A Trip To The Post Office

There’s a soccer field on the sand at Floreana Island, just around the corner from the post office. When the tour boats stop there, crews will play against their passengers, or the crew and passengers will all team up against those of a second boat, if there is one. The day we were there witnessed an epic battle between two boats, and I am here to tell the tale.

The wind was calm that fateful afternoon. In the distance, sea lions barked. Frigate birds circled patiently overhead. Clouds gathered in the east, but the sun still shone over the field of the coming battle. Most of the passengers from both sides had gone snorkeling, but a few of us weren’t up for the cold water and relaxed in the shade, watching the crews kick the ball around.
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Day Of The Iguana

I love reptiles. The bigger the better. However, I have no interest in meeting a Komodo Dragon, which would probably kill and eat me. The next-best thing is the Galapagos land iguana. Land iguanas are pretty big—they can grow to over a meter long and weigh up to 30 pounds.
North Seymour Island was a desolate, wind-swept place during our mid-October visit, mostly covered with dry grasses, dead trees, and the occasional cactus or small shrub growing amongst piles of broken brown or grey lava rock. The calls and whistles of frigate birds as they wheeled overhead or courted in the dead brambles, the rise and fall of the morning’s breeze, and our own footsteps were the only sounds. …

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Got Fish?

Early on the morning of our fifth day in the Galapagos, eight passengers disembarked from our boat at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz island; their time in the Galapagos was over. Twelve new passengers were to come aboard at lunchtime but for now, the four of us who were remaining for a longer adventure had the morning to ourselves.

Yvonne and I walked down the dock, which was covered with sea lions and recently-arrived tourists. As the latter waited to board various boats, they excitedly took photos of the sea lions lazing about on benches and against railings. The two of us smirked condescendingly at each other, amused by these newbies’ innocent delight. We were once wide-eyed like them but after four days, we felt oh-so-cocky. Docile sea lions on the dock was so normal; this was nothing compared to what we’d seen in our vast experience of the Galapagos. …

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Diego, The Galapageño Gigolo

During the 17th and 18th centuries, at least 150,000 tortoises were taken from the various islands of the Galapagos, mostly for food and later, for oil also. The Galapagos were a way station for Pacific whaling ships and fur seal hunters. Because they’re so slow and have no fear of humans, the tortoises were easy pickings. Each ship would take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tortoises and keep them in the hold stacked on their backs, alive. They could live up to a year that way, providing fresh meat for the sailors as they slowly starved. Even Charles Darwin thought little about how the constant taking of tortoises for food was bringing about their near-extinction, or how the introduced animals, especially rats, were decimating the endemic birds and reptiles who laid their eggs on the ground. Naturalists were not necessarily conservationists. …

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Love, Galapagos Style

On our first day in the Galapagos, we had one of several opportunities to witness something that normally isn’t easy to see up close: Avian courtship. Also, really big iguanas. But I’ll talk about the iguanas in a future post. I should state for the record that I am not a birder, but during this trip I became a temporary convert.

The Galapagos Islands are famous for their bird life. Charles Darwin observed the differences in the beaks of the otherwise-similar finches on the various islands and surmised that they had developed their differences to deal with differing environmental conditions. These and some other bird species are seen nowhere else on earth, while others, though they also exist elsewhere, have long made their homes here. But as I will keep mentioning, all of them had no fear of us humans. …

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Aboard The Xavier III

Twelve of us sat in the salon of the boat, the Xavier III, with our Galapageño guide, Fabian. We went around the circle—Germans, Americans, Brits and Australians—introducing ourselves and telling him what we most hoped to see: Tortoises, iguanas, boobies, penguins, flamingos. Fabian told us that if we smiled a lot, we might see them all. Wait—penguins and flamingos? I didn’t know you could see those in the Galapagos Islands! We must have been doing some good smiling because we saw everything the group hoped for, and more.

For the next 8 days, we would be living on this boat as we visited different islands, each with its own geology, ecology, and endemic wildlife. Almost every day included two hikes and two snorkeling opportunities. There was very little down time between our 7AM breakfasts and our 7PM dinners; sometimes we craved an afternoon to just relax on the deck and read. But those cravings didn’t last long.
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