Up for an Adventure?

Picture of the shop frontage of one of the local tourisme businesses...



Im really not quite sure which is more daring...
Is it riding the "Volcano Horses" or going up the "Indians Nose"?

Not "The Same Day"

I think Ive mentioned before that one of the big challenges of moving to live here in SanPedro for someone from the modern developed world is that nothing really happens here. There are barely any discernible differences in the days of the week at all. Different restaurants close for a day on different days of the week and the market is a bit bigger on one day but other than that, its pretty much always "The same day"!

Yesterday was a bit different though :)

First off, I have been teaching a young guy named Mike (friend of the family of the people who own the rental rooms Im staying at) to ride a motorbike. We spend an hour or so each morning at it.
So, at about 8am, we start the lesson. Yesterday it was day two and he was practicing starting the bike off from zero speed in first gear. This is easy for people who know how, but for someone who has only ever driven an automatic transmission car, it takes a bit to get used too....especially if you are trying to hill start where you have to have quite good coordination and subtle control between all four of your limbs.
So Mike is there in the middle of a relatively quiet street trying to get the subtle balance of clutch and throttle right. He is dealing with school children laughing at him when he stalls it as well as tooktook drivers tooting at him and roaring past.... and he is dealing with it quite well.
Anyway, while hes there in the street, a local police officer walks by at a brisk rate and Mike looks at him self consciously (probably thinking hell get a comment about getting out of the middle of the road or something) but the officer walks straight past.... Then another one walks past and she´s got her pistol drawn and pointed at the ground..... Then five more trot past also with guns drawn.... and Mike is there trying to get the bike moving and look "normal" :)
The police stop twenty meters ahead and split into two groups and half of them start running forward and the others run back the way they came.... Mike stalls it again! :)

It seems that the police are actively trying to catch some local brothers who were involved in shooting someone in the area a couple of weeks back (drug related)... They caught one of them but the other two got away...
There was no gunfire this time, so the motorbike lesson continued :)

It was however quit funny watching the scene play out from the sidelines where I was sitting :))
It was clearly a bit of an event for the police too... I watched a couple of them exchange big smiles at each other as they trotted past with guns drawn... like they were saying "Hey, Check me out , I´m a Bad Hombre with my gun out and all!"

The lesson finished and no one got shot, so we all went about our business.

The next thing for the day was that one of my friends has had a rather nasty skin complaint on the ends of some of his fingers for several months. He has been to a couple of doctors and been prescribed a few antibiotics, but nothing has solved the problem...and it has spread/developed from one to four fingers.







I dont blame him for being dissatisfied with the doctors given the results, but he has also been rather blaze about looking after the affected fingers and keeping them protected (though his work does make it hard). Anyway, through one thing and another (including internet research!) he had decided that what he had was "Anthrax of the skin" which sounds way over the top but that I agree it "could" be... But the diagnosis was anything but rigorous or professional.
So my friend goes ahead and prescribes himself a stiff dose of antibiotics ...that are available over the counter down here. Things go well after the morning dose and the day progresses normally.
Later that evening though, my friend apparently collapsed while using his laptop in the garden. I was not there when it happened but I did see him about 20 minutes after....He was having a really bad time!
There were other friends there and much discussion in Hebrew (they all speak Hebrew) and things were animated. I mostly stood aside but I did get in and take his pulse and check breathing, temperature, palour, pupil dilation and level of consciousness etc... He was definitely not good, but vitals looked OK to me. While I was with him, he sort of groaned out that I should take his computer and check some kind of  "Plague"...he felt pretty sure that that was what he had! As requested, I checked the computer and found what he had been reading...again, a self diagnosis based on internet research of symptoms while in the grips of a strong physiological reaction....
Yeah, I know "plague" sounds nuts, and it did to me too, but I also know how hypochondria works and what anxiety can lead people too, so I definitely have sympathy for the poor guy. Needless to say, reassurances were made, and no more time was spent worrying about plague.
Anyway, the decision was made that he should be packed off to the hospital in Guatemala city (There they would have options if he got worse, here in SanPedro there were no doctors or facilities and no options). So a minivan and a driver were found and he was bundled up and got into the vehicle and sent off in the middle of the night ... Even though he was starting to look better at this stage and didnt have to be carried to the vehicle.
What had happened... I dont know for sure, and Im not a doctor, but I STRONGLY suspect that it probably had a lot to do with combinations of caffine, nicotine, ganga, large new doses of antibiotics and dehydration!!!.... Clearly, my friend didnt worry much about the recommended procedures when using antibiotics!
He is apparently more or less fine today and the doctors (Yes he went to the hospital even though he was feeling far better when he got there) have so far found no health issues or pathogens. That does not surprise me at all, but they may yet come up with something definitive, so we will wait and see...

I will also be very interested to see if my friend acknowledges that he had a significant role in causing the problems all by himself and that he probably should consider behaving differently in future....
It seems obvious to me, but people see the world through strangely tinted lenses sometimes (including me) and it may well not be "quite so obvious" to my friend... and thats just how it may be... But even if it is, he will still be my friend and Ill accept him as he is!

Like I said, we will just have to wait and see.

But all in all, it was "Not the same day as every other day" :))))

Paying the Rent

It doesnt really matter where you are born or what you do or who you are; In one way and another, we pretty much all have to "pay the rent" on this life in some form or other.

Which is to say, that just about all of us have to spend a good deal of our time doing the same old thing day in and day out. For most of us it is earning a living weather that be working in an office or breaking rocks on the side of the road (I see a lot of that down here).

That daily toil feels like a burden to most of us and I know that for a great deal of time in my past, I have felt that Id much rather have been somewhere other than the office. Ive changed where I have worked a few times in my life, Ive changed countries where I live a few times and homes ...many times. But its the same where ever you go.
At the moment I spend a good deal of my time sitting in a chair outside a little shop waiting for someone to come along to rent a motorbike to... Its a far cry from working as an Engineer in the HiTech industry!... but at some level, essentially, its the same thing.

And you know what?, Im starting to get a bit of a different perspective on it.
I think that in a lot of ways, it lets me appreciate the time when I dont have to do it... it acts like a reference point. And I dont think Id look at things the same way if I didnt have to work.

Now, thats not to say that I think the way I have spent the past twenty years of working in cubicle farms for deluded management was the best choice. In fact I am pretty sure that the Western Capitalist world has got the "wrong end of the stick" as far as work/life priorities are concerned and that there is plenty of room for improvement in our social model.
But I do think that if "living was free" then we would not appreciate what a gift life can be.... we´d just take it all for granted.... which of course most of us already do anyway....

I guess I just think human nature is to not value something unless it has a price...

...so I´ll go back to "the grind" and sit here under my umbrella in the sun....with a drink... and wait for the next person to come along and want to rent a motorbike :))

... Paying the Rent

Another Coffee?

Well, this is the rest of the local coffee story as I know it.

The last episode ended with the freshly picked coffee beans being driven away from the coffee fields in 25-30Kg sacks, in the back of terribly overloaded pickup trucks at the end of each day.
Those pickup trucks converge on a bunch of small coffee processing plants (called "beneficios") where the coffee berries are processed to get at the coffee beans.

There are about four or five of these little processing plants located in the town of SanPedro and they are running through the night pretty much everyday.
The berries are first dumped out of their sacks into large concrete holding tanks (We are talking about 25-30 cubic meters of coffee berries here). The berries are then covered with water and left to stand for a few hours (6-8?). This is so that the berry "meat" and skin get absolutely as soft and water logged as possible.
The berries are then fed into the processing machine which is a large mechanical beast and to be honest I have not seen their inner workings but their function is clear...
They remove the soft skin and meat of the berries from the hard beans inside.
It seems that the process is a mechanical version of squeezing the berries between your fingers so that the bean slides out from inside. This is easy for the nice juicy ripe beans but not so easy with the less ripe ones and so some of the skins stay on... I think they pass the beans through the machine a couple of times, but there are still some that "dont want to play the game"...but they are all mixed together at this stage.

The skins are removed from the system at this stage and dumped in great piles outside the coffee processing plants. There is so much of this stuff that they employ a person throughout the day to shovel the berry skins away from the end of the auger to make room for the next days skins... Not one of those jobs that I would really want!
Anyway, the skins just accumulate there in a massive heap throughout the picking season and of course they "compost" themselves and there is a constant smell of decaying coffee bean skins during picking season. It is a sour smell but not like any other I know so its hard to describe...It is somewhat unpleasant when you first smell it but you do get used to it.
Once the picking season is over, these composted skins are shoveled back into sacks and carted back to the coffee fields in the backs of the same pickup trucks that brought them to town, and they are then spread under the coffee bushes as fertilizer for next season.

Back to the coffee beans.
Well, they are again left in those concrete holding tanks and flooded with water. Again they are left for hours so that the residue of the meat (which is full of sugar) dissolves into the water and the beans are no longer covered with a slimy layer.
Then (and this happens in the morning of the next day), the bean/water mix is pumped up and let run through a sluice of about 10m in length. This is where the good (skinless) beans and the bad (still in their skins) beans get separated. It seems that, over the length of the sluice, the good beans sink and the bad beans float.
So after a while, there is a sluice full of good beans and a pile of bad beans back in the holding tanks.

At this point, the good beans are scooped back into bags and taken away on those pickup trucks to drying fields...and in fact the same is done for the bad beans but they are kept seperate.
The drying fields are either large areas of flat concrete or just bare ground covered in big sheets of black poly plastic. The good and bad beans are clear at this stage by the amount of skins in the mix.
Here the beans are spread out in the sun and raked around for a day or three where they dry out. Then once more, they are scooped back into the bags and loaded onto large trucks that take them off to be given a light roast by the big coffee exporters. I assume (but dont know for sure) that the bad beans are also processed similarly but kept local rather than exported.

There are plenty of small bean roasters around the place here in town, and the local coffee is easy to buy (and nice to drink) but I dont know where the beans are taken to or what happens after they leave here.
I do know that the true origin of the beans is lost immediately that they are picked and that at best, beans can be tracked back to their local region (say 10Km square or so) which is not at all like wine grapes...

And thats the story as far as I know it.

An Illusion of Community

My mind has as usual been playing games with me...

I have been thinking (in a kind of subconscious way) that since I plan to be here for a year or more and that because I know a couple of people here reasonably well, that I should be trying to "build a home" and all the associated relationships etc...
This makes perfect sense to the logical mind of course, but it has been causing a background stress that I have been feeling and in fact, it has been building since a couple of months before I left Vancouver!

The truth however is that I am pretty much completely isolated (much moreso than external appearances would suggest) and its not likely to change in the near future!

The people I know here are great but they have their own lives and are engaged in them fully. They are mostly Israelies and are very nice people, but when any two of them are together then about 50% of the conversation is in Hebrew. Thats of course fine and I am still quite involved and able to participate, but if there are three or more of them then the conversation is completely in Hebrew... and it doesnt matter how much I try to participate or contribute, within about 30 seconds of me stopping talking, the conversation has fully switched back to Hebrew and thats where it stays. That too is fine - I have no desire to change how people interact and they have a nice little community that helps them feel comfortable... but it is very exclusional for me. So in the midst of a nice little community, Im actually completely isolated.
Other than that, the tourists in the town are mostly just here short term and the other people that are not tourists are mostly not people Id choose to spend lots of time with (thats more a reflection of me than them though) ...It always takes me a long time to filter out and build the friendships that are significant.
So even though I am completely surrounded by the symbols and tokens of "community", the truth is that I am completely alone! (on all levels). I am (and always was) quite prepared to deal with things here as they are, but it was the illusion of community that I had allowed to trick me into an approach here that was doomed, And now that I recognize it and I change my approach to things, I feel much better (So Im sure Im on the right track!). Im now thinking like Im traveling even though Im staying put!

It took me quite a while to figure out what was going on though, and of course my friends here have all been full of advice of the form "you should...". Saddly but unsurprisingly, this was more obstructive than helpful (though of course it was intended to be helpful).
In fact it became so obstructive that I eventuallly figured things out because of it!
It never ceases to amaze me that EVERYONE thinks they know whats best for someone else... (I of course do it too, though these days I try to do it far less) and everyone is always so sure of themselves too.
And no doubt the advice can be useful to people, but its the sureness of everyones attitude that they know whats best for someone else that saddens me.
There are so many different personalities with so many different values and so many different experiences that people have had ...we are all such complex entities...

I am reminded yet again that (at least as far as I see it) the greatest gift you can give with regard to human relationships is that of tollerance and acceptance, and the greatest ability you can have with regard to communicating is that of being able to truely step out of ones own perspective and see the world through another persons values/experiences.
Of course, everyone thinks that they can do it quite well, but its not true. We may be able to appreciate other opinions and points of view, but what we cant do is to let go of our own values at the same time...and that TOTALY changes the view!... and that totaly LIMITS our ability to truely understand....

and that is the human condition :)

Evil Clutches!

Well, Im renting out motorbikes for a living down here in Guatemala. Its been a slow start but this week I have to say that I am "ahead" for the first time and that includes all living expenses as well as running costs for the bikes. This does not include recuperation of capital expenses yet but hey, its only Wednesday :)

In the process of renting the bikes out, I am learning quite a bit more about customers...
It seems that in almost all cases, my gut instinct about people is correct, but it depends on me both talking to them and seeing them ride off on the motorbike... and thats a little bit later than desired if I am to take corrective actions if the feeling is bad!

And what does that mean?

Well, I get a really quick feel as to who the people are when I talk to them (and they talk back) and since it takes me about 10 minutes to do the explanations of where to go and what to do and how to drive the bikes, I have enough time (based on my "You can see anyones "imbalances in 5 - 10 minutes" theory) to do a good basic assessment. This results in me gently rejecting those people whom I feel are just going to cause me problems (in short, Damage my bikes).
So Im left with the ones with no "ill intent" so to speak.
But the trouble is that some of these people are not very "self aware" when it comes to practical skills (and that of course could be said for most of us in some aspect or other).
In particular, people seem amazingly able to delude themselves that they know how to use a clutch!
But using the clutch in a standard transmission vehicle is probably the hardest part of driving other than negotiating traffic. It requires the subtle use of throttle and clutch which becomes completely second nature once you have mastered it (gets learned by that primitive little "lizard brain" at the top of the spine) but uses absolutely all of your concentration when you try to do it the first time.

So, it seems people truely believe they know what they are doing but in reality they SUCK! - Im pretty sure Id detect deliberate deceptions!

There is a bit of an incline when driving out of the area where I park the bikes, and if someone stalls the bike more than three times trying to drive away, then I know Ive got a problem.
They are going to be really hard on the bikes because there are so many really steep hills in the area and they are going to drive up them and they are going to not care about the bikes because they are rentals...
The result has been that I have had to do repairs on both the smaller bikes because of poor rider skills in the clutch department. And soon enough I will have to replace the clutch plates.
There is not really that much to be done about the problem other than plan for it... The repairs cost less than the rentals earn, and it just takes me time to fix - not that Im that busy :)
In the longer term though, I am seriosly thinking of getting another two bikes that have automatic transmissions and so will survive the trials of unskilled drivers better...

If next week is like this week then Ill go look for the right sort of bike to buy.... a rugged scooter would I think go well here :)