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Published: June 24th 2008
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From Baños we headed straight to Montañita on the Pacific coast where we spent a few days. It was alright, a small village with lots of cafes, restaurants and bars. We felt it was mainly a place where people go to party, something that we were not really in the mood for. We spent our days relaxing on the beach which was nice. And of course one day we met God. Or at least that is who he claimed to be. We are pretty sure he wasn´t God at all, but rather a very disturbed man with serious mental health problems. He had some strange ideas about life involving an obsession with order and hierarchy combined with clear racist and sexist elements. He was writing a book which he thought would save the world and showed us his little note pad where he wrote down all his ideas. We both found it a bit scary to be face to face with such a clearly deluded individual and therefore opted not to challenge him too much...
After Montañita we went a bit further up along the coast to Puerto Lopez to do some whale watching as we read that the mating
season of Humpback Whales starts there in mid June sometime... We arranged a tour for the following morning and on our way there Monia suddenly stopped. Kiki, alarmed by Monia´s apparent distress asked her -WHAT? What happened? Monia wasn´t sure whether or not to show her, but then Kiki saw. There was a tiny little dead kitten lying there in the street. Then, suddenly we heard some whimpering sounds and discovered another little kitten who was still alive, he couldn´t have been more than a day old at most. We picked him up and took him with us asking people if there is an animal shelter or anyone who would be willing to take him. They told us there is nowhere and noone would agree to take him in, saying he´ll die anyway. Apparently kittens and puppies get dumped like that all the time. A local woman at least agreed to watch the kitten for us while we went on the tour. So off we went and saw the whales. It was truly amazing!! They came so close to our boat, so graceful, so big!! But so difficult to photograph... and the videos don´t really show how close they actually
were to our boat.
When we got back, the woman was waiting for us with the little kitten. We were not able to convince her to keep him. We asked around everywhere if anyone had a cat with kittens so that we could see if it would adopt our little one, but no. Someone told us about a woman called Maxima who apparently looks after a lot of animals. We went to see her, but even she wasn´t able to take him, saying he is too small, she doesn´t have the time to look after him. So what were we supposed to do?! We couldn´t just leave him. So we decided to care for him and at least try to give him a chance. We named him Marco Antonio.
There were no vets, no pet shops or anything, so we bought him some baby formula and fed him with surringe. We really tried everything, getting up several times during the night to feed him, keeping him warm in the box with a hot water bottle. We carried him around with us during the days, under our t-shirts to keep him warm. People were looking at us, probably laughing at the
two tourist girls trying to save the kitten. For a while we thought he was getting better, and we even talked about taking him with us, wondering how we could get him across the border to Peru, but after a couple of days we could see that he wasn´t doing so well. He was getting weaker and weaker and after some time he wasn´t even able to swallow the formula we were feeding him. He was clearly suffering, so finally we accepted that there was no hope. After much thought and discussion we decided that the only right thing to do would be to put an end to his suffering. Monia was not able to do it, so Kiki said -Ok ok, I´ll do it, and she did. She drowned him in a bucket. It was not a nice experience and it was horrible and traumatising to keep his little body under water, it felt like it took forever, but someone had to do it... We buried him on the beach and then we left town heading towards Peru.
Marco Antonio, our baby, we will never forget you.
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