Mysterious tremblings

I woke up in bed at ten to 4 this morning, with my whole body trembling uncontrollably, and my heart racing.

I thought that I must be having some kind of seizure, but then I noticed that the door was rattling in its frame too. Then I worked out that it was an earthquake!!!

It was the coolest thing! I have never felt an earthquake before, and it was so strange!!! The whole house was vibrating, for about 7 seconds.

The epicentre of the earthquake was in Mexico, at a place called Guerrero, 623 miles from here, where there is a lot of seismic activity. It´s magnitude was 4.3, which I don´t think is particularly big by earthquake standards, but we felt it so far away!!!

I have this theory that the day after a thunderstorm, people are a bit crazy, that there is a strange atmosphere in the air. I think the same thing definitely goes for earthquakes. Everyone was in the kitchen at breakfast, shouting, whooping and skipping around. Full of crazy excitement. I feel full of energy and totally in love with everyone. Post Tremor Love Syndrome (PTLS) I shall call it.

Xela also appears to be in the grip of a water shortage. We haven´t had any water in our kitchen for 2 days now. The problem is that the kitchen in our house is upstairs, and the water pressure has fallen to such an extent that it´s not possible to get any water out of the taps there. In the afternoons there tends not to be any water anywhere in the house at all. This actually isn´t so bad as it sounds though because nobody drinks water from the taps, and instead we have those enormous water-cooler things delivered to the house. It just means that washing things is a bit of a pain. I guess it´s because we are quite a long way into the dry season. As I said yesterday, it hasn´t rained since December 1st. I think the rain usually starts to fall again in May, so we have quite a long way to go!

Time is slipping away

ARghgh! Not so many weeks left in Xela. Time is slipping through my fingers. I can't believe I've been here since November. I hear there are snow storms in the UK at the moment - well, it continues to be sunny here! It rained once, on December the 1st, but I haven't seen anything other than sun since. I appear to be rambling incoherently,with the English obsession of talking about the weather, so will make an effort to gather myself together, and talk about something interesting.

Actually, I feel bad about my last rant, and suffused with love and affection as I am today, I will write a list of the things I love about Xela in particular and Guatemala in general

1) OK, I'm English! The weather. It's amazing. It's hard to be glum for long in a country where the sun shines every day.

2) The people. Especially in Xela, it's great to see a place where the indigenous culture is so vibrant. About 60% of the population dress in their indigenous dress - magnificently woven fabrics. I love to see them. There are 26 different indigenous groups in Guatemala, and I think 21 different languages. When I travel out to my voluntary job in La Selva, I sometimes hear people talking in their own languages. I love to hear them. They sound so mysterious and exciting. So different from any other language I have ever heard. They have wonderful names like Kaqchikel (which is pronounced Kack a chick ell, really fast, and is one of my favourite words).

3) The attitude. We could learn so much from Guatemala. For a start there is no such thing as liability. You know how we are obsessed with sueing other people for our own misfortunes? Well here, you take responsibility for your own risks and your own well being. Being here makes me realise how uptight we Brits can be. So many things that are normal here are illegal/not done in the UK. Just little things like riding in the back of an open truck, jumping on and off buses when they're moving, disregarding copyright, selling things at all times and places without a licence, showing up late for things (does it really matter in the scheme of life?), disregard for personal space!! (what is that anyway?). Everything is relaxed and easy, people seem less veiled here.

4) You can do anything. If you want to volunteer in a school, you can do so without having to wait 4 years for the police to screen you. If you want to set up a charity or a voluntary project, you can just do it like that. Of course I realise why we have these checks in the UK. It just seems that the starting point here is that you are trustworthy, whilst in the UK, it seems that we start with the opposite assumption. :o(

I have so much more to tell you - about my voluntary work and about a talk I went to last night concerning the Central American Free Trade Agreement. But these will have to wait as it's time to go to work.

Hasta luego chicos
Hilz x

Rant

Possibly because I have had a headache for a whole week, and possibly because I made it worse by going out with the girls last night for several Cuba libras, but today everything seems irritating.

So, for your reading pleasure, here is a list of everything I hate about Guatemala:

1) The altitude and pollution here mean that I have had a continuous headache since I got back from Costa Rica with its clean air and lower altitude. I had this when I first got here and it lasted for 2 weeks. One more week to go it seems until I get my head back :o(

2) The music. There is no music scene in Guatemala. Aspiring musicians have to leave the country to find a recording studio, and the result is that there isn't really any music scene here. T and I bought a little radio but the radio stations here play the most apalling music. It's not that they play traditional guatemalan music, and I am being an ignorant bigot. They play literally anything they can get hold of, which is typically Stevie Wonder's 'I just called to say I love you' Honestly! At least 4 times per day. I haven't heard anything that was recorded after 1982. It's not possible to find classical music anywhere either. When I left the UK I decided to bring absolutely nothing of value in case it got stolen.

People have been astonished at the tinyness of my backpack for 6 months of living here, but I have always felt great that I need so little. Now I snarl at people who are travelling with their IPods. Thousands of tracks of lovely music there for them whenever they want them. I feel like I am crawling around in a desert, with my tongue dragging on the sand, with barely a molecule of water in my body, and all around me are people in their private swimming pools, that I cannot enter. It's not true of course, I could get my visa card out and buy a CD player and start burning CDs at this internet cafe. But I feel that I have undergone this deprivation and misery for so long, that if I buy a CD player now I will feel even more angry that I didn't buy one earlier.

3) The Police. So far, I have no first hand experience of this, but I have heard so many stories. It's quite hard for me I think, with my 'If you want to know the time ask a policeman' mentality to grasp the concept that the police here are not to be trusted. The latest story I heard last night, it's actually quite amusing.

There are several tourist places in Guatemala where nice young men will approach you with a knife or gun, and kindly offer to relieve you of your money. Most of the time you just hand it over and you get away without anything too horrific. Anyway, some people were walking down the volcano in Antigua, and this happened. One of the women in the group punched the robber on the nose and ran away. She went straight away to the police station, and lo and behold, there was a policeman nursing a freshly broken nose.

3) The noise Clearly I'm getting old, but Xela is the noisiest city I have ever lived in. Leaning on your car horn whilst driving along the streets is common practice, as is having your car alarm go off and doing nothing about it. Other cars have rudimentary PA systems stuck on their roofs and drive round the streets advertising Gallo beer (it's crap). I'm fed up of people shouting at me to buy things or give them money just because I'm a westerner (see 4).

4) Being a Westerner. I'm not entitled to complain about this, being as I chose to come here. But I'm going to anyway.

Being a Western woman means that I'm fair game for sexist comments (often delivered in gangsa rapper style American English, which annoys me even more because a) I am not american. Just because I'm white, I'm not bloody american, I could be French or German or anything and b) I speak Spanish. If you're going to letch at me, do it in Spanish!!!). The underlying assumption is that Western women are whores. This notion is perpetuated by all the advertising and media here. If there's a picture of a woman in her underwear, or looking in any way seductive, it's a western woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. It's crazy! There are no Guatemalans that look like this.

5) Cup of tea. I realise I'm getting petty now, but why oh why does no-one here know how to make a cup of tea? The number of times I have sat in a cafe, staring gloomily into a cup of boiled milk with a tea bag on the saucer!

back in Xela

I am back in Xela, with a stinking cold, but feeling happy.

In my absence, the number of people that I live with has now increased to 13! I love living with so many people. It's ace.

Costa Rica has been so different from Guatemala, and quite an eye opener. I am lead to believe that it is the only country in Central and South America that is so prosperous. Apparently it has enjoyed a 'close' relationship with the US, doing for a long time. It also seems to have been reasonably free from dictatorships and has enjoyed a democracy for quite a while. It's wealth was a real shock to the senses after Guatemala, but one thing I did notice was a complete lack of indigenous culture, as though this is the price that must be paid. In Guatemala, you see people wearing their traditional clothes, attending mayan ceremonies, hear them using their own languages all the time. But in Costa Rica, I only saw 2 people in indigenous dress, and they were women, begging on the street :o(.

I asked about the indigenous people, and was told that there is a village where tourists can go to look at them. The thought of this left a sour taste in my mouth.

Nevertheless, I was pleased that there is a country that has managed to make some money without having to slash every tree that stands, and force every animal, fish and bird to extinction. The national parks are magnificent, especially Monteverde, where you can look out over miles and miles of virgin cloudforest.

When I walked in the cloud forest, I was overcome with a sense that this is how things ought to be. That all is as it should be in these places. It was a very poignant sad-happy feeling. Happy that such places exist, but sad that more of them don't.

I love some of the symbiotic relationships that exist in the cloud forest too, and this one is my favourite:

The strangler fig is quite a common site in Costa Rica. It grows around the outside of an existing tree, literally strangling it until, many years later all that remains is a hollow fig tree that provides a home for mammals.

But the strangler fig starts its work at the top of the host tree, not the bottom, and send its roots gradually down the branches and trunk until they connect with the ground. So how can the fig tree ensure that its seeds get into the branches of other trees, rather than falling to the ground as is the fate of most?

In the strangler fig species, the seeds inside the fruit are surrounded by a sticky, latexy type of glue. The monkeys that feast on the fruit find that the seeds get stuck in their bottoms due to their gluey coating!! What can they do to relieve themselves? They find a branch at the top of a tree, and scratch their bottoms against it to remove the seeds. The fig seeds have now been deposited in the treetops of another tree, ready to take over it.

How cool is that!???

Housemates in our kitchen.

Perfectly camoflauged in the foreground, is a massive lizard that looks prehistoric!

Manuel Antonio National Park

I was just urinated on by a group of howler monkeys high in the trees!!

How cool is that!!! :o)

Jaco Beach, complete with coconut palms!

Crocodiles basking in the sun as seen from the road bridge.

On the road between Puntarenas and Jaco Beach, there is a bridge that passes over a river. This sign on the roadside warns you not to descend into the river. There are crocodiles!

Coffee fruit spread out to dry in the sun.

Coffee picked after a hard day's work. Apparently, T was the fastest coffee picker they have ever had on the farm. You can see that my basket is pretty empty!!

A coffee plant. The red fruits contain the beans that are roasted to make coffee.

coffee picking in Monteverde

Trevor and I have spent the most heavenly day working at a farm in Monteverde picking coffee!

The farm (or rather the land) is actually owned by Quakers, but Finca La Bella is a community project whereby 24 families live in the area and farm the land using the food for themselves, and to sell. The community project has provided the families with basic housing, and electricity that comes from solar power and hydroelectric power. Trevor and I are staying with one of the families, in a small house where the rooms are just partitions that don´t quite reach all the way up to the ceiling. For a reason that I can´t fathom, all of the houses in Monteverde have corrugated iron roofs, which rattle and bang with the continuous wind that blows through the monteverde mountains.

Anyway, you might have heard of Monteverde coffee. Look out for it in the shops, because in a couple of months time, you could be drinking the very coffee that T and I picked!

Whilst I was picking, with the sun shining, the low cloud forming rainbows all around, and monkeys playing in the trees above my head, I considered what an odd relationship some of us (i.e. rich westerners) have with our food. For example, the only form of coffee I have ever seen is the roasted beans. I couldn´t have told you anything about the plant, or what part of it the beans come from. Often, we only know foods that have been processed beyond recognition. For anyone who is as ignorant as me (!!), coffee grows on small trees with leaves that look a bit like laurel leaves. Each tree produces thousands of berries, and when green berries turn yellow, orange or red, they can be picked. Sometimes the beans dry completely on the branches, and turn dark brown, a little more like the coffee beans we are familiar with.

The beans are picked by hand, by pickers who wear wicker baskets held with a circular strap that goes around the waist and then around the front of the basket, fitting under its rim. When the baskets are too heavy with fruit, they are emptied into an enormous white sack. When the 4 of us had filled a sack we finished for the day.

The coffee sacks are sold to the local cooperative, who separate the fruit into 3 groups, the yellow and orange fruits, the red fruits, and finally the dry, browny black ones. They all make different types of coffee, but I understand that the famous monteverde coffee comes from the red ones, that have a sweeter taste.

The fruits are spread out in the sun to dry, and then are passed through a machine that takes the beans out of the fruit. The beans then go into a roaster, and are finally ground into a powder. It´s fascinating!

Costa Rica - Monteverde

I love this place!

Costa Rica - Monteverde

I am in love.

First of all, you must promise me that you will do whatever you can to come here. This is possibly the most beautiful place in the world. I really don´t want to leave. Honestly. I have heard of people that have emigrated here, and now I understand why. If I had half a million pounds in my pocket I would do too!

Being here, I feel that everything is as it should be, and that the jungle is a perfectly crafted, magnificent miracle. Yes, I´m turning into a hippy (or even more of one). We should be living in harmony with this rather than getting rid of it and replacing it with our ¨civilisation¨ -ugh!

The first thing I noticed was how astonishingly different to Guatemala this place is. It is significantly richer, and the grinding poverty that I see every day in Xela isn´t nearly so apparent here. I realise that I feel a little freer for not feeling so awful all the time. Having your heart broken everyday by witnessing such poverty and wrongness as exists in Guatemala is quite draining :o(.

I love Costa Rica because it has built its reputation on looking after the environment. There are so many nature reserves all over the country, and each one is utterly magical. So far we have been to Santa Elena Reserve, and Monteverde Reserve. These are cloud forest areas, which means that the jungle is pretty much kissed by clouds the whole time. It is moist and fresh, and home to a staggering amount of wildlife. Today was our 3rd day in the reserves, and we have begun to get used to looking out for wildlife. We have seen a monkey, beautiful butterflies, a snake, and many beautiful colourful birds - including the Quetzal, which is the bird that everyone hopes to see. We especially wanted to see it because it is the national bird of Guatemala symbolising liberty. I find this whole metaphor depressing because the Quetzal is practically extinct in Guatemala.

This evening we are going to an organic farm which is owned by the Quakers! We are going to stay for 3 nights and spend 2 days as farm workers! I´m really excited!!!! Then on saturday, we have a 6 hour bus journey to the Pacific Coast and another nature reserve. This one has a different climate, and we hope to see scarlet mackaws and monkeys. We will spend next week travelling down the coast whilst I seek out the perfect snorkelling spot!

Please promise me that you will come and visit Costa Rica!!! It´s wonderful I think to be able to support the organistions that are protecting the cloud and rainforests, and are continuously buying up more land to protect it. All countries should be like this.

Banana trees growing in Monteverde. The locals cut the bananas from the trees before they are ripe, and hang them up in the porches of their houses to ripen. If they wait for the bananas to ripen on the trees, the monkeys will eat them first!

The daily rainbow that appears over Monteverde every afternoon.

Monteverde rave continued

And the best thing about Monteverde?
It has a rainbow every single day!