ECOLOGY FRIENDLY JUNGLE GARDEN SANCTUARY, Stories March 2023

Stories March 2023

ECOLOGY FRIENDLY JUNGLE GARDEN SANCTUARY, updated 2023

First the contrast: Some people are color blind, no amount of explaining will ever get them to see red.

Still others are garbage blind and likewise no amount of explaining will ever get them to see trash.

The ecologically blind are a hopeless lot that are entirely incapable of living in harmony with nature. These are the PPP or ecology enemies that pave it, pollute it and poison it.

As George Bernard Shaw so aptly put it; “An art gallery is a dull place for a blind man.”

Being ecology friendly is not for everybody, but for those who embrace this kind of unpolluted untainted world the reward is incalculable.

ECOLOGICAL CONCEPT HOUSE:

Our requirements for an ecological house and its location.

We needed a home in a semi arid tropical location with fresh natural air flow because of my wife Jane’s asthma.

The year round climate had to be salubrious with no extremes.

We wanted a quiet nature friendly environment.

Privacy in a sanctuary setting.

Location, close to shopping, abundant restaurants and on quiet bicycle friendly streets.

International airport in town.

Excellent public transport by bus and taxi.

World class medical facilities; Mérida is renowned as a prime leader.

Bicycle friendly: Yucatán is a bicycle touring paradise we have not fully explored even after 34 years.

Almost all neighborhoods still have owner operated grocery stores.

Our ecological concept house didn’t just fall out of the sky.

We thought long and hard about our dream home because we had certain requirements that were absolute imperatives. Number one being my wife Jane has asthma, and we were not going to live someplace where she would be required to take medications just to survive. Jane’s doctors in Florida had told us that she could live there, she just wouldn’t live long.

In our many years of travel we fortunately discovered Yucatán with its tropical semi-arid climate and set about locating a north-south facing lot to take full advantage of the prevailing sea breezes. We would want high land that didn’t flood in a heavy rain, away from busy thoroughfares but close enough so we would have good public transport. After four years of poking around and investigating nearly two hundred places we finally found our “special spot” that suited all our requirements.

When our search ended our work began and after two months of hard effort the first person finally came by that told us they thought the place might have possibilities.

Hardly anybody could envision the dream that Jane and I shared.

The property we ultimately purchased resembled a garbage dump in the desert, but we both immediately recognized its hidden potentials.

Two years after we had begun our ecological home project that would use thermo-siphon air exchange without fans or motors to heat in winter, cool in summer, and maintain humidity at low levels, we achieved our goal.

Finally when Jane and I finished we were told how very lucky we were to have such a lovely home and jungle garden. The harder we worked the luckier we were.

The garden was another case;

We started with a desolate rock strewn terrain devoid of foliage. Using no chemicals we began by composted everything in sight included shredded paper and even sawdust from a local furniture factory, in order to build all organic top soil. This process took us fifteen years before our jungle garden ultimately became self perpetuating.

Now thirty three years later in 2023, having started from seed, we have a real canopy tropical jungle filled with towering fruit trees that also provide heavenly cooling shade.

Our secluded jungle garden provides many of our produce requirements including fruits, spices, herbs, medicinal plants, hot chili peppers. Everything here is biodegradable. Our gray water is recycled to the garden.

We are synchronized and coexist with nature creating a positive impact upon the planet...and it just feels good.

Amazingly this has all been achieved using absolutely no chemical insecticides or poisons in our thirty three years here.

We live peacefully, in parallel with nature.

Tropical birds and butterflies abound freely in our private jungle sanctuary wide-open and unrestricted to the sky.

Our screened in spacious covered patios command stunning views of our garden.

This ecological home and jungle garden is in three parts enclosed behind a tall privacy wall inconspicuously tucked away. Each separate dwelling is equipped with bathrooms and their own separate kitchens.

We fill our indoor Jacuzzi in summer. In less than two hours it naturally cools the water. Cooler outside air is taken in through a low window then sucked up and out a roof top chimney that naturally draws up and out. Just like cooling hot soup by blowing on it.

It is amazingly fresh. The discharged water goes to the garden. The naturally cooled Jacuzzi water is a great place to linger in the warmer times of the year while we even drink our coffee and listen to audio books or music. Even when the outdoor temperature exceeds 40 degrees centigrade or 100 degrees F. we have a simple efficient and very economical way to stay perfectly cool and comfortable.

We have city water piped in and bottled drinking water delivered weekly. 

However, we have a solar hot water heater system, which I designed and built from locally obtainable materials that use no electric, gas, pumps or valves for the few cool months of winter.

When I pull the large ball valve to the rooftop water tank it cascades down like Niagara Falls and fills the Jacuzzi in just two minutes.

We clean and then fill the Jacuzzi with fresh water every day recycling the old water to our jungle garden.

Our sanctuary is equipped with places to hang twenty-five hammocks. Even on our rooftop patio covered with flowering vines we can accommodate hammocks in the shade and fanned by nature’s salubrious sea breezes.

Though we have no motorized vehicles we have off-street covered parking that can accommodate vehicles with plenty of space for bicycles.

Outwardly our ecology concept house is relatively unassuming. It is an original design and not copied in any way.

Viewed from the street side our super solar dehydrator, the domed ventilating chimneys and vaulted roof capitalize on heat differentials and have little meaning to those unaware of the functionality of our environmentally friendly home.

Here is a link to a narrated YouTube tour explaining the functioning of our ecologically friendly home. Watching time 2 minutes.  Video home tour.

Link to the story of our home with captioned photos where you can venture inside. Photo tour.

Another link: This one is to a YouTube video Jane made of a collage of the seasonal flowers of our garden. Flowers video.

One more YouTube: Street musician at the municipal market food court. Street music video.

Visit my Amazon author's page

Victor Rico Cusi, from the Arctic Ocean to the southern tip of South America.

Victor Rico Cusi’s miraculous “Crotch Rocket”ride!

Determined, focused and powerfully motivated, Victor began in tropical Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico.

He crossed Mexico from extreme southeast to extreme northwest. Then he crossed the continental U.S. to Canada. In Canada it was north to Alaska and on to the shores of the Arctic Ocean…as close to the North Pole as you can go on wheels and still be on land and returned.

As if that wasn’t enough to satisfy his wanderlust next he turned south from Yucatan through Central America to Panama. There he boarded a ship for Columbia and continued south following the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast of South America to its southern tip at Ushuaia, Argentina.

Returning took him up the Pacific coast of South America.

Victor took the seldom traveled scenic routes including Route 40 through Argentina. Few motorcyclists travel the full length of Route 40 as much of it is unpaved.

Victor says the people he met along the way made his trip unforgettable.

To the best of my knowledge Victor is the first from Yucatan to complete this Arctic to Antarctic round trip by “Crotch Rocket”…his BMW motorcycle. 

Special congratulations to an exceptional man who lives his dreams!   

In Argentina Victor and his heavily- laden Crotch Rocket hang on as gale force winds add a dimension of adventure.

Photos by Victor Rico Cusi

Eye surgery a success in Merida, Yucatan

Mérida, Yucatan, Mexico

Jane and Dr. Wilbert Chi after a successful but complicated surgery.

In 1990 Jane underwent a radical new laser eye surgery. It was like a miracle, with reshaped corneas she could do away with the glasses she had worn since childhood.

In 1994 she was diagnosed with glaucoma in her left eye.  All went well for a while but then glaucoma took most of the sight in her left eye.

This month cataract surgery was done on her good eye. The cornea reshaping surgery of twenty-five years ago complicated the cataract removal and a surgery other than what has now become routine had to be performed. Great care had to be taken.

The procedure was much more technical than what I can describe here.  Jane was fortunate to find Dr. Chi, an eye surgeon with the expertise to do this complicated surgery.

It was very gratifying to see the elation on Dr. Chi’s face after his successful operation.  He is a fine doctor and an exceptional person, truly concerned about the well-being of his patients.

Jane is smiling also.  She now has perfect vision is the right eye without correction.

PORK – MMM…MMM…mmmm – Good! Chicharrón

Just too good to hurry through!
A visit to Yucatan is a culinary sojourn down memory lane to a place from by-gone years before prepackaged foods embalmed with corporate chemicals and barcodes.
This is fun food worthy of the search.
You can enjoy it even if it is nutritious.
These pork delights are fondly enjoyed throughout Latin America, North America to Canada…even Europe and Asia.
Regional seasonings and presentations are uniquely area specific.
The good news is that one of Yucatan’s classic delights can still be found here in Mérida.
We invite you to come and meet smiling Don Herberto the purveyor of these succulent treats and find out for yourself.

Enterprising  Herberto Chán is located at the corner of C. 28 and 37 in Emiliano Zapata Norte, two blocks east off Paseo de Montejo. Find him there daily from mid morning to mid afternoon.

This is smiling Don Herberto Chán who we have been happily patronizing for more than thirty years. He has been in this neighborhood business for thirty-seven years and his excellent quality has remained unchanged. Sample an authentic morsel of Yucatan from years gone by.
He has tortillas, limes, habanero chilies, and pre-cut taco stuffing and veggies bagged. 
His gastronomic delights will make you into a repeat customer.

Pork Rinds or chicharrones:
Mexico is one of the world's largest producers of pork rinds, known as chicharrón or cuerito. The very best is fresh from street vendors, eaten as snacks or antojitos.
Packaged store bought pork rinds are adulterated with preservatives and flavor enhancers such as MSG. Remember no bar-coded foods from Don Herberto!
A 1-ounce serving of chicharrones contains zero carbohydrates, 17 grams (g) of protein, and 9 g of fat which is 43% unsaturated. Consider this; chicharrón has nine times as much protein as potato chips.
I still love them even if they are healthy.

In the Yucatan these tasty delights of yesteryear are cooked to absolute finger-licking perfection.
No place in Mexico does pork better than Yucatan. Regional subtleties are the standard. 
Exquisitely cooked and ready to take home to devour. Buy chicharrón by the kilo, gram, or as custom made tacos. .
We like to buy a chunk of pierna or leg and slice it very thin and serve it warm or cold.  Building tacos makes ingestion a pleasurable occurrence.
I still haven’t learned how to build a little taco.  

No product code and 100% natural food from tropical Yucatan
In the above photo starting at the top: glasses of pineapple liquefied in the blender and flavored with slow steeped jamaica tea, chicharrón and bacon bits, lower left, a all meat pork taco with chicharrón and lower right a salad featuring home made sauerkraut, shredded onion, carrot, chopped sweet peppers, tomato, chives, and radishes with a hard boiled egg. The dressing is key lime juice and olive oil.
My creative wife who happens to have won the Betty Crocker Homemaker award quickly made our salad into fusion food. She suggested dumping the contents of our pork taco onto the salad and it was terrific!
Come savor this authentic slice of genuine paradise before it is gone! You will have only one regret…you didn’t find it sooner.

PROGRESO, YUCATAN – CRUISE SHIP DESTINATION

A cruise to Progreso is a fun and an affordable opportunity to see the real Mexico safely away from border towns and jet-set end destinations.

Progreso is a go-at-your-own-pace kind of place abounding in unique options.

Be your own guide:  walking, biking, busing, or by taxi.

It is easy with Yucatan’s Magic – Merida Side Trips, as your guide.

Take a LOOK.  It will make you happy and save you money!

The book has eighteen self-guided day trips plus a section on bus and colectivo taxis to make it simple for you to travel Yucatan with confidence.

This book is one of the top Yucatan travel books. It has no paid sponsors or advertisers.

The author has more than 25 years of exploring experiences in Yucatan and Mexico.

Yucatan’s  Magic is a compendium of the author’s 25 years of exploring the Yucatan, and it offers the best of the best memorable destinations…built as the Maya built their temples, one stone at a time. 

Yucatan is getting better all the time!

Yucatan's Magic was published in 2011 and updated in 2013.

Related links:

Progreso  

Bicycle Yucatan