"These birds are so silly they forgot how to flee¨

Finally, the much-awaited-for post on Galapagos (well, actually two posts).

I was thinking of how to title this post, and I decided this quotation from the Bishop of Panama´s unintentional 1535 visit to the Galapagos would work (He was trying to go Peru but got lost). The other title I was choosing between was ¨We need a montage,¨mainly because of how many photos I plan on including in this message. I was trying to think of something Darwinian, evolutionary, tortoise-y, finch-y, or booby-y, but I couldn´t think of any.

For a little context: I am writing at an internet cafe in Loja, Ecuador. Tonight, I will end my Ecuador adventures and take a bus from here to Pirua, Peru (a town about 40 minutes across the border). So will begin my Peruvian ones. I expect them to be very similar.

On with the Galapagos.

A bit of information of how we booked our trip before I delve in. The mother of the family I stayed with in my first few days in Quito has a friend who is a travel agent. She talked to her friend and hooked us up with an eight-day, seven-night, four of those nights on a cruise ship trip. Our boat, the Encantada, is one of the oldest and smallest tour boats still operating in the Galapagos. Because there is a limit to the amount of tour boats that can be in Galapagos, there has been a shift ..to bigger ships that can fit more people.

The Galapagos Islands are special for a variety of reasons. They are a collection of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific that didn´t break of any continent, so any animal or plant that resides there had to travel there at some point and then evolved. Several ocean currents lead directly to the Galapagos. Because of these currents, there are sea turtles and penguins from Australia (think Finding Nemo) in these equatorial isles. Also, because there has been limited human presence on the islands, the animals do not show the fear of humans that other animals show. Therefore, you can walk within feet of a bird without it flying away or swim within meters of a shark without it biting you.

I don´t really know how to structure this e-mail because I have so much information about the islands, the animals, and my experiences. I warn you that it might be difficult to follow but I will try my best to make it reader-friendly.

Hallo, Polly. You for SCUBA?

We booked out trip through SCUBA Tours, and our guide for the cruise, Juan, is very similar to Claude from Along Came Polly. He grew up on the islands and just exudes island lifestyle. He was born in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, the biggest city on the Galapagos (16,000 people). There are three islands where there are cities on the Galapagos and there are about 40,000 Galapageños. On the first day and for a few days after that, Juan wore a Michigan basketball jersey he bought on a vacation to the United States (from the looks of the shirt, it was about 17 years ago).

In 1998, the Ecuadorian government passed a law to curb the amount of people living in Galapagos by saying that, in order to reside there, you must be born in the Galapagos or marry someone who is a citizen of Galapagos. Because of this law (and genuine love between the couples), there are many foreigners married to native Galapageños. Juan didn´t answer our question of whether there is a high divorce rate in the Galapagos. (Also, to be a tour guide on Galapagos, you must be a citizen of Galapagos. We passed someone on a trail whose first visit to Galapagos was on one of Juan´s tours. She married a tour company owner and is now a tour guide.)

He also has a pretty sweet work schedule. He takes cruises out for four weeks in a row and then gets two weeks off. Those two weeks don´t count to his vacation time, either. He says he likes to escape paradise during his time off, so he goes to the big cities.

He also says he wears shoes once a week: Sunday at church. Otherwise, it´s barefoot or, when he was lounging on the ship, some flip-flops. We walked on some volcanic surfaces which I thought were pretty jagged rocks, but Juan had no issue walking on them barefoot. He received some ooohs and aaaahs from tour groups we passed.

A hint of the Galapagos

As I walked off the plane at the Baltra Airport (A U.S: airbase in WWII that is now the main airport in Galapagos), a grasshopper jumped onto my shirt. And even when I try to get it off, it stayed there. This just shows you how trusting and friendly Galapagos animals are.

After we got on the boat and navigated for a few hours, we all unloaded onto a motorboat to go on a water safari in Black Turtle Cove off Santa Cruz Island. The brief trip, we saw red crabs, red mangrove, white mangrove, sea turtles, frigots, sea iguanas, black-tipped sharks, jumping mallet fish, and a feeding frenzy of birds on tuna fish. I´ll highlight a few of the facts that our guide told us about the animals we saw.

- Juan used to eat the crabs after church on Sundays as a treat. They are now a protected species on the Galapagos and can´t be eaten. He says they were delicious.
- Sea turtles will only eat red-rooted mangroves - not white-rooted - even though they grow in the same areas.
- Sea turtles can spend over an hour underwater before coming up. Darwin discovered this in one of his experiments.
- People used to mix the blood of the sea turtle with Coca Cola and go diving in the water believing that drinking the blood of a sea turtle will allow you to stay underwater longer.
- There is no such thing as a black and a green sea turtle. It´s the same species. It just depends on the amount of algae.

Organic shit

The next morning, we went for a short hike on Rabida Island to observe the cactus forests. Juan told us that the French once put a bid down to buy all the guano (bird crap) from the Galapagos for fertilizer, but the Ecuadorians said no, but this allowed Ari and I to make numerous jokes about Galapagos guano being organic because of the limited human presence and plenty of comments about the French also ensued.

Afterward, we went snorkeling along the beach there. Also hanging out on the beach were a bunch of sea lions. They´re pretty friendly, and the fathers make great yelping/heaving noises if you get too close. After snorkeling, we took a walk along the red beach (it´s red because it older and has a higher iron content than other beaches) and saw a group of pelicans just chilling. Now is when I insert my obligatory mixing cement in a pelican´s mouth comment.

If Russell Crowe attacks hotel employees with phones, what does he use in the middle of Galapagos?

On our second day on the cruise, we passed a spot where they filmed Master and Commander. I´ve never seen the film, but one of the Australians on our boat was really excited when we passed the spot. It is actually one of the most famous sites in all of Galapagos (the picture with beaches on the right and left divided by an isthmus). It looks out onto an island that was formed less than 200 years ago. A guy named Sullivan was in Galapagos when he witnessed a volcano erupt. He documented the event and watched the island form (the island in the background is known as Sullivan´s Island).

When you are in Galapagos, you can really see how volcanoes shaped the landscape. On many islands, you can see in what direction the lava flowed and dried (in some places, you can walk in tunnels formed by how the lava dried). When you walk on newer lava landscape (hundreds of thousands of years old), you feel as if you are walking on Mars).

My first penguin and booby

If you think that I have just been being really immature but repeatedly saying booby, you are right. but i have actually seen plenty of booby birds. they are what Galapagos is very famous for (I have purchased two I Love Boobies shirts). We also saw a manta ray, but it´s not nearly as hilarious to say that I saw a manta ray as it is to say that I saw a booby.

While walking around the next day, a booby came up to Rolf (a Swedish guy on our boat) and started pecking at his foot. It was more of a getting to know you peck than a get the hell off our island peck. Remember: that type of peck doesn´t exist in Galapagos.

Frigots are hilarious

The frigot is another type of bird that is very common around Galapagos, and if I would´ve come to the islands at any other time of year I would not have appreciated their hyjinx (sp?). We came during mating season, which means that that male frigots are doing everything they can to woo the females, chiefly among them is showing off their huge breasts (or protrusion coming from their chests). To impress the females, the males blow up these giant red air pockets on their chests and shake their body to make a funny clicking/clucking noise.

We went to a place on Genovesa Island that looks like a scene from The Birds. There are thousands and thousands of birds just flying around and perched on whatever they can be perched on. In the Hitchcock version of the Galapagos, these birds would then attack unsuspecting tourists. Luckily these ones remained peaceful and didn´t kill.

Streak still alive

Before my trip to the Galapagos, I had never been on a tropical, island-traveling vacation. One thing I worried about beforehand was how my digestive system would handle an extended period at sea (the majority of my nights on water before this were spent in the Petoskey harbor). With the ocean waves and constant movement, I thought my body might succumb to seasickness. And the boat that we were on was one of the smallest cruise boats in all of Galapagos. So when there are big waves, everybody feels it.

But I came out victorious. I can´t say the same about the other 12 people on the Encantada. At one dinner, only six people came to the table and just four ate anything substantial. The chef made rice pudding for dessert, but nobody remained to eat (He already served the black and white cookie). My stomach felt a bit out of sorts at that meal, but it might have been how unbearably warm the dining room was. One person on our boat threw up directly on the equator (We had the GPS coordinates to prove it). I didn´t take an official tally of people on our boat but I would say that fewer people kept all their food in than didn´t.

My vomitless streak that started July 25, 2006 will remains intact. Refer to this link for more information about how much pride I take in keeping my food down. http://hearyoni.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-think-it-was-black-and-white-cookie_26.html

So that will conclude the first of two Galapagos e-mails. The next one will include our time off the boat and on land. Subjects to be covered include: watching another erupting volcano, a bachelor with no hope, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mystery, Alaska, and Pleasantville.