by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 30, 2013 | Blog
The next day we caught a boat to Belize city.
We found a clean and safe place to stay and worked on finding our next destination. I found a Russian family on a farm outside of Belize city that was looking for volunteers. We got the address and the next day we were on a bus to the farm.
They had lived on the farm for about 2 years, but the place itself was very rustic. Very little running water and no sinks. We did have an inside sleeping space that we shared with a very bossy and demanding 12 year old. It seems his Mom left him there with this family for a couple of months while she went back to Russia with her new husband…
We were glad to have a bed, but when we started to get itchy we found out that our bed was covered in tiny little ants. These ants we found out are more like mites and they leave their saliva on your skin and it causes an itch that stays with you for weeks…
Each day we would wake up and do what ever we could to help on the farm. Rob was great at using his machete to chop down tall grasses and clear the land. I would help out with digging up potatoes and cleaning up. Each day was very hot and tiring, but Rob was glad to be working the land and I was glad to be there with him doing what I could.
The rules of Woofing is that you work for food and lodging, but the family didn’t really want to feed us…so we had to go into town to get food and that was a big struggle in and of itself. We had to hitch hike in and then take a long bus ride and then be there in town, which is dirty, loud and stressful…by the time we got back we would be very tired.
One day we were hitching into town and we got picked up by this man who said that he was looking for people to help him at his resort that his wife and he run. We told him we could help him and he was over joyed. We got his number and scheduled to come the next day.
We said good bye to our Russian family and we were on our way to our new destination.
by Joanna Albrecht | Apr 27, 2013 | Blog
Money goes fast when you are traveling…so we had to figure out a way to make money on the road. I do voice work and have a steady client so I had some money coming in from that. Rob codes websites and does graphic design work, so when we could find a place we would be doing our work. I think the most beautiful place Rob did coding was on the beach in Tulum. We were camping on the beach and in the morning we walked down the beach until we could find a place for him to sit at a table. We found a fancy resort type place and sat down, but they wanted to charge us for using the table, so we said…are there any free tables? and the man said, yes that one over there without an umbrella. So we sat all day and Rob worked away.
In those days we lived job to job, so the graphic design job he did got us to our next location. Then I would do a voice job and that would get us a little further…I suggested that we get a machete because there were days when we were really low on food and if we had a machete we could cut down coconuts, which we could quite easily live off of for a while if we needed to. (That machete became Rob’s very favorite thing in the whole world, besides his family and me.)
We tried to make it on our own, but there were times we got into trouble, and our families sent us money so we could get to our next location…our intention was always that we were going to make enough money to pay everyone back, but as it went, it was hard to have enough time to work and travel. Traveling all the time takes it out of you sometimes and there are not always perfect situations in which to work when you are on crowded buses or finding the next place to stay…
After Tulum we were at a bus stop and we met this man Jerry. Jerry was quite a character. He was vivacious and full of life. (and rum) We told him we were going to go to Synthesis, but couldn’t get on the list and he said, “I am not on the list, I am just going to show up!” So Rob and I looked at each other and said “Ok, we’re in!”
Off we were to the Synthesis party!
