A SORT OF VICTORY OVER OLD AGE

RETURN TO MEXICO: FEBRUARY 16
Saturday afternoon and I am alone at Guatemalan Immigration and Customs offices. I cross the border, dismount and kiss the road: Mexico to Mexico via Tierra del Fuego. A Honduran tourist at Mexican Immigration overhears the brief account I give of my travels. He asks permission to photograph me beside my bike. Mexican Customs officers invite me to rest a while in their office. They ask the usual questions:
Surely I didn't ride all the way on the small Honda?
Which country did I prefer?
What country had the most beautiful women?
Which food was best?
Where was I most in danger?

PAIN OF PARTING

biker and moll


FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 16
More farewells, more pain of parting. Olga tells me that I am family: that I must return. Jim has honoured me by sharing his passions (and his worms). And I am joyful. What if? no longer occupies even the smallest corner of my head. To the contrary. Now there is a Thank God.
Thank God that Jim and Olga have Los Andes. No member of my family, certainly not I, could have achieved what Jim has achieved. Here, in a land ripped apart by a vicious internal war, he has created a place of hope and laughter and a shared pride in achievement.
Yet, as I ride slowly and carefully down the cobbled lane, I wonder that no one of Mark's five children wanted to make this their home, wanted to inherit their father's achievement and take it further.
As for me, Mark and Helen crocheted a rug together in the evenings at Los Andes. It is the one possession of theirs that I long to possess.

FREAK WIND AND TEARS

wood stove and good cook


FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 16
I will leave before lunch. Jim drives me uphill in the early morning. He planted Cyprus on one slope. Last year a freak gale felled every tree and blasted on down a narrow gorge to strike a planting of macademia nuts.
Jim shows me the trees spilled as if they were spillikins: Yes, he had wanted to weep.
We head back to the house for breakfast.
Children play football on the field below the school.
A woman tells Jim that the coffee harvest is complete.

A DISTASTEFULL ROLL

better of house


FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 16
The house at Finca Los Andes is comfortable. I lie in bed and wonder. I wonder that I brought the tea seed out of Kenya.
I had my instructions as to what I should say were the Customs to stop me at Heathrow. Except to the seed, Heathrow was never the danger point. At most, British Customs woud have confiscated it.
Kenya was critical. In Kenya I was committing a crime.
What would my uncle have done had I been arrested?
The seed was important to him – hence the arrangements in London. My safety was a minor side issue.
Not a pleasant thought...
And I recall another time when my uncle used me. It was a more distasteful roll.
My uncle knew that I would never refuse what he asked.
That was our relationship.
He has been dead nearly thirty years.

STARBUCKS AND WORMS

FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
The tea picked on Los Andes is certified organic. Coffee is sold to Starbucks. Starbucks insist on eco-production. In my uncle's day, water flowed through the coffee factory, washed the beans and flowed back to the stream. Now water is used again and again before being held in tanks where the sediment settles. The sediment is spread in long shaded trays and covered in black plastic. Worms are introduced into the sediment. Juice from the trays is a natural fungicide; the sediment becomes a powerful natural fertilizer.
Infected by Jim's enthusiasm, I dig my fingers into the sediment to sample density of worm population.

A RISK WORTH TAKING

coffee hard-pruned

FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
We have visited the school and the office and the health clinic. Jim introduces me always as Mark's nephew. I sense the atmosphere between Jim and the indigenous population as one of mutual respect and understanding. Jim is not a boss in the traditional sense, nor is he paternalistic. Imagine an elderly tutor in semi-retirement.
He is proud that one of the field foremen is a woman.
He is proud that the tea pickers are self-organized to be most productive.
I suggest that a workers' cooperative is vulnerable to expropriation.
Jim says, “Surely that is a risk worth taking.”

MARK OLIVER: CIVIL ENGINEER

FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
Jim drives me through the lower slopes of the finca and we walk a forest track to the hydroelectric plant my uncle installed. Mark harnessed waters from two springs. The fall is some 300 feet and has generated 5 kilowatts with minimum maintenance for close on forty years. I recall lunching with Mark in London and his describing the installation. He had no training as an engineer. Jim describes it as a remarkable achievement.
We drive back to the house and swim in the pool before lunch. Small birds dart amongst the blossoms. Mid-sized birds are marginally more sedate. Butterflies drift on a light breeze.

A VERY CIVIL CIVIL ENGINEER

FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
Jim Hazard is a quiet, polite, thoughtful man, mid-seventies, slim, bearded, upright. Anglo Guatemalan, he is a civil engineer by profession. By passion he is a husbander of land and of those who live on it. He has organized Los Andes as a workers' cooperative. The cooperative runs a savings bank and a store and owns a mini-van which, when required, the finca hires. The finca covers 1500 hectares. Coffee and tea are the main harvest. Macadamia trees have reached their first fruiting and there is a quinine plantation. The top portion is cloud forest and borders a nature reserve that rises to the peak of Atitlan. This is great bird watching territory (Questzales are common). Los Andes supplies forest guides. Check the web site for room rate and a bird list: www.andescloudforest.org

TEA PARTY

tea at los andes




FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
A community of some 150 families have their homes on Finca Los Andes. Two full-time and a part-timer teach at the primary school. High School is down on the coastal plane. The finca funds scholarships to University. The young woman who greets me and shows me to my room studies business management.
Jim Hazard is out on the finca. I sit in what was my Uncle's sittingroom and explain myself to Olga Hazard.
Olga's blood lines reach south from Mexico to Colombia. She is a warm woman, kind and gentle- yet steel must lie at her core. There is steel in any woman who survived the clandestine war and possesses the courage to create a life up here on a volcano that was guerrilla territory.
Guerrillas entered the house when Mark and Helen were here. The leader addressed Mark as Enginerio in recognition of the hydroelectric system Mark designed and installed. In describing the incident, Mark told me that Helen behaved “Very well”
Though a Scot, Mark was schooled at Eton and was very much an Englishman. Very well was high praise.
My Aunt Helen created the garden that stretches beyond the window. Seed for the camellias came from the Botanical gardens at Kew, London. My uncle built a relationship with Kew. He sent orchids from the cloud forest to the orchid house.
The relationship was useful.
Mark was keen to plant tea at Los Andes (none was grown in Central America). I smuggled 20 kilos of seed from Kenya to England. I don't recall the name of the botanist at Kew whose name my Uncle told me to quote should I have difficulty at Heathrow airport. Mention of Kew was sufficient. Mark had a connection at the Guatemalan Embassy in London: the seed was forwarded to Guatemala as Diplomatic baggage.

OLD MAN, OLD MEN

FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
An old man slithers down the bank. He has one upper tooth. I have none. He has no lower teeth. I have five. My five are vaguely white. His one tooth is dark green at the gum fading to yellow at its peak.
Am I visiting Don Jim?
Yes, I am visiting Don Jim.
Had he known my uncle?
Certainly he knew my uncle. My uncle aided him during the time of the guerrillas. The old man left the finca at the time of the guerrillas. He had to leave. I am uncertain why. Lack of teeth impairs his diction and I am moderately deaf. Added to which I am astride a bike with the motor running.
I nod in understanding of that which I don't understand and ask directions to the house.
The old man points this old man uphill.
The house is white and overlooks an acre of lawn and trees and flowering shrubs.Look a little further (sixty Ks) and the darker blue way below is the Pacific Ocean. A woodpecker pecks a rowdy tattoo.

BRAVE COWARD RIDES AGAIN

cobbles through rubber
entrance to finca los andes


TO FINCA LOS ANDES: FEBRUARY 15
My mother's brother, Mark owned a plantation on the high slopes of the volcanoe that dominates Lake Atitlan. In my early twenties, Mark invited me to work on the plantation. A month later Mark changed his mind. I wasn't suitable. He was probably correct.
I have lived for fifty years with a What if?
What if has stopped me visiting Los Andes.
Eugenio has pressed me over the years. “You need to free your head...”
I am 75, an adult. I don't have much time. Eugenio is correct. I do need to free my head.
Mark sold the finca late in the clandestine war.
Jim and Olga Hazard are the owners. Jim has invited me to stay Friday night.
I ride down from Antigua to the coastal highway. Harvest time and smoke rises from vast tracts of sugar cane; farmers are burning leaf.
The road up to Santa Barbara heads straight for the reverse side of volcano Atitlan. This was guerrilla territory. A swing barrier bars the road. An armed guard asks my destination. My license number is recorded. Sugar gives way to brittle pasture. Boulders litter paddocks. Santa Barbara is one street, low houses, a few mini stores. The road is newly concreted beyond the village. The white central line weaves a little. Giant bamboo form a tunnel. Concrete gives way to a cobble. Tyres kick and slither over stones – dangerous to lose concentration.
Two locals riding a 250 trail bike ask my destination and beckon me to follow. We cross shallow fords and climb through rubber plantations. A loose feathery leaf-canopy softens the light. The air is cool and fresh with forest scent. Above towers the pyramid peak of Atitlan.
My guides pull in at a small modern house.
“Straight on,” they tell me. “You will see the entrance.'
They would have been young during the clandestine war.
Which side did they support?
Was my uncle the enemy?
Would I have been the enemy?

WHINE, WHINE, WHINE...POOR OLD MAN? SILLY OLD MAN.

silly old man


SOMEWHERE DARK INSIDE MY HEAD: FEBRUARY 19
I haven't ridden for two days. I haven't written for a week. I want to plead mental exhaustion. Truth is that I am a coward. Writing fact, or my perception of fact, is uncomfortable. Safer to hide in a foxhole...Or stick to writing fiction - though the novel I have with Clare (editor) is anything but safe. And riding this wretched bike, am I courting danger? Or have I, in my seventies, finally become an adult? Adult writers don't whine. Adult writers write.
Here goes: I have been invited to Finca Los Andes. I leave Antigua Guatemala early on 15th February. Erick photographs my departure and leads me out of town...