Fernando Garcia, Rare manager, ecotourism promoter, explores the connection between the super grand slam in sport fishing and the ecotourism enterprise Community Tours Sian Ka’an.

For the saltwater sport fishing hobbyists, the super grand slam means that a person catches four species of fish in a single day: for instance, a tarpon, snook, permit, and bonefish. It is very difficult to have a super grand slam because each one of the species demands a lot of knowledge, skills, and luck, so it is rare and unique. That is why it is easier to be good with one or two species, but it is more difficult to achieve three or four at the same day. However, the hobbyist pursues a grand slam, no matter how much effort is needed. At each shot trying for a super grand slam, the sport fisher can be nervous, bouncy, bored, frustrated, anxious, or happy. Finally, a super grand slam provides a lot of fun and pride to those that achieve one in his or her life.

Fly-fishing in Sian Ka’an 

Rare enterprise Community Tours Sian Ka’an (CTSK), a locally owned ecotourism operation in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve on the Yucatán Peninsula, is trying for its own super grand slam. But it’s pursuing not fishes, but other trophies: market, quality, capability, and conservation. These are some characteristics of those “prizes.”

Market: CTSK is achieving great success running its four tours: Fly-fishing, bird watching, the Muyil forest and float tour, and the Punta Allen eco-adventure. Every month the number of visitors is growing, and it is very common that CTSK simultaneously runs two different tours in the same day. Twice in the last month the four tours were served in the same day. Similarly, it is more and more common that visitors take two CTSK tours in their vacations in Sian Ka’an, and last week a family participated in all the four.

Quality: “This is the highlight of my visit to Mexico” is an expression repeated again and again at the end of the CTSK tours and shows one part of the CTSK mission. With the support of Rare, CTSK has been able to design tours, train local guides, and organize operations, putting together the pieces so the results are unforgettable experiences provided by knowledgeable local guides in a pristine environment. But quality is not a final result, it is an attitude and process. As Pastor Caamal, one of the leader guides, says, “For CTSK to do better, all our work is not an option, it is an obligation. And not only for one person, but for everyone that is involved in the tours: guides, cooks, drivers, and administrative staff.”

Capability: A normal working day is 16 hours or more for the three full-time employees at CTSK. Similarly, the board of directors at CTSK works extra hours in order to make sure that the cooperatives are ready to deliver meals and tours day after day in a very complicated environment. I have seen several times that the major concern for CTSK members is how to enhance CTSK capacity in front of the growing demand for new products and new clients. It’s not just the issue of hiring more staff, but to recruit or train the kind of person that is social and environment-aware to deliver an experience about modern Mayan culture and a unique set of ecosystems.

Conservation: Under the leadership of CTSK, three different initiatives started this month: the bird observation stations, the clean-up campaigns, and waste management. The goal is to focus on some of the environmental challenges at Sian Ka’an and involve more of its residents on specific actions to alleviate the challenges. CTSK will establish three stations where guides and trainees can monitor bird populations. It will create the stations in areas where there is pressure to transform forest, wetlands, and savanna into hotels or residential areas. The clean-up campaigns are focused on picking up all the garbage on the beaches or next to the trails in Sian Ka’an. Finally, the garbage management begins with composting the organic garbage that results from the tours and keeping plastic bottles and cans for further recycling.
 
As in fishing for a grand slam, there is no certainty that CTSK people will have success with all four strategy arenas. But again like the grand slam, any progress that CTSK makes provides more excitement and fun. That is the root of the social energy that hopefully will transform ecotourism in Sian Ka’an.

Fernando Garcia, Rare’s Manager, Ecotourism Promotion, reports on his teaching stint at the Fisheries Fellows program in Baja California Sur.

I spent a week at the Fisheries Fellows training course, teaching site assessment, a personal passion. We talked about a basic question: How can we improve small-scale fisheries and at the same time promote marine biodiversity conservation? During this process I was thinking about similar questions, like “Can well planned ecotourism do something to preserve a valued threatened species? What is the major threat for it?”  Complexity, uncertainty, and limited resources are common obstacles to respond to those questions and reflect the underlying difficulties of many environmental challenges.

But in the rich menu of Rare’s tools developed to support local conservationists, site assessment is fascinating for me. Well, it is more that a tool, it is a process that involves several methodologies and tools. During the week I was teaching it to the fellows, they all had different ways of seeing how it could help them.

For Dulce it meant: “The site assessment consists of identifying the roots of the problems and describing its causes. This is the starting point to describe the kind of actions that are needed and what our role will be. It means to first understand the site and then propose an action.”

For Pablo: “It is a dynamic that enables different actors to create a collective vision about the overall goal of the project and how to pursue it. It is a good tool to engage local actors.”

For Adriana:  “If creating a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bounded goal is hard for an individual, it’s even harder for a group of people. That is the magic of this process. I have to say that with it I’m building a little trick-magic box to use in the community.”

While this tool seems useful for conservationist, local people will decide how valuable it is. We all visited four México, where Adriana will be working. We conducted a vision workshop there and came with an interesting concept model that shows what factors affect the threatened sea cucumber.

At the end, a local fisher, Maria Elena, approached us and said, “I’m very glad that the cooperatives in our community are agreed about the more important things to address. I think that working with Adriana, we can make some progress here.  Thank you for coming and explaining this to us.”

There is a Mexican song and an expression that says: “No soy monedita de oro, para caerles bien a todos” (“I’m not a gold medal wanted by everybody”) that basically is used when somebody realizes how hard it is to meet different expectations with a simple alternative, so there is a need for trade off. That is what happens with ecotourism entrepreneurs living in protected areas.

So in thinking about their role to promote conservation, job generation, and quality of services, it is common that people become overwhelmed and then start to ask what really matters in ecotourism. Local people, money, or natural habitats? Visitors satisfaction, employee satisfaction, or profits? Meet and enforce park regulations or new and catchy ecotours?  The answers to these questions finally lead to the models of ecotourism business that are developed by the people. I wonder how hard it is for local people  - on one side – to address some of those critical questions and on another side to show the way that those concerns are linked.

In the last couple of months I was interviewing visitors, guides, employees, park managers, tour operators, asking just one question: What could Community Tours Sian Ka’an [at Mexico’s Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve] do for you? Using their answers, the challenge was to articulate a business strategy that shows how to address all those expectations. The trick is to explain the relationship between expectations that apparently are separate, but in reality are intrinsic to the business. For instance, last week we met with representatives of one tour operator, and when they ask to reduce the price, the answer from CTSK was: that is not possible because the best way to provide your tourist an extraordinary experience in Sian Ka’an is to make sure they have professional local guides, have delicious meals, have to be covered by insurance, and so and so. After a while we agreed that CTSK is meeting the need of the tour operator with a comprehensive approach.

Similarly some days ago, the staff of CTSK was concerned about issues like social security and increase of salary, and again, a business strategic map helped to clarify how better staff helped to realize the profit goal of the business, but at the same time to articulate why conservation benefits are part of the duties of the CTSK staff. After some clarifications, it was agreed that the mutual interest is to keep experienced staff and at the same time increase revenues and conservation activities.

This strategy map is an ongoing tool and I’m pretty sure it will change over time. These talks have inspired CTSK to build a network of clients, partners, and staff that share a vision and some common goals. In this way CTSK is becoming a key player in the conservation role for Sian Ka’an. Hopefully with this role, CTSK could use another Mexican song (used in the soccer World Cup): “Si se puede! Si se puede!” Or “we can do it! We can do it!” (Fernando Garcia is Rare’s manager, ecotourism promoter, based in Mexico.)