I was a bit afraid I was going to wake up in pain, but I
actually felt very fit after a good night sleep, ready to tackle a day
bicycling along the lowlands. I am staying at Puerto Villamil, the only town in
Isabela, where there are all sorts of boutique hotels, tourist agencies, and
places to rent bikes. $15 for an all-day rental, although my plan was to come
back around 3 pm. The lady at the renal place was very nice (just like all the
other Ecuadorians I have met), and gave me a thorough description of the road I
was to follow, and the places where I should stop.
The trail follows close to the coast, so the landscape all
around me is desert with the occasional pocket beach amid basalt outcrops. The
beaches and small lagoons were thin pickings when it came to bird watching (and
what is the purpose of seeing a boring old bird anyway), but the rock outcrops
were loaded with iguanas, some of which were big, fat, and totally smug about
being protected (they would make a very nice iguana stew if we were in Mexico).
Later, on the way back I stopped at a lagoon where I sighted five flamingos;
they were feeding, with their heads upside down and shuffling sideways on a
quick sidestep, which I imagine stirs the bottom slime and loosens the little
critters they like for lunch.
I had started my ride with a slight overcast, but pretty
soon the clouds burnt out and I was able to enjoy the glorious Galapagos sun. I
had applied sun block before getting started, and was delighted that the cool
breeze from the coast was blowing steadily.
Farther down along the way the road left the coast and cut
across the desert. This should be good tortoise watching terrain, so I moved
forward at a slow pace. The desert is occasionally cut by shallow ravines,
where intermittent streams support a slightly greener vegetation and, in some
instances, mud wallows. It was in one of these shady places that I spotted my
first tortoise, unfortunately not doing much. My second tortoise was happily
eating the fallen pad of a cactus, apparently oblivious to the sharp thorns.
The desert is not as clear of vegetation as one would imagine, and there is a
fair number of brush obstacles to the passage of tortoises, and after a while I
learned to recognize the “trails” used by them (and I tested myself by walking
down one of those paths to discover a tortoise within the first 20 paces).
A small rise, with a set of stairs and a lookout platform
gave me a fine look of Sierra Negra Volcano, with its belt of greenery between
300 and 700 m elevation, just as if it were a green band around the crown of a
broad hat.
The trail ended at “The Wall of Tears”, which is a wall to
nowhere, built by the inmates of the penal colony that operated here in the
1940’s and 1950’s. Let me tell you that the inmates were no Incas, and that
their wall, built with pieces of basalt to a height of maybe 10 m and a with of
5 m, experienced many collapses. Legend has it that many inmates were killed by
these collapses, and that their souls still wale around the wall at night.
On the way back I saw what I suspect was a nesting tortoise.
Clearly she had been scratching at the soil to form a shallow depression, maybe
a meter in diameter and 20 cm in depth. The soil looked dry and hard. Later I
learned that indeed, the reason the tortoises come down from the greener
elevations to the desert lowlands is to find a dry place where they can bury
their eggs, and that the mother will urinate where she digs her nest to soften
the ground and bury 4 to 6 eggs. Then she covers the eggs and urinates and
defecates to create a kind of adobe that will keep the eggs safe. The eggs,
which look like a ping pong ball but are the size of a tennis ball hatch for
120 days, and then the small tortoises spend a couple of days coming out of
their shells, only to find themselves entombed in adobe. It may take a whole
month for the small tortoises to dig themselves out of the adobe, all the time
surviving on the reserves of food and liquid they gathered from the eggs. Once
free, their struggle for subsistence starts in earnest. [I learned all this
lore about tortoises at the hatching center I visited once I got back to town.
There they will keep the little tortoises for up to 8 years before returning
them to their natural environments. A 8 year old tortoise is the same size as a
mature desert tortoise one might find in northern Mexico and the American
Southwest. A 25 year old Galapagos tortoise might be half a meter long, and it
won’t reach its final size of 1 to 1.5 m long until it is between 100 and 150
years old. Tortoises might start reproducing when they are 40 years old.] My
last sighting was of a young couple that was slowly pondering whether the time
for reproduction had finally arrived.
By the time I got back to town the sun was getting pretty
toasty, so after having my late almuerzo
I sat down in the shade, with a book and a cold beer, and eventually faded into
a well-deserved siesta. When I woke
up, around 6:30 pm, it was already time to go to dinner! I had previously
invited the manager of the hotel to dinner, so together we walked a few blocks
to his favorite restaurant, and had a delicious meal. His name is Gonzalo, he
is 62 years old, and his family lives in Quito. Not only has he been a gracious
host, but he has two daughters and two proud fathers always enjoy exchanging
stories about our beloved ones. I am very happy to have made yet another
friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment