Internationales

     A few years ago I was walking in Bluefields with a friend and pointed out a couple on the other side of the street.
    'Gringos'  I said.
    She corrected me with a smile.  'No.  Now we call them internationales.'
    On Big and Little Corn Islands prices are high and available land is disappearing, especially land on the water.  So, more and more internationales are looking in and around Bluefields.  I mean, who wants to live in a gated community on the other side when the right side's the up and coming place to be?
     A couple of internationales were guests at False Bluff just before Christmas.  She's from Argentina, he's Dutch, and they've added Nicaragua to the list of places they call home: they bought property about a kilometer north of us before they returned to London where they live...just in time for the birth of their baby in early January.

     And their new son has a Miskito name...true internationales.

(I thank the photographers of these photos.)

Why the hell...

...am I in Virginia right now?

     It's 3 degrees in Richmond!

Watching the grass grow

     Years ago when I first began learning about Nicaragua, there was a guy from the U.S. who lived in RAAN (the opposite of RAAS) who frequently posted on a Nicaraguan blog (that didn't survive) about his hobby of 'watching the zinc rust.'  This was a joking reference to how fast metal roofs were eaten by the salt in the constant Caribbean breeze.
     Since we don't have metal roofing at False Bluff, what we do instead is watch the grass grow.
     An earlier blog post here tells of my determination early in the project to get a particular type of grass to grow here: http://falsebluff.blogspot.com/2013/05/bermuda-grassmaybe.html.
     It's a particular grass that grows all over Big and Little Corn Islands and in a very few places in Bluefields....which is where our grass at False Bluff got its start. The effort began with tiny pieces I pulled from a crack in the sidewalk along Bluefields' main street - about as much of the grass as could be stuffed into a shoe box.  
     Planted at the base of a few coconut trees, which is where it seems to thrive, our small start took hold and spread; and we then stole hand-sized pieces from these locations to plant elsewhere.
     And here it is, growing strong and spreading, unfazed by the salty breeze...

How to grow sugar cane

     As part of our ongoing gardening/learning experience, we planted two rows of banana trees between the Caribbean and the garden in an effort to reduce the damage of the ever cool but salt-laden breezes. The banana trees are producing but their leaves suffer from salt damage and that'll eventually reduce their ability to produce.
     So, between the banana trees and the Caribbean we've planted two rows of sugar cane. The thin leaves of the cane don't seem to suffer as much from the salty breeze and when fully mature the plants are almost as tall as the banana trees so we're hoping for protection for the banana trees as well as for the garden.
       Cut some stalks of sugar cane. Strip the leaves off and slice the stalks into pieces about eighteen inches long. Drop these pieces into a shallow trench, or in our case two shallow trenches. 

Here's trench one being filled with the pieces of cane...

  

     

     Then cover the pieces of cane (Lillian is supervising).

     And wait a couple of weeks...

Housing...an option we can use at False Bluff

Nicaragua has a house-building option I've never seen before. It's what I call a 'kit house.' A buyer can configure the rooms and porches of these cement-based houses in most any way s/he likes, sometimes using block to add to the pieces that come with the kit. And so, at least based on what I've seen in RAAS, there's a pleasant amount of variety in the interior layouts - and thus the exterior shapes - and in the porches.

The pieces of these houses are manufactured in the western part of the country and are, according to engineering specs, capable of withstanding some pretty severe weather. Since we have such easy access to False Bluff from Bluefields, building this type of house in our Caribbean setting is a nice option....and the price is right.
As of just a couple of years ago you could buy the basic kit, including shipping to Bluefields, for about $2500: one bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bath. The kit prices may have gone up since I asked, but they're probably still eminently affordable.

In one Bluefields neighborhood a favorite house of mine, unfinished, has three bedrooms - with the standard living room, kitchen, and more than one bath - and under roof with a really nice porch, the owner had managed to spend about $10,000.

Also unfinished is this house. I don’t know how many bedrooms or baths this one has but it's got a nice layout. In this house it's easy to see how the finish coat covers all the seams, just the way a finish coat would cover seams in a house built entirely of block.

Here now: red bananas

     In a blog post I uploaded just over a month ago were three pictures of a tiny new red banana tree taken over a three-week period; and another picture showing a nearly adult red banana tree photographed under the new power lines (where many of our banana trees are planted since they pose no threat to the power lines).
     In that post I wrote that for some reason red banana trees grow taller then their yellow banana producing cousins...and that since we didn't have any red banana trees producing yet, the picture of the red bananas in the post was not of bananas at False Bluff.
     That was all in the December 14 blog post. Things have changed. The bananas in this picture are now hanging on the tree under the power line that was shown in that December post.  

(photo taken by Jose Gonsalez)

Limes, already

     The lime trees at False Bluff have been in the ground less than four years, seedlings planted when they were about a foot tall...and they're producing.  I made limeade from two of these.  Excellent.
     Soon we'll have oranges and a host of other fruit.  

     Not yet, but soon.  I took some 'moro' blood orange seeds to a friend in Bluefields who had almost a hundred percent germination. We divided the seedlings among three of us and the ones at False Bluff are growing well. I really like the thought of orange juice from blood oranges in a few short years (this picture does not show our fruit or juice).

Tropical Caribbean living?

     I just read this article about lessons the author had learned while living on a tropical island for two years:

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-walkins/lessons-learned-living-on-a-caribbean-island_b_6225300.html

     Among the lessons not mentioned in the article, a major one is access. 

     Did you know that sometimes people have a hard time getting to an island on which there's no airport?   And if you're going to live on an island with an airport, you might as well live in New York City which, while not in the tropical Caribbean, has both an island and an airport...and any kind of light bulb you might want (see article).        
    Sometimes people heading to an island where there's no airport - for instance Little Corn Island, Nicaragua, or most privately owned islands - can't reach the 'get away' because the sea's too rough for the 'get to.'   In fact the access problem is a reason some people who've purchased an island get rid of it, usually to someone so caught up in the romanticism of island life that access is the last thing considered before that new owner signs on the dotted line.
     Unless an island is privately owned, most islands are tourist destinations; and that's great for the tourists because even tourists need a destination.   But sometimes, if you're really planning to live in a place, tourists aren't the best neighbors.   After awhile, even the people who are the island's original occupants get tired of tourists despite the money the tourists spend.
    But if you're really thinking about a tropical Caribbean life for yourself, rest assured that there are options that present the good things the article mentions minus the things like watching tourists adjust to "Island Time" or not being able to get just the right lightbulb. 
    Nicaragua's Caribbean coast presents all the good things mentioned in the article - and more.   
    It's the up and coming option for those looking for what's good without much that's bad. 

Orchid nursery: in bloom

     An orchid in one of the pictures of the orchid nursery that's located right behind the kitchen (see October 4, 2014 post),  is blooming...and in this case a picture is, indeed, worth a thousand words.

Bananas as finger food

     Red banana trees may grow taller than yellow banana trees but red bananas themselves are little - they're short and stubby compared to the fruit of most yellow bananas.
     But the fruit of at least one of the varieties of yellow bananas we grow at False Bluff could be considered finger food...it's tiny!  Even the small red bananas are bigger than these babies.

Papaya flower

     Up close and personal.

Red bananas

      Never ate one of these until my adventures began in Nicaragua...never even knew there were such things as red bananas. Short and stubby, the flesh of the banana isn't what's red, it's the skin. The eating part of the banana is a cream, almost white, colored flesh and the taste is very sweet.  The bananas shown here are not from False Bluff because most of our red banana trees are only recently planted.

     Back in Virginia I found some red bananas offered in a local grocery store and bought a few to enjoy a taste I'd gotten to know in Bluefields...and found that eating these that had landed in Virginia was like eating the bottom of a tennis shoe. This probably had something to do with the fact that it must have taken weeks to get the bananas to Richmond; and that by then they'd kind of lost their freshness...but that's only a guess.
     It took a couple of years for us to find some starter plants since no one in the Bluefields area seemed to grow this type of banana. I think our starters came from one of the Corn Islands. Wherever we got them, I'm glad they're part of our growing collection of fruit trees.
     Here's one of the newly planted trees (with a stick marking its location so we don't walk on the baby).

week one...

week two...

week three...

(you get the idea)

     And here's the oldest one we've got which will probably produce in a few months. A red banana tree grows taller than the trees that produce the more commonly known yellow bananas. Here it's stretching for the sun. We're planting a lot of bananas in the right of way, because even the taller ones won't ever be a threat to the power lines.

     Interestingly, the stalk of the banana tree is red, sort of like  the trunk of a plantain tree.  Here are shots of a red banana tree and a yellow banana tree growing companionably side-by-side at False Bluff.

Red banana tree trunk

Yellow banana tree trunk

   

In the sand

     Tracks, shells, and crab house....

Hibiscus: the collection grows

     The second variety of hibiscus recently added to our False Bluff collection.  The blossom of this one is about eight inches across and the color almost burns!  My camera sure doesn't do this justice.

Shards!

     Sometime last year the back yard of my home in Virginia was 'probed.'  
     Nineteenth century bottle diggers seek out old houses (mine's about 1835) whose owners will allow them to probe the back yard with long metal......probes, in an effort to locate the house's original privy, or outhouse. (In nineteenth-century Richmond, bathrooms hadn't come indoors.)
     So 'privy probers' stick long metal spikes into the ground and listen for the sound of glass or pottery garbage, because the privy was usually where both household and human waste ended up. 
     The day those guys were in my back yard I took lots of pictures and sent some pictures and a brief write-up to a local news feed; because I was fascinated at the process and at the bottles and pottery shards that came out of the hole, all of which were given to me.  Some of the people who read and commented on story were appalled that I would actually let these priceless artifacts be harvested from a hundred-year-old outhouse by people who weren't professional archaeologists.  I hope they don't learn about this.  An earlier blog post here tells how to ripen bananas by burying green ones in a hole in the ground and leaving them for a few days.  
     Well, we dug a hole in the ground recently to hasten the ripening of a bunch of bananas, and came up with these three pottery shards.

     According to long-time residents of the area, these are fragments of bowls or cups  "...made by Indians..." and "...That stuff's been in the ground for at least three hundred years..."  Nobody I talked to knew anything else and I'm not sure they even knew that.  But I do know it's been well over a hundred years since anybody lived at False Bluff.  
     I have learned recently, thanks to Bluefields native Herman Downs, who now lives in Florida and whose head seems to contain a fully stocked library, that in 2003 Nicaraguan and Spanish archaeologists found remains of really old ruins near Kukra Hill - which is right outside False Bluff's back door.  
     And I mean really old!
      "...evidence of a poorly known, complex civilization that existed in the tropical forest just before the Maya began to dominate regions to the north" according to archaeologist Ermengol Gassiot from the University of Barcelona.  Gassiot also said  "Usually scientists say that the conditions in tropical forests are not suitable for the development of social and political complexity, but here we have a tropical forest (society) with great social complexity, and well before the Maya."  
     The first sign of habitation in the area dates to about 1500 BC with major construction having begun at about 750 BC.  The society came to an end about AD 400.  Living along the Caribbean coast these people might have been both fishermen and traders.  John Hoopes of the University of Kansas speculates that inhabitants were probably ancestors of the Rama Indians who still live in the area (Rama Cay is in Bluefields Bay).  

 Upside down?

Right side up?

     So going through all the information Herman provided was good, and it was educational; but it didn't help me reduce the possible times during which the bowls and cups were made or the possible group of people who made them. 

     In fact the information widened the spectrum considerably....and pieces like this, or bigger, or smaller, come out of the ground just about every time we dig a hole to plant a tree or an electric pole...or unripe bananas. 

A death

     In late July, 2014,  a Hawksbill  sea turtle washed ashore just south of False Bluff either dead or dying.  There was no indication of 'foul play' and no indication it had been wrapped in the debris that washes around in the Caribbean...the turtle was just dead.
     A neighbor found the carcass on a walk down the beach and salvaged the shell.  When I showed up at False Bluff he brought me something else he'd salvaged: tags from the front flippers that showed that the University of Florida (UF) at Gainesville had tagged the turtle.
     I reported the tags to UF and have been told this female sea turtle was tagged while nesting in the Pearl Cays in 2008.  I followed up by sending UF photographs and additional information with my own request for input from them on specific conservation practices I can institute at False Bluff, more specific than what's outlined in the booklet mentioned in the previous post, and in English.  (To date I've not had their promised response.)

     I asked the neighbor who found the remains if he would bring me the skull and a few bones if there was anything left on the beach - and he did.  The skull and one of the bones are shown here.

     And he also brought me the two sections of the very thick tail shell, shown both right side up - and upside down.

Turtles and MARENA

     Several species of sea turtles nest along the beach here at False Bluff and in our ongoing efforts to protect both the turtles and their eggs, we visited the Bluefields office of the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, or Ministerio del Ambiente y los Recursos Naturales, or, simplest, MARENA, to put our property on their radar and somewhat under their protection.  (Blog post at http://falsebluff.blogspot.com/2011/09/sea-turtle.html)
     MARENA is charged with protecting, studying, planning for, and managing the country's natural resources; and sea turtles are definitely a natural resource.   There are seven species of sea turtles in the world and five of the species nest somewhere along a Nicaraguan coast line.
     The visit to MARENA involved signing papers which will end up being registered at the main office in Managua plus a site visit that included a local MARENA staffer, a member of the police department, and someone from, I think, the Nicaraguan navy.
     I loaned a MARENA staffer my passport overnight in exchange for use of the only office copy of a book detailing strategies for management of sea turtles along the Caribbean coast.  I promptly had that book copied and the new copy bound at a local copy shop.    The copy now resides at False Bluff.

     The poster about not eating turtle eggs was a gift right off the wall of the MARENA staffer who was so helpful.  It's been laminated and affixed to a wall at the house at False Bluff.

ENEL 13

     Just outside the kitchen we have an electric pole up and the cross bars with wire and accoutrements installed.  Only waiting for the transformer.   After the transformer, we drop a line to a meter at the house and electricity in the house itself will follow.  Very odd to see this stuff out here.

Rosewood at False Bluff

     I'm a fan of rosewood, which is one of the prettiest colored and grained woods I know.  I have some old pieces in my home in Virginia, like the table below, inlaid with mother-of-pearl

and the piano leg which supports a vanity top and sink.

     I don't know the variety of either of the above pictured pieces of rosewood, but I've brought from Nicaragua some small hand carved pieces of 'cocobola' rosewood (dalbergia retusa), a variety of rosewood known worldwide as one of the best quality rosewoods of the genus.  Since the pieces are hand carved, the maker's work is easy to see.  Cocobola rosewood is denser than most other true rosewoods and the variety found in Nicaragua has a reputation for consistently producing vibrant reds and oranges.  See the July 25, 2013 post for more of Mr. Lopez's work:  http://falsebluff.blogspot.com/2013/07/horses-and-hair-sticks.html

       Cocobola is listed as 'rare/vulnerable' on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) 'red list' and at False Bluff we are prepping to plant about a hundred young trees.  I've been told that cuttings from the trees root easily and so, as time goes on, we'll extend our plantings.   Although Nicaragua now carefully regulates the harvesting of all species of rosewood trees that grow in the country, rosewood trees can be harvested beginning when they're as young as ten years old.