Mt. Pine Ridge Forest Reserve - Recreation/Prof. Skills Field Trip

Recent Happenings

We are currently experimenting with making our own hot sauce and yogurt. We built our own bedroom furniture from US $1.50 scrap pine. Steve has learned how to cook torillas from scratch. There are ants everywhere, all the time. It is raining alot. We bought a hammock. We're planning a trip to Guatemala in December. We're out for field trips every weekend in October from helping the foresty department with trail building in the "mountains" and learning about sustainable tourism at eco-resorts in the rainforest to doing coral surveys on the reef and exploring mangroves and littoral forests on the Cayes. Busy busy. We might make it to a festival in Bengue this weekend after we return from the field trip and we're definitely looking forward to the Garifuna festival down south in November but more importantly of course, and the Wulff clan visit for Thanksgiving. Still trying to get the garden growing. The seedlings are thriving, we just need to get planting.

Steve is the writer around here. The following are his recent emails home:

After the rains come, the ants come. They have been here all along, but this morning they are everywhere, big ones, and little ones, black, white, and red ones. It has been raining here in Belmopan for the past four or five days, not constantly but significantly. We usually have enough sun during the rains that rainbows are fairly common.
This past weekend Nicole and I took a student group to a resort called Chaa Creek. It is an “eco-lodge”, which means that it has under gone some series of certifications that are designed to measure its energy efficiency, and the amount of waste that it produces. It’s a neat place, very fancy. We took a bus from the university to the resort, did a full day tour with the students, and then stayed the night after the students left. Our cottage, as well as all of the other buildings in the place, had a thatch roof made of bay palm leaves, neat how well that seems to work. Sunday morning we went on a hike through the rainforest out to a couple of scenic overlooks. The Macal River runs right by this lodge, and through the town of san Ignacio, which is where we had to catch the bus back home on Sunday. It is not that far between the two, and down stream, so we paddled to san Ignacio. Two hours of easy paddling.
Along the river we saw a giant iguana lying up in a tree, catching some rays, and a small colony of bats clinging to the underside of a limestone escarpment. There were lots of these little limestone overhangs along the river, so we began looking for more bats, so as to creep in and get a closer look. As we paddled up to a large over hang, and then into/under it, I remarked that it surprised me that there seemed to be no bats there. It seemed like the ideal area for bats, but we didn’t see any. We shrugged our shoulders and turned the canoe around, back into the main channel. Just as the canoe cleared the edge of the escarpment, a small cloud of thirty-five or forty bats came from some small cavity in the rock further down stream, and for a brief moment enveloped us as they flew up and onto the underside of the little rock amphitheater. It was very cool, it didn’t seem as though our being there had anything to do with their “coming home to roost”, just lucky timing I think.
There are Mayan ruins all over this place. Most of them have not been excavated, or really even explored to any real extent. We passed a couple of such sites on our hike Sunday morning. They are indicated on the map, but they are just huge mounds of dirt in the jungle, and like everything else in the jungle, they are crawling with life both green and otherwise.
I have lots of great notes from our many weekend trips, and some idea of how to put them together. This weekend I may be going out to Calabash caye, if the boat gets fixed in time. Calabash is part of a marine reserve that is managed by the university. Only people with some affiliation to the university can get out there, and our roommate, Eden, is the director of the institute that manages it. So that could be pretty cool if it works out. If not, I will set off to find a book shop that is rumored to exist an hour and a half west, in San Ignacio.
Well I should go for now. I have to ride up to the market and get some oranges and bananas before everyone packs up there stuff. There should be some more photos up on Nicole’s blog soon, maybe already up, I’m not sure. Check out the size of the grub worms they have down here! Well I love you guys and hope all is well.

Steve

Hello again

I have read what is to be read, and written what is to be written. I have made the tortillas and gone to the market, so I am writing again, to include some of the little things that I had forgotten to include in the previous letter.
On the bus ride to san Ignacio Nicole noticed something. The buses here are all old school buses. And the one we were on had two large stickers on the inside, over the middle seats. They said things like “be courteous to your neighbors”, and “always tell the truth”, and at the bottom of each of these large stickers it said “character matters in West Virginia”. I thought that it was funny that these buses had most likely come from the West Virginia public school system, and they had just thrown a new coat of paint on the outside, and left everything else as is. It is a small world I guess.
Fire ants really do hurt quite a bit when they bite. I wasn’t sure how much of my perception had been formed when I was a kid and hadn’t had much experience with other sorts of bites and the like, but having experienced some other bumps and bites since then I feel safe in saying that those little red devils pack a pretty good bite for their size. The other night Nicole and I came home from a trip to Belize City. It was dark and I was unlocking the gate when I felt a sting followed by ten or fifteen others in rapid succession. I was standing in the middle of a heap of them that had moved in while we were away for the weekend. The next day, with bumpy feet and ankles, I poured a pot of boiling water into their “compound”, and they were gone within a couple of days. The back yard, however, is full of new hills.
I have apparently attained “local” status at the market now. I go to the same tents every Tuesday and Friday for peppers, tomatoes, oranges, bananas, plantains, mango, and papaya, and I now pay lower prices without even haggling. I have come up with some nice recipes with the local produce. Sliced plantains fried in butter, with some vanilla, local sugar (somewhere between brown sugar and white sugar), and a shot of local (dark) rum, makes a great topping for ice cream. The ice cream is a product of the Mennonite and Amish settlements of the area, as are most of the milk and eggs that the local markets sell. I have also started freezing this concoction in with some of our homemade yogurt, which is actually really good.
Nicole makes breakfast every morning, fresh squeezed orange juice, and either tortillas and eggs with salsa, or French toast. All I have to do is the dishes, sweet deal. Well I will close for now.

More later
Steve

Ailments- August-October
Nicole
2nd degree Burn on hand- boiling water while cooking
Blood blister on finger- building bedroom furniture
Bladder infection- ?
Common cold
Ring worm- ? sharing snorkel mask with student?

Steve
Wrist pain- bike maneuvers
Rib pain- fall from bike on beer run
Bloody knee abrasion- fall from bike on beer run

Calabash Caye- Marine Biology Field Trip

Chaa Creek Field Trip and canoeing