How noisy am I? I’ve never asked myself what my acoustic footprint was until now because I’ve only ever really been in built-up areas. Now I’m in a place where human-generated noise isn’t really a thing.

Here’s my list, representing all of humanity in my 2-3 square kilometres;

• movement: footsteps and – rarely – the clatter of a heavy awkward bike
• water: taps, showers, garden hoses and sprinklers, toilet flush
• open and shut and overhead: doors, screens, windows, fans
• electronics: YouTube and Duolingo talking at me
• talking to people (and also to cats, sigh)

The jungle soundscape is magnificently panoramic.

Wind: The breeze runs east to west down the slope of the crater, a mass of air crashing into billions of leaves, fronds and branches. A vast roiling green ocean all around my jungle lighthouse.

Rain: brief, hyper-local spatter on roof tiles and vegetation.

Bugs and amphibians: “crickets” is taken to mean silence in our city world. Here, it is the very opposite. Countless critters, somehow in unison, three chirps per second, and hearty croaks, hours on end, through the night.

Bugs – indoor studio session: imagine the insect version of wayward frat boys, returning home from the pub unable to find their room. Whap, whirr, buzz into lights, walls and furniture. And the next morning you find them passed out on the hallway floor or lamely dragging themselves to a balcony.

Birds: all the usual avian peeps and warbles we know, richly overlaid with an exotic explosion of dorky gloops, synth-pop zoinks, and over-caffeinated fiddly-dees.

Do
/doo/

Verb

1. perform (an action, the precise nature of which is often unspecified)
2. achieve or complete
3. act or behave in a specified way
4. be suitable or acceptable

“What are you doing there?” is a reasonable question to which I don’t have the standard answers. The things I will not be doing include;

• working for money
• studying to achieve credentials
• travelling much beyond where I am here in El Valle

For the next three months I only have two things to do;

• live
• feed three cats, twice a day

I get to do this in a big well-appointed house nestled in a jungle. Power, plumbing, Internet, Netflix. No human neighbours in sight. A thirty minute walk gets me to a small town in a small country where I don’t speak much of the local language, and have no friends (yet) or family.

Does that sound like a good time to you? What would you do with an abundance of time and freedom and other resources under these conditions? Is slowing down, doing less, for that length of time in these circumstances something you would actually enjoy? Or can a prolonged stay in a comfort zone cause discomfort? I get to find out, and will tell you about it.

Oh, and about those cats. I’ll write about them when they do something interesting.