Tempestuous times at Iracambi with heavy rains and raging rivers

For those of you who have been following my blog lately you have seen what I believe are two promises of photos of recent "floods" we had in the area due to torrential downpour and over flowing river banks. If you don't believe me after the photo above take a look at the next few. The first in each set was taken on Tuesday the 24th and the second few days later from about the same position. The rain that produced the first of each set was rather hard and lasted for about an hour and it was amazing to come down to the kitchen area and see how the river was being swept away. A few days later when I made the trek down to Casa do Barro I saw that one of the foot bridges we use had been clearly moved by the floods.

As we are in autumn heading in to winter the rain is supposed to lessen and I wonder if this was the last real rainy week I will see here at Iracambi. The bridge we use to cross and head up the hill is almost not necessary as seen in the above photo.

I sure wouldn't have tried to cross this frothing waterway on this day, especially as our foot bridge which is barely visible (mostly underwater) in the middle patch of trees near the far side of the bank, was inaccessible and in danger of being swept away. The furor of this normally calm river (almost stream) was quite amazing.

The group of trees almost to the far right of this picture is the same one where the footbridge was during the above shot and amazingly enough it survived. I stood in almost the same position to take this photo and if I didn't tell you there was water coming down you almost might not believe me.

This is the path we walk across to get to the viveiro (nursery), some trails, and head to part of the community and on this day it was only crossable in boots or bare feet but even then moving rather swiftly from left to right.

Here is that same path!!!! These final two were just some of the calm after the storm which gave a good sign that drier more peaceful times were on their way.
What a lovely way to end a photo story almost as nice as a sunset!

Offline and doing just fine....in fact getting a lot done on my capstone proposal and more.

Since last Tuesday, not counting today, we have had internet at Iracambi for just 24 hours and although unwanted and a pain at times it turned out to be a great help for me at least. I am in the midst of my capstone proposal for The School for International Training which I plan to have done and off to SIT in a week. While I did need the net to do research especially for my literature review and bibliography I really didn't need it to distract me with my blog, Facebook, MySpace and more.
The internet returned this morning and was off through a combination of company banking error as they thought we hadn't paid our account and thus they cut us off and technical mess up here as a cord was not properly in place. It is nice to be back online but in truth it was good to have less distractions than normal this past week as I was working on my proposal. Now, I just have to make sure not to get too distracted now that I am online again. As I promised a week ago the pictures of Iracambi's raging river and flooded areas will be coming up soon as I sure haven't forgotten. I just need to get some of the "drier" times here so that you can appreciate the bubbling, red, fast moving river we experienced after a drenching downpour.
In other news Alana, who has been helping me a ton with my proposal, taught me how to make eggplant Parmesan night for dinner, which was enjoyed by all and is one of my favorite dishes. Tonight we will be making "couve" Mocambican style complete with ground peanuts and coconut milk. It will actually be my first time trying this dish outside of Mocambique and will be complemented with equally nice tomato and coconut rice which is ohhh sooo nice. If it goes off well then Carminha our great lunch time cook has asked me to show her how to do it too!!! YUMMY!!!!

Blacked out, off line and out of touch. Electricity and internet back, still waiting on the phone.

If you are one of the many visitors from Canada, the US, UK, South Africa or Australia or myriad of other countries who has visited my blog in the last few days you might have wondered why I haven't updated my blog since Sunday. Well the reason is simple, Tuesday around 1:30 PM a rain storm descended upon Iracambi with thunder and lighting and when it was over some 45 minutes later we were without power and internet and later in the evening when the battery had died out telephone as well. As you might guess this made it just a bit hard to update my blog and hence the 3 day hiatus.

To be honest I don't have much to share other than that we now have internet and electricity the two necessary components that when added to my laptop make this entry possible. Our telephone is a different story as it is a "rural cellular" and the receiver is located on a hillside above us. Yes, any of us could walk up there to reset the switch and get it back on but that would be too easy. So, why haven't we? Well, it is simple the key to open up the receiver is with one of the people who works for the "fazenda" (farm) and as far as I know he has yet to bring the key by so that we can open the box, flip the switch and get our phone back. In fact I spent over three hours this morning going around the property to get to a phone that worked, call the internet and telephone people, find the guy, Joao, with the key and try and get us back online. Tomorrow or over this weekend you can look forward to pics I took on Tuesday of the river below our kitchen running very high/flooding after the rain that took out our communication tools. With pics that compare how it looks today and how it looked after the rain you will see that the river after the rain really was overflowing, fast and muddy. Gotta run as I am off to cook dinner with Gustavo.