October 15
Life in the jungle: I worked on and published my A Day in the Life of Living in the Belize Jungle post. After breakfast, I headed to the village. I was planning to visit Orlando, but learned that he ended up going back to the hospital in Orange Walk. I am worried about him and had hoped to visit him over the weekend, but our road is so overgrown that I need a lot of motivation to venture from the farm.
On the road, my bike’s crank broke. A bike crank is the arm that connects a pedal to the bicycle’s bottom bracket and chainring(s). I think the bearing disintegrated from dirt and mud getting into it.
By the time I got back home, I only had a little time to paint. In the evening, I had ChatGPT start teaching me about SEO and blog performance improvements that I can make. It’s amazing what I’m learning. I’m a slow learner, and if ChatGPT misunderstands or misinterprets your questions, it can send you in a lot of circles, but slowly, I’m getting it. I could never learn this stuff without ChatGPT. I feel like I am practically a junior web developer now.
My road has become a mess
October 16
Life in the jungle: I hitched a ride with Andy to the city. It allowed me to drop my bike off at the mechanics and not bring it on the bus. I also picked up four cans of paint and the ceramic tiles I would need for the new cabana shower and kitchen counter.
After returning home, I got some more painting done, and at the end of the afternoon, I started working on digging the trench for the drinking water line to the cabanas. I had worked on this job the other month, but discovered that the black-poly pipe I had was not suitable for human drinking water. So, I have to replace it with a PVC pipe. No rain today.
Bike crank photos from my bike mechanic
October 17
Life in the jungle: Today I hitched another ride with Andy to Belmopan so I could visit the Lands Department in my never-ending situation in trying to get my land deed issued figured out. I didn’t anticipate any helpful answers, but I at least needed to confirm that suspicion. When I was sent up to the second floor to speak to someone, along with the service counters, I discovered over a dozen people at tables with laptops.
Asking who to speak to, one of the ladies at the tables looked at my papers and said she could help me sort out all my problems. I wasn’t expecting that. I guess all these people who were working at the tables were independent workers helping people solve their land title problems. She seemed knowledgeable and said my situation was fairly straightforward and not too complicated. She is probably the first person who sounds helpful and hopeful. For this reason, part of me is nervous.
On the way home, a road worker recognized me and hollered out – Hey, Safari Arie.
After we got home, I went back to work on the waterline trench. I now have a 1/2″ PVC pipe connected at the main drinking water vats running to the kitchen cabana. Tomorrow, I need to run a pipe from the kitchen cabana to the newest cabana.
October 18
Life in the jungle: I started my morning SEO’ing my website pages. After feeding the chickens, I finished yesterday’s job of connecting waterlines to the kitchen cabana and the new cabana. I got the lines all in place. All that’s left is hooking the lines to the sinks when they get installed. I got the job completed right before the rain started.
It rained on and off all day. I was able to completely SEO all my website pages and refresh all the (content) text on every page. Website pages do not mean blog posts; they are the pages where all the assorted blog posts are found, depending on the category of post. This job would have been impossible for me to do a year ago without ChatGPT.
Drink water line installed.
The left-on/off valve is for a future holding vat.
The closest right valve is for the cabana in the photo.
The far valve is for the newest cabana, 100 ft away.
October 19
Life in the jungle: This morning and today did not go as planned. Opening up my website, I discovered that I had to deal with a serious website issue where my server storage seemed full even though I’d deleted files and cleaned everything up. After some troubleshooting, I learned that the deleted files were still being held open by system processes, so the disk space wasn’t actually released. After almost five hours of going in seemingly circles with ChatGPT, I was able to do a server reboot, and finally cleared the issue.
It was a complete headache, and trying to troubleshoot with ChatGPT was also frustrating, but I’m learning that if you keep going around in these circles with ChatGPT, eventually something breaks (becomes clear), and that is when it comes together. There was so much code involved, it was all code, and I don’t even understand the simplest basics about code. It took over half a day to ultimately fix, but without ChatGPT, I would have had to give up in about 30 seconds and had to hire a web developer for a few hundred dollars to fix this. I’m not even sure who I could hire anymore, as my web developer hasn’t worked on the WordPress platform in many years now.
While feeding the chickens this morning, I discovered something had broken into a corner of one of the coops that was holding three young ducks. Two ducks were free (escaped the coop), and the third was missing. I assumed that an opossum had done this. Looking for remains of the young duck, I discover cat tracks in the yard nearby. This is so weird that a cat would tear into a coop when there are almost 20 ducks roaming the yard. I can make no sense of this or what happened. Regardless, I repaired the hole.
In the afternoon, there was one of the loudest thunderstorms I have heard in as long as I can remember. It knocked out the internet in the middle of a large scan I was performing on my website, while dealing with my morning issues. That didn’t help with my frustrations. There was a pretty heavy downpour following the thunder.
Cat tracks in the front yard
October 20
Life in the jungle: I heard rain throughout the night. First thing, I wrote Belize blog Parts 188, 189, and 190. I then started on my second blog post of an ultra SEO and AI optimized series called – How to Set Up Your Home in the Belize Jungle
After breakfast, I painted the new cabana. I am now basically finished with the primer coat for the interior. There was a rain shower in the afternoon.
Glossary of Terms
Glossary of words or people that may or may not be part of this particular blog post. This glossary will be at the bottom of every blog post for Belize.
Wayne – He is the son of the original owners of the farm (both owners are deceased). The original farm was two – 30-acre parcels minus two – ¾ acre parcels for my house. In 2017, Wayne sold me 40 acres of land from the original 60 acres (one 30-acre parcel plus 10 acres from the second parcel). Wayne lives in his parents’ house and has a few cows on his remaining 18 acres of land.
The ponds – I have two large (300ft long x 50ft wide x 10ft deep) ponds on my 30-acre parcel of land, which is basically a jungle. I have about 60 coconut trees (mostly mature) around the ponds. In my first two years of living in Belize, I also planted about 250 assorted fruit tree seedlings (Lime, jackfruit, custard apple, pomegranate, and avocado).
The coconut field – I have about 400 coconut trees planted (various growth states) on about 3 acres of cleared land of my 10-acre parcel. I have planted about 350 assorted fruit trees (lemon, starfruit, mango, soursop, cashew, lime, orange), all raised from seed since my arrival in Belize in 2021.
The river lot – my house sits on a ¾ acre lot. I have a second joining ¾ acre lot that allows me river frontage on the Belize River. I call that my river lot.
The dry – Belize has two main seasons. The rainy season and the dry season (no rain). The wet is obviously the rainy season.
Chopping – using my machete to clear brush, vines, weeds, and unwanted trees. Generally, when I chop, I am removing unwanted vegetation around my baby fruit trees.
Andy – A fellow Canadian who rode his dirt bike from Canada to Belize at the end of 2023. When I offered Andy the use of an apartment that I recently built and the use of my greenhouse, Andy decided to stay in Belize permanently and start a hot sauce company here.
