Almost There....

Full Moon Tonight from the Hacienda Tijax  

Regata Indepdendencia Rio Dulce 2012

Crew on AVIVA

First Bouy Action

Multihulls off to slow start

Crew on POC

Asovela Dinguies & Lasers

Second Bouy

Spinnaker Action on Spindrift

Aviva Picking up fist place

Wiondsurfers along for the fun

Chicho´s Rocket Ship

Crew on POC

Finally we pulled it off Thanks to Jean Vayssier for motivation, Roy for support, Adriana for some great pics and crewing, to the Asociacion de Vela de Guatemala for making it possible and bringing the kids all the way from Guate.  Special thanks to Emiliano, Monica, Lucrecia, Juan Maegli and all the people at ASOVELA and Grupo Tecun that sponsor this activities.  A special thanks to all the competirotors young and old and in all sizes and shapes of boats..  YOU all made the DAY!!!

Dragonflies Swarming at Dusk

Video of Dragonflies, Very Unusual!!

Nuestro Museo..At Tijax

This brief presentation shows our "Interpretative Museum" really just a palapa with a lot of interesting tidbits of info about the surrounding jungle and some natural history of the area.  Interpretation makes the overall visit more meaningfull once one knows what trees and green vines we are looking at! Enjoy

Beautiful Sunset at Lago Izabal

I Love it here.  Often we come to swim with the family and witness these awesome sunsets.  Only 10 minutes away from the Hacienda Tijax it is our favourite swimming hole.  The pics were taken with my Nokia N-8

Una presentacion con fotos del Jungle Trail en Tijax

Mas Bichitos de Izabal

Esta merece estar "al centro" hacer click en foto para ampliar, ver area gelatinosa en las extremidades..

Gallareta

Linda foto a contraluz de una Gallareta en el Lago de Izabal cerca del Castillo de San Felipe, no son muy comunes pero aun es posible realizar avistamientos de aves a pocos minutos de la Hacienda Tijax.  Pariente del extinto Poc de Atitlan la gallareta es una Podicipedidae. 

Cuac Cuac Cormoran del Rio Dulce

Una de las especies de aves mas comun del Rio Dulce localmente llamdo el pato "coche" por el sonido porcino que hacen al anidar en las tardes. Es de la familia Phalacrocoracidae de la que hay unas 4o especies.  Esta foto me salio paarticularmente de buena resolucion por si alguien esta interesado. 

Guatemala´s Advanced Cloning Tecnology..

 We have successfully cloned a bombacacea tree to produce Footballs, so move over Chiquita Banana here comes the Fruity version of the football, just in time for NFL season.
Only the best will be exported, of course, and properly inspected, packaged, etc. We expect to avoid FDA approval as they are not meant to be eaten.  Investors please contact us directly or just give us LIKE on fbk.
Thanks..  click on pics to enlarge.  

Great Article, this is the image of Izabal we need to promote thanks Al Argueta!!

https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/u/0/?ui=2&ik=3348abe135&view=att&th=1360e3f08ebf60d6&attid=0.1&disp=inline&realattid=8a12e65630aac713_0.1.1&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P9G38yhTIbpE5FX8rNU1ir1&sadet=1331697668356&sads=KUddtBqrubYdhD--N5Ey6vzW0z4&sadssc=1

Tucanes..

 What can one do on yet another rainy day in the Tropical Rain Forest?  Well get out of bed and take some awesome pics of Toucans (Ramphastos sulfuratus) for example. In the zoo it's very easy to get good pics:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keel-billed_Toucan

Que hacer en otro dia lluvioso en la Selva Tropical Muy Humeda??  Pues dormir y levantarse de vez en cuando a tomarle una foto a los Tucanes (Ramphastos sulfuratus).  Es muy comun que salgan en estos dias a comer en los Guarumos Cecropia obtusifolia.

tijaxblog: Preview "Tucanes.."

tijaxblog: Preview "Tucanes.."

Flooding in the Barrio El Bosque

Flooding caused by rains of last week but mostly due to a faulty and badly designed bridge downstream from this photo at Hotel Costa Grande.  Have requested the authorities in this case AMASURLI and CONAP to intervene are have the owners repair or replace said bridge. 






The Gentleman apparently walking on water is in fact having to cross a bridge to get back to his home!

Most homes near the creek were affected as well as large areas on the other side of the road.

 This is the bridge at the entrance to the Hacienda Tijax Farm.  The water had already gone down some 25 cm. as we could get through with the car.

These are the pastures which fill with water and unfortunately garbage and sewage from the town.  Again the "authorities" have turned a blind eye to this scenario which repeats itself year after year with increasing violence due to "climate change" flooding has been more frequent and more severe.






The boys of the "hood" without a care were having fun and ready to pose for the pics.

 

Insane: My pluviometer (rain gauge) runeth over!

After I checked this morning nine ish.. I had 72mm on the rain gauge for the last 24hrs, which added to the earlier 29 made a total of 101 for a 48 hr. period in February.  Of course they say here "Febrero es loco y Marzo otro poco." but this added to the 474mm for January was really insane.  Right about then when the electricity went off due to a fallen post on the road.. It started REALLY raining.  From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m when I finally got back home my rain gauge was nearly overflown and it only marks up to 140mm and it was at least 1 cm above that so I figure it rained 160mm in 10 hours.  Accumulated total for the year so far is: 598 mm.

Trogon

Before the deluge I got a clear shot at him-her?

Now do you believe me!!

See the blue spot over the Western Caribbean corner, Belize-Guatemala.  Blue = 800% above normal!!
800% above normal rainfall for last 7 days!
 

Has the Earth's Axis shifted?

Zopilote Mojado!

101 mm. in the last 24hrs. The weather has obviously shifted and is flowing west to east see link:

Current Weather on Western Atlantic & Caribbean

Since January 1st  I have registered 598mm of rain in 34 days this has to be some kind of record we will check later. 

I need a name, any suggestion?

Fortunately even in the massive wetness of this environment good things happen like the birth of two colts.

La Pinta

And a Cricket preparing for rebirth or metamorphosis??

Some things are predictable, thank God!! and the Weatherman!

I've found this site to be really good for predicting rainfall, not perfect but good enough to use for my planting and fertilizing needs on the farm. http://wxmaps.org/pix/ezla.wcar.html The Institute that produces the Weather maps is IGES/COLA, http://www.iges.org/ Check it out hope it is of use.  We love it here!!

The 2012 Mayan Prophecy ( My take on it)

I'll never forget this event, the moments that preceded it and what came afterwards.  We had been partying with Hilda a very nice and very good looking girlfriend I had at the time, after much kissing and stuff I got out of her orange Polo VW and walked up the steps to my Mom's apartment.  It was the first one above the parking spaces in a small building in zone 9 of Guatemala city. It must have been way over 2:00 a.m. I was groggy from the booze , the long day and the partying, in a haze  I got into my sofa-bed and read a few lines from a small book on Buddhism I had bought at La Plazuela bookstore.

The book  entitled The Secrect Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel and Lama Yongden with a foreword by Alan Watts is now a classic of that era and is one of over 30 titles by the author. It was one of my favorites and one from wherein  I pretended to get some insights into my otherwise confused state of existence. I opened it to page 64 and read from a section dealing with the "cause and effect" view of Buddhist on how thoughts and forms arise from the mind and then the author jumps to this:

Page 64

"...This excludes the possibilty of any definite prophecy.  Some people have thought that if one could know all the causes existing at the present moment, one could foresee their effect and thus behold the picture of the future.  This idea is rejected in the Oral Teachings." And then this paragraph which seems inserted "apropos" to reinforce the point as a textual statement:   "Based of the law of universal impermanence, while at the same time upholding the determinist doctrine of the concatenation of causes and effects, these caution the student against the idea that the absolute determinism is within his reach: the sphere of probabilities alone is accessible to him."

After reading this rather "heavy" thinking for someone nursing a hangover and with a foggy mind I thought: "wow heavy!" yeah,  one the one hand one thing leads to another in an endless chain of causes and effects and on the other hand one can never tell!!  I put the book down, turned around switched the lamp off and curled up in bed.  As I was dozing off into never never land I thought I heard the train.  Living in Zone nine at the time one was always subject to strange loud noises.  The airport was withing a few blocks and the old Pamplona Trains Station and overpass were only a few kilometers away so it was normal to hear the train in the wee hours of the morning.  Then the train got louder and I thought: "My god what did I smoke tonight that can increase my perception like that?" Then it seemed that the train had gone insane and was going down sixth avenue and was headed for my apartment, all of this in a few seconds and with and unearthly increase in volume. Nah definitely the Train would come blasting throught the wall at any minute!!  And then it hit me!!  Of course after the reading, one could never tell what would really happen next and besides in the Bible  it said that the end would come when we least expected it and this was the least expected thing in my life at that precise moment! The End was Here!!

An insane howl like noise, a groan as if the earth itself was tearing in half preceded a loud explosion and then in the semi darkness I could see the wall closet in front of me explode and vomit out with force all its contents, plates,  forks knives, blenders, radios, everything came at me.  I got sober in a nanosecond and tried to seat myself on the bed which seemed airborne, flower pots flew by,  chairs and tables were in mid air. I tried to get out of the bed but as I tried  to step out on the floor it vanished from beneath me and I fell flat on my face with a massive thump as it came back up. Dust and apocalyptic screeching noises permeated the air.  I crawled trough debris,   moving furniture  seemed to have come alive and would not quit re-arranging itself,  got to the door of the apartment and was able to squeeze out.  The stairs were like a live snake, more like a big carpet with a stair design being shaken out by  a giant hand.  A lot of the thoughts going through my head had to do with Oh! My God  and what the F---- is going on..speechless massive surprise.  I somehow made it downstairs I did get bumped a few time but not really hurt besides my adrenaline had me going full blast!  I got outside and the Electrical posts were still swinging back and forth and the wires had all touched and grounded each other out, sparks flying in all directions and lights blinking on and off and then,   well then,  it was over.  Dust and silence began to settle in the now pitch black night.  I was naked in the middle of the street, 6th Ave. "A"  Zone 9 or maybe in some new dimension.  Nah,  it was now clear it had been a massive earthquake. 

I heard shouts and voices and then, shit! I had forgotten my parents back in the apartment!  I ran back put my jeans on, and answered to my Mom's and Dad's appeals for help! their door was jammed.  I knocked it down and got them out.  The inevitable comments, "Madonna che terremoto"  "e tutto distrutto" etc.  We got outside looked around in the semidarkness.  Our building was in one piece but the massive beams that went over the parking area were bent and the building would be condemned.  We had to move.  Made a few calls got a hold of Giovanni got some belongings in the car.  Went to see my Mom's factory and my Dad's Biz, they were OK but devastation was everywhere.

I never went back.  My life had changed for ever.  I never lived with my parents again.  Guatemala was never the same again. The next three days  were like a race through Dante's Inferno on a bad day.  At some point I went back and got my things which at the time consisted of the famous little book quoted above, 6 or 7 other books mostly Shambala publications on Bhuddism, The teachings of Don Juan, the Upanishad, one Bible, and a Whole Earth Catalogue, my back pack a sleeping bag, my Svea camping stove, my orange tent some clothes and off I went. Later we saw the clock on the Tower at the Cathedral and it had stopped at 3:04 a.m. it was February the 4th 1976.


So now we have the Mayan Calendar coming to the end of one of it's big cycles.  Fist let me say that there is a long and interesting story of what happened after the Earthquaque to me and my buddies.  In brief we got together a bunch of friends some with cars and we started first filming the destruction and then we started to carry food and medicine to Dr. Carroll Berhorst and his famous clinic in Chimaltenango.  We went through many more adventures in just three days, one more earthquake many more shakes, meetings with VIP's in high places as we were the first to go out to the villages and report back.  Giovanni had filmed everything he could around the city, developed it at Carey Productions Lab and then we sneaked into the airport and handed the film to the Pan Am skipper and asked him to send it to ABC news.  the ABC did air it and it was the first news of the earthquake out of Guatemala to the world.  CARE and World Neighbors and Oxfam would use our "Volunteer Caravan" for days in order to get food and Meds to the neediest villages.  On Saturday Dr. Berhorst asked us to stop bringing him stuff and to please go to a very much forgotten out of the way village called San Jose Poaquil as it had many surrounding Aldeas and he was sure no one would have reached them yet.

Destruction was everywhere.  Scenes of terror, grief and shock were commonplace, we reopened the road to Antigua through "los Aposentos", this entrance was not destroyed but as the government had been building the sewers in and adjacent (to Antigua) village where the road had to go through the road was all dug up.  We got out of our caravan and borrowed shovels from the dumb struck neighbors and started filling in the ditches, soon people started helping and in a matter of an hour so,  passage to Antigua was re-established.  A Busload of Doctor had been stuck there all day.  Every Village we went through was pretty much flattened out, San Lucas, Santiago Sacatepequez, Chimaltenango, Patzizia, Patzun...

San Jose Poaquil

Where once beautiful adobe houses with inner courtyards had flanked each other ordered in streets and avenues of  Spanish style cities,  now nothing stood,  one could see clear across towns with just a few piles of rubble and the occasional remains of a big church or a "block" building.  People wondered around aimlessly, some congregated at open areas for fear of continuing tremors and the occasional moronic preacher would be vociferating and predicating about the end of the world,  inciting sinners to repent!

Ian Perrone, Don Oso and Marroquines

So off to Poaquil we went but this is where the new story starts.  At any rate I lived and worked in Poaquil for the next five year within and interacting with a whole Mayan-Cackchiquel community, as a result of this I did learn a few things about their culture and society.  Some more info I picked up from visiting numberless Maya ancient sites and currently used sacred ceremonial sites.  I don't consider myself an expert in the field but I did learn some of their language and customs and met some of the most wonderful personalities y have ever known.  Don Jesus Chacach Maxia, Calixta Gabriel, Benita Jutzuy, Cristobal Apen, Pedro Chacach, Inocente Sis, Agustin Chuta, Nicolas Lucas Tecun, and some non Mayans like Don "Toyo" Angel Custodio Rivera Montealegre.

I had also lived earlier in Todos Santos Cuchumatan but that's also another story worthy of a few chapters if not a book.  Many years later and after much reading like The Mayan Factor by Jose Arguelles ,  The Forest of Kings and The Blood of the Kings by Linda Schele and again trying to make some sense of my own life I came to this conclusion: Unlike us (Judeo-Christian-Greco Roman descendants) the Mayans were not obsessed with mapping space but they were with mapping time!!

Boda Chente Sis en Poaquil

If you have lived here in Guatemala and with Mayans one soon realizes the importance of what day it is in terms of: at what point of this cycle (year, moon) are we in so that I may know whether to plant or not, harvest or not, collect or not, or just sit back and relax or maybe do a ceremony or get married or when will a child be born etc. The seasons are not obvious here but the geography is. It is always green in the Jungles of the North and it can rain almost any day of the year although it may not last and then may be followed by a long drought.  On the other hand you can look out of your porch and see very far and see your Neighbors lands and valleys and their domains from any hilltop.  you can walk to a neighboring village to sell your stuff and buy form them those things you cannot produce, they will have things for sale form the next village over and so on.. a Network of villages so that in almost any market you can get salt, corn, obsidian, avocados, cotton, beans, dyes and so on. 

Our culture on the contrary came from shepherding tribes in the desert, wine growers, or from sailors in the Med or Atlantic They traveled far to get things, spices, food that did not grow all year round in their homelands.  We had to search the heavens at night to determine where they we were in the daytime.  We built cities an domains in grids so we could establish limits and sizes to our properties.  We invented the grid (streets and avenues),  private property and probably greed a la Wall Street.  We built homes and domains with storage for grains, animals and preserves to make it through the winters and figured out routes to get more,  the powerful figured out controls to hoard and transport.  The Pharaohs, the Caesars, the Venetians the Spaniards, The UK, and now the USA... Well this is a long story too but the point here is: The Mayans figured out how to live according to an elaborate Calendar and going about their business at the right time.  We figured out how to get what we needed/wanted through travel and commerce which was established through exploration, conquest and establishing boundaries through Cartesian Coordinates, our "Logic" our "Economics" our values and ethics...We had the bible in one hand but the compass and the chart on the other.

We may never fully understand the Classic Mayan values and ethics, their complete vision of their universe or their calendar.  As noted before The Buddhists don't believe in the possibility of accurate Prophecy.  Our Ancient Books are a sad collage of badly translated and politically edited materials covering several thousand years and are pretentious in that they claim to be  "God's Word" (I bet He cringes at the thought). The Mayan Calendar on the other hand is pretty clear and has gotten down to us as it was used by the Mayans and it clearly notes that 2012 marks the end of an era.

What will happen in 2012?  Who knows?  The fact is that incredible changes are already underway and as humanity increases in numbers we also accelerate in pace.  More and faster changes are underway than ever before in our history. Technology has revolutionized how we communicate. Societies are revolting against old regimes see Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, etc. Economies and Capital  are critical and shifting from West to East along with employment.   Soon there will be as many people on earth as have ever walked the face of our planet, mind-boggling for those that insist on a linear reincarnation or that only a few chosen (144,000) will be raptured up into the heavens.  We are more dependent on technology and machines than ever, however we also have more poor and starving people than ever before.  Our cities are turning into madhouses.  Drug abuse, it's traffic and collateral violence seem unstoppable. The environment and the Earth will never be the same again and she seems to be belching on our toxic waste.  We've had major earthquakes and tsunamis: Indonesia, Chile, Fukushima all strong enough to slightly shift the earth's axis. Our resources are being depleted at an alarming rate and at a inestimable cost to the Environment and well ourselves. 

520 years ago, or 20 cycles of 26 years, 10 cycles of 52 which is a magical number resulting(13x4) four times the 13 numbers in the Sacred Calendar times 20 days (A recurring theme in Mayan numerology) would be 1492 our calendar.  That year Columbus discovered America to the West, the Muslims were kicked out of Spain and hence mainland Europe, the Jews were kicked out of Spain as well and the Inquisition was set underway in a Europe already under the demand of Reform.   Within a few years the world had changed, shipping lanes were established Magellan and Cabot circumnavigated the Globe, the Spanish conquered with a few men vast territories, the other empires followed suit. Technology and arts flourished in the west while the Mayan and their descendants were subjected to unspeakable misery.

Space People?

Now it is 2012.  We are trying to understand the Mayan Calendar. some of us are trying to figure out "when" we are rather than where.  I know where I am all I have to do is find my place on Google earth! Or use my phone's gps for that matter.  But we as a whole society are quite blind to our position in time in this time space continuum. We may learn something from the Mayans yet.  Who knows maybe we will be visited by creatures from outer space as some imply.  Nothing would surprise me at this point! But then again expect the unexpected! One thing is sure we are moving towards a constantly higher degree of complexity and as the Buddhist point out the whole sum of causes and effects is impossible to "know" not even with modern day computers,  I may add. So is there a prophecy? I think not but change is coming at unprecedented rates so fasten your seat-belts!! Finally has the internet crystallized the Noosphere? (Proposed by Teilhard de Chardin) could this be our 6th sun?  See Wikipedia: Noosphere on Wikipedia

Here's some links from people that know more about this:
John Major Jenkins Article on Dec. 21 2012
 
2012: End of the 5th Sun by Will hart