Sunday, January 21, 2018

Galapagos 2018 - Day 3. From Quito to Santa Cruz

I woke up early, showered, and was ready to go a good half hour from the time my taxi was supposed to come pick me up, so I loaded on three complimentary cups of good Ecuadorian coffee before heading for the airport. Check in was a breeze, but I almost missed my flight because I dozed in the wrong gate. No big deal because I had put an alarm in my cell phone, but I was the last to arrive at the correct gate, and I could hear the attendants radioing to each other “We found him.” And “You can put his luggage in the plane again.”

We landed in the Isla Baltra airport, went through a rather thorough inspection to make sure we were not carrying potential pests into the islands, and walked out into the desert landscape of this small island, which at some point during World War II was an American military base, of which only the concrete pads remain. A short free bus ride brought us to the small port, where for $1 a small boat took us to the adjoining and much bigger Santa Cruz Island. I had my first wildlife sighting from the boat, when a pregnant lady with two kids showed me a ray that was leisurely swimming past the prow, in perfectly crystalline water.

Once on the other side there were taxis to be taken (but Ecuadorians are not pushy at all, so it did not feel like you were being smothered by hawkers), but I chose to ride the $2 bus. Puerto Ayora, where my hostel was located is on the south side of the island, whereas the airport is on the north, so I had ahead of me a ride of about 40 km, which I enjoyed by listening to “The Voyage of the Beagle” by Charles Darwin (I love audiobooks!). I know that my blog entries sometimes tend to be long, but now I feel vindicated by the fact that Darwin’s own travel log was also a candid description of the people he met, the costumes of the land, the animals and plants, or the rocks and the landscape. He had plenty of digressions about funny mishaps, or about the exotic food he ate. So there!

I was reflecting on the change in the vegetation from the arid north side of the island to the moist south side, and comparing what I saw with Darwin’s description of the Falkland Islands, when my eyes popped out of my head. There, slowly walking through a clearing, was a giant tortoise! I felt so … happy. I had been reading about the 1905-1906 scientific collecting expedition of the California Academy of Sciences, and about the carnage that for the sake of science the collectors did, that I had little hope of seeing one of these majestic animals in the wild. And there it was! I felt he had come out just to welcome me to the Galapagos, and from there on wore this stupid grin of delight.

Once we got into Puerto Ayora I asked the bus driver if he knew where Hostal Fragata was located, and would he please drop me off at the most convenient spot. Sure, no problem. Five minutes later he was stopping the bus right in front of the hostel! Have I already told you how friendly Ecuadorians are?

After dropping off my stuff I went for a walk. I would like to rent a motorcycle, or at least a bicycle, so I can go exploring tomorrow, and also get a feeling for the lay of the land. Puerto Ayora is a pretty coastal town, clean and friendly, and totally invested in welcoming the tourist without smothering him. Oh, look, there is an iguana (photo opportunity). And there is another. And another. Pretty soon I saw I was surrounded (if such an active verb could be applied to this most lethargic of creatures). Well, clearly I will not have any trouble spotting this type of reptile. But this were run of the mill, albeit remarkably big and fat, iguanas. The real treat would be to spot the rare swimming iguanas, which I seem to recall will be the subject of the visit I will make with the boat to one of the northern islands next week. I continued my walk, photographing pelicans and non-descript little brown birds (I am deadly afraid of missing the finches, or pinzones, that are so often associated with Darwin’s thinking about evolution by natural selection, but unfortunately pinzones are very small birds with rather boring plumage, so I am just taking photos of every bird I see, hoping that at a later time someone will help me find out if I struck gold—incidentally, legend has it that this is exactly what Darwin did, and that many of his specimens got mixed up and he had to rely on the notes of Captain Fitzroy to figure which bird came from which island).

When I reached the end of town I took a detour to a small peer, to take a picture of the bay and the boats, when I once again noticed a richness of iguanas. They were everywhere on the planks of the peer, but looking down I saw that they were also think on the ground, sunning on a low, black, shiny basalt outcrop. Ha, maybe if I waited for high tide I could see them scramble out of the water, and then I could check a sighting of swimming iguanas. I was toying with this thought when, a good 50 ft from the shore, I saw a small something moving through the water. Is that a fish? No, it is … a swimming iguana! The little guy was happily swimming in from deep water, using his legs as fins and his long tail as a weaving propeller. I was enthralled as I saw him approaching the shore, crawling up unto the rocks, and finally collapsing under the broiling sun to warm up after an invigorating swim. Will Galapagos wonders never end?

My wanderings took me to the Charles Darwin Research Station, where Ecuadorian scientists and conservationists collaborate with colleagues from all over the world to study and preserve the ecologic richness of the islands. They are world famous for their efforts to breed and re-introduce tortoises in the islands that are/were their natural habitat. You probably remember that the tortoises played a crucial role in Darwin’s thinking because he noticed that even though all the tortoises belonged to the same genus, the ones on any given island were distinctively different from those in other islands. Of the 15 species that existed in Darwin’s time only 11 are left, and of those 11 a good half is in danger of extinction because there are very few individuals left. So many pairs have been caught and bred in captivity, and their eggs have been hatched at the station, and the hatchlings have been raised to ages of 2 or 3 years, and then they have been re-introduced into their original islands. The program has been very successful, although in all but three of the 11 islands the populations of free roaming tortoises are less than 100.


A sad story is the one told about Lonesome George, from the Pinta island. The 1905-1906 Scientific Collecting Expedition took the last remaining tortoise of Fernandina island, and the last three remaining tortoises from Pinta island, effectively causing the extinction of tortoises in those two islands. Imagine thus the surprise of the park rangers when in 1971 one more male remaining tortoise was discovered in Pinta! If they could just find a female, then they thought they could bring this species back from extinction. It was a long shot, but after all George had successfully hid himself for 65 years (and once you see the density of the underbrush in the islands you could understand that a low key tortoise could very well hide in plain sight). So they went into search mode, and for 40 years combed Pinta in search of an elusive Georgina, alas with no success. Lonesome George finally died in 2012, a most painful epitaph of the last of his species.

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