30 before 30: #23 – Own a plot of land 

Completed: 4 Sept 2018

When it comes down to it, my pulse runs at the pace of a small village. I grew up in one.

Cresswell, 25 minutes outside Stoke in the middle of the Uk, is a little isolated. Pub, church, postbox. When I was a child there used to be a bus service that could pick you up on a Tuesday morning. The return service was Thursday morning. I didn’t get out much.

Next to my house there was a field. My dad once asked me what I’d do if I won the lottery and my small town dreams told him that I’d buy that field and put a go-kart track on it. Of course, for most lower-middle class Brits that’s the only time you’d really think of owning land; if you won the lottery.

But the world is not equal. I’m not lower-middle class here, and the price of land in Bolivia – where I now call home – is substantially lower than in the UK. I remember that pioneer land-owning dream creep into the back of my mind when I came back to Bolivia having bought a one-way ticket and a stake in a company. Maybe if things go well, I joked with a friend, I might be able to buy some land and build something for myself out there. That’d be nice. That’d be freedom wouldn’t it?

Porongo, 25 minutes outside of Santa Cruz, is a small town the other side of the river Piraí and it’s suited to the laid-back lifestyle. A step up from Cresswell, there’s a football pitch on the town square. Milk ice-creams and alligator meat are served from the small restaurants. Oh, and there’s fruit everywhere. Ever had an achachairú? You should. You should have several.

Go down the road that goes past the wooden Jesuit church for 10 minutes from that plaza and there’s a 500m2 plot of land that is mine. Next to it is a 500m2 plot of land owned by my friend and business partner, Joe.

Credit where credit’s due; this was his idea. The seller wasn’t going to sell anything less than 1000m2 at a time, and neither of us had the money for the whole chunk- so now we individually own half each.

Like most things that involve lawyers in Bolivia, no-one really knows what they’re doing. But anything worth doing (especially in the developing world) takes much longer and costs more than the initial, wildly-optimistic timeframe and price that you start off with. When it comes down to it, it’s a good deal when the raw price of the land is $15 a m2 though. A damn good deal.

It’s a long rectangle, so maybe a go-kart track isn’t the best idea. It’s much more suited to archery, a bowling alley or a shooting range. Whatever it’s good for, 500m2 of potential is my favourite thing about it now. If I saved up, I could have a pool if I really really wanted. Or a treehouse. Or a bamboo forest. Or a fallout shelter for the apocalypse.

Santa Cruz has a cultural thing called quintas. It’s your house in the country and your weekend escape whenever you want it. Most wealthier families here will have one or share one and they’re just what you need to escape. That’s the aim right now. Something small for a little shelter and make the rest pretty with fruit trees and bamboo.

I’ve never done anything like this before. The land has a few youngish trees on it at the moment, but I feel there should be more. All I really know right now is that I’ll plant a tree in memory of a green-fingered friend of mine we lost, and then a few more to see if I can’t get some fruit to offer to weekend guests.

Joe and I have started potting around already. It’s mostly weeding and cleaning right now. Joe managed to put some grass down in a way that totally didn’t look like we’d just buried someone.

This adventure calls for its own blog and I’ll keep updating here with how things are going. We’re spending quieter weekends dropping by with better tools, beers and ideas each time we go. We have to fence off our bit (although we’re not separating our parts from each other) and then we’re just free to take it at our pace, though I hear the best time to plant here is in November.

It’s really the beginning of an adventure, but it’s a check off the list. Two down, twenty-eight to go. See the whole list and why I’m doing it here.

Days remaining: 280