Speedboat races on the Laguna.
Apr 16, 2011
Apr 14, 2011
Catemaco Noise
Zoning laws are a mystery in Catemaco. You may be living on a quiet residential street, and wake up one morning with a tractor repair station or a cantina as your neighbor.
Add your neighbor's rooster or his newly bought boom box blaring at 100 decibels, and you'll regret you left New York City.
Daytime noises are excruciating. There is a tourist train zipping along the Catemaco centro with full blast loudspeakers of obnoxious music. (He piped it down after I repeatedly made fun of him in my Spanish news pages).
Then there are the two local intermittent news rags who cross town in beaten up junkers peddling mostly gruesome news. The most recent aberration was their peddling "two killed" news among the tourists along the Malecon on one of the busier weekends.
Add to that any merchant who has a vehicle and a giant loudspeaker and let him loose on the streets of Catemaco peddling his wares.
The traditional noises of Catemaco are slowly disappearing like the tenor of the peanut seller, the tinkle of the knife sharpener, the whiste of the pine oil seller and many more.
For a while Catemaco was inundated with motorized tortilla sellers, whose moped beep beeps drove me nuts to the point I stored eggs on my patio to throw at them.
I don`t even want to mention the 3 cantinas within a rock throw of my current house. By now I have memorized every song on their juke boxes blaring way beyond my bed time.
The Zona Rosa of Catemaco in the last few years has begun to emulate Cancun with second story open air discos, probably hearable in Veracruz City. I bitched and bitched about them, too and apparently you can now only hear them within a 6 block range.
I don't really consider this objectionable noise, but the cacaphony of the birds along the Malecon in the early morning and late afternoon, put all the above noises to shame. And of course they shit on you when you walk below them.
I also have the pleasure of a troop of tourist promoters congregating on my corner. On a busy weekend, their screams of "lancha, lancha" and general mayhem add to the local noise industry.
Way after midnight, the Malecon is in full swing as Catemaco's Daytona speedway, and there are dozens of damaged post, fences, and landmarks to show their mettle. Of course there are no cops and sooner or later I expect to listen to the funereal music of death announcers also adding to the Catemaco noise mileu.
Fortunately, in the last years, the incidence of firecrackers has diminished in beautiful downtown Catemaco. For many years I was pretending to live in a war zone and diving below my desk when something sounding like a 200 mm mortar exploded in my living room.
Of course there are local inhabitants like the Fool on the Hill who still think Catemaco is a quiet little town. Of course he only has the crunch of his neighboring rock crusher to enjoy while reading this.
Add your neighbor's rooster or his newly bought boom box blaring at 100 decibels, and you'll regret you left New York City.
Daytime noises are excruciating. There is a tourist train zipping along the Catemaco centro with full blast loudspeakers of obnoxious music. (He piped it down after I repeatedly made fun of him in my Spanish news pages).
Then there are the two local intermittent news rags who cross town in beaten up junkers peddling mostly gruesome news. The most recent aberration was their peddling "two killed" news among the tourists along the Malecon on one of the busier weekends.
Add to that any merchant who has a vehicle and a giant loudspeaker and let him loose on the streets of Catemaco peddling his wares.
The traditional noises of Catemaco are slowly disappearing like the tenor of the peanut seller, the tinkle of the knife sharpener, the whiste of the pine oil seller and many more.
For a while Catemaco was inundated with motorized tortilla sellers, whose moped beep beeps drove me nuts to the point I stored eggs on my patio to throw at them.
I don`t even want to mention the 3 cantinas within a rock throw of my current house. By now I have memorized every song on their juke boxes blaring way beyond my bed time.
The Zona Rosa of Catemaco in the last few years has begun to emulate Cancun with second story open air discos, probably hearable in Veracruz City. I bitched and bitched about them, too and apparently you can now only hear them within a 6 block range.
I don't really consider this objectionable noise, but the cacaphony of the birds along the Malecon in the early morning and late afternoon, put all the above noises to shame. And of course they shit on you when you walk below them.
I also have the pleasure of a troop of tourist promoters congregating on my corner. On a busy weekend, their screams of "lancha, lancha" and general mayhem add to the local noise industry.
Way after midnight, the Malecon is in full swing as Catemaco's Daytona speedway, and there are dozens of damaged post, fences, and landmarks to show their mettle. Of course there are no cops and sooner or later I expect to listen to the funereal music of death announcers also adding to the Catemaco noise mileu.
Fortunately, in the last years, the incidence of firecrackers has diminished in beautiful downtown Catemaco. For many years I was pretending to live in a war zone and diving below my desk when something sounding like a 200 mm mortar exploded in my living room.
Of course there are local inhabitants like the Fool on the Hill who still think Catemaco is a quiet little town. Of course he only has the crunch of his neighboring rock crusher to enjoy while reading this.
Apr 9, 2011
Catemaco Facebook
Facebook is the worst aspect of the internet since Al Gore invented it. I thoroughly dislike the site because of its conformity, restrictions and unintelligible set of instructions to do anything beyond a basic profile. Heck AOL groups was better than that 15 years ago, and I have been desperately waiting for GOOGLE to come up with a Facebook killer. But I suspect I missed the lancha.
I now have 1500 Facebook "friends". The local mayor has 4400. That makes Catemaco Noticias the second most popular destination for anything related to Catemaco on the Facebook internet. I accumulated maybe a quarter of these "friends" by fishing for Catemaco residents or natives. But from there it snowballed with "friend" applications pouring in.
Until a few months ago it was very difficult to list Catemaco as a place of origin or residence, that's why the following figures are suspect. Of my 1500 "friends" about 275 list Catemaco as their hometown, another 275+/- list Catemaco as their residence. Obviously there is an overlap, and I estimate that perhaps a maximum of 500 have anything to do with Catemaco. And in true Facebook stupidity the 99 or more percent Spanish speakers whose home or residence is Catemaco, get to read about their town on a Wikipedia English version.
Curiously the mayor's 4400 friends show about the same distribution. And that is noteworthy because it demonstrates the reinforcement that his page gets from the political effort that his PRI party is making to dominate the political aspect of Facebook in preparation for the next Mexican presidential election.
Most of my "friends" seem to have the IQ of one of the monkeys on the islands of Catemaco, and I spend considerable time clicking on the little X next to their names to have them disappear from my Facebook "news wall", so that I don`t have to read their drivel. But surprisingly there are many with informed commentary and some gorgeous photos. And I actually dug up some old pals and made a handful of new acquantainces.
My objective is for my 1500 "friends" to read my drivel, not the other way around. And that has been successful. Sites that I have linked to on www.catemaco.info have shown considerable increase in readership.
My Facebook sites:
Catemaco Noticias - original, locked, discontinued
Catemaco Agenda - new, open (successor to Don Gringo Notas because it allows comments that I can gleefully delete if they come from river rats.)
Catemaco Tourism - reserved for the nice things of Catemaco
Catemaco Tourism - reserved for the nice things of Catemaco
And yes I have a personal Facebook page, but that is so locked and private, that even I have a hard time entering it.
Apr 5, 2011
Catemaco Measures
I've been measuring, and so apparently has a government agency in Catemaco, trying to figure out whether water runs downhill. The purported intent is to renew the water supply lines of the city, which relatively has no problem, while the out lying hill communities all still depend on "whenever" deliveries of water by "pipas" (600 gallon water trucks).
About 10 years ago, the state of Veracruz analyzed Catemaco, and promoted the suggestion that nothing over 4 stories should be built in Catemaco. So of course, the first one to erect a 5 story apartment building without an elevator or parking lot was the then and now cacique (political boss) of Los Tuxtlas, Jorge Uscanga.
A few years ago, a now dead gringo, in cahoots with the then mayor, snagged a piece of federal property on the Malecon of Catemaco and began to build what I call the "Hotel Monster". He dropped dead and his daughter is now looking for 7 millon pesos for a concrete abortion. That one too was planned to go above 5 stories.
There are a few homes in Catemaco desperate to have a view of the lake, and some reach as high as six stories.
My current favorite is the owner of a lot, a block west of the Malecon, who happily lived in a one story shack, but apparently got rich off something and is now in the process of erecting a fifth story on his 20x40 foot lot without ever having provided foundations.
But that's O.K. In Catemaco, and the way I see it, in most of Mexico, where you can invent your own building codes, while waiting for the zone's next earthquake, which incidentally has affected much of Veracruz but has fortunately bypassed Catemaco. Or maybe that was because everyone lived in grass shacks, because there is no mortar presence before 1896.
Anyway, as for measures, the Catemaco lake is supposed to be 340 meter above sea level. That varies, by which Mexican rocket scientist you want to believe, by about 50 meters. That little bit of altitude really matters! Because generally the higher you are the cooler you are. The "sea breezes" of the lake help to cool Catemaco from the now intolerable heat indexes in the lowlands of Veracruz.
The Catemaco lake is now near its record lows, which seriously affects the local hydroelectric plant which was responsible for flooding Catemaco a year ago. (supposedy on orders from the then Veracruz governor more worried about down stream flooding).
If you read catemaco.info, you would know that some believe that more water disappears from the lake than gets channelled through its only outlet, the "Rio Grande de Catemaco". Some believe there are cracks in the lake bottom that permit water to sieve out. Again, if you saw the fault map hidden somewhere in catemaco.info, that seems plausible.
Anyway my unprofessional measure of the lake height between high and low is 8 feet, at the extreme, which I have only seen once in 9 years. At present the lake could descend another 6 inches. After that, I will seriously consider that something "pulled the plug".
Update: Ironically a 6.5 or 6.7 earthquake epicentered about 80 miles to the SE shook the area a day after posting this. Some felt it, I didn't. But it was earthshaking news in hundreds of writeups.
About 10 years ago, the state of Veracruz analyzed Catemaco, and promoted the suggestion that nothing over 4 stories should be built in Catemaco. So of course, the first one to erect a 5 story apartment building without an elevator or parking lot was the then and now cacique (political boss) of Los Tuxtlas, Jorge Uscanga.
A few years ago, a now dead gringo, in cahoots with the then mayor, snagged a piece of federal property on the Malecon of Catemaco and began to build what I call the "Hotel Monster". He dropped dead and his daughter is now looking for 7 millon pesos for a concrete abortion. That one too was planned to go above 5 stories.
There are a few homes in Catemaco desperate to have a view of the lake, and some reach as high as six stories.
My current favorite is the owner of a lot, a block west of the Malecon, who happily lived in a one story shack, but apparently got rich off something and is now in the process of erecting a fifth story on his 20x40 foot lot without ever having provided foundations.
But that's O.K. In Catemaco, and the way I see it, in most of Mexico, where you can invent your own building codes, while waiting for the zone's next earthquake, which incidentally has affected much of Veracruz but has fortunately bypassed Catemaco. Or maybe that was because everyone lived in grass shacks, because there is no mortar presence before 1896.
Anyway, as for measures, the Catemaco lake is supposed to be 340 meter above sea level. That varies, by which Mexican rocket scientist you want to believe, by about 50 meters. That little bit of altitude really matters! Because generally the higher you are the cooler you are. The "sea breezes" of the lake help to cool Catemaco from the now intolerable heat indexes in the lowlands of Veracruz.
The Catemaco lake is now near its record lows, which seriously affects the local hydroelectric plant which was responsible for flooding Catemaco a year ago. (supposedy on orders from the then Veracruz governor more worried about down stream flooding).
If you read catemaco.info, you would know that some believe that more water disappears from the lake than gets channelled through its only outlet, the "Rio Grande de Catemaco". Some believe there are cracks in the lake bottom that permit water to sieve out. Again, if you saw the fault map hidden somewhere in catemaco.info, that seems plausible.
Anyway my unprofessional measure of the lake height between high and low is 8 feet, at the extreme, which I have only seen once in 9 years. At present the lake could descend another 6 inches. After that, I will seriously consider that something "pulled the plug".
Update: Ironically a 6.5 or 6.7 earthquake epicentered about 80 miles to the SE shook the area a day after posting this. Some felt it, I didn't. But it was earthshaking news in hundreds of writeups.
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