Lately.....

Well, here we go. On Valentines day we finally went to cut the main posts for what will be my house. We traveled up river and stopped on the side of the river where my host dad´s brother had spotted a fallen tree that was hard wood. The hike up to it was almost straight up. We carry our supplies up and down for two days while we cut the main columns for my house. Here is a pic of my host dad making a kind of scafolding out of tree branches and vines to cut the trees because the slope was steep. There is also a pic of the guys that came to help cut trees. And one of the river early in the morning as we traveled up stream to work for the day. We saw one smaller alligator and the dogs weren´t too impressed.

Also, before we left to cut trees, I almost stepped on this snake on the trail between my community and the next. I just wanted to passed it but it wouldn´t move so I ended it. I didn´t know what kind it was until I brought it back to my community where they told me,´its a boa. It eats rats. why did you kill it?´Sounds like an honest question for those of you at home, but when you don´t know what kind of snake it is, and it wasn´t like any boa I´d seen before, you don´t take chances. And I was a little upset at it for ruining a perfectly good pair of my shorts.....

So we spent two days cutting down 2 trees for my house. They were both already dead, and the second one was this huge tree that was still standing. I´ll put a pic below. When they cut it you could hear it crack so loud it sounded like a gun firing. Then when it finally fell the whole ground shook.

Also, turns out many of the trees in the primary rain forest have spines, and some of them contain posion that stings. A lot. So when you´re climbing that steep terrain lugging your equipment and you reach up to grab the sapling dangling in front of you, look at it first. Not to mention EVERYTHING stings or bites up there. You look forward to the bites, because you realize it could have been somethings that stings. I´ll also include a pic of the scorpion I saw while we were cutting trees.

I´ve been clearing my little hill with a machete every day. Here are a few pics, one is the top of the hill with the 4 holes I dug for the corner posts and some of the poles we had carried up. Also there are a couple pics of the trail I made down to the river so we can haul the poles up.

You can see the water. Me and a couple of buddies have seen a lot of fish there, so we try and throw spears we make at them. We get close, but close doesn´t fill your belly. Also, I´m going to include a pic of a cute little girl in my community. She is almost walking.