Tortuga Lodge got hold of Willis in September of 2014, after he’d been guiding for another hotel. But as a Rankin, his pedigree in Tortuguero reaches way back. Willis’s great grandfather was a British captain, whose ship ranked amongst those frequenting the coast to fish and trade in turtle meat. He first arrived in Tortuguero in 1920, making him part of the second family to do so.
Captain Rankin traveled much of the Caribbean coast, and Willis’s grandfather was born in San Andreas, a strangely Columbian island located off the coast of Nicaragua. Durhan Rankin, Willis’s grandfather, got to Tortuguero in 1936 and founded what today are 7 different nuclear families. With the town’s isolation far more pronounced at the time, Willis’s grandmother was a longtime Tortuguero midwife.
Durhan worked with Tortuguero’s original conservationist, the U.S biologist Archie Carr, who pushed the Costa Rican government towards the creation of the park. He helped Carr count and tag the turtles arriving on the beach, research that drove his arguments for conservation. To do so Durhan walked the beach from Tortuguero to Parismina, a journey of several nights with the immense jungle to one side and the roiling Caribbean to the other.
Willis speaks English, Spanish and the Caribbean patois dialect. He says he’ll never forget the day he watched a jaguar swim, crossing the river in Cano Negro, one of the park’s canals. Nor will he and his wife Flor de Maria ever forget the Christmas of 2005, the day his first son Keyrron was born. Today he has two other children, a son Kenny and a daughter Kiara, to whom he dedicates all his time not spent guiding.
Already our guests have been letting us know they’re impressed with Willis’s eye for wildlife and deep area knowledge.
