Jane and Russ’s excellent Galápagos Islands adventure

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Our trip to the Galápagos Islands had a rough start.  We arrived at SeaTac at 4 am to find our Seattle-Houston flight had morphed into Seattle-Denver-Houston.  Then after sitting thirty minutes on our Houston-San Salvador flight, it was canceled, so we spent a night at the Houston Marriott.  Up at 5 am to take the little train back to airport and fly to Miami.  We had been gone a day and a half and were in Florida.  Eventually flew to Guayaquil, the Ecuadorean port city where we spent the night at the Sheraton as planned.  Flew to the island of San Cristóbal the next morning to find Nina waiting breathlessly at the airport, having walked there from school in her flip flops.  A black Darwin finch perched on the wall of the open-air airport.

We opted for a “land-based tour” of the islands instead of a cruise, to spend more time with Nina, avoid seasickness for Jane, and see more of island life.  Our tour-guy Rick (a Californian who married a Galápaguena – you can live in the islands only if you grew up there or marry someone who did) set up our tours and found us a wonderful National Park guide, Jorge, who spent the next several days with us.  (Jorge grew up in Quito but his stepdad is a Galápagueno.)  We had a top floor room at our lovely B&B, Casa de Nelly, and a huge deck overlooking the harbor. 

Nelly spoke no English but made delicious breakfasts, sometimes including typical plantain/cheese empanadas, and novel juices from “tree tomato” or “little orange.”  There is no source of potable water in the Galápagos Islands.  There is a single freshwater lake on the island of San Cristóbal, and temporary lagoons and ponds on a few others.  Nobody, not even locals, drinks the water.  So our room had a pitcher that we filled from an “ozonator” Nelly had installed in the wall of her kitchen.
 

Our first excursion was “fishing with the locals.”  The Galápagos waters have been overfished, especially sea cucumbers sold to China, so some fishermen give up their commercial licenses and instead take tourists out fishing. Russ, Nina, Jorge and I headed out in a very small (to me) fishing boat with Nacho, our fisherman, and his 15 year old son.  He took us by huge platforms full of sea lions sunbathing and showed us amazing seabirds such as petrels, shearwaters, waved albatrosses, magnificent frigatebirds,

blue-footed boobies, nazca boobies, brown noddy terns, storm petrels, and brown pelicans.  He chased a pod of dolphins until dozens were leaping along the bow of our boat and a hundred were swimming and playing around us.  Eventually he caught a nice meter-long fish for our dinner, which Russ reeled in with effort.  Then his son caught a baby (two foot long) barracuda, mean with lots of teeth, and threw it back.  Sport fishermen in the Galápagos like to “catch and release” but 80% of these fish die, damaged by the hook and the chase. 

Some days Nacho heads forty miles out to sea and catches marlin that weigh 250 kg!  The fish is about the length of the boat, and exhausted after being reeled in, so he lines the tired fish up alongside the boat and the men lean over the edge and haul it in (it fills half the boat.)  We went back to Nelly’s to clean up, and an hour and a half later we were all served our fish for dinner and patacones (little fried plantain patties) and rice (at every meal every day) prepared by Nacho’s wife.

Our second day was a highlands tour of the single lake in all the islands (El Junco was so shrouded in fog and rain that we couldn’t see it among the greenery of the native and invasive plants), a farm, and the Galápaguera where giant tortoises are raised.  So many species have become extinct that on several islands, rangers collect eggs from the wild, incubate and raise them in pens in a “semi-natural” environment until they are five years old, a foot long and too big to be eaten by feral cats or goats. Then they’re released to live out their 150 or so years in the wild.  The farmer’s wife served us lunch after we toured the muddy grounds and had a striking demonstration of how bamboo plants hang onto water.  Each 6-8 inch segment of the fast-growing bamboo tree has a liter of pure water in it.  The farmer whacked one stalk with his machete and gave us tiny bamboo straws to stick in the hole and drink water from the tree.  About 97% of the Galápagos Islands is National Park, so farms and towns take up 3%.  Nelly buys as much food as she can from local farms, though most places buy cheaper bulk food from the mainland.

Friday was a free day, so I joined Nina on her sea lion count.  Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday she and three other students participate in the park’s Sea Lion Census.  She gets up at 4:45 am and walks to the remote beach where she begins at 5:30 counting the number of macho adultos (dominant adult male of the colony), macho subadultos (macho wannabees who

often live in bachelor colonies), hembras (females), juveniles (young sea lions over a meter long), pups (under a meter long) and newborns. Sea lion placentas are a big deal here, with frigatebirds, boobies, hawks and even mockingbirds fighting each other for the nutritious treat.  Nina usually counts about 150 sea lions or so.  We ate granola and milk in our room atNelly’s and headed out in the dark.  It was a gorgeous time to be out walking as the sun rose, and she showed me a dead Galápagos short-eared owl on the beach, the bony remains of a pelican, and sleeping piles of young marine iguanas.

The sea lions on the inhabited beaches are counted three times a week but the outlying islands get a monthly count.  Nina and her fellow counters will soon travel by boat to Española and Floreana to participate in the monthly count, going off the beaten path where only researchers get to go.

Saturday we took a boat to Isla Lobos where we saw blue-footed booby nests with fluffy white chicks being fed by parents who swooped in with half-digested fish in their throat/stomachs.  It was a violent-looking process as the baby booby stuck his bill all the way into the parent’s throat and frantically sucked.  We snorkeled with playful sea lions, enormous sea turtles, marine iguanas, and sting rays.  That evening Nina and I hiked to a nesting spot for endemic swallow-tailed gulls.  They are nocturnal and fly many miles out to sea at night to hunt luminescent squid.

Sunday we rented four mountain bikes and put them in the back of a cab (the majority of vehicles on the islands are taxi-cabs, all of which are white pick-up trucks with room for four passengers) and rode to El Junco, the lake at the top of the volcano, where we saw endemic white-cheeked pintail ducks.  It was a crystal clear day, so with Nina’s pal Amanda we hiked around the little lake, explored the farms, and rode down the mountain, checking out the native and invasive plant species.  In the arid zone at the coast, native plants are still the dominant species, but up high there’s more rain and invasives are taking over.  We crawled under barbed wire to inspect some cool moss and Nina’s pal Amanda scaled an orange tree to pick us fresh fruit. We dodged marine iguanas crossing the road on the way

down.

The next morning we said good-bye to Nina as she headed out to count sea lions, and caught an early flight to the island of Isabela.  We stayed at the ritzy hotel right on the beach with enormous French doors opening on to the balcony, listening to the waves all night long.  Isabela is the biggest island, much younger than San Cristóbal, made of six volcanoes which became connected as the land mass rose.  But each volcano still has its own species of giant tortoise.  When we flew over we could see why – miles and miles of uncrossable black lava flows separate the volcanoes.  It’s pretty amazing the tortoises made it here at all.

They’ve been around much longer than the islands. A tortoise might by chance float to and land on one of the Galápagos Islands every hundred years or so, and only when a male and female happened to land on the same island could reproduction begin.

We snorkeled along reefs and in a mangrove swamp with a group which was mostly twenty-something couples staying in hostels, and saw Galápagos penguins, an octopus peeking out of a hole, a moray eel, porcupine puffer fish and bright blue sea stars.  We saw huge manta rays leaping and spinning out of the ocean (they leap high so when they land it will dislodge the leeches that have attached to their gills) and white-tipped reef sharks resting amid the lava tubes.  We spent a day hiking around the giant black gaping caldera of the second highest volcano on the island, Sierra Negra.  Our group of about twenty people was mostly young and from eleven countries; we were the only Americans.  We saw Galápagos hawks and martins, and heard but did not see the elusive Galápagos rail.

On our last day on Isabela we rented bikes and rode several miles out to see the haunting Wall of Tears.  In the 1940’s Isabela housed a penal colony and the prisoners were forced to build this giant pointless wall with lava rocks, costing many lives.

Along the way were ponds with flamingoes, black-neck stilts, endemic herons and several wild giant tortoises on the edge of the road.

Every time we parked our bright yellow bikes and returned, they were swarming with bees and wasps.  All the endemic plants of the Galápagos Islands have white or yellow flowers, so those colors attract the bees. I wanted to ask our bike rental guy if he saved the yellow bikes for tourists.

We saw a small procession of two dogs, three horses and two riders returning from an expedition.  The middle horse was loaded with four bloody dead feral pigs, evidence of an ongoing effort to rid the islands of feral animals threatening the survival of the endemics.
 

We took the commuter boat to the most populous island of Santa Cruz and this is the trip everyone said to take Dramamine for.  I did, but the crossing was OK, sitting in the very back of the boat balancing the benefits of the wind and the spray against the gasoline fumes for two and a half hours.  I embarked on our highlands tour alone while Russ napped,

expecting to join some sort of group.  I was picked up by a cabbie named Mario, who did not know a lick of English, and we headed up the volcano.  After a while I asked him if I was joining a group and he said, no, just you.  So Mario and I toured Los Gemelos (the twins), two giant craters in the middle of the endemic Scalesia forest which are actually sink holes.  And a private reserve where about a hundred giant tortoises live in the wild.  And a 200 meter lava tunnel where Mario dropped me and said he’d pick me up at the other end.  I meandered alone through the other-worldly tunnel, like a cave lit with a string of electric lights, two stories high in some places and in others I had to lie on my back and squirm through.  My Spanish improved a great deal on our trip; even though all official tour guides are bilingual, many people spoke no English.

Across from our B&B in the town of Puerto Ayora was the fishing pier where fishermen gutted giant fish on their boats.  Swarms of pelicans, lava gulls and frigatebirds flew about, and sea lions stood on their back fins at the counter gazing longingly at fresh tuna. That evening Nina and a dozen of her classmates arrived on the commuter boat from San Cristóbal for a week of classes on Santa Cruz.  Our last day was a yacht cruise to the tiny black lava island of Bartolomé. Nina and I identified sea birds, including flocks of tiny sandpipers and phalaropes that travel from the mainland, which I find impressive.  All in all I saw forty new birds on the trip, yippee!

We got an early taxi on our last day for the hour-long ride up over the island, where our luggage got plopped on what looked like a little dock but turned out to be the roof of the “ferry” that took us about fifty meters across to the island of Baltra, where a bus delivered us to the airport.  We ate breakfast while several Darwin finches pecked at the crumbs on our table and perched on our forks and coffee cups.  On our flight to the mainland I heard an overhead announcement in Spanish asking if there was a doctor on board. 

So another woman who turned out to be the ship doctor for Lindblad National Geographic cruises and I spent the rest of the flight sitting on the floor of the rear galley attending to a young woman who was sick and unconscious.  We got priority landing and an ambulance met us at the gate.  On our flights home the next day we got hung up in customs and security in Houston (no, not another night at the Houston Marriott!) and had to run and hop an airport golf cart to get to our gate, ten minutes before departure.  The gate agent (Nurse Ratched) would not let us on and said she’d book us on tomorrow’s flight.  We begged and pleaded and eventually boarded the plane.  Back in Seattle we got a cab home, and our cabbie’s Prius was four years old with 410,000 miles on it, still on its original battery and running great, not bad!

Galápagos feet: