Crazy Mexico

I'm living in Campeche, Mexico for some time now. It's a sleepy town on the safe side of Mexico. 

The hardware store

Where the old meets the new

The guy who walks around town selling furniture. You can buy the most surprising things on your doorstep here.

Campeche is a fishermans town

Doing some workshops with kids

Bedroom

Worlds craziest Christmas light display

There must be a way to open this up...

Awesome abandoned buildings with a small forest growing inside them...

My new favorite world map projection method: dymaxion. 

Mexican shrine cake

Building things

Everything has color

Cycling to Mexico City

A week in Pisac

In an attempt to escape the heat of the jungle for a short while I spent a week in Pisac. A very picturesque town just outside of Cusco, this is (apparently) a place where hippies gather to find themselves, often aided by generous and repetitive helpings of ayahuasca. Despite the floatyness Pisac is a great place to be. It's beautiful, safe, very laid back (time perception is different there, no one is in a rush), and it attracts some very kind and interesting people. The people who live here seem happy. It is very easy to connect with people here, and they seem to actively take the time to get to know each other which was a very nice change to regular life.

Most of my time in Pisac was filled by helping out at a small bakery owned by Jose, a young Peruvian guy who escaped Lima and moved out here a few years back. His mission is to educate people about food quality and the production methods behind it. To do that he opened a bakery in town and is setting up a network of small farmers who he works with for the ingredients of his bread, and who he hopes will encourage other communities in their area to reevaluate the way they work and eat as well.

I learnt about making bread, cakes and empanadas, but more interestingly I got some first hand experience at working in Peru. Working hours, at least for stores, are very long there. Stores open early (6-8am) and close late (7-10pm), and shift work seems rare. As a result working days are long (easily 12 hours), and free time and work time seem to blend into each other rather than being strictly divided as they are in the west. After just a week of working there I can't say much about which scenario is preferable, though I can say that this way seems less stressful. You do what you need to do during the working day.

The lower stress probably also has to do with the lack of deadlines (opening hours are flexible, what's available is flexible etc) and the lack of strict rules in general. It would likely be easier to do something interesting and new in a place like this than in the west. Here, what you are doing can be redefined as you go and learn, without needing to be locked down in advance to get to necessary paperwork in order. 

It was a fantastic week. I considered altering my plans and just sticking around there for a while, but decided try out Mexico for a while and then make a more informed decision instead.

Awkward Spanglish service, you're welcome.

Making tea out of herbs, because there's time for that. 

Local lakes look surprisingly similar to the English Lake District.

It's funny how a small change in altitude has big effects on how you feel. Going up this small hill made me feel both tipsy and incredibly unfit. I wonder if living here makes you into some kind of super being when you go back down to sea level. 

Local farms, mostly growing corn. Some have irrigation channels that are fed by rivers, others rely on rain, which is risky especially for such a water intensive crop (and on what is likely at least in part clay ground, which doesn't retain water well).

On the road...

The trip from Pichanaqui to Cusco took longer than expected. 

The first bus got stuck in a 5 hour traffic jam on the mountain pass due to a crashed papaya truck.

this might take a while...

On the upside random locals showed up selling food and drinks, so at least no one got in trouble with water. 

The second bus ride had about a five hour delay too, adding up to a grand total of 45 hours in a row on busses. 

On the upside the view was stunning: big busses crossed the Andes mountains.  Also Peruvian cama busses are very, very comfortable, more so than anything I've seen in Europe, the USA or Canada. As soon as you surrender to the fact that you'll get there when you get there, being stuck on a bus like that for 20 hours is actually quite relaxing. 

Kadagaya

I spent most of November in the central jungle of Peru, working in a project called Kadagaya. Kadagaya (meaning abundance) was started about 6 months ago by Julie and Vladimir, two awesome physicists with expertise in energy systems and materials and a grudge towards the monitary system. Both in love with the idea of a resource based economy (where everyone gets what they need and the system runs on abundance, not scarcity) and fed up with the inefficiency, destruction of the planet and corruption caused by money, they decided to leave their jobs in Copenhagen to build a "pilot project" for the society that they want to see. The goal is to create a self sustainable community, with technology to improve quality of life and reduce human labour where possible, and where choices are based on science. The pilot project aims to show people what can be done with the current state of technology, more or less a "proof of concept" for the idea.

During my four weeks there, among other things I helped build an elevated chicken coop, build a roof, even out floors, plant all kinds of things in the gardens, dig ditches to protect the house from the ridiculous tropical storms of the upcoming wet season, learned how to bake bread without an oven, learnt how to cook many things and learnt a lot about what solutions are out there to sustain basic needs (water, food, electricity, sewage, rubbish disposal, etc), as well as about the philosophy behind the resource based economy and ideals like the venus project. I also saw lots of crazy, huge and fantastic bugs, and got bitten a whole lot by less fantastic ones.

No textile stores, no problem: making curtains from old flour bags.

Building the roof for the workshop, a large earth bag building.

The nearest town, which we lovingly referred to as Pichanasty. I don't think we made one trip there without someone coming back ill.

Making bowls out of coconuts: easier said than done.

Avocado abundance: just pick them up off the ground in the jungle. The inevitable avocado withdrawal after leaving here wasn't pretty.

Their seeds are ordered from an online seed bank, which offers a huge amount of choice in plant species (eg. 30 types of tomatoes, etc). 

Other jungle harvests

Thank god for the river: no better place to cool down after digging trenches in 30 degree heat for a few hours. 

The beginnings of a vortex based hydro electric plant in the river.

Everyone loves avocados 

The only way to get to Kadagaya is with a one hour long ride on a windy jungle road on the back of a pickup truck, often filled with people, random stuff and local crops. The trick is not to touch the pineapples. 

My home for a month

The project is ambitious: next on the list are creating buildings from grown polymer, fiber and fungus materials, building a hydro electric powerplant, creating a system to collect methane from the compost toilets, building a tractor and so on. It would be most interesting to visit this place again in a few months to see how it's evolving. In a few years, the hope is to create a community of roughy 40 people on this piece of land. In the long run, the vision is to have similar communities in different parts of the world, so that the ones who live there can move between the different places by switching houses every now and then, thereby learning how to live off the land anywhere, and being able to experience different cultures and so on.