Cabanas Yankuam

My little corner of Ecuador has been trying to improve tourism for a while. It’s one of their goals to generate some cash flow. That being said, there is no tourism in my site. Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen two tourists. And as far as I could tell, the only money they brought into the town was for the 10 bucks they paid to rent a two person room for the night. They didn’t even buy dinner. I was so excited to see other gringos I invited them to dinner. Tuna tacos. Mmmmmm.
The only tourism thing we have going on for us is one little cabin in the jungle. And the cabanas have a truck, so they usually pick up tourists from the city and bring them straight to the cabanas, bypassing all of the little towns along the way that could use the gringo money.
Anyway, I’m trying to help develop tourism as a little side project of mine. This weekend I went to the cabanas to speak with the owner to bounce ideas off one another. I got there just in time to hop on a jungle tour boat with a total bird nerd and his wife (Bryan: I would love to see the two of you engaged in a mental fight to the death using only knowledge of Orange Throated Tanagers) and a 60 year old hippie on a 6 year (yes YEAR) backpacking trip through south America.
We went to “the Labyrinths” to hike and look for rare birds. The hike was cool, but the dude never saw his bird. That didn’t stop him from making us wait a buttload of time to try and encounter it. During this time, I managed to swing on vine like Tarzan, then a little while later I caught a wild boar with my bare hands. Yes, it’s true, I did. Never mind that it was about 2 days old, and only needed a bare hand, not hands, to catch it.
This is how it went down. It waddled across the path, the guide and I got really excited, and we ran after it to try to catch it. We didn’t think about the fact that baby wild animals usually have mother wild animals nearby, and that these mother wild animals are usually pretty pissed off. Luckily, the mother wasn’t nearby, and as I held the cute little piglet in my hand, it dawned on me how lucky I was to NOT have a 300 pound tusked animal disemboweling me.
At this point I was ready to release it back into the wild. The only reason I wanted to catch it was to saw that I caught a wild boar with my bare hands. And I did say that…twice now. Mission accomplished. Anyway, a different tour group came by, and one of the women decided that she was going to take the boar and raise it. We tried to argue with her, but she was an idiot, and wouldn’t listen. When we got back to the boats, we found out that they also thought it would be a good idea to take a baby bird and one of those giant centipede things from the jungle. They lost interest in the bird as soon as they stole it, so as the only person living on the continent in my tour group the charge fell on me to take care of it. Which I did. I named him Mordachay (or however you spell that). He died 2 days later. I tried my best to rear him, but his life ended by me shoveling him to death after he quit eating and turned all stiff on me.