Run Pig, Run!!

Gave the crew the morning to chill… good thing I did because I didn’t make it back to camp until about 11. I got some complaints about the fact that we were pretty much out of breakfast food. I really didn’t care so much because we were almost to the end of the trip and honestly I was a little sick of a handful of people in the group. We were supposed to have our final clean up and then leave by 2:30, but it turned out that only a couple of people showed up to help. The last day of every trip the group gets together and we clean all of our gear, the coolers, all the boxes that we carry our gear in, the van, etc. So people were so ready to leave the beach that they had all their personal stuff ready to go early and then they cleaned all the gear themselves.
I wanted to have the last night be kind of special, so I planned to go to Genisis Eco-Lodge in the village of Ek-Balam, near Vallodalid. I chanced upon the place last summer and really liked it, so now I try to squeeze it into all of my itineraries.

We got to Genisis and I showed the crew around the place. It was nice to see Lee, the owner, again. She is a really nice, inspirational woman. She moved down to the remote village all by herself and built the whole place pretty much solo.

We spent the rest of the afternoon chilling out. I had Lee and her crew cook dinner for us at night. She makes a lot of Mexican fusion type dishes and uses many local traditional Mayan ingredients. After dinner I chilled with a couple of the volunteers that work there. We were just having a couple of beers when Lee came in from outside and said that we should be prepared for a pig slaughtering that evening. Apparently the morning before we arrived all the guests at the lodge were awoken at 5 am to the death screams of a pig. Apparently the neighbors were heading to Cancun the next day for a wedding and their contribution to the party was pig meat. So they woke up, brought the pig right up to the wall that borders Lee’s place and then stuck it in the belly with a pointy stick. Lee said the guests at her place were running around in hysterics while the screaming pig slowly died. Sure enough, a half hour after Lee warned us, the neighbors put down pig number two for the day. Nasty, when you actually see or hear an animal get slaughtered (not an uncommon sight in these parts) it’s enough to make you want to only eat greens the rest of your life.