Surprise! We bought some land in the Amazon Jungle! What do you think? I hope you can come visit sometime. You can also watch and share this video on Facebook and YouTube.

Doc and I purchased this hectare (2.5 acres) on Rio Jatunyacu, about 30 minutes southwest of Tena, Ecuador. The views from this property are absolutely amazing and it's an incredibly peaceful place to be. Check out the crazy bridge we cross to get there! 

Rio Jatunyacu is one of the most popular rivers in the area for rafting and kayaking. I believe it's a level three. On any given day, you'll see rafters and kayakers float by. Actually while I was filming this video, a large group floated by, which you can see in the video around the 3:15 mark. 

We'd actually been rafting on this river before a while back, long before we were looking at property for sale. Our friends Erin Patricia and Tony at Pakay Hostal & Tours took us on our first rafting trip back in Oct 2020.

Why THIS land?

We had been looking for land on a river for about 8 months before we came across this gem. What attracted us most to this particular property was how much river frontage it offers. The land is shaped like a triangle with the longest of the three sides facing the river. Whereas we had come across many river adjacent properties during our search that were similar size, but had very little river frontage.

For some reason in Ecuador, people like to divide up their land into thin 50-100meter strips and sell it off, which I hate because that type of layout doesn't offer any privacy from your neighbors and typically doesn't have much land access or river frontage. On our land, we can be in the middle of the property and not see any neighbors or the road while still having a magnificent river view.

We also appreciated how elevated this property is — about 10 meters (30 feet) above the river. Some of the properties we'd looked at were easy flooded, whereas it would take an epic biblical flood for the river to reach us where we're at. 

What are you going to do with it?

We actually purchased this property 6 months ago, but I had to leave Ecuador immediately after for visa reasons, so this is the first time I'm seeing the land since I've been back. In the meantime while I was away, Doc had been working on cleaning it up and planting trees to help with erosion.

Right now growing wild on the land we've got avocados, cacao, papayas, plantains, guava, coffee, and more. Over the next few years, we are going to plant hundreds more trees and plants including more of the above, cacao blanco (my favorite Ecuadorian treat), guayusa, palms, oranges, bananas, guanabana, and probably some plants I've never even heard of yet. The weather is hot and humid year round since we are located on the equator, so the sky's the limit in terms of what we can grow.

Since filming this video, we tried making our own chocolate using our wild grown cacao, and we failed miserably! Roasting the beans came out well, which you can see in the photo below, but the chocolate we tried to make next came out horrible. We later learned that we weren't using the right equipment to grind the chocolate. Next attempt will be better!

What will we do next with the land? Time will tell! We might build a small house on it in the future or potentially use it for a tourism project. We've also thought about constructing a giant bird statue along the river for kayakers and rafters to enjoy. If nothing else, we'll simply preserve it and leave it better than we found it.

In the meantime though, we will plant hundreds of trees and continue developing a biodiverse ecosystem to attract more birds and wildlife. I'll keep you in the loop in the coming years about our progress.

Join my friends list or follow me on Facebook and Instagram if you'd like to keep up with the project. And if you're ever near Tena, Ecuador — give us a shout and we'll take you out there to see it!