I’ll start doing weekly updates from now on since we’re only able to make it into Canela once or twice a week since its such a difficult trip. I’ve started at one again since it’s our first week on the land. We moved the tent and most of our things to the proper final location because the wind was too strong in the temporary location and it snapped one of our tent poles. It’s much more sheltered in the “island” (a clearing within the natural bush that we’ll eventually build our dwellings and plant our fruit and vegetables).
The first thing to set up was the toilet – we’re using a big bucket in the bush with the toilet seat from our last flat on it. To prevent odour and to assist with the composting process we put saw-dust on top of the content, the bucket is emptied every few days onto a compost pile in the bush – this compost is used for fruit trees not for the vegetable garden. Large bags of saw dust can be obtained from local saw mills, but we didn’t have to look because there’s about ten large sacks of it close to our previous camp site 🙂
The land is really awesome, there’s so many kinds of natural resource available such as sand, clay, really fertile soil, bamboo and many fallen trees, many with incredibly hard wood. There’s humming birds, cranes, hawks, quales and there’s a family of armadillos living a few meters away from our tent 🙂 we even have our own tiny beach where we can wash our clothes and ourselves!
At night there’s amazing bugs called Vagalumes which are like fire flies but their light is brighter and white and fades on and off periodically while they fly about slowly. They give the land a really magical feeling as many of them come out as it starts getting dark and they surround our little island around the tent and vegetable garden!
