“Hey. Hey wake up. It’s 7:30 and you’ve got that meeting at 8:15”







—
I feel you, sea lion.
Going everywhere in a neverending journey.
“Hey. Hey wake up. It’s 7:30 and you’ve got that meeting at 8:15”
—
I feel you, sea lion.
Bonus post! While digging through the landscape photos that went up here, I also put together an album of life on the Galapagos, from animals, to people, to patterns in the nature here. Enjoy!
This is the end of our time in the Galapagos, which despite tourism has been one of the wildest, most beautiful places we’ve ever seen. Here are the fourteen best landscape shots we took while on the islands:
Now we’re off to Cusco, Peru! See you there.
Day five of our cruise is drawing to a close, after visiting Post Office Bay on Isla Floreana and snorkeling away the better part of the day. It’s time for our last excursion onto land, this time at Punta Cormorant in search of the American Flamingo. It’s already around 3 pm when we arrive on the shore, removing our shoes for a quick water landing and wading the last few feet to the beach. A trail leads us from this beach inland, past the now familiar Palo Santo trees and dry brush. We walk though the volcanic hills, home to the now familiar lava lizards, finches, mockingbirds, and land iguanas. Then it winds down to the edge of a long, flat marsh, where the flamingos live.
The viewing area is fenced off from the rest of the marsh, and today the flamingos have decided to graze all the way on the other side of the marsh, half a mile away. They’re nothing but pink dots on the horizon, and even with my camera’s zoom I can’t see much detail. Someone in our group was smart and brought birding binoculars, so we pass them around. Using these I can make out the birds, standing on one leg, gracefully dipping their heads along the water’s surface to feed. I try to take a picture with the camera pressed to the binocular lens, but no luck. Sometimes this happens; in the Galapagos and elsewhere, nature does what she pleases and not what we want. But that’s part of the thrill.
After squinting at the flamingos for several minutes, the guide leads us on a continuation of the trail in a pass between the hills. We emerge into a sandy white bay, the kind that we’ve seen all over the Galapagos. Our guide asks us to walk only on the shore, and not on the dry sand or in the surf. The former is a routine request, because sea turtles nest on these beaches and a single misstep could crush a whole nest. But the latter request to stay out of the water is new. Our guide leads us to the water’s edge to show us why: stingrays and skates, dozens of them, cling to the sand under the pounding surf. Occasionally a rough wave will dislodge one, sending it swimming off in search of a calmer part of the beach.
We’re turned loose to explore the beach, and Stoytcho makes a game of burying his feet in the loose wet quicksand at the water’s edge. Then the two of us walk over to the tidepools, where we meet with Sally Lightfoot crabs, anemones, and a sea cucumber. We’ve spent so much time snorkeling and chasing the rare megafauna of the Galapagos that we haven’t had a chance to explore life on the rocky shoreline. Between the animal life and the algae on the rocks, it reminds me of California and many other Pacific Coast beaches.
Finally, it’s time to head back to the cruise ship one last time. Our guide calls to us, and we straggle back along the trail to our boat, stopping often to take pictures of the scenery and the sky. The sun is low now, a brilliantly blazing ball of orange in the sky, overshadowing everything else. In the distance, we can make out old fumaroles and volcanic vents, once molten hot and orange of their own accord, now still and dark against the horizon.
Our feet meet the soft sand of the beach one last time, and just before we board the boat, someone asks if Stoytcho and I want a photo together. So with lifevests donned and and bare feet, we pose for our photo.
Our afternoon hike today is through the lowland scrub in Urbina Bay, and now we’re getting serious about our search for the Galapagos tortoise. There were signs of tortoises at Tagus Cove earlier in the day, but only trails through the grass. Our guide suggests we might have better luck here in the lowlands of Isabela, where many more tortoises can find food to sustain them between the dry and wet seasons. But nature is not beholden to a human schedule; we’ll have to wait and see.
The lowland scrub along the trail here is greener and denser than in the highlands, likely thanks to more abundant water sources. Some plants also look familiar. In the thickets of woody bushes and small trees, I spot a yellow hibiscus in flower, a native species of hibiscus that looks much like the ornamental plants in so many gardens. The trees give way to a large clearing, and the guide gives a shout, “Hawk!!” Far off in the field, a Galapagos Hawk stands nonchalantly on a log. It’s larger than the hawks I’m used to seeing back home.
The other interesting things in this field are skulls, horned and lining our path, on rocks, and perched atop signs. These are goat skulls, left from the extermination of the animals from the islands starting in 2001. Goats were introduced to many of the islands in the Galapagos in the early 1900’s, as this Nature article describes with deadpan anti-humor, “successfully”: they ate everything in sight, threatened rare native plants and denuded whole areas, which led to erosion and the starvation of many native species, including tortoises. With the situation dire, conservationists created an ambitious (and sordid) program to rid the islands of goats that was nearly 100% successful, as Radiolab details in good scientific drama. At the end of the program, only a few sterile goats were left on the islands, and the skulls of dead goats now adorn trails and landmarks in many places, a morbid reminder of what sometimes must be done to save a unique species, a singular ecosystem. They are the death of the few for the many, the unquantifiable price we put on the continued existence of a species.
It’s getting late and so far we haven’t spotted the fabled tortoise, though. We’ve seen depressions in the dust where they burrow down to rest, and tracks in the dry leaf litter in the underbrush, but neither shell nor scale of a tortoise. It looks like it’s going to be an unlucky day until our guide hears a crackle over the radio: one group has spotted a tortoise! We race to their location on the path and find a massive animal, a moving-hill-of-a-creature, something that looks like it could have cohabited the Earth with the dinosaurs. A Galapagos tortoise.
Like all the animals we’ve seen so far, the tortoise shows little interest in us and is intent on fulfilling his day’s chore: filling his belly. Given that this tortoise is the size of a small washing machine (but turned on its side, sprouting a head, legs, and a tail), that’s no small task. Galapagos tortoises subsist on nearly any green fare they can find, including grass, cacti, leaves, and fruit. This particular fellow has found himself a treat: a poison apple, or la manzanilla de muerte (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel). While the fruit is toxic to humans and most animals, the tortoises here consume them with gusto and without ill effect. Like the rest of the harsh, dry, volcanic, windswept Galapagos environment, the tortoises have found a way around the problem. They’ve adapted.
And though harsh, I’m slowly realizing how beautiful and mesmerizing the environment of the Galapagos is. There are inexplicable patterns in the scenery that melt into one another, tapestry of landscape, sea, and sky, embellished with the creatures that have managed to survive here. The grass is windswept and dense, forming feather-textured, miniature hills and valleys in fields. Thin, pointed brushstrokes of trees jut into a storm-gray sky, framed by a smattering of green leaves and lowland underbrush. It all looks so uncurated, untouched, so natural. This is what makes the Galapagos so unique; it’s a rare place unchanged by human hands, sculpted only by the forces of nature.
As we watch, she encounters a ravine a couple of feet across and seems stymed. How will she cross it and get back to land?