Island Paradise Day 4

Bugs: You have to love bugs if you want to live in the tropics. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. OK, maybe you don’t have to love them, but you need to be able to tolerate them. There are bugs everywhere: Big bugs, little bugs, flying bugs, crawling bugs. Back home when you garden, there are always little critters you have to watch out for. In Oliver, for example, the ants are horrible. They get onto your fruit trees where the farm aphids. It’s quite gross, and they are really hard to combat. Well here, you can times the bug thing by a bugzillion!

There are pretty neat looking termite nests in many of the trees around here, so I am not sure why so many of them have taken up residence in our lovely cottage.

Steph spends a good deal of time smashing termites with his shoe. I just ignore them because hey – they eat houses not people. Such is not the case with sand fleas. We have tried to be diligent about keeping DEET on us, but today I forgot and walked to go for a swim, and I am now the proud owners of a few good welts on my ankle. Apparently August and September are the real buggy season here. It gets hot and humid and the trade winds stop blowing so the bugs are much worse. Many people leave the island at that time. We will also be leaving the island before then.

Yesterday when I was taking a tour of my neighbours back yard, she showed me a papaya tree where all the leaves had been nibbled off by the bats. I told her that bats were great because they eat bugs, but apparently these bats don’t…just papaya! And these fruit bats are huge. I saw one trying to get up into the eaves and I thought it was a black bird! She said they make a real mess because they love to nest there and they poop a lot – usually covering the side of your house or deck. And they are next to impossible to get rid of, so like the bugs, one must embrace the bats.

By now you might be thinking eeew…but it gets worse…

There are these really creepy land crabs here. And in the tropics, gardeners have to go to all kinds of measures to keep them out of the garden. They will crawl up plants and bushes and literally destroy them. She uses upside down empty tequila bottles to create a slippery glass raised garden bed, and the crabs cannot climb up the glass. Ingenious! (Not to mention you get to drink a lot of tequila under the guise of gardening!)As for me - like I did with the garden snails back home, I will figure out a way to catch them, feed them cornmeal until they poop white, and then eat them!

No discussion about island living in the tropics would be complete without you knowing that houses on the beach (and many in town too) do not have septic systems that can manage toilet paper, so all used paper has to go in the trash to be later burned with all the other garbage that cannot be recycled.

And last but not least, when writing about all things ikky, I would be remiss to not mention the pathetic state of vegetables in this place. Being an island, not much grows here, and most things must be shipped in from the mainland; and that only happens on certain days. So what happens is you have a stampede of people hitting the stores the hour the stuff arrives, so that by the time the poor suckers like me arrive, the carrots are flexible, the spinach is, well, it’s hard to describe spinach that has been out in the heat for 4 days, and if you are willing to fight for it, you might get yourself a bundle of yellowing broccoli complete with small green worms.

Of course all of these annoyances are clealy worth it for many people. Falling asleep to the sound of crashing waves and waking up to the aquamarine water outside is pretty marvelous. I came here with my eyes wide open, and having had a fair bit of experience in the tropics I knew what we were getting in to. The verdict is out for Steph on whether or not all of the hardships will be outweighed by the sheer beauty and tranquility of Utila. There is not a day go by he does not say, “I can’t believe I am living here!”