We came here for the weekend to see the south end of Baja, make the presentation about our journey for the kids from the local community and swim in the (finally) warm sea. It's been already more than one month we are here and we are still not ready to leave this place :-) First we wanted to volunteer for Friends of Cabo Pulmo, what is local NGO which helps with nature protection of Cabo Pulmo Marine National Park and with protection of the sea turtles. We found them on Helpx and they actually invited us to come and make the presentation, but they already had a volunteer (Ian from Ireland, very soon we became good friends), so the plan was that we will be here only for a few days to look around, maybe do some snorkelling.
When we were about to leave, Gris, one of the locals, came and asked us for help on the building of her souvenir/art "stuff" shop. She and her husband (actually he is a park ranger) were building cob house (or adobe house?) by themselves. Naturally we wanted to help them, we are very interested in this type of buildings (we want to build our own house also from adobe :-)). So since then we are working with them, snorkelling almost every day or hiking in the desert. Danny (Gris's husband) took us on the sea to see the whales, snorkel with sea lions and showed us some really nice parts of local coral reef (the only coral reef in the Sea of Cortes) and also some of his duties as kick out stupid gringos on the yacht from boundaries of National Park (they were fishing). Time runs so quickly here, usually we wake up with the sun, sometimes we snorkel right in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon (every time we've seen something new, we found nearly everything what lives here in this time of season, like eels, rays, the tons of fish of all kinds and colours and also one turtle, only the sharks are still successfully hiding from us) and for the rest of day we play with cob. Building the house from adobe is great experience, you can literally build entire house (at least the walls, that is what we do) with your hands, without any special tools, all what you need is clay, sand, hay, water and bucket :-) And believe me, during the hot days isn't better place to stay than in the adobe house. Even when outside is nearly 30°C (and it is still "winter" here) in our house is nicely cold (for instance now I am writing this blog in one of these "ordinary" concrete/brick houses and it's night and today was quite cold day but it's still very warm here and I feel like I can't breath - well, that's maybe also because we sleep on the beach in tent without flysheet, so now we are used to fresh air (especially after nine months of travelling)). Our work on the house is also quite creative, we already built one mosaic in the shape of the whale from the glass bottles (we used almost 300 bottles and it's about three meters long and it took one week of extensive work) and now we are working on the mosaic of turtle and the last one will be the logo of the art shop. Only disadvantage is, that it takes a lot of time because it is only two of us, but here everybody has a lot of time, no rush, if people in Mexico have something, it is time :-) So how long we will be here? At least until we finish the house but maybe we will stay here a little bit longer even after that, we will see... One thing is sure now, when we leave this place Baška will be pretty fluent in spanish, she can understand nearly everything right now :-)
