Little Brother ‘Alex’ is knocking at the door

Agatha's little brother Alex came out to play today.

He tapped on the window and on the door and on the tin roof but luckily he didn't make it inside. Alex was no match for his big sister and her heavy handedness. He was an insistent little bugger though and he kept tapping through the night and through the day and his persistence was annoying.

The best course of action is to stay inside and make little trips to the shop with a raincoat and umbrella and avoid soaked feet with hops, skips and jumps. Oh, and making sure you have a decent supply of tea. Then just sit back, relax and let the tropical storm pass. So this is our second hurricane and although we are not in the storm's most devastating path we are close enough to witness four days of searing rain with cloud misted skies and damp; everything is damp. Even the table salt has become a mass. It's perhaps not like you would imagine. Hollywood and the news sensationalise storms and before I came here I imagined that tropical storms suddenly strode in and whisked whole houses into the beyond or terrifying floods that came out of nowhere to wash whole villages away.

On the news you are shown the worst devastation without any of the build-up. To give some perspective, Agatha unleashed an incredibly heavy downpour that started much like most days during rainy season. She just didn't let up for four days. This amount of rain makes the ground soften until anything on a slope could unexpectedly just slide away. When this happens sometimes whole sections of the vegetation on the mountain fall into the beyond. The noise, amplified in the valley by the rock that surrounds 300 of the 360 degrees, is like a child's box of lego being emptied onto the floor, only ten times louder. With multiple landslides the water masses into a muddy torrent that carries trees, rocks and anything else that gets in its path, including houses down to the lake below. The build-up is gradual and the town is left fairly unscathed but the street that is under water is the one that makes it in the newspaper and the houses devastated are those on the evening news.

Right now Alex's persistence has entered day five and I am drinking a very good local tea called 'Te Chirrepeco.' It comes in a little red and yellow box a little more elongated than a matchbox and costs 1Q (Quetzal), about 10cents. It has a honey scent when it's brewing and its mellow enough to drink without milk. Lovely. As I mentioned before it's the perfect accompaniment to these damp days.

I am writing this from my study with a view of the 'Cara del Indio' (The Indian's face). This is the peak of one of the mountains which follows the contours of an Indian chieftain's profile. The mountain is very close and is so high that it takes up about 80 per cent of the view. It's not clear today as there is a white mist that has also completely obscured it during Alex's outburst. In someone else's writing this area was described as 'the place where clouds were born.' We are 1600 metres above sea level here (same as Boulder, Colorado) which is high enough for our red blood cells to expand so they become more efficient with the lack of oxygen found at sea level.
I'll be running faster when I get back to Barcelona!!