it's finished. finished. FINISHED.

OHHHHH EMMMM GEEEE. It is finished! Our palace on the hill-side, our best ever egg farm in the history of Kerala, our main frustration for the last two months...it. is. finished.  

This is what we were thinking when we began this project (now I think about it I really don't know what we were thinking). We were thinking 'a big chicken coop, easy, should be done in two weeks tops.' We were thinking 'well, obviously we need to make some kind of snazzy laying-boxes-poking-out-of-the-back-of-the-fence situation, for ease of collection and all.' We were thinking 'oh, and why don't we make the front walls lever up so we can clean it easily and I think the floor should be split in two, and have some kind of ridiculously over-complicated lowering system for some reason that I can't even recall right now'.

What we ended up with, two months later (!!), is a fairly simple hutch made almost entirely out of bamboo and coconut rope, with your basic floor and walls and nesting boxes strewn thoughtfully about, a snake/eagle/rat/dog proof yard for our hens to peck about in and a design that is so un-Keralan that everybody keeps asking us when we will be putting the tin roof on, concreting the floor and installing the light. And we keep telling them that our chickens don't need those things. Our chickens are going to be happy, earthworm digging hippy chickens. Our chickens are going to be the happiest in the land. And they accepted that (sort of). But then we bought rice-sifting baskets for laying boxes...

Here is our last two months in pictures. The satisfying digging and planting of the poles, the kind of frustrating kind of hilarious days when the kids were helping, the tedium of stitching together 60 metres of netting for eagle protection, the triumph of putting the roof on.

A moment when we were so sick of roping together bamboo to make walls that we had a quick 'look at how pensive and meaningful I am, staring into the distance, sitting in a chicken coop' photo shoot.

The painting of the hen-house. The time we were having a cup of tea and a sit down and we heard coconuts falling form the neighbour's trees...

And finally, the Arrival Of The Hens. We drove for half an hour with thirty hens cowering in terrified clumps under our feet in the back of the jeep. Then we arrived home and I handed them out, one by one, as you would with lolly bags at a birthday party, so the kids could take them up the hill and plonk them into their new home. As you can imagine there was much squealing and giggling.

And some very happy hens. Thank freaking god.

our adventures with mowgli...

 

 

I wish we had adventures with Mowgli. Walking through the intense green of the jungle to a soundtrack of eternally chirpy birds and chatty cicadas it is easy to picture Shere Khan and Kaa plotting and Bagheera and Baloo watching over us from a distance. But I think they know we couldn't hack the jungle, these white folks who go back and sleep in their barn every night, and so they stay hidden. I know they are out there though.
And before we left we did actually meet two of them...Colonel Hathi and Hathi Junior. Remember who they are?

Have a guess and I'll tell you later.

As I said, we had a simple existence in the jungle. Our mornings were spent digging and planting usually, and fighting the curse of the lantana- an Australian plant that has found the subcontinent much to its liking and has invaded every single free space that there ever was ever. Which makes the coffee harvest impossible without vigorous slashing. So sometimes we would head out into the weeds, jungle knives wielded high above our heads, to do battle, and we would return an hour or two later, covered in scratches and disbelief that we had only cleared 20 square metres.

More satisfying was to wander around the garden beds in the cool of the evening and watch the beans climbing up their posts (which is only a teeny exaggeration- after a night of rain and a day of sun their curly little tendrils would have stretched at least another centimetre or two) and the corn sprouts tentatively peeping out of the soil, and picking beans and tomatoes and beetroots and parsley for dinner. One day while we were clearing weeds to dig some new beds we stumbled upon a patch of wild ginger that had sprouted in amongst the chaos.

There is an abundance of fruit trees scattered through the jungle aswell. Every few days somebody would go for a walk and come back with armfuls of green skinned Indian oranges or local sweet limes, or clutching a bulging shirt filled with little berries- an as yet unidentified fruit that is bright red and tastes of sour cherry, or very occasionally a guava or two. Or perhaps a rose apple, which looks nothing like an apple and tastes kind of like Turkish delight. There are also papaya and jackfruit and mango trees, baby banana trees and a tree in the corner of the veggie garden that was drooping with little green starfruits that were so sour they tasted like warheads dipped in lemon juice.  

With all the fruit we harvested we made jam over a campfire. We tried so many times to make oven-less bread...flat-bread over the stove (so much rolling), damper in the fire (we were thwarted by impatience and monsoonal rains), and a lovely looking loaf that we left at the mercy of a "pizza oven" built by termites. We ate a lot of bread that was simultaniously charcoal black and uncooked dough. How did we possibly eat it, I hear you ask? With enough jam, anything is possible.

And when all the work for the day was done, we wandered downriver and washed off all the dirt in a pool under a little waterfall. On Sundays we clambered over rocks and through undergrowth to find our way to the second waterfall, deep, deep in the jungle. And it was one on of our last afternoons at the farm that we encountered two of Kipling's creatures. As we were drying off on the rocks, after our swim, somebody gasped a four-letter word and pointed just downstream, about fifty metres from us. And there, in the water, were two wild elephants, mother and baby, having a bath. It was an incredible sight. And despite the potential danger of the situation- wild elephants can run very fast and they are very huge and strong- we watched transfixed, until they slowly glided into the invisibility of the jungle. Then we climbed the steep hill back to the top of the waterfall quite quickly, lest the elephants changed their peaceful minds.

 

 And now we know what we want to do when we grow up. So if you meet a little farm who is looking for a couple of grubby youngsters to take good care of it, please let us know.

    

sunshine, shisha pipes and head-stands everywhere...

Picture this...a taxi careening down a high speed road being driven by a guy chatting on his mobile and narrowly avoiding serious collisions, with two sleep-deprived Australians in the back looking bleakly out the window into a night of sheet rain and lightning flashes. We are this scene's protagonists, it is our first night in Cyprus and as well as crossing all our fingers and toes in order to prevent death we are also keeping an eye out for some kind of electrical store, which is where we were told to alight in order to find this farm we would be volunteering on for the next month.

We get out of the taxi. It is still raining. And we are very confused. We seem to be in a town, surrounded by houses and shops; not exactly the type of area in which you would expect to find an organic farm. We wander around in the dark, following what look like the darkest, leafiest streets- using our very superior detective skills' we figure that the farm is probably not going to be somewhere well-lit and suburban- getting ever more drenched and irritated.

After about twenty minutes we accept the futility of wandering around this strange new town in the soaking night and seek help in the nearest open shop...the cashier speaks no English but thankfully the only other person inside does, and is more than willing to help us. She calls the guy who runs the farm, tells him where we are and then is on her way with a friendly wave from the car window.

Five minutes later a guy turns up outside and from under a hoody we hear in a very London accent "so you're who I'm s'posed to be meetin' then". Success!

The farm turns out to be the big fenced off area- well lit and suburban- that we've been wandering around scratching our heads about for the last half an hour; Mark (the guy) turns out to be very chatty and friendly and the other volunteers turn out to be some cool cats from Norway and Poland who we become very good friends with (so much so that we all end up staying at the farm only for as long as we are all there together).

The farm itself is a bit odd. It's a project started by somebody who has since left and now the point of the whole exercise is somewhat ambiguous...it is funded by the fanciest hotel in the area and provides said hotel with some vegetables a few days a week, as well as randomly growing other vegetables just for the hell of it (it seems), with two people who have some conflicting ideas trying to run it as a team without really communicating with each other. Some previous volunteers have apparently been disappointed by the rather 'un-permaculture' ethos of the farm, but as we had no expectations at all and only wanted to escape a British winter and do a bit of yoga, we were more than happy with what we found.
We even learnt what 'permaculture' means.

As well as rejuvenating our vitamin-D deprived skin and becoming the yoga teacher's favourite class ever (really, we gave her a goodbye card and she cried), we did do some things of actual use with our six weeks.

Lots and lots and lots of weeding. It became a bit of a source of tension between the two guys in charge about how much time we should spend on weeding and how much on other (more fun) projects. Thankfully, for the most part, the arrow swung more into the 'fun' part of the chart. But still, no chemicals means a lot of weeds...it is even almost theraputic sometimes- depending on how much you have already done and what is left stretching out in front of you.

We planted seeds and harvested sprouts and lettuces, watered plants and walked the dogs, took ourselves right back into the pioneer age with our 'incredible human-powered soil-sifting device' (think a huge metal sheet with holes in it which two people shake over a wheel barrow while somebody shovels dirt on it, all to a specially devised chant...it was very, very funny and very, very permaculture), cooked amazing vegetarian feasts everyday and did a few general maintenancy type jobs that every farm has a plethora of.

More memorably though...we built a very impressive outdoor kitchen, all the way from donning our architect hats and drawing up plans to eating some wonderfully alfresco lunches under the sun. We built the coolest pizza oven ever (after much trial and error and a little fire fiasco that left the cat's face a little blacker than it was when it was built) and had a very gourmet pizza party in honour of our wonderful yoga teacher, which concluded with us dancing on our kitchen bench (in order to test its strength, you understand). And we had the 'marmalade' day, which wasn't so much fun as memorable in the fact that the following night I actually dreamt I was still sitting at the table peeling mandarins and thereafter, whenever Peter (one of the founding members of the Goat Gang) offered us a mandarin it was always 'guys, who wants a piece of marmalade?'.

'After all this work you must have been exhausted' I hear you say, 'you know, all work and all that...'. Ahh, but you see...we worked only 5 hours a day 5 days a week, which left plenty of leisure time for things like...band practice:

fruit picking:

sunset gazing from the roof (our internet hotspot):

camping on the beach:

hanging with the Goat Gang (now I will explain...so called because two of the members- you can guess which- very, very earnestly spent a lot of (wasted) time trying to convince Mark that having goats on the farm was probably the best idea ever and also because we scaled the side of a mountain in the manner of monkeys...no no no sorry, goats)

and smoking the most deliberated over home-made shisha ever:

So. You can probably guess from the tone of this article but I will reiterate for you anyway: we really, really liked North Cyprus. It is super easy to travel around, all you have to do is stick out your thumb and wait for a minute or two (so easy in fact that we even had hitch-hiking races), the weather is amazing and the people we met were fantastic. The farm may not be quite as permaculturally, self-sufficiently organic as some volunteers expect but, as for us, we got to work in the garden everyday, do lots of yoga with the most awesome mini yoga teacher ever and just generally hang out with some very fun people. And for that we are very grateful.

lives in still...

And once again we are saying hello from this dark little northern island, searching for the sun and shivering in our goosepimpled skins; our time in Cyprus could be a dream but for our slightly browner skin, blonder hair, and these pictures...

After I made a very successful little batch of mandarin marmalade from some of the farm's glut of citrus, we all somehow found ourselves spending an entire day peeling and deseeding mandarins for a massive batch to sell at the English market. Then we spent the evening boiling it over an open fire in a huge cauldron. Double double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble...

The fruit (haha) of our labour.

And trying to convince all the English expats that they need our marmalade... 

                    Cooking our dinner while we camp...there seems to be a bit of a theme here...                                

This is what happens when you leave Will in charge of the campfire. 

The alien landscapes of this amazing camping spot. Gaudi in nature I thought.

The beginnings of what is to be the coolest pizza oven in the history of the universe.

Have you ever seen a pizza oven with footprints on the roof?

The fire-breathing hell cat that spits out pizzas of all kinds

And our outside kitchen continues to grow...from an empty grassy patch near the herb garden to benches, swivel stools, a pizza oven and a VERY perma-culture bamboo floor. Aren't we amazing?

The first supper.

An old monastery that our wonderful yoga teacher recommended. Nothing remarkable here, though a hitch-hiking race meant that we arrived crammed in the back of a very rickety old van whose doors were held closed with wire- and we didn't win the race...

           See those cliffs there? We climbed 'em. We call ourselves The Goat Gang and we are               the coolest. Once we got to the top of the mountain, for want of anything else to do, we decided to climb over a wall we found. Then we discovered we had accidently broken into the castle that sits atop the rocks, and that it was closed and that we had to break out of it again in order to hitch-hike back into town.

We need sustenance before we make the very impressive climb up the rock face.

The weekly lettuce harvest. Not too interesting so I tried to get artistic.

Keeping bees in the mountains of North Cyprus.

We come from all over to play guitar and smoke from a hand-made shisha...

Bathe in herbs?

Chamomile made walking around the farm a very pretty exercise.

'The Guru's Apprentices' doing yoga on the roof. 

So it was real after all...in a minute I will tell you some stories about it.