box in my arms, all the while cooing soothing, nonsensical gibberish at the forlorn feline in the box. Gordo was on his own for the night, if he can summon the guts to go near ‘his box’, he’l find there’s a plate of sardines in there. 🙂

The music studio is the only room with a door, so that’s where we spent the night. Yes it meant a not too comfy night on the sofa while she got used to the sensory overload, but by the morning she was happily taking a stroll in the garden with me as I showed her around the estate.

On Sunday Carolina & Enrique were able help me with Gordo – turns out a pillow case is perfect for the job & he was soon reunited with his friend. He is settling in, still sleeps on my bed at night, but he has now become an outdoor cat & has slimmed down to nicely athletic. He comes & goes when he pleases & that’s just how it should be.

Lastly on cats, it seems Yena had something of a leaving party before we departed the beach & like many a young gal on prom night, now has at least two memories of the night growing inside her. I think she has about a month to go, but Im hardly James Herriot, so Im expecting to uncover a mewling mass of writhing bodies every time I lift a cushion or blanket. Updates to follow.

 

Mindo No More

The impending kittens aren’t the only reason I wont be going to Israel in September. Ive left the door open should situations change, but for now, Einat & I don’t have a solution for remaining together, so have consciously uncoupled. Of course I wish her every happiness, but cant deny I secretly hope anyone that follows in my footsteps, pales by comparison & Im back to being the best decision she ever made. 😉

 

Living the Dream

Before I moved in, I had a priority check list based around what I considered essentials for living. I already had a functioning w/c & some lighting, so after that came a shower. Everything else was do-without-able. Of course this wasn’t to say I intended to rough it, just that absolutely nothing was actually finished, so I only focused on what I felt I really needed – no need to bust a gut if it was only a “nice to have”. We had all been very busy in the run up to D-Day, but as explained last time, I still had some issues that were preventing me from putting the ceilings up, so all the guys were concentrated on the outside. On the upside, this means I now have a pool ready to be tiled, a garage, outside steps, a fully fenced & planted perimeter,  roughly landscaped primary areas, a front wall & gate pillars. Of course we have still managed to make some advancements internally since everything in the ceilings is now good to go. This means I now have a fully functional, fully tiled bathroom with ceiling & sensor lighting. It doesn’t have paint, it doesn’t have floor tiles & its got a few planks tied together to make a vanity unit, but I can do all I need to in there & do it well. You may have picked up over time that showers are important to me. Indeed they are. So imagine how much pressure you put yourself under when you are building one yourself, for yourself. You couldn’t live with yourself if you couldn’t make your own a decent experience  could you? Well, it is with some smug satisfaction that I can state, its already better than expected, with just the standard head fitted & the pump turned down to ¾. Usually spread over 2 sessions, I probably spend half an hour a day in there, reveling in steamy, pulsating bliss. As an added Brucie Bonus, after having pleasured me, the water flows out & irrigates my hedging 😉

Due to the varying levels of “suitability for living” vs “need for using”, Ive found myself spread over all 3 floors. The music room is the only one with a door, so all my gear is in there & then of course the cats…Ive set up an outside kitchen with fridge, coffee machine, microwave & a sink in the space that will be outside dining. Ive coupled this with the coffee deck furniture as we’ve had showers of late & don’t want to keep bringing in cushions, so this is where I relax & receive guests. I use my bathroom, but rotate the bedrooms subject to what else is being done in any given one. Id also quite like to wait until Ive finished The Master Suite before I take up full residence. Its not ideal, but it improves daily & wont last forever.  The pay off though is exponential. A friend asked me if I missed the beach – I miss staring out to sea, sure, but that’s it. 90% of the time the only thing I hear here that I haven’t generated myself is wildlife. The nightly jungle chorus is just the right level that doesn’t intrude. Even during the day, you know when someone is coming to see you because you can hear the car for 5mins before they arrive. Coffee on the deck at dawn, watching the crazy throb of the colibris, humming their way around the orange blossoms in search of their own breakfast is mesmerizing. I bought a small, shiny wind-chime the other week & yesterday a hummingbird spent almost a minute hovering around it, presumably looking at its own reflexion. Awesome! Im not sure I should tempt fate here, but the insect presence, particularly of the biting variety, seems very low – maybe that will change when we get into summer…..There have been a few spiders. One time, (but not at band-camp), I went in to use the basement loo. Its sensor lighting, so I was unbuttoning as I walked. The light coming on as I got to the nitty-gritty, I open my eyes in relief & look up. Its not a huge spider, but it aint tiny, so even though I am most definitely tensing, I summon the calm to relax & continue. It is at that point, the timer expires on the sensor & the light goes out.

The stream wavers, but I hold my ground along with my breath. I struggle for too long on the thorny problem of moving to activate the sensor, against not moving to avoid disturbing the spider. I wiggled my ears feverishly. Ironically, dropping my head in defeat when the ear wiggling failed, was enough to ping the lights back on. The spider was no longer where it was when the lights went off. Now I would really like to believe the spider lovers who will tell me that IT had taken advantage of the dark to ‘escape’ from me, but I scanned the rest of that room like a peregrine falcon. Nothing. I re-buttoned & backed the hell up out of there. Fortunately, mostly through personal discipline, I am not troubled by “the thought of” where they might be or when they might attack, I deal with f2f, on an individual contact to contact basis. I have by no means cured myself, but its getting easier.

 

Wildlife encounters aside, Im not really able to use much of the rest of the house as I eventually intend to, but Im still starting to get a feel for what its going to be like…Im excited! Even without most of it being finished yet & certainly no décor or furniture, its already giving out a relaxed, ‘we want you to enjoy living here’ vybe. I would imagine some people may question why I didn’t wait until Id finished more. Well, quite simply I didn’t want to wait, no, couldn’t wait any longer once I had my starter for 10 ticked off. As unfinished as it is, its already a better house to live in than the beach was, which yes, has a lot to do with the shower ;0). For most everything else, I see them through a kind of rose coloured spectacle or an in-built VR that allows me to see it as it WILL be.

Ive set up my old UK TV in the music room, along with the music & pc kit. Of course its going to have to go back into a box in a month or so, but for now it provides a welcome break from ‘work’. To make the most of it, required connectivity to the outside world, that frustratingly isnt going to be cable fibre. It isnt even copper cable, I have a biscuit tin sized dish bolted to the side of my house, occasionally picking up waves from a repeating tower miles away. My package includes bandwidth up to 2mb. I enjoyed 100mb in UK, so its just a case of adjusting my expectation…& of course the time allotted to do it. Musically though it sounds sweeeeet. Im basically in a concrete bunker that thinks its a bass bin, so when I come down the stairs into the basement, the thudding getting increasingly louder, I am transported back to a time of yesteryear where descending into a basement pumping out badass basslines was the deja-loop of my life for a wonderful while

Fast Food for Thought

Food has become a bit of a chore. I go out for breakfast mostly & always for lunch, at which time I often get the other option on the menu for dinner that night as it saves me the hassle of running in to town after work. Ive found a decent Chinese, though nothing like a UK version. Ive got a great pizza place & a couple of nicer eat-in restaurants, just to vary the intake & hopefully cover any gaps in the food chain. I cant wait to be master of my own kitchen & have a fully stocked fridge once again.

In a house across the valley, siblings or possibly one overly ambitious child, is attempting to learn the violin whilst also doing their level best with a recorder. They are trying to learn by rote & they simply forget the order of the notes. ‘Neither’ of them sounds like they are ‘feeling’ what they are doing, so in my idle evening moments, I imagine them as weeping children huddled over their instruments with a wicked governess, jabbing at errant fingers with her pointy baton. As I said, its quiet here & the imagination runs riot when the sun goes down. I confess to having very nearly soiled my sheets around 3 in the morning when a pair of horses cascaded through my woods, crashing rotten wood underfoot & smashing branches out of their way. Like a scene from a spoof movie, I went from out cold horizontal in bed, to fully upright & all guns-a-blazin in a single, fluid movement.

I leapt from the bed, but slowed as I approached the balcony edge. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to see what had made that noise. Ive watched ‘Lost’, so visions of trees being splayed as “the unknown” beats a steady path to your door, played out heavily in my mind. From the noise, it seemed to have passed me by, so let’s let bygones, be bygones & actually be gone. I edged forward & peered over the balcony into an inky blackness, barely lit by a sliver of moon. Movement caught my eye off to the left & then the unmistakeable whinny of a pair of horses took me back down to defcon 5 & allowed relief to seep back into my adrenalin fuelled body. Before I put up the fence, they are free to wander wherever, so had come through mine on the way to my neighbours. I assumed they were eating all his freshly planted flowers, but as his rear garden is now an open space, they were frolicking & generally tearin up the place. It seemed like one turned & said something to the other, then they were both off out into the night, crashing back through mine on the way. The jungle equivalent of living in a road favoured by teenage joy-riders, out to test their ill-gotten wheels.

 

My bedroom is now complete with ceiling, lights & render. The fan is fitted above the ceiling, but Im waiting until the a/c has been fitted first as we will need to drop a ceiling panel when we do that. First floor landing ceiling & lights, just awaiting render. Bed 2 ceiling, lights & render, with fan & a/c the same as my room. Bed 3 has ceiling & lights & is being rendered. When bed 4 is at that stage, I can get all the a/c fitted in a single visit. The fitter is a guy I met when I first came here, so Im glad we can finally do something together 🙂 After much legwork, Ive now been able to source the remaining lights I needed, so they are going up as fast as I can put them there to stay ahead of the ceilings. In between running up n down to various far away locations picking up all the stuff we need. This ladies & gentlemen, is why I treat it as a job & take weekends off 🙂

Ive not taken many photos this month, or at least not many that really show whats been happening. So after having tried & failed to show some Uk friends around on a video call, I sent them a few short videos. The over riding comment seems to be that with video you get a much better sense of proportion & the relationship of one thing to another. With this in mind, Ive included a few videos to “show you around”. I like the idea of doing a proper video when its all finally finished, but for now, this is low res, hand-cam footage, worthy of a Blair Witch, but I think you will get the general idea. They are all safe for work & there is no sound, but a few seconds blackout in the basement when I pick up the torch. They are hosted externally on Vimeo – the following links should be embedded video, but Im not sure how much testing I can do before I post – there may be an edit 😉

Welcome:

Showing the approach road, front walling, garage & entrance porch

Ground Floor:

Showing kitchen, outside dining, lounge, cinema, w/c & laundry

First Floor:

Showing landing, master suite, beds 2 & 3

First Floor & Roof Terraces

Basement:

Showing lobby, Beds 4 & 5, music studio & outside to yoga shala & gym

Garden & Pool

 

The Cat is Out of the bag

So having watched the videos, & you now know ‘Yena’ had four lil kittens. We were sitting on the sofa watching a film, when she crawls under the blanket & starts to purr on an industrial level. She’s just laying there looking all pleased with herself & rumbling like a diesel genny. This is not normal behaviour for her, so eventually the penny began to drop for me. After a while she got up off the sofa, but her back legs gave way after only a few steps. I knew it was “time” & time was not on my side. She needed her “nest”! Several weeks ago I re-purposed her transfer box into a nesting box, but she refused to even sniff it & has ignored it since. At that moment, a light bulb went off in my head as I stared at the now obvious box exposed out in the middle of the room under bright light. I picked it up & moved it under my bench desk. As I re-positioned the towel inside, she crawled in past my arm & slumped against the side, still purring like a maniac. Then she turned & looked at me, if such a thing could be said, her expression changed from bliss to WTF?! Her first contraction took her by surprise & the wail that followed was heartbreaking. After several smaller cramps, she staggered back out of the box, clearly no longer crystal on what was happening or where she was. She slumps down again as another contraction hits. She is biting the air in spasms & clawing at nothing & everything. I don’t know why, but I reached out & took her paw, which she curled around my hand & retracted her claws, pulling hard against it as another wave hit. By this time we had what could possibly be a nose “presenting”, but in any event, time had run out & they were coming. I couldn’t allow her to give birth on the dirty concrete floor – & yes, I also thought what that might mean for me in terms of clean up – so still holding her paw, I put my other palm underneath her & put her back in the box. Barely a minute later there was this tiny bundle of black & white, mewling its way into the world as ‘mum’ instinctively cleaned up. Barely 5mins later with hardly any fuss, out comes an orangey/red mess, which I assume is part of the process & direct mum to get to work on clean up because it looks like it gonna run all over the towel. Well blow me if it isn’t a another kitten, but this time its ginger. Definitely smaller than the first, but now head up & scrabbling for ‘breakfast’. I guess we now know who the father was! Another 2 strawberry blondes followed over the next half hour or so & by 10pm that night she was laying crescent shaped with the sound of four hungry mouths guzzling, barely audible over her contented/proud purring. They are 12 days old in the video, so nearly opening their eyes & it wont be long until they are out of the box, which is why I made them a pen. When they can get out of that, then they are big enough to be on their own.

Last year on my birthday I was pouring the concrete foundations, this year I was a little more relaxed. I put in a couple of hours hanging lights first thing, but then Roey & the girls came over with cakes around 11am. Its lovely just hanging out on that deck, especially with good company, but Elba took things to a new level with a bit of random, extreme yoga. Then it was lunch & after barely a couple more hours in the afternoon we were back out for dinner & drinks…though it was a school night, so still in bed before midnight . I didn’t feel too guilty, I think Ive earned a day off here or there J So thank you for all your birthday wishes, though for those of you doing so on facebook, it’s a dead account. Or at least the Chinese hacked it a few years ago & I cant get in it even if I wanted to. This also means I cant turn off the notifications….so I know you’ve wished, I just cant thank L

Don Simon

I was coming upstairs from being in the garden one evening when someone rings the bell. Its a woman that lives down on the main road, along with her daughter. I see this woman most days, often give her a lift into town & as she has asked for the job, she will probably be my cleaner. They asked if they could come in & they stated they had a favour to ask me. The sirens & red flags all fought for air space in my head, this should be interesting! The mother began, her daughter was getting married – phew, so no “will you marry my daughter”, no “my daughter is pregnant, you will marry my daughter”, so far so good. Ah, getting married = wedding =$’s. As politely as I could, I stopped her in mid flow to advise that I am not funding anything, nor am I loaning anything. Just in case I threw in I wasn’t able to host anything either. Surely that couldn’t leave much?? What they asked me, is will I be a part of the wedding. I don’t recall the actual term, but its essentially the godfather to the godfather of the bride. I probably lost in translation the sob story that lead to this vacancy, but they assure me it is an honour. Most humbling for me, they say it will be their honour to have me do this. Ive yet to find out the rest of the details, but they’ve taken copies of my cedula – you will recall from earlier posts that you need a copy of your cedula to break wind – for inclusion in all the official documentation. Im happy to do it & Im touched that they have asked me & it very much feels like a milestone on the way to being part of the comuna 🙂 So as of 27^th October, I will officially be able to sign my name, Don Simon 😀

On the subject of names, thank you all for your wonderful suggestions for a house name. In the time honoured tradition of Roy Walker, its close, its just not quite right. Following in the spirit of “say what you see”, Im going to wait & see if anything comes to me organically. You may have noticed from the video that I have built the pool bridge – rest assured there is already a pipe installed underneath to create the waterfall – so currently that’s just got its nose in front. I sorry we cant return any of your suggestions, but all other entries will receive their runner up prizes in the post.

So that just about wraps things up this time. A much shorter read, but lets see how we go with “show don’t tell” & review going forward 😉

Until next time when I will bring you more from the jungle & quite possibly some paint on a wall…

Take care,

Si x

Welcome back to another slice of my life here on the Ecuadorian Costa.

Yes I’ve borrowed a song title from Prince, but unlike the original, which was a gem from his 1986 album “Parade”, I’d like to take it more at its poetic face value. The song is the sad telling of the death of his friend, but Im using it here to simply mean things may happen unexpectedly. Now Im not talking of random surprises here, Im talking about established norms that change when you wouldn’t expect them to. Yes its probably true that in states like Colorado, snow is perfectly normal in April, but that’s maybe over thinking it a little. Coincidentally & not unexpectedly, June saw the start of what is referred to as Winter here, so the temp has plummeted to an average of 27degC & the blanket has gone back on the bed to get me through the frosty 23degC nights. I did get some early exposure to these ungodly temperatures when I went to meet Einat in Quito back in the middle of May, but more on that trip later…

Tech Failure.

You will recall from last time, that I had some electrical issues at the beach house, well I attributed these issues to be the cause of my laptop failure. It ran the battery empty & shut down when plugged in, so it seemed reasonable to conclude that there was no power to the socket at these times. If left for a day or two & plugged in elsewhere, the battery would recharge & we were up n running again.

When the electrical issue was found innocent, all fingers pointed to the battery or the charger. I ran all over town for a battery, but my best hope was $150 with at least 6wks delivery & I wasn’t doing that. I tried a few charger options, but didn’t really get anything conclusive. I then got referred to a shop/engineer in GQ, so I let them have at it. My charger had caused a fault, which they fixed & gave me a new charger at $80 plus $15 standard minimum charge. I still felt Id had a result. That is until, back at home & halfway through Black Panther, the ‘Plug in Now’ warning flashes up & it shuts down. Doubly angry, I at least need to finish the film, so I switch to my old n crappy, back up laptop. All was beginning to calm down, I would just have to take it back to them tomorrow & the land of Wakanda was back to being a happy place, when “imminent hard drive failure, please save all work now” appears briefly & then the screen went blank.

The primary laptop went back & then came back & then went back until they admitted they were just chasing the symptom but couldn’t identify the cause. Through some old DOS menus I can get the crappy lappy to boot now & again, but it seldom stays up long enough to watch anything to the end. Im told it’s the corrosive salt air & everything Ive read supports that, so Im glad Ill be a good enough distance back in the jungle before I break out the expensive stuff.

So, all of that not only means I don’t get to relax glued to the tube, it also means Im writing this on my phone. I then email it to myself so I can pick it up at the internet café to add photos & upload. Yes, these are the Herculean efforts I go to in order to bring you this content, so as a reward for appreciating them, this is a longer edition to get you through your summer holidays, all the way through.

 

Driving Miss Daycee Craycee

 

Dropping Stevie off at the airport seems like lifetimes ago & yet it was only my 3^rd time driving in to Guayaquil…with like, just me driving yeah! Since then its been at least once a week, usually its there & back on the same day & sometimes its more than once a week. Ive said before that it’s a 3hr bus ride but driving shaves 20-30mins off that, depending on how you drive. I tried driving it faster once, but revised that plan when an unseen dip followed by a hump threw me airborne. The roads are just in no condition to drive safely & fast or most often, neither. The maximum speed limit is 100kph or 60 mph. This varies down to 70kph for non obvious reasons along the “motorway”, but drops down to 50kph or 30mph on the coast road. In my head these are the speeds of state funerals, however, in reality, its really hard to drive much faster & by hard, I mean Lewis Hamilton levels of concentration & awareness, which takes all the fun & relaxation out of driving for me. Interestingly enough, I’ve settled in to driving at the same speeds I did when driving in the UK, or at least the same numbers (60 & 80) on the speedo – Im sure some psych major could enthusiastically tell me why 😉

The drive itself is only 183km or a lil bit over 100 miles. In terms of orientation & in comparison to England, Guayaquil is London, the airport is Tottenham & I live in Birmingham if Birmingham was on the coast. In England that’s a doddle & you’d just zip down the M40. The M40 doesn’t exist in Ecuador, there is only the M5 & the M4, so yes, you guessed it, you have no choice but to go via Bristol, which in our case is Salinas or “the nearest place we have to go to get anything we want” town, as we usually call it.

In spite of the bum numbing hours behind the wheel, the process of driving is an interesting & entertaining one. Any flashing lights in any combination means something is about to happen or might be happening right now, or maybe quite some time ago. Often this means the person is stopping, but when & where is anyone’s guess.  Hazard lights mean absolutely anything except what one might expect according to the accepted definition of what constitutes a hazard. A right indicator means someone is driving slower than they would normally, whereas a left indicator means pass me on this side. Im sure you can see how driving slowly & wanting people to pass you requires both indicators, well there’s an example of where the hazards come in. When I’m turning right into my road, waiting in the middle close to the line & being nonchalantly gringo by using the turn signal as Edgar A. Walz, Jr. first intended back in 1925, I always have to stick my head out of the window to make sure some old boy on a motorbike isn’t trying to go around me on the outside. There is a nearside lane policy, but it seems only advisory as everyone simply weaves left & right like they are chasing O.J. The crazy thing is, you cant turn left off of the motorways. Now I grant you, not being able to turn across oncoming motorway traffic doesn’t seem too crazy, but what you have to do instead is make a U Turn at the many  designated gaps, then when on the other side of the road you can make your left turn as a right. What this means is that vehicles having come to a complete stop & are now turning 180 deg & starting to pull away, suddenly appear in the fast lane in front of you – far safer!!

You’ll Never Take Me Alive Copper

 

Back when I bought the truck, I had a month from signing the papers to getting the name changed on the documentation. Unfortunately you cant just change the name on the matricular, you have to be issued with a new one & this requires a new test. Ive seen the state of some vehicles on the road here & so I wasn’t too concerned with whatever tests they would do, but all four of my tyres were bald & I mean kojak radial bald with barely an indication of where the tread used to be. They operate a free same day retest if you fail, so it seemed prudent to find out what else may need attention before I commit to just the tyres. You have to pay the fees & taxes at a bank first & then wait 3 days for the payment to show up on their screen as in their account, then go to the test centre, wait in line & take the test. You stay in the car to switch on the lights, bib the horn & wash the screen, Senor Clipboard then strolls to the back & repeats the instruction with the added bonus of brake lights this time. He looks closely at the tyres & takes out a piece of card with some lines on it. After much cogitation, he determines that 2 of my tyres are bald & must be changed. I intended to replace all 4, but out of interest asked for confirmation & was told the other 2 are fine for now. I zip down to the tyre place, a modern looking & seemingly well stocked ‘warehouse’ by the side of the road. All four tyres with discount comes to $600. To use my debit card will cost me 15%. There is a cash-point in the wall of the Electricity Board Head Office next door to the tyre place, but of course its got no power so isn’t working & the next nearest is probably a half hour round trip away. Did I tell you that this was now late morning, I had to go home first & then drive to Guayaquil in time to get on a 6pm flight to Quito?? Well if I had, you would now understand that I was more than a little pushed for time by this point. As a good advert for less haste more speed, it was during the drive later this same afternoon that I took off from the road before I even got to the airport.

I only had enough cash on me for the 2 new tyres only, so that’s what I bought & the old ones were tossed in the back. Return to testing station, boxes ticked, all new paperwork issued, just none of it too quickly mind.

Eventually, as I dashed back up the coast road, it was perhaps inevitable that I should be stopped at a police check point. The ink was still damp on my documentation, so they waved me on happily enough, despite their customary passive intensity.

I made it to the airport & bought my ticket with 45mins to spare, so grabbed a bite to eat & relaxed into my mini vaykay. I had a wonderful time in Quito, but to continue with this part of the story, fast forward to me arriving back, just before 6pm on Thursday. A mad dash in a taxi to the main computer store to see if I could buy a laptop battery proved fruitless & as it was now 8pm by this time, the rest of my shopping could wait until tomorrow, so I asked the taxi to take me to a $50 hotel. Appalled at my apparent largesse, the cab driver was having none of it, but was instead taking me to a $25 hotel. It had been a long day & Id lost the will to argue. Pulling up outside an impressive façade, I couldn’t help notice the 4 stars underneath the name. The cabbie dashed inside, returning with a satisfied grin to confirm they had a room & yes it was $25. Leaving the smart & functional foyer & upon entering the room, it was clear the guy painting the stars must have had a stutter, but the bed was clean / comfyish & the shower was fantastic (considering). An early start saw me chasing the city for computer stores & a few other bits n bobs before heading back to the airport where Id left the truck – 5 days armed guard secure parking, immediately outside arrivals, $38! – A quick call in to a warehouse to collect a door Id ordered the previous week & then it was pedal to the metal to get home before dark. Ive never enjoyed driving in the dark, so with all of the challenges as described earlier, things only get worse when you cant see them until you are upon them. I try to avoid it if I can as its just too much hard work, though I don’t often think of it as particularly  dangerous.

I make good time & Im heading into Manglaralto a bit before 6pm & I see the roadside stop outside the police station, multiple vehicles pulled over suggesting something was going on. Naturally I was waved over, so I smiled understandably as I handed over my documents, leaving my hand hanging as I expected them to be returned after the usual quick check. Oh no, this guy was off around the vehicle, then returning to my window to deliver his verdict. “one infraction, your tyre is illegal, your vehicle is to be impounded & $300 fine”. Now Id heard similar speeches before & this would usually be the point at which I would enquire how much it will cost to overlook the matter this one time, I say usually. This time I felt I had a case & was prepared to make a stand….

 

• Excuse me your amazing dickness, I am returning mere minutes from the state administered vehicular testing station & the very same deemed these two tyres to be of legal standard. They carried out an exhaustive test, using only the finest & perfectly calibrated tools in order to determine their road-worthiness, the results of which are clearly written on this here official stertificate. Where as you on the other hand have merely glanced at them in the half light & written them off without further enquiry. I Sir, refute your claim & refuse your action.

 

I wish I was that eloquent in Spanish, but I feel I got my point across none the less & even showed him the two replaced tyres in the back under the door. Amazingly, he entered into debate & suggested I had stopped somewhere on the way & swapped the virtually bald for the completely bald. He ushered me back into my seat & shut the door, making a point to remind me he still had all my documents, including my ID card & wandered off to terrorise some other poor sap. He let me stew for a couple of cars, then came back & repeated his impound monologue, to which I began repeating my offer of non declarable income, which got a look of derision as he once again walked off. It was time to phone a friend. Luckily Jarret answered after a few rings & as he had been with me at the vehicle testing, he understood & immediately came up with the same reasoning, so I headed for the cop & handed the phone over. I should mention here that Jarret enjoys a quid pro quo relationship with the Manglaralto traffic police in that they are his diggers that pull wrecks out of ditches for them, & his diggers that do all the work around their station, plus a million & one other lil favours that mean he & his can drive freely & without contest. Of course I didn’t want to use up Jarret’s favours, I just did not want my truck going into that compound. Full stop! After much toing & froing I get the phone back & Jarret sucks in a breath & tells me its $40. FORTY FRICKIN BUCKS?! $5 is standard, $10 if you are getting gringoed, but $40 is taking the piss. I wrenched the notes out of my wallet & tipped my head in his direction, which he ignored. So I stuck my arm out & waved the notes so all his mates could see, meaning he’d at least have to share it now, I smiled at the pathetically small victory. Well colour me Flash, you’ve never seen the man move so fast, desperately waving his arms down for me to hide his soon to be ill gotten gains. It was a hollow victory & I feel as if some unseen force has conspired a series of events, but after an early visit to a working cashpoint the next morning, I got the two baldies replaced first thing Saturday & they haven’t pulled me over since. Some even nod back occasionally as I drive by 😉

 

I’d like a P please Bob

 

We have been busy onsite these last few weeks. I still hope to move in end of June/first week of July, so Ive been focusing on all the elements I need in place to live there, whilst also keeping the guys going on finishing everything else. My current challenge is that they cant get on inside the house, until a certain sequence of preceding “Simon jobs” have been completed. As an example, I don’t want the walls rendered until the ceilings are plaster boarded. I cant plaster board the ceilings until the water & electrics are complete. I haven’t been able to buy enough light fittings yet & I am still awaiting parts for the water system before I can test it. These parts have to come from their head office in Miami, so of course I have to wait for them to go through the whole customs process before I can get them shipped to me locally. The vast majority of the hot & cold system is now installed though, or at least up to the point where they will connect to something else, such as a tap & it is these adapters that I am awaiting. I have also installed the pump, pressure tank & boiler combination that will fulfill all my hot, wet fantasies in the bathroom.

We still have plenty to get on with externally, so the whole gang is good for another few weeks or so, but once the outside is complete, I want to slow the whole job down to focus on one aspect at a time through to completion. My guys are all definitely getting better because Im drumming it into them, but they still have little concept for not trashing what they’ve previously completed whilst carrying out the next task. So the fewer work areas to police the better when it comes to fine finishing & detail.

The door I collected in Guayaquil has filled the last but one hole in the exterior, leaving only the skylight yet to fill. The door is at the top of the landing, leading out onto the now newly surfaced, first floor patio. We first installed gutter drainage & then laid a medium fine grit, set in a cement paste, across the whole of the floor & up the stairs to the roof. Its relatively cheap, hard wearing, easy to repair & much like Lindsey Lohan, quick to lay. Im not convinced it’s the grey colour I was promised, though I’m confident that will change when I have some paint on the walls to contrast it.

Misty Blues

So the last big challenge, or rather the thing that would run continually in my head until it was done, was the transfer of the glass from storage in Sinchal, to installation in Dos Mangas. A journey that made me nervous, around 15,342m of nervousness. I had a couple of transport deals fall through for one reason or another & I felt I was running out of options. Whilst there are plenty of pickups adapted to carry glass, they aren’t big enough to handle the size of my package ;). Unfortunately there just aren’t that many bigger trucks equipped in the same way. So I thought a little outside the box-van, mostly just near the edge & opted to take a standard bigger truck & construct my own specialist modifications.

Its pretty simple, just an A frame with something to stop the bottom sliding out. So having called everyone to arms first thing the next morning, we set off in convoy, on a make or break mission to bring back something shiny, or go home on shattered dreams. We had a little pre-start meeting, everybody knew their job & we set to work. 90mins later we were unloading in Dos Mangas with not a single scratch in our triumphant demeanor. On site we’d been building our tower-block stairway all week, so with my ad-hoc redesign, the now low level wall was easy to step over to gain access to the first floor patio. Again we had a pre-start, but this time I bought out props. I had put together a life size model of the glass from timber around site & whilst not as heavy, it would at least allow me to test the route without risking the glass. They of course thought I was a raving loon, but went along good naturedly. Well blow me down with a feather when, going over the wall & turning to the right, the guy at the end gets pushed off the stairs & the wooden facsimile falls on the sharp concrete edge. They of course all look to me sheepishly, I think my expression says all it needs to, but I try to raise my eyebrow a little further nonetheless.

We “Take Two” & this time turn left at the top. We have another challenge on the stairs to the roof, but after one final rehearsal, we are ready & Operation “Raise a Glass or Two to Us” is underway. It goes without a hitch & very soon each huge slab of glass is perfectly in place. But there’s a problem. The rail clips that hold the glass down & prevent the ingress of water, are not staying in place. It doesn’t take long to figure out the reason is the glass is no longer as thick as it used to be. During its extended storage since manufacture, much of it exposed to at least some sunlight, the material that separates the two panes has softened, changed shape & thus changed the whole nature of the assembly. On at least one unit, this has also allowed air & possibly water inside. I say this because a milky residue that doesn’t look like condensation is covering most of the inside of one pane. In the UK, 2 out of the 3 panels would be replaced. The only solution to that here, is expensive & amounts to either you employing an agent & importing them yourself, or you buy them from a company that is already set up & has an outside supplier to do it for you. Neither of these options come cheap, so its just not worth it for 4 panels (remember the 2 broken bi-fold door panes). Not wanting to spend my idle moments wallowing in either self pity or chasing ghost solutions, I have nothing to lose by trying to correct the issue myself. I have an idea that by opening up one end & inserting a 3m long, ultra slim squeegee, it will clean it off with some concentrated effort. So in the absence of such a tool being available here, I believe that by attaching a windscreen wiper blade at 45deg to my nylon cable puller, it should prove a more than adequate substitute & might even get Jim Dyson frothing outside the patent office or perhaps just the 99p Store. I am hoping that if I throw in one of the small bags of silica you always get in the box with electronics, it should keep enough moisture trapped & so prevent ‘most’, future condensation build up. In all honesty though, I just can’t be bothered right now as I have more pressing areas to focus on & this disappointment is still a little too fresh to be particularly positive about.

Of course, without the occasional low, the highs wouldn’t seem quite so wonderful, so on balance I am very pleased with where I am. To reflect that pleasure, I threw in a little design flair, a little wavy texture to off set the largely cubist statement of the rest of the house. When seen from the rear & once the staircase down from the coffee deck has been built, the corkscrew of the spiral should flow up into the waves above, centering the contrast & grounding  the boxes either side of it.

An essential part of being able to live somewhere, is having a place to sleep & that to me, means a nice big bed. I bought my old King size & a spare double in the container, with the intention of getting myself a complete new base & mattress locally. Unsurprisingly, all the reasonable ones are imported & thus super expensive. So taking inspiration from my recent trip, I made the base myself & cast a floating bed in concrete. Its now been sealed & ready to take a mattress, but depending on my eventual floor tile choice, I may end up painting it. 2m x 2m is a standard size here, which they call a three person bed, though perhaps whole family would be more accurate. Think all the granpas & granmas from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory….. Anyway, there is a supplier in GQ that is offering 30% off & free next day delivery on orders of 2 mattresses or more. I also need a double & Roey needs 2, so let the haggling begin.

 

Money for Nothing

 

We pretty much have the cement mixer running all day on site, multiple battery tool chargers, circular saws etc & we leave all the temporary lights on all the time to discourage bats roosting & yet my electricity bill has never been over $8 a month, which Im pretty pleased about. Of course when all the 240v fridges, freezers & music equipment gets fired up that cost will go up, but Im confident it wont be by much. My hob & water heater are gas, which is $1.50 a bottle, so all in all, overheads should be low. Water as Ive said before is a $5 standard charge, up to a certain amount & that’s what Ive paid every month except once when it went to $7, but as we concreted the roof that month, it felt reasonable. Imagine my shock then when the bill for April came in at $16. Of course I challenged it, but our meter reading records matched, so I had no argument & paid it…begrudgingly. I beefed up our water policy & so no spare filling of the cistern was permitted, we would only draw it as we needed it. May’s bill turned up, $16 again. WTF?! I challenged his numbers & we walk over to the meter to confirm they tally. They did but I didn’t understand what was happening. Then I noticed the wheel whizzing around. It was late morning so the water was no longer being pumped, but I checked the end of our hose nonetheless & saw it to be dry. I turned off the stop cock & the meter stopped, back on & it spun with nothing passing through it. I felt like I was on an episode of Candid Camera. Whatever the anomaly, it hadn’t always been present, so I asked if they had made any changes to their system. Well we changed the pump last month, but that wouldn’t have anything to do with it, you have to pay for the water you have used. That tipped my penny & it dropped nicely into a convincing argument. I put my thumb over the end of our hose & the meter stopped. I suggested the reason they changed the pump was because the seals had gone & would no longer pump. They agreed. With a newly sealed pump, pressure would remain in the system & air would be pushed to find an outlet. All the other houses are complete, so have a ball float shut off system, which means all the air is pushed to me. I am not paying for air. After some back & forth we agreed that I would take measures to prevent the further egress of air & if my readings returned to normal the following month, then the $16 Id previously paid would see me through to June. Thank you m’lud.

The Electricity company aren’t exactly error free either. I get an email notification of my bill, which I then take to their office & show to them, they print me out a copy, which I hand to the cashier & she takes payment. At the beginning of June I get a disconnection notice posted on my meter – I hadn’t paid my bill. I searched back through my inbox, but I hadn’t missed a bill, so I went down to the office & showing my ID card, paid my balance. I then asked why they’d stopped sending me my bills as that was a useful reminder when one has many other things to do. She checked my details & showed me my email address for confirmation. It was wrong, which was strange as I had typed it in myself last year to ensure its accuracy. I asked her how it could have changed & was told that part of her job was to audit their database which she had just done the previous month. Apparently my .co.uk suffix had looked like a typo to her so she corrected it to .com. Did she remember I typed it in originally, yes. Had I been in to ask why I hadn’t been getting emails & in fact, showed her the emails each month when I came in to pay, no & yes respectively.  Yet you change it without cause nor provocation & then threaten to cease service………..and……Breathe…..

 

What I needed was a little break…

 

More Than Mindu

 

You will remember from last time that I had met Einat, the most amazing woman who had an incredible & immediate effect on me. Fortunately, she feels the same way, so it was a no brainer for me to fly up to meet her in Quito to spend a few more days together before she heads back to Tel Aviv. She had arrived a couple of days earlier & whilst waiting for me to get my truck sorted, had ticked off most of the local attractions for herself. That meant we were able to take a trip within a trip. Cotapaxi was high on the list, but the weather wasn’t being reported favourably & Id donated most of my mountain gear to Oxfam. So we agreed on the cloud forests of Mindu. A couple of hours on an early morning coach saw us arrive in a quaint mountain village & Einat had booked us into a gorgeous boutique hotel across the river on the outskirts of town. The owner was French & the vybe was a relaxed, multi-cultural mix of innovative style to create a sense of comfort. Girl done good, real good! We take a stroll around town for lunch & are amazed to count off seven pizza places – legend has it an Italian came to town & fathered seven children to different women, who all grew up to start pizza businesses. The mornings were glorious & with the endlessly forested mountains, fringed with mist not yet burnt off by the golden sunshine, life felt about as perfect as it could be. We didn’t have to pay to go see the evening frog chorus as we could hear it from our bed, but we did spend an afternoon zip lining from peak to peak. It was way more than I was expecting, with a total of 10 long lines back & forth, you got a lot of zipping for your buck. The views were outstanding, though it took me a few rides before I could relax enough to enjoy them. We were very high & Im not ashamed to admit I actually saw myself plummeting as the shackle gave way & my fingers slipped from the cable. Of course the premonition would have been better placed before I was launched from the platform, so I was very grateful for the often lengthy walk between stations in which to get my sphincter back under control. After a few times though it got great & I guess I must’ve begun looking relaxed, because half way across No7, our “guides” began seriously swinging the cable to spice up the ride. The first few seconds whilst my brain tried to work out what was happening & concluding very quickly that I was about to plummet, was beyond terrifying. Being spun around to see what was happening didn’t make it any less scary. They had both been flirting with Einat & this could be the perfect setup where the old man has a mysterious “accident”. Shaken, but trying not to show it, I got back on the proverbial horse by doing the last run hanging face down. Superman style apparently, though more “The Incredible Falling Man” most likely. Yes, the ego needs to be reassured now & again that the body has its back, but if we do not rise to that challenge when we can, then we have already fallen.

We also spent an almost spiritual afternoon at a butterfly & hummingbird sanctuary. In a large, aviary like structure covered with netting, hundreds of butterflies surround you & flutter on about their day. Over-ripe bananas are set out on plates for you to scoop a little on your finger, to entice a butterfly to land, which they do, a lot, which is surreal. They’d also filled the structure with exotic plant life & very kindly put up name & species details, so I’m looking forward to including some in my garden next year. Humming birds are wondrous, but have an innate sense of when a camera is pointed at them & effortlessly avoid being snapped. We waited patiently & failed nonetheless, though displaying dedication above & beyond, Einat secured elusive video footage to preserve the moment. As often though, these things are over all too quickly. Too soon it was back to Quito, where we spent our last night in the old town, before we had to say good bye. Up to that point it wasn’t a subject we spent much time on. Yes we knew it was going to happen, but for the whole time up until then & especially whilst in Mindu, we had been living only in the moment & without consequence, free to be whoever we wanted to be. They say if you are the smartest one in the room, then you are in the wrong room. Einat bought peace & introduced challenge back into my room. I was free to be better because of her & it felt great. I want to spend a lot more time with this woman, lifetimes in fact.

We were pretty grown up at the airport, so it felt a little unreal, almost like just seeing a friend off on holiday. It certainly didn’t feel like any kind of actual ending & denial is on another continent after all. The harsh reality is though, Einat is now back in Tel Aviv. We carried on as something of an LDR, but without an idea of when that could change, we were just treading water in a choppy sea. When it became clear that we didn’t have a solution, I ended it…… but then couldn’t keep to it, it seems neither of us can let the other go. I don’t want to leave Ecuador, Einat doesn’t want to leave Israel & there doesn’t seem to be much of a third option. Not exactly Sophie’s Choice, but whilst straight up logic says “enjoy the memories”, every other part of me is demanding “do whatever you need to do to keep her in your life”.

The selfless thing here is to let her get on with her life, the selfish thing is to ensure that life is with me, but whilst kidnapping served as a big romantic gesture for early man, its a practice that is somewhat frowned upon these days. So in an ‘off again, on again’ sketchy plan, we are going to meet in September, though location not yet known, I will no doubt follow in Prince Williams footsteps & make a very important visit to the Holy Land.

The future is not set, there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.

 

 

Its Competition Time

 

As I will be moving in to my new house soon, I feel it should have a name to personalise it as my home. For some reason, my usually fertile mind currently resembles the live stream from a goldfish tank. My best shot at the moment is with reference to the estate name, ‘Rincon Las Cascadas’ (Waterfall Corner).

If I add a small rock outcrop to my pool & divert a return pipe, I could create a small water fall & then  use “  La C A  S

C

A

D

A

on my gate post. But its quite a lot of work & not very imaginative. I cant think of anything original along the lines of ‘Dunroamin’ & don’t want to express any left of centre religious leanings by using Valhalla, Nirvana etc.

So Id like to throw it open to you guys for suggestions. The winner will be the one drawn out of a hat before I move in. If I should receive more than one suggestion, then the one I like best will receive an all expenses paid holiday with me & a Blue Peter Badge (NB expenses not covered by this offer include, but are not limited to, any form of travel, any form of nourishment or beverage, any form of activity, any item whatsoever. You will not receive a Blue Peter Badge). So get to it, let those juices flow & allow your imagination to fly free, you’ve got 3 just weeks to find a new house name for me.

 

Going Dark

I am hoping to get some kind of confirmation that I can have fibre internet access installed to my house by this coming Wednesday, but as this is Ecuador, my breath is not being held. This could well mean I have to write the next update on my phone again, though if the move pans out as Im expecting, the blog will likely just be a series of smiley emojis as seen relaxing on the coffee deck 🙂

 

Till next time, when I’m officially a Homeowner

Si x

Starring, The Three Amigos, plus Special Guests

Aside from just being the title of a song by 10cc, Ive been reflecting recently on how much love, or similar connected emotions, are at the root of everything we do. Of course this isn’t simply limited to being ‘in love’, as most often they are done out of love & by that I mean, because of love. A parent will sacrifice their life for a child, an addict their soul for a hit. Morally, they are maybe miles apart, however, Im sure they would both put up a very convincing argument as to the lengths they as individuals would be prepared to go to. No of course they aren’t the same thing, but to the individual it can feel like the same thing. A driving force that defies explanation & holds no truck with reason

We love ice cream but hate Brussels sprouts – do we really mean that or do we just like & not like? I quite like sprouts & ice cream is often lovely, so it seems crazy that someone could feel that strongly & yet their actions will often be a better indicator than their words. There is after all not much of a scale to play with: hate, really dislike, dislike, ambivalent, like, really like, love. Yes I could’ve used different words, but without going into expressions such as “Im really rather keen on”, three levels each way pretty much sums it up. Perhaps we need another word to express the difference between the emotional love for a person, or how you feel about your absolute favourite string cheese, for example

As Im typing, Love & Happiness just came on the radio, which to me is a sign I should see this thought through to the end, or just to the end of the paragraph at least.

So, love is a powerful motivator & it seems that at its most intense, there is nothing we wont do for it, because of it, or in pursuit of it. Its something we feel completely & yet cant effectively describe. Amazingly we can turn on a sixpence, hating something we once loved for reasons that need only make sense to us. Or when feeling hate is based on expectation, have reality flip that on its head when the belief is seen to be false. Logic plays no part in the process, yet good decision making demands the absence of emotion. Does that mean we can only get the best an algorithm can can calculate for us, or when we make important decisions, should we sacrifice sense for happiness?

I read recently that if we act based on passion, then we are far more likely to see that action through to fruition because of how strongly we feel about it. Its not logic that gets soldiers up & over the top of a trench, its not common sense that gets a climber to the top of a mountain & actual happiness is seldom the result of a calculation. Love is happiness & happiness isn’t always something that makes sense on paper. They say if you love what you do, then you will never feel like you’ve worked a day in your life. That may be true, but few of us are that fortunate, so what do we do? We focus on the goal, which is our individual version of happiness. Doing XYZ for X amount of time is an integral part of achieving that goal, so why not love it for what it means to you & your future happiness, rather than the pain in your ass it seems from time to time.

Act 1, enter The Three Amigos

When last I wrote, I’d just got my wheels sorted & was all prepped for our pre-arranged rendezvous at Guayaquil Airport. 24hrs before the off, there’s chatter on the wire with rumours of delays. Frantic cross checks produced contrary & confusing results, we believed what we wanted to hear & we got it wrong. Jeffs first leg would be delayed, thus missing his connecting flight. Due to the now known, future delay, the airline had been bumping passengers for a little while & the next flight had filled up quick. This meant him taking the next flight after that, which now also meant a 6hr delay for Jeff & a long ol’ wait for Stevie & I. It also didn’t help that I broke my phone again & until Stevie came through at arrivals, I wasn’t quite sure what plan we were working to. Not the best start, but it was great to have time for me & Steve to catch up – so we went to a DIY store to set the ambiance :).

So even though having my own transport means I can now knock 30mins or so off the 3hr journey, its still getting late by the time we reach home. Jeff & Steve tried their best bless them to keep me going, but I fell asleep first by a long way, so I hope they had a good time amusing themselves. A lazy breakfast followed by a ride out to see the house saw another glorious day unfold before us . Both were genuinely very impressed, with them now looking forward to staying in the finished version. I cant wait to be able to welcome them back. They also pointed out that it seems much bigger than it looks in the photos once you get inside & seeing it through their eyes, I cant disagree. Sunday should have been a last night blow out, though in spite of a nice meal out, we opted for a gentle evening of catching up properly. The kind of lazy intimacy you cant get over skype, just hanging out & saying what comes into your head, which leads to all kinds of fun & entertainment.

Soon enough it was Monday lunch & time for Jeff to depart. I dropped Stevie off at the house to begin getting his head around the job, whilst I sped down to Salinas to get my phone screen repaired, leaving Jeff to potter. We had lunch together & then Jeff took a car to the airport. What we hadn’t processed at this point, was that in an effort to mitigate the disaster of his arriving flight, he had changed his flight & was now going via San Salvador rather than Bogata. That decision turned the usual 5 1/2 hr flight with a 2hr stopover into 16hr nite mare journey. No matter how much he loves me, he is never doing that again!

So with just me & Stevie, it was back to work & we hit it like Spartans. Unfortunately the drive belt on my mixer broke in the afternoon, which meant the guys were now mixing by hand & that costs time & money, besides making a mess. This meant Tuesday I headed back to Salinas to find a belt. I went to every motor shop, washing machine repair shop, tool shop, you name it, no one had one. Everyone I asked assured me the person they were sending me to definitely had one. He never did. I returned back to site to find Stevie stripped to the waist, sweat glistening as he surveyed imaginary cable roots across my ceiling. There was a lot of work to do, like really, a lot. Following a conversation with the guys, they convinced me I just hadn’t been to the right place for the belt, so after having secured location details from his father, I took a labourer back down to Salinas. In an effort to salvage something from this, I took a little pride in knowing that he had as little luck as I had, or rather, I was just as good as him at not being able to get what I needed, but only because it didn’t exist, not because I couldn’t effectively communicate my requirement. Out of desperation I bought a sewing machine drive belt, but predictably that didn’t even last a single revolution. All this meant Stevie was left alone & discovering that even though I had done what I could beforehand, there was still a lot of concrete that had to be drilled & block to be chiselled before he could run his cabling. So I took the baton, or rather the hammer and got to work. Like dogs we worked through till sundown every night, stopping only for lunch.

After a bite to eat & a shower, we were good for an hour or so, then it was fall into bed before starting all over again first thing the next morning. So when Saturday rolled around, we definitely deserved a beer. Grabbing snacks to go, we made our way along the beach in Montanita & sat down for a beer whilst we watched the world turn & the sun swiftly head down before us. We stayed for quite a while with Stevie out pacing me by some margin, but I cant drink & he deserved it for he had earned it. When I’d finished my last mojito it was time for bed, or for me at least. Which meant for the second time I was wimping out & left Stevie on the deck to stare out to sea. I felt even more guilty at 7am Sunday when I took him a cup of tea. What followed was a quiet day at work. We were getting close, but there was a problem & we couldn’t make sense of how to connect to the incoming supply. I felt rough as hell & I could only imagine how Stevie felt, so we left it, hoping it would make more sense in the morning. But you cant stem the mans conscientiousness, so when we got home, Stevie took the cover off the distribution board to see how it was connected. Which was when all the power in the house went off. He quickly got most things back on as they were just the result of loose breakers, but the circuit with the fridge & water cooler wouldn’t come back on. You know when you see someones shoulders slump as they realise they so don’t want to be playing this game anymore, but then shrug some commitment back in to them somehow & carry on. It made me all warm n fuzzy to see. Having done what he could, we got around the rest with extension leads. It was all a result of extremely poor & dangerous wiring that was a major incident waiting to happen. The main incoming supply was just twisted & taped then buried in a wall. So without perhaps realising why at the time, Stevie quite possibly saved my life by disturbing that ticking time bomb.

So apparently the problem we were having difficulty understanding is the way electricity is transferred through the cables. In UK we have a live, a neutral & an earth. In Ecuador they use the neutral as a return, which goes to earth. This makes no sense to me as I am not an electrician. What it means in real terms is that the fully functional & safe distribution board I bought from UK will not work. Sadly it also means that Stevie wasn’t able to revel in his joy of accomplishment by switching the lights on in glorious ceremony, but we did test it & it all works as expected.

So from my perspective it’s a fantastic achievement. I now have a full 1^st fix electrical installation, with only a board replacement & final connection to be made by a local as a couple of hours work. My only regrets are Stevie not having any time to explore & get a better sense of what living here is like. Time off is what I think most employees would call it. It would also have been nice to spend more time with Jeff. Fortunately there will be more opportunities for both.

Cut to Construction Scene

After dropping Stevie at the airport, a couple of hours running around Guayaquil finally produced the drive belt I needed, so things were getting back on track at site.

The render debacle had caused me real concern, so as a stopgap I worked out a plan with the guys whereby they would only apply the first coat, this would at least buy me time to come up with a solution. I talked through my issue with Jose & when he understood what he needed to achieve, we were able to work out the best way to solve it. I am now beyond pleased with the result & cant wait to paint it. The only downside is that the process for them is slow, involves everyone & Im neither good enough nor do I have the time to teach them the skills necessary to improve things significantly. That being said, they level from top to bottom & from side to side so everything is perfectly straight to the eye, which in my case translates in to ‘well worth the time & effort!’.What this also means is that little else is getting done, except by me. This is fine as Ive now finished off some of the drilling & chasing we skipped in the 1^st fix electrical. Ive also been working out exactly what happens with the plumbing. In essence getting my head around the detail of what I need to do to move in whilst keeping everyone else productive.

One such solution was to progress the external works & it turned out my neighbour was looking to do some external work himself. He wanted a lot of soil removed from his front garden – I needed a lot of soil to fill my rear garden. I wanted my pool dug – he wanted his rear garden leveled. He needed access through my rear garden to level his – there is no mechanical access to my rear garden after the pool is dug. It was clear we needed to synchronize & he can barely decide whether to blink or breathe, so I took over. He paid me a token gesture & I got him to draw out what he wanted it to look like. It turned out though that it wasn’t what he wanted at all, so we spent a week with the digger frustratingly creating various options for him to be able to see what they looked like. Its only because of my friendship with Bob the digger driver, that he didn’t walk off site. It took 2 weeks to do what could’ve been done in 4 days & then only 2 more days to level all my new dirt & to completely dig my pool. He was able to do this because I gave him accurate instruction to begin with, I confirmed his adherence to the plan at various stages of progress & he did his bit by doing exactly as instructed. A point I tried to explain to my neighbour when he whinged about how much it all cost.

With all this new dirt I had no more room for the temp office & w/c, so I needed to get an operational toilet inside. Granted you still have to flush with a bucket & the door is the old one from outside, its lit by a diffused LED in-ceiling lamp unit (not actually fitted in a ceiling yet, more like hanging on a cable) & is underground plumbed all the way to the septic.

In evolutionary terms, man being able to sit on his throne indoors, has always been thought of as a significant step!

After some consideration, I figured the loo didn’t need quite as much space as Id given it, so with a quick shuffle & a cut of walling, we now have a cupboard under the stairs…& who doesn’t enjoy more storage eh?

 

So in between co-ordinating next doors hopes n dreams, Ive been working on the plumbing, which has meant more drilling of concrete. I had Stevie bring me out some spares, but even though they are by the same manufacturer, they are just slightly the wrong size to fit the large hole cutter that they supply as a pair. Even though Ive tried welding it, it wont hold for a complete hole, so now I use it as a template to stitch drill through 12” of reinforced concrete. Next time, set the bathrooms in stone before you start so you can cast the holes in the concrete where you need them as you go.

Having gotten no where with any of the glazing specialists Id been referred to, I needed to take action. I need to be secure & in the case of the roof, I need to be water tight cos rains be coming. I took the guy that did the music studio glazing up to Sinchal to look at what I had. In real simple terms, he’s going to get a new sheet of ‘similar’ glass & glue it to the rubber frame of the original. It wont function as originally intended, but as long as it fits & doesn’t look too different, Ill take it. As part of the deal, he would collect all my remaining glass from Sinchal & deliver them & the repaired panels to Dos Mangas. $120 all in, my previous quote was $1500, but what choice did I have. We shook hands & on the appointed day he set off to Salinas to meet his buddy with the glazing lorry suitable to transport my panels, buy the replacement glass, go to Sinchal & collect everything, then deliver to me. Im not an idiot, so having arranged for him to call me when they left Salinas, I went to meet them in Sinchal. “…..the big truck was busy” was their reply when asked why they were in a pickup. I got a bit shouty Im afraid, but there was no way I was letting my glass on that truck. They all tried to reassure me it would be fine & I took them to see the glass. We came to the two broken panels & they burst out laughing, saying they didn’t know why I was making so much fuss & this was nothing. I then took them around the corner & they became quiet until finally turning on my glazing guy saying of course they need the big truck. We will try again next Monday, meantime, he is busy trying to get the glue to stick.

By chance I met a lovely couple who live in Manglaralto just down the road from me. Would you believe, he is a plumbing engineer & has given me sound advice on what & how I need to do, as well as the components to use. All this means I am now up & down to Guayaquil trying to find & buy stuff. There is plenty of work now for the guys with the pool & garage, but I need to get a shuffle on with the interior if I am to have any hope of moving in by the date as yet still to be confirmed. I have however extended the beach house lease until end of May & then we will see where we are.

 

Animal House

I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to say this, but Im actually getting quite used to the wildlife, or more specifically, the spiders. I guess they’ve now grown accustomed to this big lump of concrete in the midst of their natural habitat, because they have begun to venture inside. Of course that’s quite easy for them to do at the moment & will continue to be so until I put the glass in the window frames & begin closing doors etc…but its still a bit of a shock when I first see them.

I was on the roof putting together the frame for the skylight when some movement caught the corner of my eye. Probably only half the size of my hand, this was a particularly vicious looking beast, fore legs up in the air & fangs clearly on display. What threw me though was a bright white sack hanging out the back of its abdomen. Jose confirmed this was an egg sack & she was looking for somewhere to secrete it for their gestation period. He advised much caution & suggested the fangs were most definitely, not just for show & intimidation, they were the harbingers of doom for anything that threatened her impending brood. By nature Im a fighter & not a runner, so it makes sense to me that this particular phobia tends to freeze me to the spot whilst I scan for something to defend myself with, or even better if I can attack. I still look for some form of protection, but I haven’t tried to kill one for some months now – Im hoping they will pass around the words of mutual respect & the importance of maintaining distance, rather than thinking Ive lost my edge & have now devolved from threat to victim to food source.

Then one evening when Stevie & I were again working late, we walk out to the truck as dusk was approaching & to quote his words “…..the biggest spider Ive ever seen….even in Australia”, was taking a stroll across my drive. I was transfixed, but couldn’t  get any closer than about 20 feet. Luckily Stevie had his camera, so clicked off a quick shot before retreating for his own safety. I tried to replicate the shot with a cigarette packet as a stand in. If the perspective seems a little off, trust me when I say it was easily twice the size of the packet.

There was also a much much smaller one that made it on to the back steps & then died. I leave it there so I have to walk past it all the time & yes I (now) know its dead, it still takes a moment or two to stave off the instinct to react. Im sure this will get easier….Im not giving myself many options that don’t include success in this particular therapy for aversion & as the trope states, ‘failure is not an option!’. So my people are gonna sit down with their people & as long as we all agree to neither kill nor scare the livin beejesuss out of each other, there may be a chance of tolerant, if not harmonious cohabitation.

 

The Boy in the Girls Bubble

As has become habit, I enjoy a midweek evening meal with Roey & the new retreaters. Its always diverse & even though these individuals have been bought together through shared interests & some common beliefs, they are often widely different. This week, one stood out. She is smart & witty, effortlessly fluent in 3 languages, she sashays across the multi-lingual conversations until eventually we find ourselves centre stage, verbally jousting with each other as the rest watched on & only chimed in if we needed them to, which we didn’t. We exchanged looks. I recognised the looks, I’d seen them before many years ago & whilst I didn’t specifically know what they were saying, I got the general message. She had noticed me as well.

Her name is Einat, she’s an early 30’s Israeli living in Tel Aviv, with the most amazing smile that brightens everything in its path.  Wanting to spend more time with this woman felt like the most natural thing in the world, so “see you tomorrow”, was a statement of fact rather than just a pleasantry. The following evening bought a birthday party & thus an excuse to go out. It quite quickly became the Si & Einat show, which saw us all the way through to home time, which in turn became moonlit beach time. A good lawyer could probably argue the specifics, however, this was most definitely a joint operation. There was no aggressor & acceptor, no seducer & seduced, this felt so easily negotiated that it was virtually organic. Just two people comfortably working towards their common goal.

From that night we were only apart for her retreat activities & my house building. There was little time for sleep. Long hours talking into the night, finding out who the other is & how they feel about stuff. Laughter with tears streaming down our faces intermixed with serious recounting of real life experiences. We were the equivalent of doing our homework on the bus as far as getting to know each other goes, but we crammed for that test like it would decide our future….

There was no official award ceremony, but we both knew we had passed with honours & would be getting a scholarship to continue the education. The problem began with where. Einat is returning to a new career in Tel Aviv, I am just beginning my new life in Ecuador. We talked about it of course & in a different place & time we might have simply eloped, but even if we allow a little bit of emotion into the decision making process, we couldn’t make it stack up for either of us in the others country. So six days later, a time that passed in the blink of an eye, our bubble burst & thoughts turned to an exit strategy. After discussing it might be better to rip off the band-aid & just go cold turkey, I pushed to indulge our inner Casablanca, by seeing the dame all the way up to her port of departure. Having seen her safely to the gate,  & kissed her for the last time, I walked away & didn’t look back as I let her get on the bus.

During one of those long nights together, we discovered she is also my muse & has kick started me on my book project. This will be on going now, so naturally we exchanged numbers on this. Yes yes, we are hopeless romantics, clinging on to some flimsy hope that the other will change their mind. Who knows what’s around the corner though, so we will stay in touch. For the short term, it means we are messaging each other as she continues her travels around Ecuador, which provided an opportunity. Not wanting to hijack her holiday, I will just be joining her for the last couple of days in Quito before she flies home, so we get to do the whole dramatic goodbye scene one more time for the special edition blu-ray.

 

Perhaps there will be more to come when I return from Quito, we’ll just have to wat & see……

So for now, I’d just like to wish my mother a very happy birthday for Monday 🙂 xxx

 

Until next time,

Si x

Its been longer than usual since the last episode……

I could tell you I have been busy & it would be true, because I have!

I can also tell you that I was again waiting for something interesting to happen so I could then write about it, but Im not really giving this blog my respect if these are the only loose binds that barely tie me. Action was needed, so taking a page from the procrastinators handbook, I assured myself I would have something to write about before I next published if only I waited a little while longer. (insert graphic of cartoon man leaning on a lamppost, whistling while he waits).

When nothing magically appeared on the horizon, I knew I had to set a time frame.

By No Later Than…..

With the first month marker a distant memory, a new factor loomed on the horizon. I was to receive guests within the month. Still quite enough time & even though I’m super busy with the house, I don’t have anything planned for the weekends, so all good. Predictably the first two passed by in self-rewarding, relaxation mode, but when I awoke the next weekend with gritty eyes along with both a blocked & runny nose, I knew I really didn’t feel like sitting at a keyboard all day. Things didn’t improve throughout Sunday, but by Monday, everything had changed. I awoke to discover I couldn’t see. My mind was definitely awake, but a searing pain in my eyes meant I couldn’t open them to confirm I wasn’t in the middle of a bad dream. Both my eyes had gone down with some sort of infection. Its apparently very common here & is something like a super conjunctivitis, As best as I can guess, bacteria from animal feces or whatever that becomes mixed with the dust on the roads & is thrown airborne by passing traffic. The sensitivity to light & the less than appealing look of it all means I have now joined the ranks of those who wear sunglasses indoors. Maybe Ive finally become cooler…….not!

So here we are, I’m feeling a little better thank you, but now squinting at the blurry screen as I feel I should at least write something before the boys get here this weekend. I pause to reflect that I could easily have finished & published everything if it wasn’t for this recent run of unfortunate events, so its not my fault after all but really rather just a spot of bad luck old chap.

Nonsense! This was a recipe for self perpetuating procrastination, topped off with Teflon blame management..

If Id written the blog last month, ( there is ALWAYS something to write about here ), I may still have fallen ill, but I would’ve been able to rest & get better without having ‘my task’ hanging over me. In short, things will always happen.  Sometimes you can find ways this can assist you or sometimes you can navigate them to ensure no impact on you at all. But, if you allow other factors to control what happens in your life, then almost everything can be interpreted as misfortune if it wasn’t what you hoped it might’ve been.

My sequence of events saw an eye infection arise from the bacterial ashes of my cold. It’s very common here & is a gritty inflammation of the underside of the lid that lasts for 3 days start to finish. It begins just like tired eyes, then over the course of a few hours, it quickly escalates to the stab of the pick & piton of a thousand tiny Sherpa’s, attempting to scale the north face of your eyeball.

By 10pm of that night I could no longer open my eyes at all. My neck & chest were soaked with the salty fluids running freely down my cheeks. I’m usually pretty good in the dark & seldom turn a light on unless I have to, but often when we say dark, what we really mean is just low light. This however was the complete blanket of isolation that you sometimes read about, maybe try to imagine in sympathy, but gratefully are never able to empathise with. My speaking clock must no doubt have been on back order with amazon prime, so I had no means of telling the time. Not knowing meant that now seemed as good a time as any to try & fumble my way to bed. After laying there a long while with the nurofen not keeping pace against the discomfort, getting to sleep seemed the key objective. An hour after the first pill, the only thing that had changed was a wet pillow for a dry one. I need a pee & Im thirsty, so I lean over & finger walk my hand back into my bedside drawer for another pill & complete the motion by swinging legs & getting out of bed. It was only much later, when the pain had finally subsided, that I thought about the variety of “santas little helpers” I keep in that drawer & the interesting combinations of experience they could produce, but in hindsight, it now explains a lot. My last conscious memory was going downstairs to fill my water bottle. At some point later, in what feels like a flashback that follows an intense feeling of frustration, I walked hard into a door. That was the final straw, which was already weak & spindly at best. My back broke & I slumped, sobbing to the floor in a puddle of my own self pity & remembering nothing more. Amazingly I awoke the following morning back in bed. As I did a quick ‘sit rep’ I was relieved to find far less pain in my eyes than the night before, but my lids were so gummed, I couldn’t lift them. After a cleansing & refreshing shower, I could crack the lids just enough to head downstairs for my morning caffeine. Oddly the 2^nd bedroom door was ajar & not closed as it should be to prevent cat access . The room was in disarray. The clothes rack, its hangers flung to the four corners, was laid across a bed that had clearly been slept in, so it seems Id gotten more time in bed than I thought, though perhaps not with the type of clothes horse my clear mind would have chosen. There’s a joke or a message in there somewhere, probably both!

 

When Karma met Schadenfreude

 

I showed you the rainfall ravine last time, but there have been several others I’ve been keeping my eye on. A whole site excavation, 4m deep & only 2m from its neighbour, slid in on itself just after they’d got the steel in place, but before they had the time to concrete. It now looks like Pompeii if Vesuvius had spouted mud. I chuckled knowingly to myself as I had predicted this when I saw them excavating without sheet piles or any kind of retaining wall. There is also another place a little further along the road & set back up the mountain, called Nativa Bamboo. I often enjoy breakfast at a corner café in town & look up at this place, just taking in how its put together. It’s a 3 tier arrangement with each tier split within itself. In simple terms these are steps, with the top step exerting some force on the step below it, which now in turn produces combined force on the step below that & so on. One day I look up to see a 6” horizontal crack running straight across the front of a patio block. Something had disappeared beneath it & so it had just dropped. Meanwhile at the bottom where it meets the main road, the 3ft high retaining wall has been pushed out nearly a foot. Workmen duly filled the crack, dug out behind the retaining wall to clean the mud from the drain holes, then simply filled the mud back in behind them again……

So where’s the Karma I hear you ask?! You recall the cheeky extra meter I snuck on to the end of the cinema room? well it came back to bite me in the Barry Normans. So the last time I had the digger on site we roughly leveled the front entrance & drive. This meant we could get delivery vehicles in & out, but also meant we had to take a pinch out of the natural camber of the approach road. No biggie, it will go back when I put the perimeter walling in & grade the driveways properly. But this meant much of the surface water that usually flowed down the hill away from me, was now taking a route across the front of my house. Most of the water was coming in under our pile of used bamboo, so we didn’t immediately realise what was happening & as we weren’t working in that area, it was maybe a week or so before I started to notice cracks appearing in the front wall. Taking the inspection internal, it was thin, but we had clear daylight between wall & column. In my defense, there was nothing wrong with my design given the original conditions, but Id failed to take into account other factors, nor calculated their risk. I now had to monitor things. Yes it had moved, but it was designed to allow for some movement, just not downwards. If it had now settled, then all I would have to address would be the walls, as the ‘soon to be installed’ perimeter walling, should rule out further risk of undermining. Perhaps somewhat predictably, it kept moving, so it now had to be addressed. Of course I could always have reverted to the original floor area as this was built accordingly, is at no risk & thus remains unaffected, so I considered my options. There exists an interesting philosophical theory on the practice of cutting losses vs seeing it through to the end & potentially throwing good money after bad. Irrelevant in this instance as I now considered the amendment as part of the original building & was only in error for not being on the plans. As I considered it a part, it was a part that now had to be corrected. The real kicker, the tuppence hapenny labourers that I bought in to break the concrete all out, managed to break my jackhammer while doing so & of course they are soooo super easily replaceable over here!

 

Which leads us nicely into, the build……

I last left you at us having poured the roof & we have come on a step or two since then. We filled in all the external walls, which included my adhoc redesign on the window reveals, completing the external shell. Next came the internal walling for the bedrooms & their respective en-suites. Meantime I got on with installing the windows, assembling the frames & fitting the sliding, patio style doors to the 2^nd & 3^rd bedrooms. Ive managed contractors on site fitting these things before, but no actual hands on experience, so I had specifically requested “idiots guide” instructions. What I got essentially boiled down to “assemble frames, fix them in place & then fit the doors”. The top & bottom of the frames are obvious & easy, but I later discovered the sides are both reversible & interchangeable. They were not marked in any way to indicate this or to caution checking. It so transpires that the single determining factor for their orientation, is the door set. The same door set that one instinctively leaves safely in their bubble wrap until the frame is properly fixed, cemented in & ready for them. On a ‘first one we come to’ basis, I chose the one Id gotten wrong. It wasn’t until we had tried all combinations of all four doors that we attempted to install the second set. These went in without a hitch & it was then that the error was understood & the implications realised. I’d also assembled the larger, downstairs patio door, but Id not fitted it, so it was somewhat easier to correct. With the other walls now in place, we had formed the reveals for the big bi-folds. After much examination & theorising, these could only go one way. One set has a pedestrian door, so again, logical identification on the frame. Same principle with the doors, but there are twelve of them, so discounting the easy to spot pedestrian door, the other eleven are 3 sets of identical triplets & a pair of twins. It took some work, but running all the probabilities, I settled on an order & began to hang the doors, starting with the pedestrian. They are a 1m wide & 2.6m high, so even without their glass, it was a lot like carrying a vertical ladder trying to move them into position. They are all precision hinges with machine drilled screws, so in spite of it not being particularly easy, it went smoothly enough. Anyone who has done anything that required blind communication to complete a task, will understand why I chose to do this by myself rather than attempt it in another language. My Spanish improves daily, however, “up a scoche, no hang on, there, no, back a smidge” requires a special kind of understanding. With the last door fitted, I tested the glide. It was smooooooth & virtually effortless. I was pleased with myself & set about closing the doors for the celebratory photo. What the deuce? For some inexplicable reason, the two leading edges would not meet. I re-opened them & tried closing them again but this fool got the result he was expecting. I went over all the combinations again & was sure I had it right, or rather I couldn’t come up with any workable alternative, so it was time to bring out the tape measure.

The second door in, the one with all the heavy sliding & hinging gear, is pretty much the backbone of the system, so each set contains one. Two of them are 95.5cm wide, the one I hadn’t fitted turned out to be 97.5cm & can only be used in conjunction with the pedestrian door, or at least that’s what the frickin label should have stated, if only there had been a label. Id gotten pretty blase by the time I got to the set for my master suite, however, I had begun to notice other important factors, that lead me to recheck the first set I installed………..door one is inside out, doh!

 

Let ‘em In

 

With all the holes in the walls filled except one, it was time to fit the front door. Its pretty big at 1.5m, split between a main & an opening leaf. Its stylish, it makes a statement & Im very pleased with it. It’s a security composite, so as heavy as you like, which meant it wasn’t an easy task having to go around the outside, over rough terrain to get it from basement storage to its rightful place. It wasn’t going up the stairs for its own protection, even though it was still mostly in its travel wrap. We got it inside, unwrapped it & I began fitting the furniture. It came locked & of course we needed to access the frame, so I spent a good hour trying to make the Polish instructions gel with the selection of parts I had before me. All finished & its resting against the wall whilst I prepare some mortar to bed it onto, when I’m called away by Jose to the other side of the building. Whilst in the middle of things with Jose, there is an almighty crash from the other side of the wall. Instantly, with a growing mix of nausea & rage rising in my gut, I quick walk/run around to the entrance ……& there is my proud portal, all face down & forlorn on the floor. Amazingly the glazing gods must think Ive had enough window shenanigans to last a lifetime, so let me off with no damage to the externally mirrored panels. Not so the door itself though. A dent above the top panel & a chip through to the undercoat beside it, both more or less directly where you will look when waiting for the door to be answered. Im confident I can repair it later down the line, but for now, I am devastated.

What happened you may ask. All I can say with any certainty is that when Jose & I came around the corner, the other 5 guys were all standing around the fallen door. Rapid fire Spanish ensued, which basically translated into “it wasn’t us!”.

What does one do in that situation? Well, when the piercing glare produces no obvious culprit, you take a really deep breath, let it out slowly & move on.

 

Back of the Pan.

 

Way back at the end of December I told you about a timber wholesaler who can also get me sanitary ware & a host of other items. We communicate at least weekly, however, I still don’t have an actionable pro-forma, even though I have now reduced my order to just wood & plasterboard. Anyway, I happened to see the same sanitary ware catalogue on the desk at my local builders merchants & so inquired within. If ordered before Friday, they would be a week to arrive with free delivery. As contrary to the norm, I didnt have to pay up front, I took the plunge, ordered everything & am now the proud recipient of toilets that outflow to the rear through a 4” pipe. No more putting soiled paper in a bin for me. Incidentally, I’m also putting urinals in my en-suite & the ground floor restroom as I think the majority of use will be male, so why waste seven gallons of water every time our ageing bladders urge voiding.

Bring on the Bubbles

In a moment of fortunate timing, I got talking to my neighbour who has embarked upon some construction of his own. He’s from the slightly odd part of California & is something of a rube, so Im offering him a helping hand. He asks a lot of questions, but as one of them was what I thought he should do with his fitted but unused, fibreglass bath, I naturally offered neutral counsel. I didn’t trust it to arrive in one piece if I left it to his local team, so I took it out myself & soon realised they don’t use legs on baths here, they build a box of bricks, fill the bottom with sand, then fill the rest with concrete once the bath is in place. It took me all day to get it out, but whilst the bath is dusty, it is unscathed except for a small chip that will be set against a wall, so wont show. It even comes with taps & shower attachment, result!

So with sanitary ware in place I could see how the layouts were going to work. This is something I only sketched in for the main design with little prior knowledge of what was available for shower cubicles etc over here. A downside to this is that I wasn’t able to lay any pipework under the basement slab, so in plumbing terms, its better for the bath to go downstairs in bed 4. I hadn’t planned for this, so of course the room was too small for my preferred orientation of the bath. $600 worth of free bath meant it was worth the half day to drop the wall & rebuild it. So to anyone getting to sleep in bed 4, if everything outside the window feels 5” closer than it should, take a relaxing bath & forget about it.

Fiddling on the Roof

Talking of water, the rains also managed to make their way inside the house & we still aren’t fully dried out. The roof concrete is waterproof, but its also flat & has a 3m x 3m hole in the middle of it. The blockwork slows it down a little, but I needed to get it off the roof before it had the time to get inside. It had been apparent early on that we weren’t going to be able to pour concrete to a slope, so I needed to add it afterwards. Fairly straightforward, a course of bricks to the inside set higher than the course to the outside & fill in between with concrete. Make sure outside course is set back from perimeter wall to form a gully leading to all outflows, seal everything & walk away. In due course I will fake grass this for all the reasons you can think of, but it will also break up the flow of water, slowing it down & thus enabling it to exit the building in an orderly & proper manner.

A Spark of Light

With all of this taken care of, I began the electric pre-installation works ahead of Stevie’s arrival. Chasing walls, fitting back boxes & what feels like endless drilling through concrete.

I could’ve put ducts in for this, but its complex, I couldn’t ensure any kind of accuracy & mostly because I don’t really have an electrical plan.

Yes I know what I want & where, but not necessarily where the cables will need to go to make it work. Im also trying to double up the benefit & halve the work by using the same routes for the plumbing….safely of course 😉

Rendered Speechless

With all the construction complete except for the garage & pool, the guys moved on to rendering the outside. A fairly perilous looking bamboo scaffold meant I wasn’t going up there myself, so we discussed my expectations at ground level & I let them get on with it. Making sure they at least were fitting handrail poles to prevent anyone falling off. The method they use for rendering is similar to the one they use for blockwork here. In essence it removes all the skill required & enables more or less anyone to arrive at a passable finish. They don’t need to be able to use a trowel & hawk, because they throw the cement at the wall. Of course it goes everywhere, but eventually enough of it builds up onto the wall in a myriad of peaks & mounds. They drag a long straight edge across this, then ‘polish’ whats left with a rigid sponge. It works & looks fine enough…..if you are doing a fairly small area. On anything more than about 4m square, the bit you did before will have dried such that you cannot achieve an invisible join. When painted this will look atrocious. In addition, the render beads I supplied for the windows were bent to fit the block work rather than drawing a perfect straight line from one corner to the other. I was disappointed & now under pressure to find a solution. Doing further research, it seems that the cement here doesn’t contain lime, which in turn means its not very sticky & really doesn’t want to stay on the wall in any kind of meaningful fashion. I remembered the wall I’d rendered for Roey last year & the trouble I had with that was now making sense. The only practicable solution for now was for the guys to only apply the base coat & I find a solution to the finish coat later down the line.

When they got to the entrance lobby, I spent quite a bit of time explaining what I wanted. 30mm of door frame all the way around. Not 29 or 31, 30mm all the way around. After Id finished explaining, he confirmed he understood, but I made him explain it back to me just to be sure. 30mm all the way around, we were in agreement. I left him to it & got on with other stuff, coming back about an hour later to see how he fared. I called him over to talk me through how he thought he had done. He repeated our 30mm mantra & felt he had delivered the brief. I took out my tape. 12, 35, 24, 68. W.T.F.?! The confusion on his face & our subsequent discussion leads me to believe he actually doesn’t understand why it is an issue. There is no value in perfection for him, so his approach to the task is wildly different from anyone who feels they are assessed on merit.

It’s the communistic aspects of socialism that understands work as an obligation in exchange for food tokens, not as something to take pride in or grow from & advance your status in life. You get up, you do what you do & get drunk in between until you die. Its frustrating, but it seems you either allow for it, or continually beat your head against a wall.

I was chatting with a local developer who had recently bought in a specialist crew from Guayaquil for something or other. To save money & as the house was mostly already finished, the crew agreed to stay in the house. The following morning Mariella (the developer) discovered the crew had put up mosquito nets….by drilling through brand new tiling & in the grout, so they ruined 2 tiles for each screw. Now I get why you would have to put up a sign to say shoes off, or no smoking, or even only use the downstairs loo, but in what frickin universe do you have to tell someone not to drill into the walls of a house, any house, not just the new ones??!! This reminds me of when I was working for Dacia in Romania, a car was rejected for only having 3 of its intended 4 pistons. The workers on the line couldn’t see the problem as it still ran & for them, that was enough. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu, a person would have to pay the equivalent of £80,000 up front, wait for up to 5 years on a list for the next one to become available. These were invariably the ones foreign importers had rejected, so riddled with any number of faults. When this is your norm & any thoughts of “this could be better” are crushed, many of the finer human qualities get left by the wayside.

 

What if its not a black cat that crosses your path?

 

I was doing another little weekend job at yet another bakery & I needed a tool Id left on site, so I hop on the bike to go get it. It had been raining the day before, but today was glorious, so it was an enjoyable ride that put a smile on my face.

As Im breezing down the approach road to mine, there’s plenty of mud in tyre track patterns criss-crossing the road & Im on a long straight looking ahead to plan my route through them. I didn’t have my shades on, so my eyes were a bit watery, but even at quite a distance, I was sure a lump of mud was moving of its own accord. I slowed down, right down. To my horror, this lump of mud, about the size of my clenched fist, had 8 legs & appeared to be on a mission to follow in the chickens footsteps.

I cursed having left my phone at the bakery & sat there transfixed. I cant deny, that once it was over the white line, I was hoping for a speeding taxi to come along the other way. No such luck & of course I wasn’t going to attempt to challenge it on just my bike, it would’ve kicked the crap out of me, cocooned me for later & taken the bike into the bargain. I watched it disappear into the hedgerow, no doubt to later tell his pals over a beer & fresh bbq chicken, how a puny human stopped to let him cross the road.

 

Police Stop Camera Action

 

The roadside police checks have become a lot more frequent of late & of their preferred sites, I pass two of them each way to work. Since last summer they had begun to wave me through, I was known. More recently, they’ve been stopping me again & were starting to ask questions……..

Where was my passport – if you drive on a foreign license you must always carry your passport.

How long have you lived here – you can only use foreign license for 3months.

Where is your matricular – a photo is not acceptable.

A laminated sheet of A4 is not an acceptable license plate.

Their lists became increasingly longer, but amazingly they always gave up & never even hinted at a backhander, even after I suggested it on one occasion. Then one day as I pull out of the Dos Mangas road & onto the main highway, I get waved over by the patrol standing outside their own gates. We go through the whole violations Q&A & this guy is out for blood. He cant grasp that I can understand some of what he says, but not other parts. I was playing the denial & ignorance game for all it was worth, but he was having none of it. The balance tipped & he stated it was now a confiscation situation & indicated the bike should go into their holding pen. I got off, took the keys & began to walk away, if he wanted it then fine, it was a fair cop, but I wasn’t going to push it in the compound for him. Wrong move apparently, as his hand resting on the butt of his revolver, silently reinforced that for me, so I pushed it into the yard. He was now going to write me a ticket & explained that after I paid it, I could collect the bike.

Fine, but Im not coming back for it, Im not paying, so you can keep it.

We can attach an order to your salary.

Yeah right……

He gets a call on his radio, begins to stride towards the gate & barks “come with me”. I follow & once outside he gets into the back of a police pickup. No way, I am NOT getting in the truck. With the door closed, he looks out the window & sees me standing there as if it’s a surprise to him, he winds down the window just enough to tell me to leave now & take my bike with me, though he may’ve also suggested some rather unpleasant ways of doing this that I shan’t repeat here. No argument, my biking days were definitely numbered.

 

How many pheasants could a pheasant plucker pluck if he was just a filthy trucker?

 

Following this most recent brush with the law, I knew I could no longer continue, but I really didn’t want to go back to being a bus wanker. My first option was actually pretty easy & workable. I caught the bus to the turn off & parked my bike behind the police station to run back n forth to the house & also to the builders merchants etc. As long as you don’t go through a check point you have nothing to worry about, I just couldn’t get home. I duly upped the pressure on finding a vehicle – my previous sure thing had fizzled because the guy wanted more than he’d paid for it 5yrs ago, because he’d put money into it. He’d had it serviced, replaced the tires & all the usual stuff it takes to run a vehicle, so I pulled out of the deal. I was asking everyone I knew to no avail when Jarrett’s digger develops a major fault. The specialist mechanic that comes out from Guayaquil had been thinking it might be time to get a new truck, so was interested in talking. He has a 10yr old Chevy Dmax with half a million clicks on the clock & its worth more than it costs to buy a brand new one in the UK. Sure its got a few lil dings & it doesn’t have all the “look at me” bulkhead bars & running boards, but mechanically its appears better than could be expected. We agreed to a deal based on a few conditions, one of which being, I had to be in legal possession before Easter. Reliant on his vehicle for work, he had to have the replacement lined up, so I feared being dragged into a chain that would lead me to frustration & misery. Not to worry as he is buying new. Unfortunately when he checked that the vehicle was free & clear, he owed some back taxes that ate heavily into what he had saved for a deposit. This meant he had to apply for a larger loan, which his credit rating couldn’t support. I was too close to give up. I suggested I loan Jarett the difference & he then loan same to Mario the mechanic (no lie!). We were back in business.

 

If you are married in Ecuador, then your spouse must co-sign all legal documents, so it was like a family outing as we all set off for the hour drive to the notary. As my mother will attest, these are seldom efficient or pleasant experiences, but this one was amazingly empty, so we breezed through, relatively speaking. We almost stumbled when they wouldn’t accept Jarett as a translator, so I would have to prove I could read Spanish as I had just claimed. All or nothing right?! The clerk points to a word on the page & asks me to read it. Maria. Ok, & the next. Louisa. Next. Lopez. Ok, you can read Spanish. Ill be sure to let Rosetta Stone know they are doing it all wrong. 🙂

So having had to apply thumb prints to multiple copies of paper & ensure each & every signature exactly matches the one on my cedula (Id been through this at the port customs), a brief three hours later I walked out the relieved owner of my first pickup. Like Messrs  Michael & Wallace, I screamed Freeeeedom!

 

Los Tres Amigos

 

Jeff & Steve arrive in a couple of days & I still have an amount of prep. Its Santa Semana, or Holy Week because of Easter, which means we aren’t allowed to work Friday, but like any good economy, all the shops are open…& now I can easily run around picking up stuff in my truck. Stevie is coming over to install my electrical system. In simple terms, I don’t trust a local who is only used to 110volts, to not kill himself or me when working with my 220 volt. There’s also now the inevitable dilemma of face plates not being straight, light patterns non symmetrical – you can imagine the horrors & the shrugs of incoherence & indifference. So not only do I get to spend time with a friend I miss & haven’t seen in ages, but I also get the piece of mind knowing everything has been done properly. Its also great fun working on site with mates. As a double bubble brucie bonus, Jeff is also popping down for the weekend, like only really famous people can do. So we can all spend some quality time before works start on Monday, which isn’t included in the official time off calendar. Easter is the last of the seasons big festivals, so Olon & Montanita will be heaving with people & they will likely be joined by three more….

I will tell you all about that next time!

Si x

Welcome back once again everyone to another slice of my life here on Ecuador’s Pacific Costa.

As the title may suggest, not much happened in January, so it passed by pretty much unnoticed. Of course the weather took a definite upturn & the somewhat Spring-like variability of December gave way to a fairly consistent streak of 30+ & clear blue days. Im sure you don’t really care whether I am toasty warm or slightly cooler, but I mention this only by way of contrast to the beginning of February, as this generally marks the start of rainy season. The faithful among you will recall last years “river incident”, I knew what was coming, yet still I was amazed at how much water fell from the sky in a single night. As usual though, this rain then interacts with all the non-tarmac roads, producing varying depths of mud. This mud is then tracked onto all the tarmac roads & well, it all just becomes a big ol mess. The extra amazing bit for me is how everyone just gets on with it. A wise man would no doubt counsel acceptance on my part & if it wasn’t entirely avoidable, I would let it go in a heartbeat, but it doesn’t have to be this way. The local officials are spending money on getting more tarmac applied to roads, but no one ever does anything about the drainage & I feel frustration when I see it.

 

I read recently about a guy in India who sadly lost his wife to a recoverable illness. They lived in a remote village, high in the Indian mountainside. It is 70miles from their village to the nearest hospital by road & they could not get her there in time to save her. Of course the husband was devastated, but rather than wallow in self pity, or for that matter, move to another village, he took a pick & shovel & began to dig into the mountain at the other end of his village. Day & night this man dug & shoveled, for twenty years. He had nothing else to live for but to dig this mountain. By some point during the 21^st year he had created a channel wide enough, low enough & accessible enough that a horse & cart may pass through to the other side of the mountain, where 1km further on was the hospital his wife had never made it to. When asked why he did it, he simply said, so that no one else would have to die because they couldn’t get to the hospital.

During my “I can do anything!” days, I fantasize that I fall over in the mud just as one of the local electricians drops a live cable. KerrrZaaapKapow & I emerge from the gloop as a flood prevention & water recycling do-gooder who channels their problem into a filtration & redistribution plant. Who was that Hydro-Planning Hero kids??

That was ‘Super Surface Water Drainage Man’!!

Well it takes my mind off choosing floor tiles & all the other little decision debates going on in my head at the moment 😉

 

Filling in the Gaps between Spaces

We continue to progress well with the build & we are fast approaching all the fine finishing decisions

When last I wrote, we were due to pour the roof, which we completed the second week of Jan. I was fairly comfortable the weather would remain dry & thus the lorries wouldn’t cause too much disruption to the road for this, out last pour, until we get to the swimming pool. Ruefully thinking, “be careful what you wish for!”, it was a gloriously sunny day. Unfortunately that quickly became a 33 deg frying pan up on the roof & we struggled to keep the concrete cool. For those that don’t know, mixing cement & water produces a chemical reaction. It is this process that turns it hard, but during that reaction, it generates a lot of heat. When that heat also occurs on a hot day, it can cause the concrete to dry out before it has time to set. This can cause anything from surface spider cracks through to the whole pour having to be removed & replaced. So in amongst the guys with big hoses spraying concrete, we had guys with buckets running up & down ladders, wetting the concrete down like a dolphin in transit. We did suffer quite a bit of surface spidering, not least because I later discovered the drivers were adding another chemical that slows the setting process. This works for a long time whilst in the truck, but too much causes the mix to dry out even faster when its poured. Fortunately the slurry we immediately filled them with hasn’t cracked since. As an added bonus, it started to rain in the evening, so Im pretty confident we kept her in check long enough, she isn’t moving & is solid beneath the surface.

So with the roof done that’s the skeleton complete. We’ve now continued on with the walling below, but first we had to put up a perimeter wall on the roof (so no one [else] falls off) & also around the skylight penetration. Ive yet to completely get my head around the skylight assembly, so for now, the 3m x 3m opening has a plastic tarpaulin keeping the rain out. Unfortunately, we didn’t complete the entire perimeter walling, leaving ourselves some space for continued access. What this meant when the rains fell, is that the water had an easier route off the roof than flowing down the drains, so we ended up with an awful lot of water in the basement. Its no big deal of course, its not like we have carpets down or anything & it will dry out quickly. Id just like it to be a little closer to wind & weather tight now we’ve begun that stage. To that end, I hope to be in a position to start fitting windows by the end of next week. 🙂

If you own a truck, small lorry or van in Ecuador, then you have to be licensed to carry anyone else’s goods. Fortunately for me, one of the guys who work for Jarett owns a truck along with several of his friends & family members. So every few weeks when they haven’t been busy, we take a run up to my container & bring back materials for the build. I have all the windows, the sliding doors & the bi-fold frames on site now, along with the glazing for everything except the bi-folds. I also have the skylight frame & a big stack of parts I wasn’t expecting. I originally ordered a static skylight, which I have an engineered solution for having it slide open on the horizontal plane. To make this work, I ordered a rain sensor from the window supplier so I can set it to close automatically should it need to. In so far as I can tell, they have sent me additional frames & motors such that each of the 1m x 3m panes will operate & open independently. In essence it seems I now have a dual function skylight. I would like to think the window company did this to try & make amends for the fubar level mess they made in delivering my order. I suspect though that a businesses true weaknesses are exposed when they can no longer even err in their own favour….What supports my theory over their redemption, is that all the fittings for all the windows, frames doors etc are packed in individual boxes & shipped separately, meaning I had to empty the entire container to locate them all, which like, took like, forever maaaan. Upside though, the kitchen is now all collated & stacked at the front of the container ready to go when we need it & I have a few more comfy cushions at the beach house 🙂

With walls going up, access is becoming less direct, so we’ve put the stairs in from basement to ground & will hopefully pour 1^st floor to roof next week & ground floor to 1^st floor the week after that, so at least we can dispense with ladders. The ladders will in fact be needed elsewhere as we begin the bamboo construction of scaffolding for the external rendering, hopefully by the end of Feb, or before my next blog episode, which ever happens first 😉

You may recall I only built the walls up to 1m high in what will become my studio. On a whim I called in on a local guy that works with glass & aluminium for a quote. Unsurprisingly he came right round & whilst he couldn’t get his head around fixing directly to the blockwork, he took measurements as instructed. It took him a few days to cost it & at $500 fitted, he was back a week later to do just that. Usually they would wait until its been rendered before fitting, which means it will fit badly & leave unsightly gaps all around it. If outside this also means it will leak, even with substandard silicone smeared all over it. Im not sure what Ted Moult would’ve thought of it, but Im pretty pleased with the result. The windows do slide & the door does lock, its not un-stylish & it does the job 🙂

I kissed a girl & she liked it….

Other than seeing Bob when I go to my container, I like to hang out & spend time with him every now & then. In an endearing way, he reminds me of Sam Elliot & I enjoy sitting on his porch, slurping our way through chilled water melon, telling war stories & putting the world to rights. Man stuff.

Bobs girlfriend is Venezuelan & an absolute darling. She came here escaping the poverty & lack of opportunity back home. Being Latin, she has a large extended family, with many passing through Bobs place like its Grand Central. Even if they don’t sleep there, they all turn up at weekends to do laundry & have a big cook up. All of the women wait while the men eat, apparently they aren’t done fussin with the food in the pot, though it always seems perfectly ready on the plate in front of me. So over time, not unlike a scene from an old movie trope, one of the nieces takes a shine to yours truly – might I be interested in some company? A pretty, always smiling girl, on the very sturdy side of robust, think hockey goalie – she wasn’t my type. Im all about the fun though & its been a while since Ive been on an actual date, so yes, why not. We tried to diarise, but with her crazy work hours & me not wanting to put myself out too much, we never really made it work & she had to return to Venezuela.

But then she came back.

We didn’t get to do the date, but we did hang out at Bobs & before I knew it, she was coming to stay for the weekend. She speaks no English, so the subtleties & nuances associated with dancing around a potentially tricky conversation, were lost on both of us. I was pretty sure Id gotten the “single & remaining that way” bit across. I covered I was inviting her as a friend for fun only & a bit of a holiday for her. Thus I had zero expectation & zero intention, but Im not a complete moron, I knew where this was headed.

I go to meet her at the bus stop one Saturday afternoon & after a quick tour, a beer & a catchup, it was off to buy some ingredients for dinner that a cursory assessment by her, confirmed I didn’t have. I scored a minor victory by being allowed to stay in my own kitchen & cook something, but anyone who has ever been in a kitchen with a Latin woman will understand why I let her take over whatever she wanted. The meal was tasty, however, by about half way through, I realised I had run out of things I could say or indeed could think of to say, in any language. I realised I had started & then carried every conversation since she arrived & despite me trying to make it as easy as I could, I was getting nothing back & getting quite bored. It wasn’t yet even 7.30pm.

After a couple of hours sitting outside, finding some escape in the waves whilst she scrolled facebook, I silently thanked the good fortune of a second bedroom & rose to bid her a good night, I was certainly tired. “ok, great, mind if I hop in the shower quickly first?” You have a shower in the spare bedroom, you can have one when you like. “aren’t I sleeping in your room?” errrr, look, you are lovely, yada yada yada, but there’s no spark here & so it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. “we are both adults, there doesn’t have to be a spark, you just have to know how!” I still wasn’t entirely comfortable, but there comes a point past which you begin to care less about the fall-out while resistance becomes futile……Not unsurprisingly, it didn’t go particularly well.  Almost like neither of us wanted to be there. It was detached & awkward. There will be no Oscar nomination & Valentino, pay no heed, no need nor cause for concern.

Over a lazy breakfast I pushed for a little clarification. A tinge of regret was creeping in & I was thinking about damage control, but then I got distracted thinking back to “Friends” & the episode where people linked back to other people, so you had to close the link to prevent a secret getting out 🙂 While I was distracted, she started talking. Turns out  the Spanish for ‘friends with benefits’ is ‘Amigos Dereche’, which is not really where my thinking was going, but it was a start & apparently supported my belief in her understanding of my continued singledom. I reminded her I didn’t want a girlfriend anyway & also, just to be safe, that I wasn’t looking to be a sugar daddy either, though if I were, well I’d pick a different sport to hockey.  She agreed completely with everything I said as I didn’t actually say the bit about hockey. She also did not want a boyfriend, just a nice man who wouldn’t beat her or treat her like a 2^nd class citizen. I did a little more digging. Seems she was pregnant at 15 by a guy that punched her, a lot. She managed to avoid having to move in with him & stayed at home with her parents to raise the baby, though in time she met another guy, who turned out to have the same pugilistic tendencies as the last. So she carried on by herself, worked hard to provide for her son & was eventually able to buy her own house in a quiet neighbourhood, but that’s now worth a little less than bugger all following the collapse of the Venezuelan economy.

 

As you might imagine, this softened my resolve. I would continue to see her at Bobs & of course I would regularly see her Auntie, so I didn’t want there to be any bad feeling. Yet the role reversal, whereby I was the one night stand, left me wondering what was the etiquette on this side of the bed. I smiled as I envisaged myself in bed, coquettishly pulling the sheet up to my neck as she strides around the room trying to find last nights clothes – Don’t call, I holler at her retreating back. This then is the point where “he” would head to the pub to regale his mates with tales of conquest. She would double shower hoping to erase the shame & heads to her mates for wine & an hour or two of “all men are bastards”. Except I was the she, but I wasn’t shamed, I was glad I had bought a bit (albeit it awkward) of tenderness & laughter in to a tough life. I wasn’t looking to scarper, but then I didn’t want to be the primary focus of someone else’s attention either.

We agreed then, that FwB did not mean regular & a Friday night wouldn’t automatically mean the whole weekend, amongst other ‘rules’. Yes I was being unromantically pedantic, it was intentional! Whilst I concede I can be an acquired taste, compared against her previous suitors, Im George Frickin Clooney! So with a lot of references to the big screen version of FwB, I explain how when two wonderful people spend time with each other, one always falls for the other in spite of their best intentions. With absolute clarity I knew it wouldn’t be me, but Id lay money she will be doodling my name in her text book by Monday afternoon…..

 

I should perhaps clarify, that whilst I am older than her father & quite a bit older than her mother, she herself is 30, which to my mind, is the last piece of the tri-factor puzzle that ends with a picture of a happy smiling family on it & the guys face is frozen in a WTF did I just let happen.

As Robbie would say, “Warning Will Robinson, Warning!”

When the legal team is happy & all the paper-work’s been signed, we actually relax into a reasonably comfortable cohabitation. I get on & do whatever I would have been doing as if she wasn’t there, while she starts to reorganise my kitchen in between FB & cooking. Now that I knew the rules, I could play the game, so it was a different story to the previous night come bedtime….I’d like to start by thanking all my fans, everyone that helped me over the line & of course Jesus & everyone at the Academy, for presenting me with this coveted award……….;)

 

She catches the bus Monday morning as I take the bike to work, I wish her well & hope she gets the job. She does get the job – $15 a day cleaning hotels in Manta, 4hrs north by bus & she pays her own food & transport. That $15 is worth the equivalent of $75 when she sends it back to her grandmother (finally one older than me!) to take care of her son, so from her perspective, it’s just good enough to be able to live here whilst sending most of the money back home.

Her administration qualifications aren’t recognised here, whilst it makes them no less easy to obtain, I suspect their accreditation is only national. So the long & the short of it is, she doesn’t have many other options. Now that is the reality of economic migrancy.

As predicted though, by Wednesday evening I was getting “missing you” messages & Thursday followed with “cant wait to see you”.

I told you, I friccccckin told you this would happen……..

 

Now That’s What I Call a Referendum

 

On 4^Th February, Ecuador was asked back to the polling stations to answer a series of questions about what the Government is doing & how the people feel about it.

There are seven points in all, 5 called referendum questions & 2 questions for the people, so Im not really sure what their differences may be. They generously give you a paragraph about the point, then sum it up with “in other words” & then you get to say yes you agree with the statement or not. They are mostly about spending on construction, generating funds for the construction, control of mineral mining & other assets along with a few other municipality statements, that to me at least, just seem to be trying to gauge the mood of the crowd. This becomes further evident as one of the points was;

“ In other words;  sexual criminals of minors will never leave jail. Vote Yes!”

 

Its Only a Matter of Time

 

It was one of those total wet days, the mist particles so fat they were practically droplets & the rain itself so fine it penetrates all known fabric. Even in my so’wester I was wet through in minutes. I cant keep my goggles clear, so I take them off & have to squint to avoid being needled. I am going very slowly. After a long straight, the road to my house throws in quite a few tight bends, but I know them pretty well by now, so even going slowly I lift my head up off my chest & drop the throttle in plenty of time before the long sweeping left. Head up, wrist straight, but nothing else appears to change. Then in quick succession, my heart rate escalates & the neurons begin to fire in my brain.

What is the problem? Throttle is stuck open & I am now approaching the upcoming bend far too quickly for the current conditions.

Is not a conscious thought, but I kind of sense my brain taking a wild stab at how long I have before I part with the road, or more seriously, meet with the barbed wire fence on the other side of the verge. Not long seemed to be the general consensus. We’ve covered that Im not a biker before, but Ive got a reasonable handle on the application of physics in certain situations. If I just pulled the clutch, the lack of friction would cause me to actually go a little faster, so I had to get down through the gears & quick. I was trying to touch the rear brake each time I de-clutched & so of course with the rain & mud it didn’t take long for it to first lock up & then begin to fishtail. It was time to deploy the final safety measure, so I stuck out my legs trying to reach the ground as I pictured Steve McQueen hung up on the Nazi wire, but I hit something & it threw me off the seat. Coming down I slam the throttle, it releases as I loose my grip on the clutch in second gear & the knobbly tyre on the back bites into the grass embankment. Next thing I know Im out of the bend & slowing down on a bike now no longer screaming. Not that I could hear it over my own screams still at full volume inside my helmet. I carried on to work gingerly, it was raining too hard to stop for a cigarette, though words fail me when I try to describe how much I wanted to, needed to in that moment. Breathing my heart back down to normal, replaying the scene over & over I finally understand why a lot of Ecuadorian drivers constantly pump the throttle. I was now doing the exact same thing, trying to convince myself it wasn’t going to stick again. After some consultation with local experts, it seems its not uncommon for a number of reasons, all of which I had attended to, but it still sticks in the wet from time to time. Ive learnt now that I just have to accelerate a small twist more & that frees it, but this cant go on. I need four wheels & a metal box around me.

Awight John, Got a New Motuh!

I know a guy who knows a guy who thought he saw a guy that has a truck for sale. It’s the second vehicle of a visiting gringo who is looking to upgrade. Unfortunately the guy sounds a bit of a div as my other guy has just spent the last 9 months sorting out the paperwork for his other vehicle. Apparently he was unaware he should retain the paperwork as he didn’t understand what it said & they didn’t look like documents he would usually associate with owning & operating a vehicle. Luckily my guy assures me the papers for the other one are all present & correct as he checked those as part of the job. He’s been told of my interest & Ive submitted an offer, though he doesn’t know I know how much he bought it for, so my offer is currently under consideration. I know we’ve been here before, but this is a much newer vehicle than before, so Im a little more optimistic. After Christmas I went with a buddy to Guayaquil to go car shopping. It was far from successful.  To flesh that out a little; Toyota main dealer has a single pickup, twin cab hilux, 2014 for $52k. Chevrolet, the peoples car of Ecuador had no pick ups at all. 6 weeks of calls chasing & not so much as a sausage. So you see why I am jumping all over divvybollox.

 

It doesn’t need to be this way either

 

Im considering a top ten list of things that irk me about living in Ecuador, it cant all be paradise of course. 😉 As in all cases, there will always be something that takes the colour out of the grass, but if the combined impact of them doesn’t out balance all the other pleasures, then that’s a happy life by my understanding! 🙂 Anyway, in lieu of a list, I will highlight how one has come to directly affect me.

I arrived home one day to find a huge 22 tonne, 360 excavator, removing the old building on the corner of my “street”. None of my business, but they had 20t dump trucks ferrying the spoil away all day, which did churn up the entrance a bit, No biggy though. I awoke the next morning to a mountain of crushed stone blocking the road. The same dump trucks must’ve delivered it during the night. Luckily, thanks to some time well spent watching ‘Kickstart’ as a kid, I managed to get me & the bike, up on the pegs riding over the top to freedom. When I got back that night though, the adjoining road had been blocked with stone & fill material. My road now had an additional twenty tonne pile of sand & a mixer. This was going to get messy. There was no boss on site & the project is for the Comuna, by the Comuna (Comuna appointed contractors, relatives etc). This means that not only can they do what the hell they want, but the bit that really galls me, they can get all their materials in advance of when they need them, but then give no thought or consideration as to how that might impact anyone else. My mother sees this as rude, but I always felt that it is a lack of awareness of anything that isn’t impacting them directly.

Which I grant you, is odd within a community lead society.

As inconvenienced as I was, it was nothing to that of Enrique & Carolina. Ours used to be the only decent access to the beach, as it only lead to the beach, the other two which lead to beach bars have been destroyed by traffic. These are both in a permanent state of flood or mud at this time of year, so taxis will no longer go down any of them & of course E & C struggle trying to pull the pushchair over the stone & mud….& if she has to do it on her own with shopping, well she just cant!

 

So Enrique went to  El Presidente of the Comuna, who wasn’t available, but his underling basically told him, “so what, you are all just foreigners!”. Im not sure what the Venezuelan term is for ‘lost his shit’, but by all accounts Enrique unleashed a torrent. I say all accounts, I mean each time Enrique tells me it becomes more elaborate. Joking aside though, if that’s

true then it is a shame & maybe my mother is right, but it highlights what has become a common theme with most of the people I meet, they seem to have no grasp of future consequence or benefit, at any level. They’ll take a dollar today because they don’t see the promise of $3 tomorrow.

 

Possum Bacon, Now there’s an Idea

Lastly for this issue, Ill leave you with an update on animal farm. I came down stairs one morning & switched on the light to find a possum staring at me from the kitchen, neither of us really sure what we were looking at. It took a moment for us both to react, then I went for the camera & it went for the cupboard. Id read that one should grab them by the tail, which I did – not very pleasant  in a James Herbert kinda way as I felt gristle & bone articulate beneath the waxy, scaly skin. I gave an almighty tug & its claws had no purchase on the tile as it sped back towards me.

Pulling the kind of wheel-spinning run only cartoon characters can manage, I let go at the same time his rubber got sticky. He shot forward, but managed to arch in midair & hang a left to dash out of the kitchen, straight for the front door. He was out & gone before I could get another shot off, but somehow I get the feeling that now he knows there’s food & its not a guaranteed death, it wont be long before Im pulling his tail again.

 

AWOL  MPD

One tail I haven’t pulled in a couple of weeks is that of the handsome boyfriend aka stripey grey cat. I saw him last a few days after this photo – his acceptance of the hierarchy & cementing our bond by bringing me a treat. I bought him a nice shiny collar with a bell to celebrate, but it hasn’t rung around here in so long I think he’s either been taken or lost. Such is life, though I guess I will find out soon enough if he left any heirs to the throne with the kitten. She be all growed up real quick like now y’hear. She be a swishin & swooshing around dem ol boys, so I whoops dem with the broom & says to dem, now go on, go on now n you get yaselfs aways from her. But I cants b sure o nuttin

 

& to close out this week, a big shout to my lil sis who celebrated her birthday last week 🙂

Carnival starts here next week, so I’m battening down the hatches & trying to avoid the spray foam! Till next time folks, Take Care.

Si x

Love to One & Love to All at this special time of Year!

 

In case you missed last year’s edition, Christmas is not my most favourite “event”, so this year, Roey & I took some inspiration from the photo above by focusing on the spirit of the festival, rather than what we were “supposed” to be doing or how we were expected to be doing it.

Simplicity was the key & whilst the idea of a huge turn out seemed like fun, we opted to keep it small. With 3 women on a retreat & 2 that had stayed on in Olon after theirs, the cook, the yoga instructor & the girlfriend of the only other guy there, it quickly became girls-night-out & that was fine by us.

The format was we’d all bring something to be part of the meal, which nicely covered both the giving & receiving bit, as well as providing a diverse menu. We had Israeli chicken, Dutch Beef, Swedish Vegetables, Guyanese Salad, Pigs in Blankets & Yorkshire Puddings (guess who bought these ;)), all followed by Venezuelan Chocolate Cake. We ate well, very well!

Eating way too much good food & ready to collapse on the sofa for a nap, check!

Unlike the stereotypical Xmas extended family meal, this was super stress free, with stimulating conversation keeping a snooze on the back burner. Now, we had planned to throw the floor open to Karaoke Christmas carolling – Unsurprisingly, I have unpacked my mike & sound system from the container, so we had the potential to go big….but in a slightly less charitable moment, we just couldn’t be arsed.

Turns out it was the right call, as by the time we turned up the volume, a comparable volume of alcohol had been downed by the ladies & they were in “Super-Trooper Abba Mode”. Good for them, they enjoyed the hell outta themselves. Entertaining as it was to watch though, for me it was equally painful to hear, so I caved to the call of my comfy seating (did I mention my container arrived? 😉 & got home at a resonable hour…..

 

I Love the Sound of Breaking…….

Having essentially bribed the authorities, my container was to be despatched in a most timely manner & thus due for arrival 2pm, Tuesday. All good, all going as planned. The Devil being in the detail & all that, the challenge of not having an address system in this country, is that you need to get extensive with your directions & of course hope that whatever you used as a reference point, hasn’t changed or been moved. I wasn’t so blind in my enthusiasm to not foresee potential for disaster here, so like a John Ford movie, I told them to meet me at the fork in the road to Sinchal. There is only a single coast road & whilst there are many small, side roads, there is only a single fork once on the coast road. Until you get to where my house that is, there coincidentally, is the second fork (to Dos Mangas). I am not storing the container at my house though; I am storing it at a friends place in Sinchal…. at the first fork.

There is a restaurant on the first fork, so I get there at 1pm for lunch as I have a feeling it will be well dark before I get to eat again. By 2pm Im alert & by 2.30pm Im standing in the road. About 10mins later, a huge truck comes barrelling down the road, clearly hauling a 40’ container I instantly recognised from only a few days earlier. Instinctively my arms went up as I guided him ATC style, in past me to the lay-by at the start of the fork. I stood agape in a cloud of dust as he carried on barrelling without even a glance at the fork. By the time I had my phone out, Sandra (my import agent) had appeared in the rear window of an SUV, equally barrelling. Our eyes locked, but the driver had his locked on the back of my container, so they sped on past as well.

On the plus side, three cabs stopped on the other side of the road thinking I was hailing them.

I quickly reached Sandra, who then had to chase the driver for a while before he answered his phone & they set about turning the beast. Thing is, this singular coast road doesn’t offer a lot of opportunities for HGV’s to turn around, so it was another half hour before we saw him again.  I used the time to (gently) enquire what had happened. The driver had faithfully repeated all the instructions regarding the fork meeting & was expecting an issue free delivery. What no one had foreseen however, was a relative of his that lives up near Dos Mangas, making him familiar with the second fork. His paperwork was folded in half, with my address on one side & delivery address on the other. I cant blame him for not turning it over, but GeeeZusss!

 

Love Cant Turn Around

When I planned this part of the process, I thought this access was the best I could hope for. Yes long bumpy dirt roads, but not uphill & bags of room. This was earlier in the year though & crops have been planted since….& fences erected to keep out  los animales. This proved challenging for a driver that prefers fast & straight. His team mates were of varied opinions & thus gave differing instructions, few of them helpful or followed. It was a lot later & there was a lot less fence & gate in a functional state when we finally got him in. The enthusiastic team then got to work emptying all my goods n chattels from the big metal box & divided them between one half its size & a covered storage area. I stood by the truck directing, assigning each box a status of “inside” or “outside”. This worked fantastically well & they moved quickly, though I did have to keep reminding them that as well as being an object to move, it was also full of my belongings, so please wait for someone to help you rather than use all your might to roll it. We are getting near the end & its only just dusk, so we are relaxing a little when the guys walk a large bubble wrapped package to the open truck doors. I can see it’s a glass panel, but they are holding it wrong & its starting to bend. I leap forward & get them to set it down on the truck bed which they quickly do. That’s when it bends again. I scream for them to pick it back up & the guy at the front does so first. That’s when I first hear, then see, the lava-like flow of billions of glass fragments from one end of the bubble-wrap, to the now pregnant bulge in the middle. I lost it!!!! Its not just the cost, the insurance will (should) cover that, it’s the fact that I am unlikely to replace it here like for like, so whilst (hopefully) no one will ever notice, I’ll see it every time I look at it. The endless introspection on how it could’ve been avoided.

Breath…then let it go.

The guys went into denial mode & I was in no state to hear it. I got up in the back of the truck & they took me into the deep recesses to where the last dozen or so items were awaiting their turn. All twelve, 2.6m x 1m glazed panels for the three Bi-Folds were stacked, record style, against one side. Including the one at the door, I found one more that hadn’t made it. For anyone that’s ever owned a 12” or two, when you stack them against the wall, the few at the front tend to slide down. Now the glass never came out of the container at the port, so it is my thinking one thing moved & pressure points changed from stuff above it &…. boompchsssssshhhh.

Im still trying to process it, I am gutted, but Ive found a guy who thinks he can replace it, so it may be recoverable….so staying positive (grinds teeth). Everything else with the house is going well, so on balance, as P. Diddy used to say, We on Top!

 

Your Love is Taking Me (Higher & Higher)

You’ve heard before how we construct each floor, so for simplicity, lets just say we’ve done it again 🙂 Since last I wrote, we have concreted the ground floor, the columns to the second floor, the second floor itself & the columns to the roof. We now only have the roof pour remaining 🙂 I grant you it isn’t quite the milestone of moving in by Xmas, but I don’t think any of us really expected that, did we? 😀

In between times, we’ve also built the basement walling & stairwell as well as begun the window reveals for the small frames Ive transported to site. Christmas is just the single day here having been mostly celebrated on Christmas Eve, so we were back at work Boxing Day. This means we just keep chugging away, so it now really, really, feels like its coming together.

 

Feels Like Im Falling in Love

If a UK Health & Safety Executive were to visit my site, he would likely close it down such are the number of potential hazards. In part this is because the vast majority of speciality (any) equipment, designed to protect workers from accidents, is simply not available here. It is also not part of their culture yet, so they rely on common sense & the good graces of whichever saint they pray to. Which reminds me of a story I heard at a gold mine in Peru. They were building a very, very high retaining wall with block-sized stone, but rather than go up the face with a scaffold, they built the ground up behind it & built from above. This lead to “several” leaning over too far & falling to their demise & giving rise to the query, “How many this week?”.

Obviously this is a poor reflection of the value placed on the worker. I do value my guys & though there are few H&S implementations insisted on, my focus is on making sure they don’t hurt themselves, rather than complying with a regulation. I’m constantly reminding them to be careful, getting them a real ladder when they begin by balancing a few bits of wood, handing them glasses when cutting steel with a grinder & gloves with concrete. Never the less, the law of averages is an inevitable player if you are in the game long enough. Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition, but everyone knows accidents can happen.

I was less than 20 minutes away from site on my way to breakfast when I got the call, Ricky had fallen off the second floor, they’d got him in a cab & were on their way to the emergency room at the end of the road in Manglaralto. Spinning the bike around, I headed for the ER, a million thoughts rushing through my head, a lump forming in my throat & something of a pit, hollowing out my stomach. The Doc was with him, so it was an adrenaline rushed blur from the guys outside that hit me like an airbag.

He was alive, TF!He’d landed badly, but I couldn’t be sure if it was his ankle first, or whether his lower back had broken the fall, either way, they were both under close scrutiny. After…quite…some…time, the Doc came out & confirmed there was a problem with his foot, but couldn’t be specific. They didn’t think he had a problem with his back, but they couldn’t be sure. Both easily resolved with an x-ray, however, for an unspecified reason, their machine was unavailable. Roey kindly lent me his car & by the time I got back to the clinic, his parents had arrived. His dad sells peeled oranges & his mum runs a roadside eatery, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ricky is the primary bread-winner, I braced myself for their reaction. The dad was subservient & overly appreciative, his mum wary but grateful. So we got Ricky in the back, with his mum in the front & we set off for Santa Elena. First it seems we have to stop at the roadside eatery to pick up his sister as she knows the way. I try to make conversation, but most of the 80min drive is spent in a slightly surreal silence. His sister didn’t know the way, she knew how to lean out the window & ask for directions…

Comparatively speaking you could say he was seen quite quickly & as I was mostly waiting outside, they may have been getting information updates that I wasn’t privy to. What I do know is, it felt like a really long time. Thankfully his lower back was just bruised, but he had broken his toe. The break had briefly separated, long enough for it to become misaligned & therefore needed an operation to reset it. Sometimes lady luck just cant turn that frown upside down, so we weren’t surprised to learn the surgeon was at a different hospital & super busy what with the run up to Christmas n all, so Ricky had to go to him. I left mum waiting with him for the transfer ambulance, Id given her some cash for painkillers, expenses etc & I took his sister home – she didn’t know the way back from the hospital either…. On balance & I mean no disrespect by this, these are state run medical centres & I’ve had worse NHS experiences. Sure they may seem to be outpaced by molasses, but they have a large turnover of patients. The care, when received, is top notch so I’m told.

He’s out of the hospital now. We got him some crutches & naturally I took care of his wages, but I didn’t want to knee jerk this & do the wrong thing. I also didn’t know what their expectation & intentions might be. So I did some research, conducted interviews & this is what I found. Whilst there was no guard rail to stop him falling, he had fixed a piece of wood in place to act as such. He then leant on this to gain greater access & said wood became rapidly unfixed & down he went. The HSE would disagree, but he is accepting of a goodly portion of the responsibility. I gave him a generous xmas bonus & reassurance he can come back to work when he is able. In turn his brother takes over the vacancies of both employee & breadwinner, life carries on.

 

Lovesick

The new administration has apparently done some good things, but like all good things, someone eventually has to pay for it. Their solution was to save a fortune on free healthcare & medication currently provided to expats & generate income by making them (us) take out insurance. It became legal beginning of December & has to be assigned to your cedula ID.

As I understand it, if you don’t have it & you leave the country, you have to pay all the back payments since you arrived, before you are allowed to leave. You also have to have proof on entering or buy at the airport. I was told there was a mixer cum info exchange being organised by a few expat-centric businesses, looking to capitalise on these changes by explaining revised rules regarding visas, importation of containers & now, healthcare.

I get why they are doing it & I have no challenge to the principle….however, I take issue with their first foray into this as a “blanket” roll out without thinking it through.

In essence, it’s the same deal they offer to the over 50’s in the adverts fronted by the late great Michael Parkinson. No medical, no forms to complete….piss poor cover should you actually need it. The difference here is we didn’t even get a free pen, let alone a handy travel alarm clock! I tried in vein to demonstrate how fit I am, that my number was non-reflective of my age & thus the risk of them having to pay out was minimal. No, I was now in an “at risk” category. Not that I would normally care what bracket anyone placed me in, but because I fell above the 49yr threshold, my premium would be $75 p/month. Outrageous!! I countered with the suggestion I could pay a (nominal) fee for a PAYG card, detailing the dental & x-ray work I’d paid for previously when I’d needed it, alas, no. Persistent as I am, she finally relented & agreed to class me as 49, which meant my premium dropped to $45. Yes I understand that, if required, a single operation can cost years of subscriptions at that sort of money, but even so, I still somehow felt cheated & anyway, isn’t that the risk they take when accepting your money?

The remarkable thing about this country though is that this is not where it ended.

I duly received the notification of attachment from the Ministerio, I am now on record as having official health insurance. Check.

What didn’t happen though, was any form of request for a 2^nd instalment, so I made my own enquiries. You are supposed to go to a bank & make a deposit to their account & then send the payment slip by way of confirmation that you paid it, & of course who you are, so they know who has paid & who has not. On further investigation, this time to the healthcare insurance provider, it appears the records are kept by the Ministerio & they are the only ones who check, or indeed enquire, who has what & then only if someone calls to ask & no ones going to do that except they themselves. So of course, I made no second payment, but as I intend to leave & return as frequently as I can, I needed to be confident I was legit. In truth Im probably just being bullish, but I don’t want to set reminders to make the trek, then to make the payment I don’t want to pay, so at least make it easy for me goddammit. This lead me to call into a bank last time I was in Santa Elena to find out, if I opened an account, could I at least set up a standing order. Well wouldn’t you know, Banco Guayaquil, much like Tesco’s or any other well renowned credit facility, also offer insurances. Bottom line, once you have an account you are entitled to get health cover at $60 per anum. Holy Santa Maria, I’d found what I was looking for & problem resolved 🙂

 

Eat, Pray, Love

My pigs in blankets won 2^nd place to the Dutch Beef on Xmas Eve. Im pretty sure they’d have taken poll if only I’d had real sausages or proper bacon, so buoyed by the flush of success & with the bit of extra time I had on Xmas day, I thought Id further indulge myself.

I still had some batter left over from the Yorksire’s & there was some beautiful looking calamari at the fish market. Yes it was open Xmas Day. I’m mostly too late for the market these days as Im at work, or don’t get there till lunchtime for the cats fish (yes, I spoil them!), so it was great to pick n mix from the days catch. Id picked up a baby tuna earlier in the week & Id had full on, side of beef to myself Xmas day, so I fancied a change. Bring on the calamari in batter to die for. Soft, succulent & full of flavour, that simply zinged with a squeeze of lime. Under 4hrs boat to belly meant this was the freshest squid Id ever eaten & whilst I always quite liked chewing my way through my allotted portion of rings in a basket, in venues believing the menu was exotic due to their inclusion, but this was something else entirely. I threw what was left over in with a bunch of prawns for a sweet ‘n’ sour Boxing Day & they were just as delicious. I tend not to make many resolutions, however, next year, in my new kitchen, in my new house, I will indulge my pallet more often, just for the sheer pleasure of doing so when you don’t have to.

 

I Love long walks on the beach, or, I’ll Always Love you Heidi

 

In this weeks, “What washed up on the beach today?”, we have a rather large seal. Its a Little Bit Crazy, right?!

It was bigger than they usually look from a boat or even on tv when they are seldom shown against something of known dimensions for perspective. So this fella was a good 6ft & must’ve washed up pretty soon after dying because he was relatively free from snack marks. It was something of a relief to not see the distinctive bite marks of its much, much, larger natural predator, so Im assuming  it was heartbreak….

By the following day & two tides later, it was clear he wasn’t going to get pulled back into the sea & he had begun to be carried on the wind. I was hosting an Elemental Dance class at my place on Friday, so I could only imagine what the smell would be in two days time.

Thursday as I get back from site, my neighbour comes rushing around to borrow tools. He’s Venezuelan & gets very animated when he talks, so its not always easy for me to define the subject matter. Eventually it transpires that the local bar owner has been contracted to remove the behemoth on Friday, which means he only has today to get the teeth. Im a little perplexed, but hand him a hammer with chisel & follow him down on to the beach. This is where I learned two things, seal teeth are much bigger than I thought & their jaw bones are practically unbreakable. Frustrated at watching Enrique chisel away & get no where, with the tide now over our flip flops, we had to move fast. It seemed to me that if we took the whole jaw, he could play Herman Mengler at his leisure. Taking the hammer  from him, I lifted the front of the jaw & swung full tilt about halfway along where the canines stopped. There was an audible clang & the hammer bounced right off. Fazed but undaunted I struck again fast, nothing. Enrique took a step & made some derisory comment, I switched to frenzy mode & hit everything within arms reach, yet still the bone remained impervious. Crestfallen & shaking my head, I handed the hammer back to Enrique. Luckily for him, the bone was thinner where the teeth erupted, so he was able to work his way up slowly to release all six. One machismo necklace coming right up 😀

 

Love X Love

I emptied most of my tools out of the container & onto site, but I took all the new Dewalt kit home. Serendipity being what it is, my front gate finally gave up the ghost & fell off – it had been swollen for a while now & jamming constantly. So I broke out the kit, put it back together, made it fit & work correctly. Naturally this attracted some attention & much marvelling was done over the tools. So it was only a few days later that Enrique, sly dog that he is, popped in for a chat. He & Carolina his wife are opening a small bakery in Olon, so he wanted to talk over some design options. In short, how do I make a shelf when I have no money. It didn’t take too many suggestions followed by “how do I do that?” before I realised where this was heading. So I embarked on a small shop fitting business, opting for the artisanal style due to lack of diverse materials. What this meant in reality is that we made up a lot of stuff as we went. He had begun by banginging in a couple of unevenly spaced nails, so what I gave him was some semblance of craftsmanship. I used screws & I counter sunk them, where possible I hid them all together. The shelves were the same planks I use to shutter concrete, but planed up & left rough. The coffee dispense work bench came from off cuts blagged from a developer of luxury flats who’d had the block-board imported. Im pleased with the results, he’s ecstatic, which makes it all worthwhile. Maybe when others want something similar, I can start charging 😉

 

Ill close this one with what feels like a blast from the past already. One of my new found friends made in Panama has finally got home & processed their photography. In amongst them was this one they took of me on a little archipelago looking back on the city skyline. I didn’t ask why or how, but the island has duty free status, so is a tourist honey pot. You wouldn’t believe how many people were queued up in a line with the photographer, all waiting to take their shot, but everyone waits their turn, whilst studiously watching their place in line. When people were called on jumping, they turned & went to the back, it was quite an amazing social display to watch. The downside of course is you are then looking back at what seems like the entire Spartan army, waiting to charge, so it’s a little difficult to relax. Well that’s my excuse & Im sticking with it!

 

Till next time people,

Show some love to yourselves this coming year

 

Si x

Welcome back everyone to another slice of life, here on the Pacific Costa 🙂 As you’ve probably now realised, my container has finally arrived in Ecuador & I’ll tell you how that all went a little later on.

The last edition was all about my recent trip to Panama, so let’s pick up the story with me flying back into Guayaquil last month. Before I left, I submitted a document request form with the Ministerio to get back important papers that I may well need in the future. Im sure it would be harder the longer its left – who knows what complications archiving could bring to the system! To this day, no one knows who invented the fire hydrant because the records were lost in a fire & that wasn’t going to happen to me. I was promised they would be ready for my collection in 3 days & I confirmed the date I would return from Panama. Thus, a full seven days later I make my way back to the counter, unsure of whether I should be optimistic or not with my expectations. It’s always the same guy on desk twelve & Gustavo clearly takes pride in his specialist area. We’ve chatted before, so he recognises me & accepts my receipt as explanation for today’s visit. He turns & heads into a back office behind the counter, absentmindedly leaving the door open, his every action now on view. Hands on hips he scans a stack of roughly 20 archive boxes (2 per month), settling on 1^st column, 2^nd row, he heaves & humps to extract the box labelled May #2 & then flipping the lid, sifted through until he came to my file, leafing through the contents as he brings it out to the counter……..

“what documents do you want?”,

“In all honesty, I don’t know what documents are in there, so lets just say, everything that you don’t need to keep for your records”.

“we need everything!”,

“urhm……”. Several painfully slow seconds of unwavering eye contact later he smiles & starts again to leaf through the file. He pulls out all the original documents & hands them to me in exchange for my passport. I am to go & find one of the little cabin huts outside & get these documents photocopied, return the copies to him such that the file is complete in document count & I can keep the originals. These turn out to be the deeds to my property & several other vaguely important papers, so it needed to be done, I just don’t see why they feel it is a 3 day service, or how they consider it a service at all. I understand I am never going to change this though, so I am the one who is changing & simply going with the flow.

The Grand Bug’n’Pest Hotel

Its been nearly two months since I’ve given you an update on the house – things have definitely moved on & it has begun to emerge out of the ground! The thing is, people notice when things start to emerge, especially when its big stuff. So it came about that the developer contacted me again, more formally, expressing grave concerns about my activities. Apparently it is forbidden to enter the site with any vehicle exceeding 6 ton. My concrete trucks are twice that fully laden, but I stressed I was unaware of the ‘rule’. I wasn’t just feigning ignorance of this, so I asked where this rule was written. “you should have signed a document when you bought the land”.

“Surely as you were there to sign at the exchange, you no doubt noticed I was absent & that my attorney signed on my behalf – did you present this document to him? No? Well then you sir, are shit out of luck on that one!”

As previously, I am of course repairing the road & will continue to do so…so that issue went away, but next up was the apparent size of the building….

“businesses are strictly prohibited on this development, you are not allowed to build a hotel!”

It took a while, but after he accepted this is solely a private residence, that I intend to live there & will not (technically) be running a business, the height became an issue. Once again all his supporting documentation was absent, however, if he had thought to have written a document for me to sign he would have wanted it to say; that only one floor above ground floor is permitted. I understand his point & even agree with it, as the concern would be that if everyone just built as high as they wanted, they would block the views of others, so any obscured property would then be built even higher….& so on. I have planning permission from the local authority, so these are only “his rules” we are talking about here. So it was almost a throwaway cheap shot to claim a technicality, that specifically, I will only have the single floor above my ground floor, with the basement being quite literally, below ground (or at least the highest point of my land). Amicably enough he conceded the point & is comfortable he can now defend the point to any future constructor. He is though, now rewriting his terms & conditions 🙂

Hi Hoooo

With all the gang in their new yellow wellies, we made short work of the external section of concrete floor remaining at basement level. We already had the columns in place, so it was pretty straight forward to build up the walls with double skin block work, but first we built the water tank. At 2m x 3m x 2m, it will hold just over 3000 gallons or 12000 litres, so I should be fine in a drought for a few days at least according to most American websites I’ve researched. I did note though that the state of Philadelphia allows for a usage of 101.5 gallons per person per day. This includes 2.5 gallons for brushing teeth & rinsing face, which feels both excessive & wasteful to me, so I was relieved to see they suggested the option to reduce this consumption by turning off the tap during the actual brushing phase – That’s some revolutionary forward thinking right there!

With the water tank rendered & tiled to prevent leaks, we got on with building the walls that won’t have doors or windows. Once the walls were built, we needed to create a mold above, into which we could pour the concrete for the next floor. You’d be surprised if I told you pre-formed products were available for this task here & I would’ve been lying if I said they were, so it’s the old fashioned way with wooden shutters. These then have to be supported, which when you consider this slab would require 50 tonnes of concrete to fill the whole floor, the boards have to be really well supported. Im sure you will have seen youbeenframedtube clips of above-ground, plastic swimming pools bursting when an integral piece of the frame is disturbed, so you can imagine the carnage that would result from the shuttering collapsing & that volume of liquid concrete cascading down the mountain like a gray avalanche, turning everything in its path into a “Medusa woz ‘ere” epitaph. The solution in Ecuador then is to use bamboo & at $2.50 for a 6m length by about 5” thick, it’s just the job. As strong as it is though, 50 tonnes takes a lot of holding up, so we used just under 600 (300 cut in half) to support the ground floor pour.

I only bought the one concrete float with me & as they don’t exist here, I managed to bring back two more from Panama, which meant the “Maestro’s” could get to grips with learning how to properly trowel a poured concrete floor. They were keen to learn & armed with the right tool, quickly proficient, so now they are officially their trowels & I have a greater skilled workforce at my disposal – win win!

Once the shuttering was complete, it was time to install the steelwork that binds the concrete together & provides the tensile strength concrete alone does not possess. Between each vertical column we formed a horizontal beam that connects each frame together, but by design, is poured at the same time as the rest of the floor such that the beams are now integral to the floor & thus far stronger than a floor poured on top of a beam. This means the floor appears to be 18” thick, though as this isn’t a multi-storey car park, the rest of the floor that isn’t a beam, is only 8” thick….. which is still over twice the thickness of most local floors! To make this all function in the way it’s engineered, all the steel must be welded together. To put that into some context, a beam/column is comprised of 4 bars that run the full length (3m for columns, 5m for beams), square collars are bent around the long bars to form a box to stop them spreading under stress & there are 15 collars per linear meter. Each collar must be welded at all four corners, as well as at every point it overlaps a previous bar or a beam that connects through a column. There are 18 columns & 24 beams per floor, with all beams & columns welded to the mesh sheets that are then laid over the top. It took 4 welders two whole days to complete & as they are the only welders in town, they can price accordingly. They were perhaps not to know I have my own welding equipment in the container, so they went ahead & priced themselves out of the next floors work in spite of me advising them to price with a view to a continued working relationship. Shame, but business sense here is somewhat short sighted as I’ve said in previous posts. I needed them this time & I would’ve given them the work again for ease, but they wanted more than kissing on a first date, so there aint gon be no second.

With the welding done it was an easy pour & with four pours under our belt now, it appears almost effortless & I am very pleased with the results. In the same week, we managed to set up & pour the columns & to make use of the premixed concrete & pump, I ordered enough to fill the retaining wall so we can begin the soil spreading from the upper level, to create the right levels everywhere…or at least we will when it stops raining for more than a day or two…..

We are now in the middle of building up the ground floor walls, stripping the formwork from below ready to re-use to form the first floor. Unfortunately the basement is only 2.2m high, so with the ground floor at a far more expansive 3m, I do need to replace the bamboo, but at least I can re-use those again for the first floor as that’s back to a more standard 2.4m. As I’ve said before, I intend to clad the outside of the house with the planks, but I am open to suggestions as to what I do with 600 lengths of bamboo that doesn’t require the use of a lubricant! 😉  

Walking around inside Im starting to get a feel for what its going to be like in a few more months & I have to concede, I completely get why people think it’s a hotel, albeit bijoux. With ground & first, its a fairly spacious 3 bedroom house, but throw in the basement & now it’s a fairly large 6 bed, with even the ubiquitous “box room” coming in at a generous 3m x 4m. Im aware Im about to rationalise here, but I stand by its size…& here’s why:

Its always nice to be able to host guests & when those guests are travelling from afar & possibly ‘en group’, its always better to be together rather than people spread across multiple venues

I don’t expect this to be my final destination, so in order to maximise my resale/rental potential, I have to cater to what the local nouveaux riche demand & that seems to be, the greater number of people it can sleep, the better. Many of the large properties we looked at for retreat venues state “sleeps 18” & none of those had more than 5 bedrooms

These 5 bed properties, which granted are on the beach, rent out at roughly $5k a month & up to $2k a week during festival weekends. I fully intend to travel nationally as well as much of the rest of this continent, so whilst I may rattle around in the place on my own, it should earn me nicely whenever I’m away. Hell I could move back to my place on the beach I live in now & still cream it.

But of course I want to live in it. I have designed it for how I imagine I want to live. I have the opportunity, the skill set  & the resources, to turn that aspiration into a reality, so why not?! I could’ve tried a small test run, but I’d still have to take the bigger plunge at some point, so if I’m gonna fail, its better to find out sooner when I can still do something about it. So in short, simply because I could! 🙂

Current Situation

Ive had electricity on site for about 3 months now, with mostly uninterrupted service, so Im pleased. I hadn’t seen a bill, but its not like Id really been looking for one, its been a few years since bills landed on our mats, but things have yet to develop much in the way of automation here. They come & read the meter, then (possibly a different person), returns with all the paper invoices, no envelopes, just that thin dot-matrix paper payslips used to come on. He then stuffs these in a fence or a hole in a tree or sometimes just left on the floor somewhere near where the meter is. When one eventually finds ones bill, you take it to their office in town & pay in cash – archaic, flawed, but simple enough. My builder found the second one & proudly handed me a sodden clump of once blue paper. It wasn’t easy to tell with any certainty, but the amount looked like $51.70 – I almost fainted! Of course we are in construction & we’ve had a lot of welding, but until recently the only power tool was my battery drill, so I couldn’t see where the cost had arisen. I felt a wave of impending nausea rise as I imagined the meter spinning out of control when I plugged in all my UK bought toys. I headed for their office. The young lady behind the desk always manages to be calming somehow & as she slowly took me through the soggy text, it was clear I needn’t have worried – $50 one-time fee for the meter (the install is free, but you have to buy the kit) & $1.70 for 2 months usage. Now that’s a lot more like it!  Water on the other hand is a bit more expensive because that’s supplied by the developer via a pump from the river. It’s a $5 a month standing charge, for which you get 12 cubic meters, or just over 3000 gallons included & then it’s a few cents a gallon after that. The detail oriented amongst you will appreciate the volumetric symmetry with my storage tank, I know I did 😉

Hissing Sid

No blog would be complete these days without the wildlife section. Im afraid both these are big no no’s for my mother, so Sue, step away from the screen now….

There I was relaxing on the deck one weekend when I hear a gasp & a yelp, quickly followed by Carolina popping her head around the corner asking if I was busy as her hands were clearly full of baby. It took me a moment to understand exactly what I was looking at – a snake had fallen off the roof (hence the perfectly understandable yelp!) & was now taking up position guarding her gate. Channeling my inner Johnny Morris (Steve Irwin for the youngsters ;), I felt the right thing to do was to simply relocate it.

Being the sensible, health & safety conscious chappy I am, I thought it prudent to pop on a pair of gloves. Ive been around snakes before & even shared a house with one many moons ago when I lived with my friend Jonah. Looking back now, a wasted opportunity for learning a few things that could most definitely become of benefit. For example, Ive since found out from Jonah that I may as well have wrapped my hand in lettuce for all the protection those gloves could provide from venomous fangs. Not knowing this then, I approached with an ill-advised nonchalance, reaching my hand out & thinking it would perhaps bend its head forward so I could easily grasp its neck & take it to pastures new. With 4k UHD slowmo cameravision I saw his head begin its lunge towards my outstretched fingers.

With every passing nanosecond the head got closer & yet I could detect no movement from my hand, it hung there awaiting the inevitable, comically seeming to be about to pet ‘El Serpente’. Clearly too late, a signal got through to the hand, leaving it no more than time to clench my fist, at which point the snake hit. There was force from the ‘thud’, but no pain & no prick except for the one with a cotton glove on his hand. No sooner had it landed the Glaswegian Kiss, it spun & disappeared under the floor. I doubt it was poisonous, but I don’t know for certain, so I acknowledge my good fortune & promise to learn from it 🙂

This old chap has set up residence in my lawn & well in spite of some encouragement, he seems determined to stay. He shan’t be getting a travel box when we move to the new place 😉

A Conundrum within an Enigma, all wrapped up in a Big Metal Box

According to the World Maritime Association, it takes 32 days to sail from Bristol to Guayaquil, my container managed this voyage in just 25, suck on that Phillius! As you might imagine, it came as something of a shock to receive a call Thursday afternoon that it was due tomorrow, a week early. I relaxed a little, after all, they of course had to unload first & then there are a limited number of bays for inspections & as such, you have to wait for the call to give you an appointment. So I left it with my agent to reach out to her network & to keep me posted as I set about planning & briefing men & deliveries for the time I would be away.

I have to be honest, I wasn’t sure Id made the best decision regarding my import agent. Visually she reminded me of my visa lawyer & this was in no way a good thing. Discussions with her on the phone were challenging to say the least – she does know a lot of English words, however, she doesn’t appear to know what many of them mean, so uses them in complex arrangements that are impossible to understand. In person, she now speaks Spanish slower with far less confusion 😉 In stark contrast to my preconceived concerns, I got the call Sunday afternoon for a 7am Monday appointment. A quick shower & I got on the bus to the city. Unlike my lawyer who forced me to fend for myself, my agent sent a car to meet me at the bus terminal to take me to the hotel she had already booked. She uses them a lot, so the car is an inclusive service, but even so, it was nice to actually be getting a service.

As you would expect, it’s a laborious process getting into any port & Guayaquil is no exception. It amused me that whilst it enforced hard hat, hi viz & boots, it does not provide or supply them. They are however available for rent at the makeshift shack round the corner, just ask for my cousin Juan… $2 for hat & bib, but $10 for boots, so clearly aimed at the expats. I smiled smugly as I rocked up in my rigger boots, though they were worn as much to reinforce my occupation as construction in order to justify the entry of so many materials, tools & equipment, I was the only one sporting the look :).

Thankfully catching an inner-port-bus, we make our way across to the inspection sheds & walked the line until we found the droid we were looking. Sandra (my agent) had her port employee meet us at the container & pretty soon a team appeared, bolt croppers sought out the security seals & after a moments appreciation for what we were about to receive, the team set about emptying the 2700 cubic feet of “my stuff”. Id be lying if I said my eyes didn’t tear up at the sight of some of my things that Ive longed for. There were quite a number I’d never actually seen before though, which was quite bizarre, like a detached Christmas gift exchange. It got even weirder when having to explain later on what some of them were. Id decided from the beginning to be open & honest with Sandra, if she was to bullshit successfully for my side, she needed to know what she was dealing with from the start. We wait around a while for the inspector, so I run my hands fleetingly over the boxes as I begin the process of making sense out of the labels & numbering. The next bit is more complex than it should be, so let me try to explain the situation we found ourselves in.

There were 101 items in my lockup, there were 187 items in the kitchen delivery, 63 windows, 15 delivered by Stevie, 62 from amazon/ebay & a few other small groupings etc etc. These totaled the 479 items that my shippers packed in the container. When packing however, they put some items together, say a bedside table on the seat of an armchair – makes sense right? So they repeated this practice as appropriate to maximise use of all available space. They took inventory as they went, though as it was handwritten & taken during loading, the list was in no numerical order. International Shipping requires the issuance of Bills of Lading, which must state total number of items. My shippers stated 365 items. Let’s not get into the how’s why’s & wherefor’s of why I was doing this next bit, however, in typing up the inventory onto a spreadsheet & simultaneously translating the contents, I could not make head nor tale of what I was reading. Emails were exchanged, explanations offered & it finally clicked. Where they had, for example, placed bedside table within the armchair, this was now considered 1 item & thus when considering all the items that had been “bundled”, the new total was 365. The fact that the inventory line entry for that item now looked like this:

No15 – 2of5/28of101 – furniture – mueble – used – $0.00

did not make it easy to identify what was what, so you understand my concern as to what we were going to find when we opened the doors. A large square lump is easy to identify, so I quickly found the chair, which did indeed have the bedside table within it & with a round or two of industrial cling film to keep things together. What there was no sign of however, was a label saying #15. It did have a label with 2 of 5, as did the table with 28 of 101, making both now look glaringly like two items, simply bought together in some Seranic embrace.

A quick conflab with Sandra & all may not be so bad. The Customs agent sent a list of the boxes to be checked & these were mostly the many fridges, the TV’s & generally anything electrical, so we were to pull those out & make ready for inspection. A little after 11 the agent appears across the yard. Even from a distance I could sense unease. She was an unfortunate looking, pear shaped women who did not seem confident in her role. I was a little irked she was only wearing trainers & wore no bib or hat – it sets a bad example! I made nice though & left them to it as advised, helping only when called upon, yet watching on from a distance like I’m starring in an old Eastwood movie. Sandra had spoken to higher ups & we had been told we were going to be fine on the tools, but there were concerns about the kitchen, so this is where the focus turned. It didn’t take her long to establish the numbering did not match the paperwork & she took Sandra aside for a chat. If the contents don’t match the bill of lading, customs have the right to refuse its entry & return it to port of origin at cost. Good to know! Taking back my earlier negative objectification of the agent, she did us a solid & said she’d go for a walk whilst we sorted things out. We spent the rest of the day & we couldn’t do it, so everything went back in the container. Rinse, repeat the next day & we are back in the boxes. As we cant make it work, she wants to look in all the boxes, Every. Single. One. A pain in the ass for sure, but aside from pretending most of the brand new stuff was used, I had no real concerns about what they’d find – They accepted the brand new projector screen was old & had simply been sent away to be re-whitened, so it was mostly just about making the numbers work, but I couldn’t help feel they were also taking the opportunity to get a closer look at what might be coming in. For the most part they  were gentle & re-taped up when they were done. Luckily I had translated everything that was in my lockup, so it was easy to explain when they didn’t know what things were. That was until they got to the suitcase I’d used to pack up the last of my clothes, the suits, the over coats, the things I probably no longer needed, but were simply still too good for me to  stop wearing them. The team & the agent were being thorough, in the kitchenware box, they counted each plate & piece of cutlery. So in the case they count the 3 suits, 7 t-shirts, 4 shirts, 1 wash bag….wait, what, a wash…. bag….oooooh noooooo, no I forgot the wash bag! 1 large dildo, brown, 1 medium dildo, pink, 2 small round……… The surrounding crew of stevedores all seemed to draw & hold their breath at the same time. The agent lifts her gaze up from the clipboard briefly & looks me straight in the eye, Im stonefaced to keep from laughing at my own embarrassment & she too is business as usual, but Im sure I detect the slightest crease to the corner of her mouth & the flicker of an eyelid, so I return an almost imperceptible nod. We close the suitcase & move on, though the guys certainly seemed to find something funny for the rest of the day.

We were not so fortunate with the rest of the boxes as many of the general content descriptions the shippers used were not accurate enough ie kitchen part for microwave was beginning to suggest some attempt at deceit. Amazingly the agent gave us another day, so out everything came again, we removed every label we could find & bundled what we needed together to arrive at 365 items, which we managed eventually, so I could finally get back on a bus to head home, knowing my stuff should now all be following on behind me in a matter of days.

The boxes came out again on Friday with Sandra just for the agent to confirm the box count, which again is testament to Sandra’s talents – Im told if it cant be completed on the day of your appointment you can expect to wait weeks for another & have to pay storage whilst you do so. Getting a whole week was golden.

What we came away with is this, they cant get their heads around the kitchen or the glass. Not just because of how many pieces, why so many etc, but also in terms of how to classify them as they just couldn’t accept these items should be considered as household goods. The agent wouldn’t make the decision herself, so she called in the big guns from the upper brass & everyone took a shot at explaining things from their perspective. After much gesticulation & obvious cogitation, a decision was reached & I was given two options. I could accept that everything was too ambiguous, therefore every item in the container would be considered non household, evaluated, priced & then taxed as imported goods accordingly, requiring a period likely to exceed two months, for which I would be responsible for storage payment as well as administration charges for all their additional work. Or, I could pay a one off lump sum of $1000 dollars tax to cover everything & the container would be released as soon as the paperwork was complete. Naturally option two wouldn’t just happen by itself, so a further $2k in gratuities was suggested to ensure no one else looked too closely at what had occurred here. $3k comes to roughly 5% of total value of all new goods in the container & as import tax can be anything up to 175% on selected items, I shook his hand to seal the deal & apologised for squeezing so hard. I am now expecting delivery this week, almost exactly 1 year since I put the padlock on my storage locker for the last time before getting on a plane. Of course I will still have to get them from where I am storing them to my new house, but that will be a story for another blog, for now, stage 3 is almost complete 🙂

Can You Feel It?!

We had a small quake on Monday, at only a 5.8, it barely wobbled & lasted only a few seconds – more nervous tick than Gran Mal seizure, so nothing to be concerned over. In fact, it became something of a comedy moment because at the exact time it hit, there was a government exercise on earthquake evacuation & emergency procedures taking place in the city. There is a prominent politician remaining nameless, who is rich yet considered nice but dim & often compared to certain other “leaders of the free world”.  In a scene reminiscent of Bush jnr receiving the 9/11 news, this guy was being interviewed live on TV about the exercises when the quake hit & not knowing what to say, he just continued to stare at the plan. When his Bushism passed, he segued straight into Trumpism, somehow claiming it was intentional & an integral part of the training to make it as realistic as possible so hadn’t been published in the plan. The memes went viral, many heralding the return of King Canute & how lucky the people were to have him running important government exercises. They do indeed have a sense of humour here 🙂

Puss in Bovva Boots

Before I leave you this time, I’ve been getting a lot of messages about the kitten, so Im pleased to tell you that she’s doing really well & growing up fast. She is extremely playful & loves to bite, but when its not playtime she is also very loving & seldom leaves my side.

She makes me belly laugh at least once everyday & fills me with calm as she spoons herself into my lap when its time for bed. She knows I generally wake around 5.30, so she waits on my chest, watching for my eyes to open as she purrs into my face. I on the other hand absorb this into my dreams, so before I wake up I think Im starring in Mission Impossible, trapped under a slab of concrete with a helicopter blade whirring a few inches from my nose. After a good nights rest she is ready to play & many’s the time at least one of us has gone flying down the stairs as she leaps at my feet causing us to trip. She discovered geckos a few weeks ago, so starting working on leaping. She gets pretty far up the wall, but she’s no Peter Parker & so comically slides back down to the floor in slo-mo as the lizard gets the last laugh.   She has a strange relationship with the other two toms – 1 takes all her abuse like a cuckolded parent – think Roy Kineer as Veruca Salts father. The other Tom, aptly named Gordo (that’s fat bastard in Spanish) chases her down & swats her at every available opportunity. Though she puts up a good fight, shes barely a third his size, so eventually she bales for safety. I figured this would settle down over time, so whilst I stop it from escalating, I mostly let them get on with it. A couple of weeks ago, Gordo came home with a big lump of skin & fur missing from his chest. It seems there is a new tom on the beach that’s heard about the good eating round these parts & fancied himself a piece of it.

A week or so later we were sat on the deck, kitten on my lap, Gordo sitting in the doorway keeping watch. The new tom hops the gate & starts in along the path. The kittens hackles rise & I can feel the vibration of her growl across my legs. Gordo steps tentatively onto the path as I wait to see what will happen. The tom pauses as if assessing his chances, then turns to walk the other way as I sense both Gordo & kitten relax. Barely a second later the tom turns back as if to say “Booo” & the kitten jumps. Gordo, big proud tom that he is, literally shits himself. He sits there frozen to the spot, a puddle spreading out behind him as the other tom now wanders off, cat chuckling to himself, his dominance asserted, mission accomplished. I was beginning to feel sorry for Gordo, we’ve all been there & I felt for his humiliation. The kitten jumped down to see what was going on (& presumably to see where the hellish smell was coming from) when Gordo lashes out & swats her in a transparent attempt to regain his fake balls. True colours revealed, Gordo is just a pathetic bully. I know it, he knows I know it & he can no longer look me in the eye. The kitten knows it too, but it looks like she is just biding her time to get bigger & decide how best to use it to her advantage. Life’s never dull down here on Animal Farm, till next time 🙂

Si x

Ive just been on a little excursion to Central America, so whilst the house is progressing really well, this update will focus on my trip & all the fun things I learn’t along he way.

Make yourself comfy, we’ve got lots to get through 🙂

Regular subscribers will recall that in order to bring all my worldly goods into the country, via container & tax free, I have to have entered the country within six months of its arrival. This translates into simply needing stamps in my passport, which meant leaving the country for a minimum of 5 days. The thing is, I didnt want a holiday…life already feels like one long holiday most days, so deciding where to go wasn’t straight forward. I considered a quick visit to the UK, however, 30 + hrs of return travel & the prospect of Autumnal weather soon put the keebosh on that idea, no matter how good it would’ve been to spend time with family & friends.

Austrian Sophie, a friend from last year here in Ecuador,  now lives on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, so an offer to spend time with her sounded like a winner until I checked the air fares – at over $1500 just for the flight, I couldn’t justify it – they´ve come down again now, so Im assuming it was just a seasonal fluctuation. In the end I went with the cheapest “package” option I could find & chose Panama. Ive always been curious about the canal, so this would also be an educational experience as well, which of course means I now get to share all that experience with you. Don’t worry, there will be plenty of pictures 😉

See that green container on the left, no, the one next to that. Yeah, thats not mine, nor are any of the others on board as my container is not now due untill 22nd November 😦

I was travelling on my own, so leaving Roey supervising the house build. I loaded up my phone with music & Spanish lessons & threw a few clothes in my knapsack before heading for to the airport. As you will know by now, there are many things you just can’t get in Ecuador & if you can, they are expensive, so I intended to buy a carryall in Panama & return heavily loaded.

Because I dont like going into Guayaquil unless I really have to, I wanted to make full use of the trip, so wanted to submit a return request for the title deeds to my land & other documents submitted as part of my visa application at the Ministerio de Relacciones Exterior. I still owed my visa “lawyer” $50 from the original application & she had promised to get my documents back in return for me paying the balance in cash. I haven’t had a response from her since May, so it was down to me & frankly, I was more than a little unsure of how to proceed. As I’d been in Guayaquil for Jeff´s departure back in September, I went to the Ministerio then to make some enquiries & discovered it was amazingly easy, just hand in a simple request letter & return after 3 days to collect. With my previous experience of all things official, on the day of my flight I allowed myself 6hrs from bus arrival to plane departure. However, In what is I’m sure an unprecedented event, I was in & back out again in under 5mins when my number pinged up as soon as I was given my ticket – I guess very few people bother to collect application documents as they only have a limited validity of 6 months, but better to have & not need as they say…..

So Wednesday morning at 5.30, I left a bemused looking kitten in the safe hands of my neighbour Enrique to feed & care for – I’d agreed this with his wife Carolina, but as she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy on Sunday, she already had her hands full of needy infants.

 

The difference between a Mule & a Donkey

For the first time in a long time, I was pulled from the line at outgoing customs. A young & enthusiastic guard took me into a back room with a lot of new looking, technical equipment. He went to great lengths to explain the procedure & pointed to all the pictures filling the walls with 3D x-rays, depicting various human abdomens, clearly filled with multiple “packets”. I couldn’t tell for sure, but they looked very real & were so clear & detailed, I could read the branding on the condoms. He then spent another 5mins flicking through a graphic photo album of people for whom the smuggling experience had gone horribly wrong. Was there anything I wanted to tell him before he began – the longer it took, the harder it would be for me. Now Ive spent backroom time at Miami Airport…. & of course I was clean, so this wasn’t even vaguely scary by comparison, but he seemed confident he was on to a winner. Does anyone else find there is a strange thing that happens to the brain when faced with Authority? If you know you are guilty, all your thoughts are protesting or at least feigning innocence. But when you actually are innocent, you begin to explore ways in which you might possibly be guilty, but somehow weren’t aware of. I began thinking back over the last 5hrs Id been hanging around the airport (probably being monitored). Had the guy who innocently bumped into me, planted something? Had someone slipped something in to my food, or whilst I was having a nap, no doubt snoring open mouthed, would I have swallowed unknowingly as an opportunistic Cartel member quietly made me their mule? I took a deep breath & stepped into the machine & as the glass doors swished shut around me, a conveyor passed me through everything from a CAT scanner to the Hubble Telescope. As lights around me began to flash, the alarm went off & all moisture disappeared from my mouth, reappearing in rivulets down my spine & coating my forehead. The guard, now joined by several of his well armed colleagues, smiled broadly & beckoned me to exit the machine. On jellied legs I approached his monitor where my full body picture was now displayed with the suspect area circled in red.

Congratulations arsehole, you’ve caught me trying to leave the country with a nipple ring. I hitched my t-shirt, we all had a good laugh & they bade me bon viaje.

 

From Bon Viaje to Buena Vista

 

Before I get into any detail, here’s Steve Wright in the afternoon with a few fun factoids about Panama.

 

• Panama is the most Southerly country of Central America & with a population of just under 4 million, nearly 50%  live within the metropolitan area of Panama City
• Panama City is the only capital that has a rain forest within its city limits
• Panama was the first country outside the US to adopt the Dollar as its currency.
• Senator John McCain was born in the Canal Basin back when it was still governed by USA
• The Panama Hat originated in Jippi Jappa, Ecuador (where I got my driving licence), but was transported to Panama for sale & export. When US President FDR opened the Canal in 1914, he was given one to protect him from the Sun & they were known as Panama Hats from then on. They are graded on the fineness of their weave, with the finest being a Montechristo – the best are so fine they hold water & when rolled will pass through a wedding ring.
• At barely 50 miles across at its narrowest point, Panama is the only country in the world where you can see the Sun rise over the Atlantic & by just turning your head in the opposite direction around 13hrs later, see the Sun set on the Pacific.
• It is one of only 6 Capitals in the world that include “City” in their name to distinguish them from their namesake country. Can you guess the other 5?   Answers at the end 😉
• The Panama Canal generates roughly one third of the countries $55 Billion GDP (2016)
• The train from Balboa to Colon is the longest running railway in the world. Completed in 1855 it was the highest traded investment of the era on the New York Stock Exchange priced at $369 a share.
• Panama has more varieties of bird than USA & Canada combined & holds most of the world records for bird watching – You will be surprised how often this will now come up at diner parties 😉
• Ex-Pat investment fees go directly into Rain Forest preservation.
• What was once thought to be a grounded Japanese submarine from WWII, was found off one of the small archipelagos at low tide. Looking a bit like an upturned boat, it turned out to be the worlds first submarine which had previously been transported to Panama from the Pearl Islands by Julius Kroehl in 1866. After hunting for pearls in the Pacific, he died after less than a year of a fever, thought to be the first ever case of decompression sickness (the bends). It is said this story was immortalised 3 years later by his friend Jules Verne, who used it & the island as inspiration for 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea….& then of course, installing a bloody great church organ  to get the right atmosphere 🙂

Arrival

After a 1hr 50 flight, I touched down around 8.30 Wednesday evening to torrential rain & a rather chilly 26 deg. The forecast for the week was stormy, with only Saturday likely to be rain free. The hotel had all the facilities its 3 stars claimed, but only delivered them at a 2 star level. Unfortunately the plot next to mine was being developed & had just started construction, which meant jackhammers for 10hrs a day. After an awful nights sleep due to general noise, I was up at dawn & out on the streets soon after to start my shopping. Previous experience has taught me that if I find what Im looking for & its more or less what I was expecting to pay, I buy it there & then or Ill never find my way back to where Id seen it. The City has all the shops a man could want, so I was done by lunch, but with no idea where I was, I bundled into a cab to get back to the hotel. Unfortunately in my rush to get me & my swag into the cab, I sat on my phone, breaking the screen for the second time in a week. One thing they don’t sell in Panama are Microsoft phones, so unlike Ecuador, a quick trip to one of the gazillion phone shops wasn’t going to get me repaired, as perhaps peculiar to MS/Nokia phones, the screen is electronic, so wont function when cracked. Luckily I’d thought to bring my actual camera, but stupidly had forgotten to charge it, which of course I didnt find out until I went to use it, which was just as we arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal, but more on that part later.

Zzzzzz’s dead baby, so we got us some Ving Rhames lookin Muthas on Jackhammers & a couple of pipe bending brothers getting medieval on their bars

I spent the afternoon fruitlessly chasing a phone solution, which gave me a chance to use the Metro. To be fair its more like a tram & many of the streets are being dug up to accommodate more track, but those already in operation were spotlessly clean & almost Germanic in their minimalist efficiency. What I didnt see though were any maps – all the stations are named after a road or location, but unless you already know where that is, planning a journey was challenging. Well it was for me at least. I don’t know who built the stations, however, I couldn’t help but notice all the escalator hand rails ran in sync with the stairs. An important design feature of escalators is that the handrail moves faster than you do, which is supposed to keep you alert & attentive when using them. But at only $2 for a travel card, it seemed worth the risk

 

Friday on my Mind

To paraphrase Dostoyevsky…..

In order to understand how a Society functions on the surface, we must first examine its underbelly.

       Fat Bottom Girls Don’ Make My Rockin World Go Round, but their message isnt difficult to read…..       “Mujer de Rodillas” or “Woman on her knees” by John Berry, inspired by a real muse.

The Best Place to Catch Crabs

I had done no prior research, so whilst it was my intention to walk as much of the city as I could, I figured it would help if I knew where I was heading & why. Thanks to those that have gone before & then written about it, I found out my hotel was in the middle of a Soho equivalent, so pretty much everything “fun” was within a short stroll. The area is known as El Cangrejo, which literally means “The Crab” & all its roads are laid out in curves like the legs & claws of a crab, which luckily meant eventually I ended up back more or less where I started everytime I got lost. This area was first established by the Jews in the 50’s & is host to many, many bars, restaurants & bordellos. As a nod to its founders, in the middle of Plaza de Einstein sits a giant stone head of the squares  namesake, though given the volume of sex trade in the area, perhaps a bust of Harvey Weinstein would have been more appropriate. (boom…tish) Anyway, whilst it wasn’t exactly 7^th Avenue, like Simon & Garfunkles’ ‘Boxer’, I do declare, I sought some comfort there (Lie La Lie).

What he used to look like & how he looks now, “protected” during construction works

Like Ecuador, prostitution is legal here, but whilst most were not to my taste, its always fun to hang around with them. Much like coming home at the end of the day to a room full of puppies, they are eager to lavish kisses & cuddles on any potential clients & usually up for a fun chat between ‘appointments’. I received extra attention on account of my “European Blue” eyes. This prompted me to try to explain to one of them that scientists now believe the Norwegian Blue Parrot really did exist & was potentially the great ancestor to many of the Parrots & Macaws now found in South America today. That conversation quickly shuffled off its mortal coil, joining the Heavenly Choir, it was bereft of life & pined for the Fjords no more. It was a dead chat-up.

The rest of this vibrant city is a vast cornucopia of stylised buildings, both commercial & residential,  interspersed with the construction of even more. Not unlike NYC, the visitors are the ones looking up – for me that was mostly trying to get my bearings, but usually I’d clock up more miles than The Proclaimers in the morning, stop for lunch then grab a cab back to the hotel, before heading off in a different direction for the afternoon.

On foot I was able to appreciate many of the little things one might not usually notice from one of the drag racing tour buses, so the following contains some sweeping socio-economic generalisations & lopsided comparisons between an Ecuadorian coastal pueblo & a modern Capital City that is the central hub of The Americas.

 

• There are a lot more smokers in Panama, but it is working hard to make the whole country smoke free by imposing many regulations & restrictions.
• The people appear slimmer, healthier & a little bit taller, so I was back to being just average instead of the tallest in the room. 😉
• They appear to have agreed their automotive supply with Japan as opposed to China, as all taxis & service vehicles are Toyota & not Chinese built Chevrolets. Pretty much every other car is what you’d expect anywhere else, but few very expensive ones.
• Panamanians drive much faster, but more considerately & it seems foot traffic has right of way, resulting in jaywalking being something of a past time, with traffic stopping whenever anyone steps in the middle of it. They put Italians to shame on horn usage.
• The whole city is accessible by wheelchair & clearly marked ramps are everywhere. I only saw one person in a chair, but the condition of the pavements is diabolical, so they would need 4×4 to travel between ramps…but it’s the thought that counts eh?!
• I only saw 2 women begging & appearing to be sleeping rough. I gave them change, & they thanked me in English. With the exception of my hotel staff, most other Panamanians speak good English.
• Things are roughly twice as expensive, so $5 for lunch & $20 for dinner. They also expect tips of between 10 & 15%. Change is never an issue & no one blinks at a $50 beside checking its validity. Perhaps its because the cash machines also dispense $5’s, but charge you $5.50 for the priviledge of using the machine.
• Panamanians smell nicer – the usual wide range of scents & deodorants are available here, plus great water pressure, heated properly, means maintaining personal hygene is a pleasure not a chore.

• Whilst most are slim, there are a ‘large’ number of women who appear to belong to The Church of Adonitoligy. Like a Sir Mix-a-Lot dream date, this is where women sculpt their upper body through cardio to be slim & toned, however, heavy weight squatting & lunges expand their glutes beyond normal proportion. Yes its popular now because of the revolting kardashians etc, but its always been a Latin/Afro cultural thing that I just don’t get! The pretty ones looked like Jessica Alba as far as their belly button, then flared out to Queen Latifah from there on down….. 😦

 

There’s no Dixon, but the Dock is definitely green

I’d looked online when I booked my plane ticket & tours to the Canal & around the City were Gringo priced, starting at $180, so my plan was to DIY it. Idly scanning around the hotel foyer, Selotaped to a door, was a scrap of paper advertising Canal tours at $15. So after confirming a taxi was a $35 round trip, I booked a seat on the bus for Saturday, hoping the weather forecast would ring true. It hadn’t rained since Wednesday night, was warming up nicely & by Saturday was a respectable 30 deg, with clear blue skies. I was looking forward to capturing some great photos…..doh! Taketh with one hand & giveth with the other & all of that, I began to chat with the others on the bus. Turns out Raul & his wife Julianna were from Cajamaja in Peru, the same place Jeff & I had stayed with Steve Perry, so we were off to a flying start, he had a nice professional Canon SLR & offered to take all my photos for me. Result!

It costs $15 entry into the Mira Flores, Pacific side of the canal & with no need to waste time fighting the crowds to get a photo, I was able to spend our allotted hour wandering around soaking up the info. But of course, you’ve got to go & check it out with your own two eyes, if only to say you’ve seen it. So I have to say, the Canal wasn’t that impressive, or at least from the only perspective we were allowed. The fourth floor of the Mira Flores building is the observation deck & was at least 15 people deep the whole way around. Pushing kids & old ladies aside, I forced my way to the front & all you can really see aside from the green fields all around, was the top of a big ship gradually rising. It takes about 10hrs for a ship to get through 3 sets of locks & 24hrs to get where the chicken was going, so nothing much was happening quickly. Yes of course the sheer enormity of the ships was impressive, but you weren’t allowed anywhere near enough to see anything else of interest, so I went back downstairs to look in the museum & watch the historical film reels. Now we were talking! Of course construction is my thing, so I was far more interested in the how than the what. So let me share with you a little bit about what they did & how they did it.

For the best part of 200 years, ships wanting to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific needed to risk life & limb going around Cape Horn, until eventually during the rise of the industrial revolution, men of substance & learning looked to find an alternative, shorter & less hazardous route. With Panama being such a skinny barrier to the financial reward of trade routes, a plan was devised to create a system of locks rather than to try digging a channel all the way across. So it was in 1880, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had previously built the Suez Canal with much success, began another ambitious plan. Working in the desert is worlds away from a rain forest & it didn’t go well. Over 20,000 men removed a strip of rainforest canopy & began to dig. Unfortunately for them, with the forest gone, there was nothing to hold the loose soil together when the torrential rains started & these then washed all their hard work & many of their bodies away. In another blunder, no one had thought to invent insect repellent, so those that were left, fell to malaria, yellow & dengue fever. In 1887, desperate for a positive turn of events, the Board of Financiers bought in another expert in his field. Flushed with his own successes designing the internal structure for the Statue of Liberty & then the worlds largest Meccano set in Paris, Gustave Eifel was tasked with pulling the French out of the proverbial merde. But barely a year later, they were down to less than 700 men & had spent so much of the investors money, that Eifel was charged with misappropriation of funds, a charge he was found guilty of in 1893 & fined 2000 francs, though he was later acquitted on appeal.

 

Lights, Camera, Action……Take Two!

Following a deal by FDR wherein the USA guaranteed independence for Panama & paid a one off $10 million for a 10 mile wide strip of land across a slightly different part of Panama, work began again in 1904. 10 years later, it was completed with the inaugural entry of the SS Ancon on 15th August 1914. To give that a little context, Henry Ford didn’t produce his Model T until 1908 & planes still had two wings made of wood & painted paper, so whilst they did have some basic mechanical equipment to help them, this was manual labour in the extreme.

Back in 1904 with picks, shovels & broken backs. Then again in 2006 with the benefit of machines.

The land between both oceans along the canal route is 26m above sea level, so the first of three locks on each side start at zero, although this differs by as much as 7m on the Pacific side due to the extreme tide variations. Through a clever system of gravitational hydraulics & culverts, 26 million gallons of water are flooded into each 1050ft long by 110ft wide chamber, to raise a ship to the next lock level. Once at the top, it crosses a massive lake, (formed by the damning of the Chargres River), sailing the 50 miles to the docks on the other side & then taking the three lifts back down again. The walls of each dock are 55ft thick at their base & with a Panamax container ship sitting in between them, it has exactly 2ft clearance each side. For the 100yr anniversary in 2014, further works began in 2006 to increase the capacity & future proof its use by enabling super-size, gega-vega-mega ships to transit. They have also refined the process such that 60% of the water is now re-circulated back into the reservoirs or following docks. This is engineering at its most awesome 🙂

 

It costs on average about $500k for a big ship to cross, a luxury yacht can do it for $2k & if you want, you can swim it for 35c. The largest boat to go through paid just under $900k.

 

You guys are gonna be in so much demand at your next works party when everyone else’s conversation starts running dry….. 🙂

 

Olden Town, textured by Sun, through the ages it has burnt down…

As dawn gently broke & crept her way silently through the gap in the ill-fitting door, something felt different about this Sunday. It was now somehow.…. Quiet!

Like in any city, many people who work there leave it at weekends heading to beaches, the country or whatever, but Panama also has some forward thinking initiatives for those who stay. There is an incredibly long cycle path/running track, interspersed with city provided exercise equipment & random artwork. It runs all along the seafront from the city out to the old town, so its offers exercise with something great to look at. However, on Sundays, they go a step further by closing many of the multi-lane “commuter routes” to traffic & open them to cyclists, mums on blades pushing prams & even whole families in 4-seater pedallos…. as long as the only engine is you, you’re good to go. So it was a lovely quiet & relaxing walk, down through the city towards the Marina, around the bay & onto the old town. Id fixed my camera so I was Mr Snap Happy on a gloriously sunny day that was getting even hotter as I neared the Old Town. Ironic really, as back in the 17^th Century, before it became old, it used to be THE Panama City & it was destroyed by a fire that burned for months.

He’s a Right Rummun

Somewhere around 1650, a young farmer from Glamorgan in Wales named Harri, was abducted from Bristol & sold into indentured slavery in the West Indies. Released a decade or so later, he adopted the more English sounding Henry Morgan & enrolled as a privateer under Sir Christopher Myngs. Privateers were an early version of mercenaries, who in this case were tasked by the British to cause as much havock as they could to the Spanish, who at that time owned everything from Mexico & Florida downwards except Brazil. It seems he’d found his niche in life & quickly progressed up the ranks, such that at the time of Myngs death, Henry took over the command to become Captain Morgan. He & his crews ran rampant throughout the Caribbean & Central America, causing chaos to all. It wasnt all smooth sailing though & after a dispute with the French over a revenge hanging, many men left him & returned to the islands around Tortuga. These islands were infested with wild boar, which the French hunted almost to extinction & became known as boarcaneers, which became baconeers & then, the now familiar term of Buccaneers….Anyway, at that time, Porto Bello on the Northern Coast of Panama was the third largest city in the Central/Southern Americas & Henry announced his intention to attack. On July 11th 1668, he lead his men in 23 canoes up the Chargres river, took three castles & the town, holding the then President of Panama, Don Augustin to ransom for 350,000 pesos. Much raping, pillaging & plundering allegedly followed before Henry had had his fill & returned to Caribbean Port Royal with over $100, 000. Panama was raised to the ground, though no one knows if Don torched it himself to prevent its capture, of if Henry was feeling spiteful & tossed a torch over his shoulder as he swaggered out of the city gates . At the time the amount Henry “aquired” was more than the agricultural output of Jamaica & half of the sugar exports of Barbados. He was Knighted on his return to London but returned to to the Caribbean as Governor of Jamaica. Although he owned several large sugar plantations there, he did not produce the rum that bears his name. The next 150yrs or so saw a back n forth in governance until Panama joined The Grand Colombia Alliance & broke away from Spain who had managed to take it back from the British. It is for many of these reasons that the indigenous gene has been tweaked so often & from so many different angles over the years, that their “look” is now very much cosmopolitan.

 

What grew up out of those ruins, is a charming, Creole flavoured network of narrow streets & decaying architecture. Everywhere that hasn’t yet been restored or developed, is trussed & braced with steel, gutted behind the façade & awaiting construction of hotel/office/luxury flats within them. In between some buildings you catch glimpses of centuries old rock defying the passage of time – large areas of the old town are Unesco World Heritage recognised, so all the works appear as sympathetic as they possibly could be. By midday it was up to 34Deg, so it was time for me to take a lil respite from the blazing & I stopped at a delightful deli & thoroughly enjoyed a smoked salmon baguette – Ive not had one of those in a while

 

On the way back I found myself in the rough part of town – I read later that it used to be completely gang run, but an initiative turned it around, ex gang members are now giving organised tours, they run a micro brewery, selling to tourists as well as in their own bars. Its legit business from now on son.

You could tell it was off the beaten track, because everything was just that little bit grimier, not renovated & not yet prepped for it either – these old wooden homes may not survive the clean up.

I wasn’t threatened, I wasn’t mugged, no one promised to love me long time  – they were  quite specific on cost & duration, confirming everything in Panama is twice as expensive, but here time is also money. A concept not yet embraced along the Ecuadorian coast.

One Last Hurrah!

Tuesday was my last night, so its up to Einsteins Plaza to see what’s a gogo. It was not what I was expecting, so let me back up a bit to explain. Every bar & restaurant in the area comes with at least 2 screens minimum & show a rotation of baseball, US football, boxing (Roberto Duran) & of course, soccer. They are Latin, so sure they are passionate, but I couldn’t avoid seeing that USA put 4 goals past them the previous week, so they didn’t sound very good at it. Clearly this night, having the whole city out & cheering them on would make a difference, especially against their immediate neighbours, Costa Rica (so presumably some petty rivalry exists there)

The streets were impassable, all cars gridlocked, all pavements filled with bouncing bodies screaming to be heard over the wailing of the car horns. The two winning goals were quickly looped & beamed to all flat screens far & wide, tilted at an angle to catch your eye no matter which way you looked. I was fast becoming a paranoid schizophrenic in a horror house of mirrors. I quickly finished my delicious Shawarma & headed for the sanctuary of my hotel, but there was no escaping the noise. All the stopped cars had their systems blaring either news reporting what they’d just seen, or “we are havin a paaaartay” music. The last of those two goals had secured them a chance to compete in the World Cup, but they were celebrating like they’d already won it. Im happy for them, I am, but when I finally passed out around 2am, it was still throbbing outside & I was no longer sympathetic to their celebration.

No one turned up for work on site Wednesday morning & I may have been dreaming, but Im sure I saw a news clip talking about making it a national holiday, so whilst not a Sunday, it was a quiet & easy drive back out to the airport, which was good cos I felt rough from no sleep.

Panama is a slightly wild, vibrant & cosmopolitan city, but Id had my fill & was looking forward to getting back home 🙂

 

I met a girl on her way to Venezuela, I tried to talk her into coming to stay with me instead, for her safety of course! I havent heard from her, so Im hoping she’s ok. It got me thinking about random violence & the hotel had CNN, so I caught up on a lot of news. So before I close, Id just like to share a few of my thoughts surrounding the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, an event that whether you believe in six degrees of separation or not, will likely affect us all in some way eventually.

Perhaps you have a problem with my creed, or my colour, or my sexuality or nobody loves you enough or maybe you simply, don’t like Mondays. It doesn’t really matter what the provocation may be, there is absolutely no way you can shoot me if you do not have access to a gun. Surely that is a better option than everyone needing an “equaliser”

Nearly exactly 50yrs ago, JFK asked, “If a society cant protect its weakest, how can it save its strongest?” Does anyone else see the insanity in him being shot, & the guy that shot him, shot, & the guy that shot him, shot. How many more people need to die before this madness can be stopped

The current situation in North Korea is the very zenith of bearing ones arms regardless of others well being. Somehow everyone can see that’s wrong & wants to take steps to control it, & yet on home soil…..

For every upvote a weapon will be destroyed & for every downvote, a tree will be planted. Go!

Until next time when I will bring you up to date on the house build, here are the answers to the Capital City pop quiz 🙂

Mexico City,

Guatemala City,

Vatican City,

Kuwait City

& Djibuti City.

Note, the DC after Washington doesnt stand for “Da City” so it & The City of (London) obviously don’t count, but I will give you half a point for City of San Marino.

 

Si x

 

All finished up for you then Sir, I do hope its everything you thought it would be?!

Reality Bites

Yeah, even though its been 4 weeks & not the expected two since my last update, it was only in my dreams that all we had left to do was throw a house warming – I hope most of you caught the watermarking courtesy of 123 stock photos before you got too excited 😉

Back in the Autumn of 2015, I developed a programme of works for this build. Of course there have been some amendments since, however, I allowed 3 months to construct, with a further month of finishing. I then took a flyer on what it might possibly be like to get work done here & trebled it. My darker, inner voice, had already pre-accepted quadrupling that to a full year. What did I know, I was making it up as I went along…..

The thing is, its going well, very well in fact & I should be elated, I am elated, I just don’t feel elated. Having given this some thought during an idle hammock moment, the likely reason for my emotional dichotomy is that I was supposed to begin last June, so even allowing for a years build, we are now several months behind. Of course I know that’s nonsense, but that doesn’t change the largely underwhelmed feeling I cant shake off at the moment. Maybe its hormones – more on that later!

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Everything else in the jungle is awake & making its presence felt!

So you recall I said there were some dangerous…ok, more dangerous, creatures calling my back garden home, well I got to meet some more over the last few weeks…..

       Aint I just all cute n cuddly?!

I can grow up to a foot in length & I got more bite than a box of bulldogs

First up is this mofo – it moves pretty quickly, so whilst the shot of it next to my boot was taken by me, the other clearer shot is a library photo so you can see the detail. This then is Scolopendra Gigantea, AKA the Peruvian giant yellow-leg centipede or Amazonian giant centipede. It grows up to about a foot long & feeds on anything it damn well feels like! Its actually part of the scorpion family & as such is carnivorous, eating other insects, mice, birds, spiders, snakes & even bats – basically whatever it can overpower. Im told their bite is fatal, but whilst the death of a four year old in Venezuela was attributed to one, they are mostly considered just very poisonous. Their bite however will probably be all that’s needed to deter you from going near one a second time as they are ranked at a 4 on the Schmitt pain scale. My guys decapitated it, then cut the rest into four pieces & flung it into the undergrowth as it screamed “you’ll never take away our freeeeeedom”

The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend

Now when this winged behemoth flew past me, blocking out the sun as it went, I was expecting four horsemen to follow along after it, heralding the rise of an apocalyptic dawn. I don’t know whether this was the same as flew by me or horror of horrors there could be more than one. It is The Spider Wasp, or Tarantula Hawk. I made enquiries as to how the hell one dealt with this kind of beast & was told you avoid them where possible, but don’t discourage them from being around as they eat Tarantulas. Music to my ears & I was never much bothered by flying things anyway, so all good. Naturally a touch of further research was also called for, just to set my mind at ease. Things didn’t start off well as rather than kill Tarantulas, its namesake feeds on flowers like any ordinary wasp. They didn’t improve much when I got to the harmful section. They have one of the longest stingers at 7mm long, thats plenty long enough to pierce all the layers of skin. This means they also score a 4 on the Schmitt scale, so let me put that in context. The scale begins at 1, goes up to 4 & only lists those within the most painful bite spectrum. The fire ant, so named because of the intense burn when bitten is only a 1. The Spider Hawk shares top spot of the 4’s with the bullet ant – guess why its called that & no, its not the shape of its head ;)

The next bit comes with an advisory warning for the squeamish, so Mum, its enough you know they are our friends & skip to the next paragraph 😉

The likely origin of the myth, is that it lays eggs in Tarantulas, the lava then bore into the spiders abdomen to feed, but amazingly manage to avoid vital organs to keep the spider alive & thus feed for as long as possible. When its ready to ‘hatch’, there’s one last trip along the sweetmeat smorgasborg & then it erupts from the belly a la John Hurt, leaving the spider taking an octo-shuffle off its mortal coil.

Bow Legged Lou

Not much needed on this. Yes it’s from a chicken & all I can say is thank you to the bandy bantam, it was delicious & a meal in itself 🙂

 

….and then there were three!

So I get home a bit early a couple of Thursdays ago & need to do some work on the pc. Having had a few weeks of strange beasties on site, I am now primed for anything large & hairy within my peripherals, moving or otherwise. Back at home on the beach though, there’s been nothing, so Im pretty blasé…..which is why it took me a minute to decide on what I was supposed to do when I pulled out my chair & saw this….

Once my testicles, momentarily in my throat, had dropped back down & everything relaxed, this lil ball of fur barely raised its head whilst emitting the saddest mewl Ive ever heard. My heart melted. Now what was I supposed to do?! I have full 1^st Aid accreditation, but it doesn’t extend to cutey pie kittens & their welfare. Fortunately I always keep cream in the fridge, so two agonisingly slow tablespoons later, there were promising signs of life. Another hour & a can of tuna later, my mystery guest is bouncing around like a lottery winner, which I suppose it could be argued, she is – heart beginning to liquefy 😉

I have no idea how she got here or where she’s from – certainly no one has put any lost kitten “reward” posters, but the thing is, if Im not home, then the door is locked & even when open, because Im home, unless Im in bed, any other animal trying to snaffle our cats food has to get past me first. A clue came the next day when she ran under the stairs – turns out she’s been in an old equipment box under there for a few days at least – someone told me its not uncommon for cats to deposit recently birthed kittens in a safe place – she’s was a feline swaddling child, left on the church steps for fate to decide. Now she’s Daddy’s lil Gurl & we wub her n skweeze her n wub her all of the day & all of the night all along. I guess she must have imprinted on me because she absolutely will not be anywhere but by my side, I even have to escort her outside to do her business, she mewls until I do, which took a few mishaps to get the understanding of……

It’s a couple of weeks on now & the warm fuzzy glow has cooled – of course I still wub the lil mite, but the cycle of sleep, eat, play, repeat has become annoying as we are out of sync & she always wants to play when I want to sleep or do anything other than play with her – its taking me twice as long to write this as she leaps all over the keyboard, then scampers up on to my shoulder when I shout, but cant resist my dancing fingers, so when uiohdioI#IJ#’Innnnnnnnnnnnnn occurs, she gets put outside with the door shut. Cant see me getting away with that if it was an infant, so no, still don’t want kids….but I have laughed a lot over the last couple of weeks 😀Daddy Loves You, but you just gotta hope you will blossom later, cos right now the camera is not your friend…..

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

When you were last here we had just finished the footings & I was trying to buy prefabricated cages for the columns. We ended up making them ourselves & then had a welder attend site to make them the equivalent of factory made. We also got the added benefit of being able to weld them to the footings steel work, ensuring a solid connection throughout. Our next task was to concrete around these cages to form the columns themselves. As Ive said previously, we opted for the metal forms as they came in the size we needed & are easy to assemble. I met the guy on site to discuss the hire, which was confusing to say the least. I needed to allow enough time for them to be ready, wasn’t 100% on when the concrete was possible, so my thinking went like this: Deliver Thurs, assemble & level through to Fri & Mon if needed. Concrete Tues, disassemble Wed, collect Thurs, so a weeks hire. Yes the w/end was a bit of a waste, but I didn’t want to put the concrete off & just in case it all went tits up, 2 days is a nice cushion. Straight forward yeah? No Senor! My understanding is that they only hire them for 3 days, but you can have them for as long as you like. This meant I could only hire them from Mon, but get this, if I still needed them after Wed, I could hang on to them, yes, for a week if necessary! I don’t recall the exact details that made up the reason for me not being able to get concrete Tues, but I was guaranteed for Wed! So I kissed the dice & rolled a 3 day hire for Mon. 08.00 he pulls up in a home modified Toyota Hilux, over full with steel forms. I duly pay him & we unload. We have 18 columns, 4 sides to a form, why didn’t I have 72 pieces on site?! Didn’t fully understand the exchange, but my main guy assured me it was under control, so I threw a glance at the dice, let the guy leave site & waited to see what would happen. With a little more time to work on explanation, it turns out Id cleaned out his stock & he hadn’t finished making more yet. I was impressed, no, very impressed. He had the forethought to deliver enough for us to be getting on with, even if it cost him an extra journey. He was back by late afternoon, we successfully poured Wed & he collected Thurs as we were stripping them. He was a shoe in anyway, but he guaranteed his continued employ as we rise up through the building by confirming this was a 3 day hire. At $5 a day each plus $15 transport, it was money very well deployed.

With the columns complete, it was time to crack on with the base for the floor, but as has now become the norm, little happens when its supposed to. As long as you don’t execute anything based on something that hasn’t happened yet, its not a problem. What this means is that you have to work concurrently & not consecutively, which I think is what I used to get the buzz from. Motivating/cajoling to get something completed because the next thing absolutely could not be affected. Flying by the seat of someone else’s pants & knowing you can only succeed if you help them to succeed. Sure I can still plan, but I don’t execute until the precursor is complete. This means its a bit more paint by numbers, for which I am adjusting. In my moments of greater clarity, I savour the reward of unhurried, honest graft towards a home & no matter rain or sun, it feels mighty fine 🙂I want to use as many locally sourced products as I can, so we built the base from cocaineFilled, vibrated down & levelled. All ready for steel & concrete

So whilst we were waiting for stuff, we ticked off a couple of out standings, like lights & sockets to the office / W/c & an actual toilet for the W/c. I didn’t want to use one destined for the house, so I asked the guys if they knew of any 2^nd hand – I envisaged a version of a council reclamation yard, I had actually expected to see one by the side of the road for some strange reason, but no, there’s none of that. The one he found is extraordinary & for $30 it will end up “repurposed” further down the line. I have christened it – it promotes a better defecatory position in that your ear lobes rest on your knees, but it does a good enough job & fulfills its function.

Yes thats the certified electricity board installation & yes the engineer drilled the hole in the top when Id already drilled one at the bottom. Apparently water doesnt drip down here like it does in the Northern Hemisphere.

Anyway, we were on to preparing the base, which meant Bob was back on site to make mechanical light work of the soil that we needed moving around & also to bring in more fill material as due to yet more rain, there was no way we were getting a lorry where we needed it to be. With the area prepped, we lined with polythene & laid out the steel mesh reinforcement. To be fair they all looked at me like Im some kind of loony wasting $100 on polythene as they don’t use damp proof membranes here, which given the volume of rain, surprises me. Now we have poured the floor, they understand the benefits during that stage, but Im not sure I will ever sell them on preventing moisture rising from the ground.

Im as yet undecided what I will use to cover the basement floor – It would follow that I use the same ceramic/stone tile as everywhere else, but as this will probably end up being an ‘anything goes’ party area for the most part, I might explore a different covering. I had considered leaving it as polished concrete, so this pour was something of a test to see what they could achieve using their methodology. Well, bless them, Helen Keller could’ve gotten a better result with a wet puppy. In fairness, none of them have ever dealt with pumped concrete before, as usually they hand mix it. When mixed by hand, it stays wetter longer, so is easier to work with for longer. However, the big difference pumping is that you are no longer dealing with a bucket full at a time, but a continual flow. So where normally they would rough it in place & then return later to fine tune & polish, you cant do that with poured as its set too hard by the time you can get back to it. Its no biggie, it was an experiment & it will now be covered anyway. The main thing is that its pretty nice & flat, which is the critical skill, the rest is just technique. We’ve discussed it & will do it my way for the next pour so they can appreciate the difference (hopefully 😉 ).How many AirBnB’s can a big basement be before its a dorm….or tree

One aspect I felt a little horrified over, was footwear. They were all in plimsoles. Not trainers, but those canvas & Indian rubber fashion faux pas that you had to wear to junior school P.E. lessons. Think kung fu slippers with laces! So whilst they willingly stepped in the concrete where needed, understandably they did what they could to avoid doing so & with poured concrete you need to get right up, close n personal in the middle of it. Luckily they don’t use lime in their cement here, but even so, contact with skin is ill advised. Along the coast here at least, footwear options don’t extend much past flip flops, so whilst you will see trainers, as Ive said before, they are expensive, so are for Sunday best. Work footwear is whatever you’ve got & even at $10, wellies are an unnecessary luxury most of the time. So long story fractionally shorter, Im taking them all shopping Friday after work.

The “lack of” status most of the work force here have is a niggling issue. They tend to have 1 or 2 key tools for their primary skill, but don’t have much outside that, or its ‘created’ to fit a function. Some of the methods I am using require certain tools, but in general terms, everything we do requires something, which falls to me to provide as I am both client & principal contractor. The thing is, I have all these tools & equipment, just not with me right now & there simply isn’t a tool hire centre. Much like the motor bikes, the tools that are available are expensive but cheap & crappy Chinese imports, or very expensive name brand. So for now at least, we are prioritising, which means the guys are still using an axe instead of a plane to trim down timber framing, which until I splurged on a claw hammer, was also doubling as the main banger-in of nails.

Oh Glazing, Where Art Thou?!

The day before the re-re-scheduled delivery of my order I was informed there were still parts needed to complete my job & thus they would not be arriving as advertised. Of course no subsequent date was offered, so I was back to swinging in the wind. Channelling my inner Bruce Banner, everything went white hot as my eyes scanned down the brief note. Intense light flooded my ears, the sound of my blood pounding through my eyes, the scream began deep down inside but became an almighty roar as it exploded forth from my lungs as I went full ‘Hulk Smash’.Jack Kirby eat your heart out!

Of course I was still the one with my dick down a dingo’s throat & I couldn’t afford for them to cough. So I took a deep breath & maintained eye contact in the form of a very strongly worded letter. Well it made me feel better & thankfully I had my good sense guru Jeff here to guide me through the subtleties I was beyond feeling. I may tell the whole saga at some point if I decide to name & shame, but for now, all you, I, anybody needs to know is that they were finally delivered yesterday! TFFT ! Any day now I expect a date to sail…..now the so far, minor concern of getting my stuff through customs here has gone up a notch to five penny, ten penny as its about to be the last significant hurdle. The thing is though, even with a very fair wind, it will be middle of November at the earliest before I see any of my stuff on site. Given the electrics, kitchen, brick ties, render beads & yes, all the glazing are in the container, I am not going to be in a position to move in before Xmas. Damn, I’ve become a Kevin McLeod cliché 😉

The Little Boy That Fell Down the Well

So Jeff came for a quick break from the 5 – 9 & this time was a little more tranquil than previous, but no less enjoyable for it. Great conversation, at least one proper meal a day, a movie & TeaSmokeBed for a good long sleep. I went into work each morning to set the guys on for the day, returning for brunch out somewhere. No pressure, just blowin in the wind & feeling better for it. On one such afternoon we were going out for an early beer & a pizza, but there’d been a power cut earlier, so we hadn’t showered in the morning. 5pm & power back on, I head into the shower only to find it was still cold. We’ve previously had ignition issues, so as I realised it wasn’t power related, I headed down to the outside boiler room to tickle the boiler into submission as I had many times before. I may’ve mentioned that forethought isn’t a big part of Ecuadorian construction, well in the middle of the door way to the boiler room is the manhole into the underground cistern storage tank. The manhole cover has been cobbled together with bits of tin, but previously seemed solid enough & you really cant easily avoid stepping on it to enter the room. Hurriedly redressed in jogging bottoms & flip flops I headed downstairs, across the yard & into the room. Into the room with no mind nor heed for the cover that chose the precise moment the ball of my right foot transferred my weight, for the lid to give way, spin on its corners like a flip bin & shoot me down into the well, making sure to bash me on the sides as I went. I caught the top sides with my arms Tom Cruise style, hung there for a moment looking off meaningfully into the distance, then hauled my sodden, battered body out the hole & the surprisingly chilly water as a curious/concerned Jeff turned the corner to see what the shouting was about. A tri-fector of shock numbing the senses, Adrenalin trying to force action & nausea bought on by the pain now beginning to erupt all over my body, meant all I could do was go back into the room on auto pilot to complete my original task. The gas cylinder was empty, there was nothing I could do as the missing spare bottle indicated the letting agents had taken it to refill. Unable to complete my mission, reality began to trickle in, then really roar as every nerve ending began sending critical error warnings. I did a quick body scan assessment based on pain, but when I looked up & saw Jeffs worried face, I began to consider things may be worse than first thought. Right little & possibly right index toes broken, right tibia fracture, right 2^nd & 3^rd ribs cracked, left little finger dislocated, left hip broken. I was fine! The gas shouldn’t be too long now, so we can still go out. Jeff was having none of it & guided me to the sofa while he went through the pain killer drawer, which meant that a few hours later I was feeling much better ;).                                                                                Seems I was right to watch E.R. & not to apply for a job there as a second, later assessment showed that aside from some grazing to the skin of affected areas, no bones were in fact broken, I would just have a few bruises.                                                                So the thoughts going through Jeff’s head. He’s resilient, he’ll be fine, he does this shit all the time. He looks hurt, this could be bad, how do I go about doing what I should do? Who do I call, how do I call, what do I say? All very fine points, so just in case……………….. its 911 same as many. Unfortunately, the chances of you getting anyone that can speak any English is slim, so maybe just remember “emergencia” & the name of the town you are in & you should be fine… 🙂 Yes, Jeffs visit was quieter than usual, but we didn’t miss out on any excitement 🙂

After & Before, the true story of a cheaply made drive sprocket ………& I thought the chain was just loose.

Sadly I don’t think the Blazer is going to work out. The guy apparently still has another interested party, but even if they exist, they don’t seem to be giving him any money. The car hasn’t been matriculated for four years & owes $700 in back taxes/fines. I told him if he clears all that then Ill buy it. He said he doesn’t intend to pay the fines if hes only getting $1500 for the vehicle, but hasn’t answered any texts since, so it is what it is. Im off to Colombia next week to qualify for my 6 month entry/container/tax free pass, so Ill sign off for now & be back with more news in a few weeks.Marcus Arelius could have said to the Senate, “If you would be weak, disguise your tolerance as ignorance & turn your back upon me, but know this, while that ignorant back is turned, I shall eat your fish & grow strong”.

Si x