The Galapagos!!
26 - 28 August, Ian
After I'd written my last entry hurriedly at
George Bush International airport, Paula opined that I hadn't captured the
essence of our transcontinental flights. This is true, although from the
brevity of that particular blog you might infer one the the features of these
monthly upheavals: we always seem rushed. Our journey from Maine to Fairbanks
featured three flights in one day and our trip on down to Quito took 4 flights
over two days. The flights are not at all arduous but there's a degree of
stress arising from the worry that a delay could kill a connection and/or we
might lose bags that are checked through. If possible, we also like to get
chores done at the airports, too: buying books, for example, and posting the
girls' newsletters and our monthly pictures. So now we prefer transit stops to
be longer than they usually are rather than
briefer.
On the way down here we arrived at O'Hare airport after a night in Chicago to find that our flight to Miami - and all of the ones following it - were cancelled on account of the hurricane. It looked unlikely that we'd be able to get down to Quito in time to make our flight over to the Galapagos the next day, thus it seemed we'd miss our cruise. Also, we knew from when we'd tried to book the cruise that the following week the boat went into dry dock so there would be no chance of getting on another run of the same trip. Fortunately, the guy at the AA check-in found us a route through Houston with Continental literally a couple of minutes before the computer locked down the bag checking system - and that's the flight we took.
In the rare island of t-mobile reception that Houston provided I had some calls I really had to make - getting advice on a residual problem from the guys who fixed my mac and asking a friend to chase up Zoe's lost camera - and then I had just enough time to get our US snaps and write/post a blog entry with a glass of rose before getting to the gate 25 minutes before the flight to Quito left. So the press for time - together with the mental impossibility of reflecting calmly on jet travel while still in the thick of it - explains why I didn't write so much about it, and maybe gives you some flavour of what the transitions are like, and illustrates one of the reasons why we chose to spend a month in each spot rather than moving around more frequently.
Stepping off the plane at Quito airport - even three and a half hours late - felt great! I've never been to South America before, and walking into the warm and barmy night, it seemed so exotic and full of promise: I felt just that romantic sense of hope, of new and exciting things being about to happen, that you aspire to when you travel. And as soon as we cleared customs a guy met us and took care of everything. For the first time since we left Alan in the middle of April we're being looked after by a travel operative this week; I don't know if you can just hop over to the Galapagos islands independently, and even if you can we're happy not to. Usually I get the shivers if I have to fall in with any form of organisation in my leisure time, but it felt good to be met at the airport by a competent local with a driver who promised to deliver our bags to our hotel and thence to our cabin the following morning so that we had no luggage, tickets or connections to worry about.
The hotel was good too. It had a large marble lobby, sofas and flower arrangements that the Carlton group probably stick everywhere buy there was something comforting about both its emptiness and the affable languor of the several smartley-dressed staff who hung out around the reception desk and greeted us when we arrived. Also our room for the night - like the excellent "Innerconinenal" in Chicago but unusually for a stopover hotel on this trip - sported the promised number of beds, which augured well for us here.
The following morning we had a 90 minute flight to the Galapagos island of San Cristobal. At the airport in Quito we met two other parties - Rachel and Chris from Adelaide, and Bill, Kelly and Alex (girl, 5) from the States - with whom we were to spend much of the next few days. On the plane ride we also encountered a large Italian party and it was immediately obvious that they would be adding colour and noise to our trip: there seemed to be no point during the flight at which they were all simultaneously seated, preferring instead to gabble volubly and happily with their compatriots along the length of the cabin. Zoe, Heidi and Paula found their liveliness quite wearing and it's true that they must burn plenty of calories through constant gestural energy; this notwithstanding, this particular group had found a way to maintain a pleasant pudginess and I, at least, found their exuberance uplifting. I enjoyed the muscular effort, precision and sheer speaking time which one of the girls invested in the articulation of the single word that I took to be the Italian for marmalade.
Being lively and happy never impaired anyone's curiosity and one of the Italians was reading - or carrying - a book with a cover picture of the last pope entitled Tra Fede e Scienza. This jived with my recent thinking about the "Intelligent Design" crowd in the States: my instinct is to distrust any sentence that includes both the words "faith" and "science". It seems to me that any attempt to talk about faith as something that illuminates the facts of how the world works as a supplement to what science can teach just becomes incoherent: science is precisely the set of meaningful things that you can propose about the world and it's too strong a religious position to believe that faith provides another dimension of useful description. On the other hand, in the context of our experience of the world the situation is almost the converse. Here you have to find a language and a mode of exploration that captures all of the pre-cognitive, urgent, visceral, hormonal human experience. To think that science can do all of this and squeeze out religious, artistic or phenomenological discourse seems too strong a scientific position. Maybe it's not an accident that at precisely the point in the last century when science had shown itself to be supreme not only in the hard disciplines like physics but also in the human disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry - just then we had the phenomenon of Existentialism: the return of the repressed. Maybe the Italians would have agreed with this.
From the plane we got on the ship and I realised that we were actually embarking on a cruise. We never meant to go on a cruise: we just wanted to see the Galapagos islands and that happens to be the way that you do it. So we're actually on a ship and spending seven nights here. The way that it works is that the tour operator offers four, five and nine days cruises. The nine is the four and the five concatenated, and each start and end day is effectively a half day - at best - because of the need to transition on/off the boat and to/from Quito. Nothing about being on a cruise appeals to me: being stuck on a ship (I can't help but think of prison ships), eating industrially-produced food, mixing with people that go on cruises, having a pre-set unchangeable itinerary, wearing a badge, being "entertained" by cruise ship staff... Every time I hear friends saying how they've enjoyed a cruise I always wonder what's different about them that gives them the ability to find pleasure in such a miserable enterprise. Well guess what: we're loving it!
When we boarded there were just under 80 passengers and something over 60 crew. Our new friends are great fun. Chris and Rachel are en route to a wedding in Peru and parked their daughter (Georgia) with Rachel's parents in Quito for the duration. Bill has served here in Ecuador for a year as the commander of the US air force base and managed to finagle both of the choicest adjoining suites for Kelly, Alex and himself. The food has been excellent, although I wouldn't want to be fed so much for any longer than we are being. The staff are great, too, and have none of the air-crew-style faux servility that I dreaded. Last night we even listened to the captain singing Guantanamera for the batch of departing passengers and enjoyed it! After four bottles of red we all went so far as to buy his cash-only home-produced CD. (He sounds like that guy - I may be way off but is it Victor Paesano? - who does the cute song in Almodovar's Talk to Her. He released a CD, which I have, in which he does covers of implausible tracks such as Nirvana's Come as you are in croony-cruiseship-club style. Incidentally, I'm regretting, not principally because of this, not stuffing every music CD I own onto my 60Gb IPod.)
And then there are the Galapagos islands!! Virtually all of our little gang here have had the same reaction: We thought it would be good but not this good. Only Paula had appropriately stratospheric expectations. The islands are stunningly beautiful. Each morning and afternoon we travel in little groups (there have been ten in our group until today) leaving on Zodiac boats - rubber dinghies with a motor on the back - and land on a beach on one of the islands. There are fifty-odd places in the Galapagos that you're allowed to visit and at each one we saunter around where we're allowed in our little knots of people. Usually we can see one or two similar groups out doing the same thing nearby but it doesn't feel at all bad to be numbered among the tourists because it's such a beautiful place and so well done. We'd expected to see more far more people milling around: with the reputation that the Galapagos has I'd pictured a flotilla of cruise ships hanging out in each bay but it's not like that at all. The beaches are wonderful: you could take a photograph blindfold and get a picture postcard vista. The inlands are beautiful too, though we've rarely been very far from the shore - and little of the whole archipelago is far from the shore. And the animals are as good as they could be: although they don't have Africa's big land mammals here, when they say that you'll see sea lions or blue-footed boobies they mean you will see them, and you'll see them up close. Even as we waited to board the ship on the first day we saw sea lions cavorting around just off the jetty, slipping on and off little fishing boats that bobbed around in the bay, and huge frigate birds swooped right over us. And they're all so tame; here, for example, is a snap of Heidi with some marine iguanas:
This was taken on the first walk we did on our first full day; we also saw sally lightfoot crabs (my new desktop background), brown pelicans, frigatebirds, blue-footed boobies (with and without chicks), waved albatross (nesting alone and performing courtship ritual), warbler finches, lava lizards, petrels, Galapagos hawks, sea turtles, swallow-tailed gulls (the world's only nocturnal gull - they have a white spot at the base of their lower mandibles that may help their chicks find the food being brought back for them), yellow warblers, Nazca boobies and mockingbirds. In fact, it was so good I'm going to drop in another snap; here's a shot of the swallow-tailed gulls:
The albatrosses may have been my favourites. They apparently have a wingspan of up to 2.6 metres and look like a supersize version of Nick Park's seagulls.
On later excursions we've seen flamingos, giant tortoises (although "only" in a couple of centres where they're being bred to re-stock the wilds, which have been depleted of tortoises by human-borne goats, rats and ants), and had some good "deep" sea snorkelling. The flamingos were a surprise for me: I didn't know they were here. Apparently, a few years ago a guy was intercepted at customs trying to smuggle one out. While I was deep sea snorkelling with Chris, Rachel and Bill, Paula and the girls were on a beautiful white sand beach swimming with the ubiquitous sea lions, and sea turtles swam around their ankles as they paddled in the shallows.
The other notable animal sighting here was the whales. An announcement came out a day or two ago (we lose track) drawing our attention to Bryde whales that could be seen swimming near to the ship. There were loads of them, though we could only make out their fins and the spouts (no flukes). Since there were so many the crew winched down the five Zodiacs and those of us who were keen piled in. Usually the Zodiac (or panga) crew drive them reasonably sedately but this was an occasion of high excitement and they opened the throttles right up and we sped towards the best and closest whale sightings at full speed. There was quite a swell on the waves and at the more dramatic moments the pangas flew over each crest, spanking down onto the troph side. The girls seemed to enjoy the soaking wet drama of this almost as much as seeing the whales. Almost as much, but not quite. Initially when the whales surfaced all we could see were the backs of the frenetic Italians, who leaped up, cheering and shouting to their friends in the other pangas. They didn't, though, all have the athleticism to match their enthusiasm and one of the Italian women spent much of the time rolling on the deck. Though they constantly occluded our view they did it out of excitement rather than selfishness, and after a couple of requests from Paula and Kelly to show consideration they moved the mums and girls to the front and everyone was happy: the moms and girls sat with Anglo Saxon restraint, the Italians could dance around as much as they liked and we all got to see a number of whales arching within a few metres of us.
Today started off sadly with our friends leaving as the four day cruise ended. Much to our surprise, apart from us the only other people on the ship who are staying on for the rest of the longer cruise are a couple from Queens. We hadn't spoken to them much before and it turns out that they're pretty entertaining. As well as our new friends, there were plenty of other people here with whom we'd enjoyed chit chatting including more Americans and a nice couple from Paris. Strangely, perhaps, there were no other Brits and it seems to have been ages since we've spoken with any. We do, though, have some English amongst today's joiners; I may write about some of the new mob next time.
We've arranged to see Chris and Rachel when we pass through Adelaide in November, which is something else to look forward to, and I hope we also see Bill and Kelly some time in the future.
Well that's all for now. Bet you wish you could come here. You should.
On the way down here we arrived at O'Hare airport after a night in Chicago to find that our flight to Miami - and all of the ones following it - were cancelled on account of the hurricane. It looked unlikely that we'd be able to get down to Quito in time to make our flight over to the Galapagos the next day, thus it seemed we'd miss our cruise. Also, we knew from when we'd tried to book the cruise that the following week the boat went into dry dock so there would be no chance of getting on another run of the same trip. Fortunately, the guy at the AA check-in found us a route through Houston with Continental literally a couple of minutes before the computer locked down the bag checking system - and that's the flight we took.
In the rare island of t-mobile reception that Houston provided I had some calls I really had to make - getting advice on a residual problem from the guys who fixed my mac and asking a friend to chase up Zoe's lost camera - and then I had just enough time to get our US snaps and write/post a blog entry with a glass of rose before getting to the gate 25 minutes before the flight to Quito left. So the press for time - together with the mental impossibility of reflecting calmly on jet travel while still in the thick of it - explains why I didn't write so much about it, and maybe gives you some flavour of what the transitions are like, and illustrates one of the reasons why we chose to spend a month in each spot rather than moving around more frequently.
Stepping off the plane at Quito airport - even three and a half hours late - felt great! I've never been to South America before, and walking into the warm and barmy night, it seemed so exotic and full of promise: I felt just that romantic sense of hope, of new and exciting things being about to happen, that you aspire to when you travel. And as soon as we cleared customs a guy met us and took care of everything. For the first time since we left Alan in the middle of April we're being looked after by a travel operative this week; I don't know if you can just hop over to the Galapagos islands independently, and even if you can we're happy not to. Usually I get the shivers if I have to fall in with any form of organisation in my leisure time, but it felt good to be met at the airport by a competent local with a driver who promised to deliver our bags to our hotel and thence to our cabin the following morning so that we had no luggage, tickets or connections to worry about.
The hotel was good too. It had a large marble lobby, sofas and flower arrangements that the Carlton group probably stick everywhere buy there was something comforting about both its emptiness and the affable languor of the several smartley-dressed staff who hung out around the reception desk and greeted us when we arrived. Also our room for the night - like the excellent "Innerconinenal" in Chicago but unusually for a stopover hotel on this trip - sported the promised number of beds, which augured well for us here.
The following morning we had a 90 minute flight to the Galapagos island of San Cristobal. At the airport in Quito we met two other parties - Rachel and Chris from Adelaide, and Bill, Kelly and Alex (girl, 5) from the States - with whom we were to spend much of the next few days. On the plane ride we also encountered a large Italian party and it was immediately obvious that they would be adding colour and noise to our trip: there seemed to be no point during the flight at which they were all simultaneously seated, preferring instead to gabble volubly and happily with their compatriots along the length of the cabin. Zoe, Heidi and Paula found their liveliness quite wearing and it's true that they must burn plenty of calories through constant gestural energy; this notwithstanding, this particular group had found a way to maintain a pleasant pudginess and I, at least, found their exuberance uplifting. I enjoyed the muscular effort, precision and sheer speaking time which one of the girls invested in the articulation of the single word that I took to be the Italian for marmalade.
Being lively and happy never impaired anyone's curiosity and one of the Italians was reading - or carrying - a book with a cover picture of the last pope entitled Tra Fede e Scienza. This jived with my recent thinking about the "Intelligent Design" crowd in the States: my instinct is to distrust any sentence that includes both the words "faith" and "science". It seems to me that any attempt to talk about faith as something that illuminates the facts of how the world works as a supplement to what science can teach just becomes incoherent: science is precisely the set of meaningful things that you can propose about the world and it's too strong a religious position to believe that faith provides another dimension of useful description. On the other hand, in the context of our experience of the world the situation is almost the converse. Here you have to find a language and a mode of exploration that captures all of the pre-cognitive, urgent, visceral, hormonal human experience. To think that science can do all of this and squeeze out religious, artistic or phenomenological discourse seems too strong a scientific position. Maybe it's not an accident that at precisely the point in the last century when science had shown itself to be supreme not only in the hard disciplines like physics but also in the human disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry - just then we had the phenomenon of Existentialism: the return of the repressed. Maybe the Italians would have agreed with this.
From the plane we got on the ship and I realised that we were actually embarking on a cruise. We never meant to go on a cruise: we just wanted to see the Galapagos islands and that happens to be the way that you do it. So we're actually on a ship and spending seven nights here. The way that it works is that the tour operator offers four, five and nine days cruises. The nine is the four and the five concatenated, and each start and end day is effectively a half day - at best - because of the need to transition on/off the boat and to/from Quito. Nothing about being on a cruise appeals to me: being stuck on a ship (I can't help but think of prison ships), eating industrially-produced food, mixing with people that go on cruises, having a pre-set unchangeable itinerary, wearing a badge, being "entertained" by cruise ship staff... Every time I hear friends saying how they've enjoyed a cruise I always wonder what's different about them that gives them the ability to find pleasure in such a miserable enterprise. Well guess what: we're loving it!
When we boarded there were just under 80 passengers and something over 60 crew. Our new friends are great fun. Chris and Rachel are en route to a wedding in Peru and parked their daughter (Georgia) with Rachel's parents in Quito for the duration. Bill has served here in Ecuador for a year as the commander of the US air force base and managed to finagle both of the choicest adjoining suites for Kelly, Alex and himself. The food has been excellent, although I wouldn't want to be fed so much for any longer than we are being. The staff are great, too, and have none of the air-crew-style faux servility that I dreaded. Last night we even listened to the captain singing Guantanamera for the batch of departing passengers and enjoyed it! After four bottles of red we all went so far as to buy his cash-only home-produced CD. (He sounds like that guy - I may be way off but is it Victor Paesano? - who does the cute song in Almodovar's Talk to Her. He released a CD, which I have, in which he does covers of implausible tracks such as Nirvana's Come as you are in croony-cruiseship-club style. Incidentally, I'm regretting, not principally because of this, not stuffing every music CD I own onto my 60Gb IPod.)
And then there are the Galapagos islands!! Virtually all of our little gang here have had the same reaction: We thought it would be good but not this good. Only Paula had appropriately stratospheric expectations. The islands are stunningly beautiful. Each morning and afternoon we travel in little groups (there have been ten in our group until today) leaving on Zodiac boats - rubber dinghies with a motor on the back - and land on a beach on one of the islands. There are fifty-odd places in the Galapagos that you're allowed to visit and at each one we saunter around where we're allowed in our little knots of people. Usually we can see one or two similar groups out doing the same thing nearby but it doesn't feel at all bad to be numbered among the tourists because it's such a beautiful place and so well done. We'd expected to see more far more people milling around: with the reputation that the Galapagos has I'd pictured a flotilla of cruise ships hanging out in each bay but it's not like that at all. The beaches are wonderful: you could take a photograph blindfold and get a picture postcard vista. The inlands are beautiful too, though we've rarely been very far from the shore - and little of the whole archipelago is far from the shore. And the animals are as good as they could be: although they don't have Africa's big land mammals here, when they say that you'll see sea lions or blue-footed boobies they mean you will see them, and you'll see them up close. Even as we waited to board the ship on the first day we saw sea lions cavorting around just off the jetty, slipping on and off little fishing boats that bobbed around in the bay, and huge frigate birds swooped right over us. And they're all so tame; here, for example, is a snap of Heidi with some marine iguanas:
This was taken on the first walk we did on our first full day; we also saw sally lightfoot crabs (my new desktop background), brown pelicans, frigatebirds, blue-footed boobies (with and without chicks), waved albatross (nesting alone and performing courtship ritual), warbler finches, lava lizards, petrels, Galapagos hawks, sea turtles, swallow-tailed gulls (the world's only nocturnal gull - they have a white spot at the base of their lower mandibles that may help their chicks find the food being brought back for them), yellow warblers, Nazca boobies and mockingbirds. In fact, it was so good I'm going to drop in another snap; here's a shot of the swallow-tailed gulls:
The albatrosses may have been my favourites. They apparently have a wingspan of up to 2.6 metres and look like a supersize version of Nick Park's seagulls.
On later excursions we've seen flamingos, giant tortoises (although "only" in a couple of centres where they're being bred to re-stock the wilds, which have been depleted of tortoises by human-borne goats, rats and ants), and had some good "deep" sea snorkelling. The flamingos were a surprise for me: I didn't know they were here. Apparently, a few years ago a guy was intercepted at customs trying to smuggle one out. While I was deep sea snorkelling with Chris, Rachel and Bill, Paula and the girls were on a beautiful white sand beach swimming with the ubiquitous sea lions, and sea turtles swam around their ankles as they paddled in the shallows.
The other notable animal sighting here was the whales. An announcement came out a day or two ago (we lose track) drawing our attention to Bryde whales that could be seen swimming near to the ship. There were loads of them, though we could only make out their fins and the spouts (no flukes). Since there were so many the crew winched down the five Zodiacs and those of us who were keen piled in. Usually the Zodiac (or panga) crew drive them reasonably sedately but this was an occasion of high excitement and they opened the throttles right up and we sped towards the best and closest whale sightings at full speed. There was quite a swell on the waves and at the more dramatic moments the pangas flew over each crest, spanking down onto the troph side. The girls seemed to enjoy the soaking wet drama of this almost as much as seeing the whales. Almost as much, but not quite. Initially when the whales surfaced all we could see were the backs of the frenetic Italians, who leaped up, cheering and shouting to their friends in the other pangas. They didn't, though, all have the athleticism to match their enthusiasm and one of the Italian women spent much of the time rolling on the deck. Though they constantly occluded our view they did it out of excitement rather than selfishness, and after a couple of requests from Paula and Kelly to show consideration they moved the mums and girls to the front and everyone was happy: the moms and girls sat with Anglo Saxon restraint, the Italians could dance around as much as they liked and we all got to see a number of whales arching within a few metres of us.
Today started off sadly with our friends leaving as the four day cruise ended. Much to our surprise, apart from us the only other people on the ship who are staying on for the rest of the longer cruise are a couple from Queens. We hadn't spoken to them much before and it turns out that they're pretty entertaining. As well as our new friends, there were plenty of other people here with whom we'd enjoyed chit chatting including more Americans and a nice couple from Paris. Strangely, perhaps, there were no other Brits and it seems to have been ages since we've spoken with any. We do, though, have some English amongst today's joiners; I may write about some of the new mob next time.
We've arranged to see Chris and Rachel when we pass through Adelaide in November, which is something else to look forward to, and I hope we also see Bill and Kelly some time in the future.
Well that's all for now. Bet you wish you could come here. You should.
Posted: Mon - August 29, 2005 at 12:39 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM