The Blaus - South America and Europe

28 de Mayo - Galapagos Islands, Ecuador

We spent 11 days in the Galapagos Islands and had an incredible time. We arrived in San Cristobal on May 16th in hopes of finding a last minute bargain to board a boat for an 8 day island hopping cruise. We had heard great success stories about people getting to the islands and then jumping on 1st class boats at the last possible minute for less than half price, so we were trying to make the same thing happen for ourselves. The Galapagos are very expensive, and have virtually no food or accomodations options priced for backpackers. Our first two days were spent in San Cristobal while we searched for a boat. San Cristobal is the captial of the islands, but it is just a tiny port town. Since we arrived in low season, we thought that it would be easy to book a cruise, but we kept hearing that every boat was full. At night we jumped on a water taxi and drove around to all the boats in the harbor, like pirates, asking the crew if they had space. This technique didn't pan out. We were working with one local travel agent and one in Quito via email to secure passage on any available boat. After two very stressful days of haggling, we heard that there were openings on a boat called The Gabi. The Gabi was one of the boats that we were warned about by other travelers we had spoken with before arriving in the islands. The travel agents even admitted that the Gabi was not a very good boat (it was economy class, which is the lowest ranking), but it turned out to be our only option to go on an 8 day cruise, so we accepted the challenge.

Since we had two days to kill before our boat left San Cristobal, we spent one day hiking around the island to beautiful deserted beaches and another day we went on an all day snorkeling trip to Kicker Rock about 30 minutes off the shore of the port. We watched every sunset from the same spot with our ritual ceviches, popcorn and beers. The snorkeling trip was a lot of fun. We went to this enormous rock off the coast of San Cristobal that juts out of the water to about 500 feet, and is home to hammerhead sharks, bull sharks, fur seals, sea lions, and sea turtles. The visibility was not great, so we did not see the sharks lurking deep below, but we saw plenty of turtles, sea lions, eagle rays and large fish. The one thing we noticed upon getting into the water is that the animals in the Galapagos are different from others that we have seen because they are not shy at all. They come right up to you, and look at you without any fear, and then just keep on swimming. Since they have had no predators (aside from humans who only colonized the islands a couple of hundred years ago), they act very differently than animals elsewhere.

The sea lions swim right at you as you are snorkeling with them, and then when their face is about 6 inches from yours they stop and stare in your eyes, playfully floating upside down, then they dart off and come right back to stare some more. They swam all around us and played with us for hours. They look like they are flying through the water, they are so agile and quick and can change direction really easily. They are built to be good swimmers and they are fast enough to escape becoming food for sharks. Since they look so much like dogs, it felt like we were playing with dogs in the park. We learned how to make them imitate us by blowing bubbles out of our mouths underwater, and then we´d watch them do the same. It was like looking in a magical underwater mirror. Sometimes we had 6 or 7 sea lions just swimming around us all as close as can be without touching us. We learned how to swim in circles like they do, and got really good at following them and making friends with them. The babies and the females were the most fun to play with in the water. Sometimes an alpha male would jump into the water to supervise our activities. The males are twice the size of the females. The alpha males are known to be a bit aggressive and territorial, and they are really big and have huge fangs. When they came near, we swam away quickly as we didn´t want to encroach on their domain. One day we were swimming at one of the beaches on San Cristobal where a baby sea lion was floating near the shore. Jen bent down near the surface of the water and called to the sea lion like he was a puppy. He swam over, jumped out of the water, barked in her face, retreated into the water and swam away. It gave her quite a scare. At this moment we realized that they may not be as much like dogs as we wanted them to be, and we learned that we should be cautious around the males.

We also visited the Interpretation Center on San Cristobal while we waited to board the Gabi, where we learned about the formation of the islands, the hypothesis about how the animals arrived there, and Darwin's discoveries which led to his theories of evolution and natural selection. The islands are naturally desolate, they were formed by volcanic activity and were lifeless at their inception. The animals are said to have arrived from mainland by floating over to the islands on rafts or bouyant pieces of wood or debris. This journey would have taken almost 2 weeks, so the animals that survived the trip were very hearty and needed little water for survival...they were mainly reptiles, like iguanas. The plants are said to have arrived in the Galapagos as seeds carried in the wind from mainland Ecuador. The birds flew there, but some, like the Flightless Cormorant, lost their ability to fly after generations inhabited the islands. These birds were able to find all the food they needed by fishing in local waters, so their wings atrophied over time. The Flightless Cormorant is an example of an animal that Darwin observed, and based on his learnings about this bird and other species, he later formulated his theories of evolution and natural selection. Darwin's Finches are the other birds that he observed and he noticed that each had developed beneficially mutated beaks designed specifically to hunt for various types of food. The marine iguana is another example of an animal that adapted to its environment and developed the capability to thrive in the water as well as on land, by an advantageous genetic mutation. The marine mammals swam to the islands, in fact, the sea lions came from California to escape being hunted by Great White Sharks. The persistence of life on the Galapagos is impressive, given that the islands are completely isolated from the mainland and the physical conditions on the islands make them fairly inhospitable.

Despite the location of the Galapagos Islands near the equator, they are not the tropical paradise that one might expect. For the most part, the islands are arid, barren, and there is little vegetation in the low lying areas. The water is cool at around 60 to 65 degrees year-round, but it's refreshing since the heat on the islands during the day is intense. We wore wetsuits so we could stay in the water for as long as possible. The color of the water is an emerald green and it is absolutely pristine. Underwater, everything is shaded turquoise and seems surreal as you witness the beauty of the ocean like never before.

After our adventures on San Cristobal, we finally got on board the Gabi. We were expecting a real joke of a boat, something that sputtered into the harbor and broke down upon arrival, but the Gabi wasn´t all that bad. The other people on the boat were all in the exact same position we found ourselves in, looking for a good last minute deal on a nice boat, and all of them had been warned about the infamous Gabi as well. It made things worse that some of our fellow Gabi adventurers who were already on the boat for 4 days had been swindled by their travel agency. They purchased an 8 day cruise, but were dropped off after only 6 days on the boat and a major change in their promised itinerary. These other passengers got the run around when they tried to get their money back, and once they found the culprit who owed them money, he got on his scooter and sped away (never to be seen again). With this disasterous orientation at the beginning of our trip, we were sure there would be major problems for us as well, but we got very lucky. The generator only broke down once, which left us in the dark for a few hours, but they fixed it quickly. And the crew only went on strike for a half day, because the boat owner hadn't paid them for 3 weeks. These small inconveniences were made up for by the stellar company we had on the boat.

There were 16 passengers and 8 crew members that we came to know, and we all laughed and gave the typical South American shrug any time we ran into stormy seas like these throughout the week. We also entertained ourselves by hosting competitions to see who could jump off of the deck of the boat most stylishly or who could jump the farthest. We had a great group, including one very crazy Spaniard from Madrid named Jesus and a photojournalist who was covering an assignment for the New York Times Travel section. Keep an eye out for a featured photo of the Galapagos at newyorktimes.com under the WHY WE TRAVEL section over the next few weeks. If we are lucky, a photo of one of us or one of our fellow Gabi adventurers will be published. Our guide, Wilmer, was a character too. Wilmer was quiet, and he spent most of his time on the boat in his room studying his books about the Galapagos. As we passed other guides on the islands, we noted the difference between them and Wilmer. Other guides led their tour groups with command and constantly spewed facts about the animals, vegetation, etc. Wilmer on the other hand would say things like, "Now you see the tortoises copulating. Hee. Hee. They are funny." He never wanted to get wet, so one day we threw him in the water while we were snorkeling. We all got a kick out of him and we think he had fun with us too.

Our first stop was the island of Española. It was an incredible place with tons of Blue Footed Boobies. The females were nesting with their eggs or newborns and the males were strutting around their nests as they performed their unique mating rituals and mating calls. The male boobies stand around their nests, which are surrounded by a carefully constructed circle of white excrement. They make a noise that sounds like a wind instrument, stretch their wings out, arch their backs, puff up their chests, and slowly march around picking their feet up slowly one at a time. Their coloring is fantastic, it's as if they know how unusually handsome they are, especially with their strange colored feet. Their feet look like duck's webbed feet, but they are bright blue. The older they get, the bluer their feet become. We also saw Masked Boobies here. We saw the giant and gentle Waved Albatrosses, which are the largest of the Galapagos birds and breed only on Española Island. Their wingspan is 7 to 8 feet. It was magical when a female Waved Albatross stood up to reveal her precious egg in its nest, just for us to get a peek at it. The island was teeming with red, yellow and orange Sally Lightfoot crabs, marine iguanas, and sea lions sleeping on the beach. The marine iguanas are bizarre, they sit still like statues, so you can barely see them on the black lava rocks. They are black, red and green, and their heads are scaley. They spit water out of their noses and they look like they have a permanent grin on their faces. Their tongues are pink and their hands and feet have long, skinny fingers and claws. We watched them walking on the sand, slumbering on the rocks, and hanging out in groups of 10...they gather together and pose in a funny way. In the water, they swim like serpeants and we caught one feeding on algae that was growing on a rock underwater. They are very prehistoric looking, primal animals.

Next we stopped at Floreana Island to see pink flamingoes and then we went snorkeling and saw eagle rays, sea turtles, barracuda, white tipped sharks. Someone on our boat saw a scalloped hammerhead shark, but by the time we all got back into the water, it was gone. These types of sharks can be up to 14 feet long. The English guy who spotted this shark, John, was shaken up quite a bit, and he couldn't tell us how big it was, because he didn't stick around to get a better look at it. We also encountered some aggressive sea lions here that scared us all by getting really close to our faces. One Swedish guy said that he was attacked by the sea lions and had to wrestle with one of them, he reenacted the wrestling match by showing us how he put the sea lion in a headlock, but we all thought that this story was akin to the kind of big fish stories you hear fishermen tell. In the afternoon we went to the post office on Floreana, where they have a post box that was once used by pirates. Here you can leave mail without postage stamps in hopes that a fellow traveler from your area will deliver the mail for you. We left two postcards for our parents, just to test the old pirate post system, and we took one to deliver to someone in the Bay Area when we finally go back to the States.

On the third day we went to the Charles Darwin Research Center and visited the Galapagos Giant Tortoise Hatchery there. The Galapagos Giant Tortoise is the namesake of the Archipelago. The word “galapagos” refers to an old Spanish saddle very similar in shape to the shell of one of two major types of tortoises: saddleback tortoises and dome-shaped tortoises. These giant tortoises live to be up to 150 years of age. They grow to be up to 1.5 meters in length and up to 250 kg in weight. At the Charles Darwin Research Center we learned a lot about the human impact on the islands. Many of the animals and plants that have been introduced to the islands by their human inhabitants, like dogs, goats, donkeys, raspberries, are causing the extinction of the native animals and plants. In the afternoon we visited a 40 kilometer long lava tube and two craters and we attempted to do some birdwatching, but we didn't succeed in finding the elusive Vermilion Flycatcher.

The fourth day of the cruise we went to Rabida Island. You can find every color sand imaginable in the Galapagos. Rabida has a dark red sand beach of volcanic origin. The snorkeling on Rabida was phenomenal. There was an amazing reef, with tons of colorful little fish and marine iguanas swimming and feeding underwater. Jen had a close encounter with a White Tip Reef Shark that was half the size of her. It swam out of a cave as she was snorkeling above and gave her a scare. That afternoon we went to Chinese Hat Island, where we saw the smallest sea lion on the rocks. He was just like any other baby...clumsy and wide-eyed. We wanted to pick him up and cuddle with him. He was so adorable that we sat and watched him for almost an hour. Chinese Hat Island had the best lava formations, and was named for the shape of the dormant volcano on the island that looked like a Chinese Hat.

The fifth day of the cruise we were up at sunrise to hike to the top of Bartolomeo Island, where we could get a better look at the strange rock formation that has become the icon of the Galapagos. We snorkeled with penguins while they were feeding on schools of small fish. We met an underwater camera man who was filming a 3 part documentary for the BBC and National Geographic. He was planning to spend 18 months in the Galapagos getting the footage that he needed. When we met him he was trying to film penguins feeding on camera, which is very difficult, because they swim so fast. We had just spent 5 minutes following a penguin around the reef and watching him feed on little fish. They zig-zag through the water so quickly in hot persuit of one little fish at a time. We had to swim hard to keep up with the little guy. The documentary series will air in November 2006...something to look out for. The first part is about the formation of the islands and the last part is about the eventual demise of the islands. Apparently, the islands are slowly moving toward the mainland every year, and they will eventually erode completely and disappear. That afternoon we went to see Red-Throated Frigate Birds on North Seymour Island. The male Frigate Bird builds a nest in the trees and then waits there and tries to attract a female with a striking, red inflatable pocket beneath his beak, which almost looks like a bullfrog. Frigate birds are large, black, and have scissor tails. They have superb flying abilities. They are scavengers that rarely fish for their own food in the water, unless a fish is at the surface, because their feathers have a low oil content and are therefore not water resistant. Instead they take food from the mouths of the Boobies or the Pelicans, by kicking them in the back of the head to get them to spit out their recent catches.

Our last full day on the Gabi was spent observing land iguanas and birds on Santa Fe and South Plaza Island. We snorkeled with stingrays and huge schools of fish. Everyday in the islands was different and amazing. We learned so much about the animals that we were able to see close-up and interact with on a new level. We will both cherish the experience forever.

posted by The Blaus @ 8:59 PM