Moving on to our land

After moving from Curitiba to Canela, we're slowly moving on to our land, this article is a diary of the initial projects involved in getting established there.

Week one

I'll start doing weekly updates from now on since we're only able to make it into Canela once or twice a week since its such a difficult trip. I've started at one again since it's our first week on the land. We moved the tent and most of our things to the proper final location because the wind was too strong in the temporary location and it snapped one of our tent poles. It's much more sheltered in the "island" (a clearing within the natural bush that we'll eventually build our dwellings and plant our fruit and vegetables).

The first thing to set up was the toilet - we're using a big bucket in the bush with the toilet seat from our last flat on it. To prevent odour and to assist with the composting process we put saw-dust on top of the content, the bucket is emptied every few days onto a compost pile in the bush - this compost is used for fruit trees not for the vegetable garden. Large bags of saw dust can be obtained from local saw mills, but we didn't have to look because there's about ten large sacks of it close to our previous camp site :-)

The land is really awesome, there's so many kinds of natural resource available such as sand, clay, really fertile soil, bamboo and many fallen trees, many with incredibly hard wood. There's humming birds, cranes, hawks, quales and there's a family of armadillos living a few meters away from our tent :-) we even have our own tiny beach where we can wash our clothes and ourselves!

At night there's amazing bugs called Vagalumes which are like fire flies but their light is brighter and white and fades on and off periodically while they fly about slowly. They give the land a really magical feeling as many of them come out as it starts getting dark and they surround our little island around the tent and vegetable garden!

Week two

The week started with our trip back from Canela to the land. When we got close we started to see a lot of fallen trees, and then a few houses with their roofs torn off, some completely destroyed! Some trees were torn out of the ground and snapped in half - some so thick you couldn't reach around them! When we were in the cafe the night before there had been very heavy rain and wind, but out in the land it seems it had been much more violent. We were very anxious on the way back expecting to see our tent completely ripped up and all our belongings scattered for hundreds of meters around the valley, but to our surprise everything was just how we'd left it apart from some minor damage to one tent - and everything inside was dry! it's very lucky that we'd decided to move from our temporary location though because there was a lot of damage there. It seems that our little island is well protected by the surrounding hills and bushland - whew!

The next day we started our first project on the land which was to build a fence so that we can start planting fruit and vegetables without the cattle eating it. There's a lot of fallen trees in our bush area so we got the axe and started cutting some lengths suitable for fence posts and support braces, and then stretched some wire around it that we had bought in Canela along with some tightening ratchets.

The next project was to try and get a temporary "office" for doing some internet work each day, but unfortunately the our rural Internet connection is not as good as expected and we'll need to keep coming in to Canela each week. I have to get more work done than I'm able to in the current situation, so we're looking in to renting a cheap place that we can stay so we can spend half the time here and half the time there until we can figure something better out for the land's connection.

The road that we travel to get to Canela is like a huge spiral going about four times more distance than displacement, but when we talked to some neighbours they told us there's a shorter road but that it's very difficult. We figured it couldn't be that much worse than some parts of the long one, so today (Saturday, November 3^rd) we decided to try the shorter road. Well, we made it, but the three of us unanimously voted never to do that again! we were lucky and if the road had been a little wetter we would certainly not have made it, there were many huge holes and chasms in the road that are a meter or more deep and lots of areas that are little more than enormous piles of rocks. Some of the neighbours in houses we passed towards the end looked shocked to see a vehicle coming from that direction!

Week three

We started this week in Canela to buy some more tools and try and sort out some Internet options for the land. Candido's mother has kindly let us stay in a house of hers that is being done up which is a great help. The bathroom's in a bit of a bad state, and the kitchen is non-existent - and we sometimes have some workmen turn up early in the morning dripping paint on our heads while we're in our sleeping bags, but apart from all that it's excellent being able to stay in Canela as long as we need to each week without having to worry about finding a cheap room that we can all stay in each time :-)

Our planting area is now all fenced off and protected from roaming cows so Beth's now busy planting vegetables in it. She's marked off the planted areas with construction tape so that Joe and I don't accidentally step on the wrong places! The first things she planted were the poor plants we'd brought with us from our vege patch in Curitiba which were in bad shape after the trip down, we brought mint, peppermint, spring onion, peas, oregano, basil and spinach. We also got many already developed seedlings of letuice, cabbage, kale, beetroot, parsley, capsicum and aubergine from a store in Canela for only R$1 for 12 seedlings!. Here's a picture of her planting some sunflower and corn seeds we'd saved and sprouted.

Our next project is to get our first dwelling built which will be used for sleeping, storing tools and also as a workshop until we can eventually build some more smaller dwellings for private quarters and then make the first one into a shared area for working and socialising. We're building using as much of the readily available materials as we can such as fallen wood on the land and spare materials like pallets. The first step is to put some foundations down.

We're using a method similar to a pole house except that the poles are short and will only hold up the floor since we don't have logs long enough to also work for supporting walls and roof (we're avoiding chopping any trees down and trying to use only what's already available). We scorch the ends of the logs that will be buried so that they won't rot (a trick we learned from The Barefoot Architect). It doesn't matter if the lengths of the poles are a bit out because we'll be bolting and nailing 6x4 planks onto the sides (we'll probably have to buy these), not the tops, that way we can ensure we have a perfectly horizontal floor regardless of the unevenness of our poles. During the process of boring holes for our poles, Joe accidentally chopped the tail off a scorpian! this is a bit of a worry because we thought the only dangerous creature in our area would be the Jararaca snake and that there were no scorpians at this elevation or this far south.

This week we were finally able to relax a bit and explore some of our land. The natural bush area is amazing with many secluded areas, interesting bugs and colourful birds, we're still finding it hard to believe that this amazing place is really ours! I haven't yet been able to get any good pictures of the birds or other exotic creatures such as snakes and armadillos (we know there's a snake around because we saw a freshly shed snake skin yesterday morning!) but we'll no doubt get some good pictures as the weeks go by.

Amongst all the hard work we had some time to enjoy the sun and little beach and do some meditation. We set up our small tent in the bush out of the sun for our temporary meditation temple :-) it has a nice view of the river and has crystals on the floor which we've found in the ground and in the river - the whole area seems to be filled with these crystals!

Week three ended on 11 Nov 2012 which is the anniversary of our move to Brazil :-) thanks to our friends who sent nice messages and reminded us of this important day, especially as it's very hard to keep track of time on the land and we almost forgot! Here's a couple of pictures from that last day in New Zealand. The third picture is from a few months ago when I finally made it through the huge bureaucratic labyrinth and obtained my temporary Brazilian ID, which is the main part of the process for getting residency in Brazil. The rest of the process involves the federal police coming to check out our living situation to ensure that we're a legitimate couple, but since we've moved to another state, we need to go and talk to them again in Caxias and explain our new situation which we'll be doing soon.

Week four

We started the week this with a change of plan - it's been too difficult getting work done having to come in to Canela every week and try to get things done in internet cafes and bakeries, so on our first day in Canela this week we rented a room in a pensão so that we have a permanent base here that we can work from. A pensão is kind of like a flat but it already has all the facilities and you just pay on a month-by-month basis - but you don't get to choose your flat-mates. The place Beth found is in a really nice neighbourhood with lots of trees and cobblestone roads and it has a secure area behind the house where we can put the car. She came to a deal with the owner whereby we can have a room for all three of us for the same price as two since we're going to be away at the land for a good portion of each week.

Getting a net connection has been a bit of a problem because the excellent 3G/Wifi/Lan router I bought is now broken after it fell out of a window onto the concrete! so we're temporarily using Joe's Android phone in Wifi hotspot mode using my Vivo Sim card.

On Tuesday, Beth and I took the bus to Caxias today to notify the federal police of our change of location so they can come and visit us at the pensão to assess the legitimacy of our relationship to finalise my residency. We found a nice cafe there with Internet, a great wine selection and excellent food - the mushroom quiches were perfect! we ended the day with a cold bottle of Opa Pilsen which is a local beer made in Joinville where we bought our Lada Niva from :-)

When we got back to the pensão we went to the talk to the women next door to ask if it was her wifi connection we could see and if it would be ok if we could access it. Not only was she and her husband happy for us to use it, but it turns out that he's in to IT as well and is looking for English speaking people to teach some PHP, javaScript and networking which would be excellent for Joe while he's still getting his online work rolling! I'm connected to next door's wifi now as I write this, the signal's quite weak, but it's much better than using 3G. Next week I'll bring my 200 milliwatt wifi router which they said they'd be happy for us to plug in to their LAN which should give us a much better connection, so that's our Canela net connection sorted! now we just need to get a solution worked out for the land connection.

Beth and I went back to the land for a few days by ourselves while Joe stayed in the pensão. We had some trouble with some cows led by a particularly stubborn "alpha female" who insisted that our tent area was the best place to feed and she even came to visit in the middle of the night a few times sniffing our things and drinking from our buckets! we decided it would be a good idea to finalise the demarcation of our territory and get it fenced off sooner rather than later. Apart from that it was an uneventful relaxing few days exploring the area and finding new exotic creatures. I got a few good photos of some very strange looking caterpillars that Beth spotted and some more butterflies, and I saw some awesome humming birds, hawks and the armadillos but couldn't get any photos of these unfortunately.

I found a spot on the nearest hill where I can pick up a weak 2G connection which means I can go up there each day to check emails and do other text-oriented work. It's too slow for Skype (even text) but fine for email and adjusting wiki pages - and I even shelled in to a server and fixed some issues that I got an email about. This is good news because it means that we should be able to get a reasonably useful connection using a small tower with a 2G router, antenna and amplifier which shouldn't be too costly or difficult to set up. Here's a photo of my new office and a strange looking bug I found there :-)

Week five

This week started with work on Monday morning which is now our usual cycle. Apart from work we've bought a 40cm Husqvarna chainsaw and found a good place to buy wood for the house. We've also checked out prices for various things such as glass and roofing materials. Even though our idea for the land is about independence, it sometimes feels like a bit of a contradiction - we need to visit the gas station a lot and have to buy petrol for the generator, ethanol and clutch fluid for the car and two-stroke for the chainsaw! but our dependence on these things should reduce down after this initial setup phase eventually to practically nothing as we get our food, water and power solutions established.

We had some bad news this week - unfortunately a problem's occurred in my residency process :-( The Federal Police come to visit at some point after getting the temporary ID so they can assess the relationship to ensure it's legitimate. The problem is that they've been going on strike a lot over pay issues or something which meant that they took over two months to come and visit instead of the two weeks they said they'd take, but when they finally came we weren't there because we'd moved. We'd advised them that we were going to be moving, but it looks like that had got lost in the pipeline due to the strikes as well! so now the head office in Brasilia has been notified that we've failed the assessment.

We talked to the Federal Police in Caxias and they advised us that we can get our status reassessed by waiting until my current failed assessment shows up in the official journal, Pesquisa Jornais do Dia, and then go back to Caxias with evidence that we've moved and go through the relationship assessment process again!

We didn't go to the land this week because on Friday afternoon when we were about to leave a huge thunderstorm suddenly came up and the weather didn't clear up again until Sunday. We didn't really fancy staying in our tent in that kind of weather and needed to be back here in Canela again for the working week, so there's very little to report on this week unfortunately apart from that we finally found a place that sells good water filters so we no longer need to carry huge twenty litre water bottles to the land each week, we can filter water straight from our river :-) Here's some pics of the tent though which is a little more organised now than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Week six

We went to the land early Thursday afternoon even though the weather wasn't the best, and spent Friday and the weekend building our bridge so we could get the trailer across to our land. This is important because we're not able to start ordering wood for the house until we have the trailer there to store it in and to transport it from the river to the land.

Basically the idea was to spend $0 on it by using scrap wood and fallen branches we found around the place, and to use four strong logs which would be positioned under the wheels of the car and trailer (the car wheels are 1.8m apart, and the trailer's are 2.1m apart). Here's some pics we took during construction.

We then tested taking the car across both ways before attempting the trailer. The bridge worked fine with no problems, but needs someone to get out of the car and guide the driver as it's impossible to see if the wheels are lined up properly from in the car.

So finally we took the trailer across! we definitely won't be taking the trailer across it again! It'll have to wait for Bridge 2.0. We emptied everything out of the trailer first to minimise damage in the event of disaster. We couldn't quite get the trailer lined up initially so we added a few extra logs and some bricks - some of the bits of wood started coming off, but by maintaining forward motion it was ok - toward the end it got a bit dodgy, but Beth made a quick run for it at the end and made it across!

We then set off for Canela at about 7pm Sunday evening leaving our trailer next to our local hill. As we passed the small dwelling wrecked by the storm we noticed it had a new resident :-)

We still had about 5km of dirt road to go when we heard a huge thud followed by strong grinding sounds! It sounded as if the gear box had suddenly blown up or something! We took a look under the car and soon found the problem - the transfer case had broken off from the bottom of the chassis! the left hand side was rusted and the bolts had ripped out.

This could have been a really bad night because even though we could see what the problem was, we didn't have anything in the car we could fix it with! luckily within half an hour three gaushos came by in a delivery truck, and even though they didn't have any tools either, they said they could bring something back as they were dropping off a delivery and then coming past again about 10 minutes later. I decided the best bet would be to ask them to come back with some pliers and fencing wire so I could then do some in-the-field gambiarra to temporarily get the transfer case back in to position so we could get the rest of the way back to Canela and get it fixed up properly by a mechanic on Monday :-)

This is often a problem when driving off road and many people reinforce their transfer-case mountings using a variety of methods.

Week seven

The first thing to do this week was to get our gambiarra fixed up by a real mechanic! Here's a simple diagram of what would probably be the cheapest way to get it fixed which wouldn't require any welding or any extra bolts - we could do this ourselves, but without proper tools and a workshop it'd just be frustrating :-( Here's some diagrams I made of how we thought it should be fixed and a photo of the work the mechanic did.

We decided to get a bigger hammer with a "waffle face" for hammering in large nails because when we were building the bridge I bent a lot of big nails trying to hammer them in with a normal sized hammer. The waffle face causes the hammer's head to bite into the nail head preventing it from slipping. I also bought some big nails so we can nail logs together - really big nails!

The rest of the week was just work as usual until Friday late morning when we set off back to the land. This weekend's project was to clear a path through our bush area so we can get our car and trailer into our "island" where our tent is. There's a reasonably clear route through the trees which only required a few small trees to be chopped down, but two large fallen trees needed to be cleared which was the main work. The first one was quite soft and rotten, so I did this first to get some practice with the chainsaw. The second one was more difficult as it was a large thick tree trunk across the path at about head height made of very hard wood. Apart from getting the chain jammed at one point and having to

Next we bought the trailer through our newly cleared path - this was a bit difficult and needed a bit of on-the-fly chopping and we had to unhook the trailer, reposition the car and re-hook it a couple of times, so we'll need to make some parts a bit wider before getting the trailer through again. It's no problem for the car by itself though, but the trailer's quite long and wide so is much more of a problem.

It was very tiring work doing so much axing and chainsawing on Friday and Saturday, so on Sunday we had a bit of a rest, but even that turned into a drama! as we were drinking coffee after breakfast I saw a scorpion scuttle past - in the tent! we couldn't find it after that, so though that we'd be best to clean the tent up a bit since there were lots of plastic bags around, and a pile of fire wood in one corner which in hindsight was really asking for trouble. Finally Beth found it hiding under the toothbrush bag! I put a glass over it and slid some cardboard under it so I could take it and throw it in the bush on the swamp side where we don't go. As we cleaned up the tent we found two more scorpions! we didn't get any photos unfortunately because we were too stressed out to think about it, but here's a picture I found of our kind which are about two inches long.

After reading up a bit more on scorpions, we feel a lot less stressed about them. First, unlike how the movies portray them, they're actually quite passive creatures (well our kind are anyway), they don't move very quickly and only sting when they're hurt similar to wasps. I found this to be the case when I trapped it in the glass (I even accidentally dropped one of them again and had to re-trap it), it didn't go psycho and start attacking everything in sight, it just wandered about fairly calmly since I had taken care not to hurt it. Also we found out that the likely reason they were in our tent was because over the weeks we've accumulated some cockroaches from not keeping the tent area tidy enough, and scorpions favourite food is cockroaches! so the bottom line is; scorpions are ok :-)

Shortly after the scorpion incident we were back to our coffees when we heard some branches shaking in the top of a tall Araucaria tree close by (we have many of these very interesting trees on our land which have edible nuts very similar to chestnuts). We soon saw that there were a group of monkeys playing up there! they were moving about pretty quick so only a couple of the photos showed them clearly. They're Bugio-ruivo monkeys which are very popular in the native bush of Argentina and southern Brazil.

See also

• Moving from Curitiba to Canela
• Wildlife on our land
• Our bridge
• Lada Niva