Galapagos 2018 - Day 4. Bicycling around Indefatigable

It turns out that when the British owned the world they felt free to survey and name the different islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, so Santa Cruz got named Indefatigable (my guess is that it got named after the ship HMS Indefatigable, but I really don’t know). In fact, one of the reasons Darwin ended spending some time in the islands was because one of the tasks of Captain Fitzroy, commander of the HMS Beagle, was to survey the channels around the islands.

OK, after this little piece of trivia, which has nothing to do with the day’s activities, I will tell you that I was violently awoken at the wee hours of the morning by a violent pounding on my door (or was it a dream because I seem to recall hearing pounding throughout the night?) I came out of my room, half asleep and in my skivvies, to the hysterical babble of this woman; it took me a while, but I finally understood that she was being driven mad by my snoring! I apologized in the best way I could, blaming the thinness of the partition walls, and back in my room moved to the small bed that was as far as possible from the partition wall, tried to stay awake for half an hour to let her fall asleep, and turned myself away from her room to try to deflect the worst of the noise. Not very funny, because I have to consider the havoc I could wreck in the confines of a boat for a whole week. I will try to stop at the hardware store in the next few days to see if they sell earplugs, so I can bring the aboard as a peace offering to my future victims.

I woke up for a second time around 6:30 am, showered, dressed, breakfasted with my landlady, and hit the road with the intent of locating the one place that might rent me a scooter. All to no avail, and after covering a fair amount of ground on foot finally had to settle on renting a bicycle. The only problem of riding a bicycle on a volcanic island is that, if you start from the coast, there is no way to go but up. I love riding a bike, but am no longer a young’un and huffing and puffing up the slope grows old very rapidly. I was also a bit taken aback that after seeing so much cool wildlife yesterday this time I was drawing a complete blank. Sure, it is a pretty countryside, but I am here to play naturalist and not in a simple sightseeing tour.

I spotted a road sign that rubbed it in, just like a bad prank. It is the standard yellow caution sign, which in the US normally would have a side view of deer or cattle, but in here sported the profile of a giant tortoise. Yeah, right, I can see a tortoise ambling across the road.

OMG! Why did the giant tortoise cross the road? To move from feasting in the highlands to search for a mate, couple, and finally bury eggs in the lowlands. I was flabbergasted when I saw a tortoise come out of a farm road on one side, cross the road at a stately pace, and ponderously continue on its merry way down another farm road. A few yards behind it were a couple more, chomping their way to the highway, and putting out enormous turds that look like yams. Oh … that is why the bike path I was following had patches of dry grass squashed down by bicycle tires. I was wondering how the collectors of the 1905-1906 expedition had found the one remaining tortoise in Fernandina. Now I know that they did it by following the turds.

I finally made it to the top of the island, where a friendly store keeper from the town of Santa Rosa saved me from total collapse by putting a cold beer in front of me. Once I was coherent again, he suggested I should ride down the hill to the private Chato Ranch, where for $5 I could visit the lava tubes and wander amongst the giant tortoises. Of course that meant that after riding 16 grueling kilometers uphill I had to go downhill in a different direction (no problem, even pumpkins roll downhill), and go up again later in the day. Groan! But I came to see the unique Galapagos fauna, so I braced myself and went the extra 5 km downhill. It was absolutely tortoise paradise! The ranch owners have worked hard at eradicating the invasive blackberry bushes, which block the way of the tortoises, effectively creating a corridor that the tortoises like for their migration up and down the mountain. They have also dug a couple of mud wallows, which the tortoises like very much. So, without owning tortoises (which is forbidden by law) they have created a Tortoise Las Vegas, where the huge animals come to eat, drink, wallow in the mud, and be merry (and I saw a couple being quite merry, but what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas).

Now that I am imbued with tortoise knowledge, I will tell you that giant tortoises are only found in two places: The Archipelago of the Seychelles and Mascarene island (but they became extinct at the latter in 1900) in the Indian Ocean, and the Galapagos islands in the east Pacific. The ones in the Indian Ocean are related to the small tortoises of Madagascar, whereas those in the Galapagos are related to small tortoises in Ecuador. The story goes that some tortoises must have been sunning on a fallen log when a swift current brought it to the ocean, and somehow the tortoises survived until the log was beached on an island (1,000 kilometers away, so they must have been pretty sturdy seafarers). Evolution then drove them toward gigantism, perhaps because of relaxed predation in the island environment (although giant tortoises in terra firma are known in the geologic record, for example form the Miocene Mehrten Formation in the Central Valley of California). Nowadays the males are truly enormous, a good meter and a half long, a meter wide, and with a dome that rises maybe 75 cm up. Females are half to two thirds of the size.

I decided to walk all the way up, and was doing good progress when a good Samaritan with a pickup drove by and offered to lift me up to Santa Rosa, a kind offer that I was not going to refuse. From there I coasted down the mountain for what seemed to be an interminable distance, reached town, returned the bicycle, and collapsed in the outside couch of my friendly hostel. I am one tired tourist.