Our land!

We are landowners!!!! (we hope....)
And we should soon be getting some photos online.



The land
We have bought a beautiful little piece of forested land on the edge of the village of El Remate, about 10 minutes walk from the lake. It has some big old jungle trees with beautiful epiphytes growing on them, and will be perfect territory for orchids in the longer term. It has many younger trees, including a little fruit (not much yet), some medicine trees and many ramon nut trees. The ramon nut is currently big news on the health food scene and is used here to make coffee, tortillas and bread flour.

We looked at it early in the visit and then looked at various other pieces and then realised, having seen more, just how lovely it is. It faces south and has a couple of sloping areas, although a view will have to be cleared/enhanced by selective thinning of the less outstanding younger vegetation, within the context of preserving and maintaining forested land and big trees.



We are not aiming to build a house on it yet, but simply put up a fence to try to help deter the land grabbers and plant stealers of the area (we’ll see....) and it is bang next door to our new Canadian neighbour who will be living here a year, and behind the women’s centre.

It measures something like 75 x 75 x 25 x 35 x 35 metres (in a weirdey 5 sided rhomboid kind of way) and we think has mainly good neighbours, most of whom just hold the forested land with no building on their patches.



We hope to get a few more fruit trees in before we leave, to give them time to grow up a bit over the next 2-3 years before we can come back.

And if we change our minds, it was a bargain and is beautiful and should be easy to sell, or simply to maintain as wild space.

The purchasing process
Amusing, although not to any of you who have recently been through 6 month property purchasing and selling experiences in the UK!

Friday night: decide to go for it for definite.

Saturday afternoon: hunt down Gonzalo, the owner and say we’d like to go up together and pace the boundaries, now even if it is getting towards sunset. Back to owners house, agree price, agree sale chat about contacting the mayor (who has to be involved) on Monday to continue.

Sunday morning: tip out of bed onto yoga platform on dock and into lake. And go for a HUGE swim only to arrive back to a grinning Gonzalo gesticulating about crocodiles and Bill. Oh no… had G changed his mind?
NO, but…
The mayor is only available now, we need to do it now.
Troop off to meet small bloke in scruffy clothes and think ‘is this a scam?’
Small bloke owns a bicycle (posh) and says he will catch us up if we start to walk to land. It is midday and hotter than a monkey’s bum.

Newly apparelled mayor in slacks and shirt sleeves and authoritative looking bag turns up on bicycle by football match and laughs at us for not having got further, pauses a while to watch the football.

We all go up to land and are relieved to find Carolyn and Anne (project managaer) and others at Carolyn’s adjacent land and they confirm YES it is the mayor(or att least the same bloke Carolyn had to measure hers).


Check out that big tree at the back. Hope its still there when we come back!

Mayor and G start pacing the boundaries, laying a tape measure and writing down the boundary measures as marked out by red-tipped sticks. This is the official and universally recognised way. Sometimes we come across a little sticky party near a complex arrangement of adjacent corners from bordering plots.

Mayor take a piece of cleanly sawn wood and sits on it while writing up the measurements. It is done in silence and with great dignity and this very quiet man clearly has a kind of natural authority that comes from his quiet dignity. We all sign, he signs and stamps it, hands it to us and then changes his minid and hands it to G.

Gonzalo takes the original until Bill can go to bank on Monday, and when a chunk of the money is handed over, G hands us the original and that is the deed, done by noon on Monday, with one further visit to the bank on Tuesday for the bit we weren’t allowed to get out on Monday. There is a daily limit on cash withdrawals and it is probably just a well, since (as per last post) the highest denomination not is 100Q and deals in tens of thousands just do involve stuffing it all in a carrier bag and trying to look like you’re only carrying string (thank goodness Santa Elena is not Guatemala City! We’d need armed guards then). Gonzalo asks to be let off at the airport and is last seen hurrying into the terminus with several thousand Q in a carrier bag…. Leading to much speculation!



The paperwork
Had a great reality check from our beautifully authoritative landlady the other day who reminded us that we MUST get a lawyer involved and we all kind of gulped a bit and I thought , well it´s not ALL our money if it all goes tits up, whereas Carolyn has most her house built already. But in fact a trip to the lawyer has reassured us all that things should be pretty tickety boo, although it takes a wee while to process all the necessary paper work.

We have to have a Guatemalan represente, who will initially be registered as a kind of ‘owner for the sake of the papaerwork’ with it being absolutely clearly known and still the legal position that B&I are the real owners. Then a lawyer takes that bit of paper and draws up the legal title document (legal title being a fairly new thing this year in a country where the political history and social land-grabbing customs mean very little land has much more than a 30 year provenance in this area, and much of that is chequered).-

Bill has just come back from 4 days at Tikal getting together the last of a set of photos he has had planned. His photography is getting better and better and he totally loves it. Landlady Mimi was hugely complimentary as she had stumbled across the Blog by chance when she was laid up with a bad leg in Guatemala city (what a place. She says she has lost count of the number of pairs of spectacles she has lost as people snatch them from her face in the street, and yet where she lives is a new literary zone full of libraries and daily reading clubs and so forth... certainly a place of contrasts).


Next plans
So next stop, land wise, is getting a fence constructed around the perimeter.