ADVENTURES FOLLOWING DARWIN`S FOOTSTEPS - THE GALAPAGOS

We have been on the Galapagos islands for 6 days now. After the long journey that took us here across South Colombia and Ecuador we are now enjoying some free time, unique nature, sunshine and fresh seafood. While Szilveszter decided to try the hammock in the garden of our hostel I thought to share with you some of our adventures so far.

Although this time has only been enough to see a little part of the beauty of this land, it is clear from the first moment that this is not an ordinary archipelago with nice beaches, colourful fish for the benefit of snorkelers and cocktail bars to make the nights go faster. It is truly a land with so much wonder that it takes a while to believe that such place exists on Earth. Numerous endemic species live here that made these volcanic islands their home over the last thousands of years. Animals that you normally see in a zoo or water park live so close to people without any fear that you could even play with them (if you were allowed to!). For more pictures check out the gallery here!

All tourists go through the same process: in the first days you take hundreds of pictures of each animal on the islands, then after the thousandth iguana you need to step over, you simply acknowledge it and continue your walk. It happened with us too, which makes it extremely hard to select only a few pictures for this post and the gallery! We have over a thousand photos so far, and I bet about 70% of them are with marine iguanas, blue-footed boobies or seals sleeping on benches in the port. Most people want to see the typical Galapagos animals, hence travel agencies organise endless tours and cruises to do this: terrestrial tortoises, marine turtles, terrestrial and marine iguanas, unique birds. like the blue-footed boobies, frigatebirds, pelicans, flamingos, seals (that are everywhere on the islands) and the Galapagos penguins (which are one of the very few penguins not living in Arctic conditions). These are really small, about 40cm tall, the 2nd smallest on Earth.

There are 3 main islands on the Galapagos: Santa Cruz (this is centrally located, has the largest town with much to offer for tourists hence most of them use this as their base), Isabela (the Western inhabited island with a much smaller town but consequently much more wildlife all across the island) and San Cristobal (the capital and administrative centre for the locals). Apart from the three big islands, the archipelago consists of numerous smaller islets that visitors can reach by boat as part of half-day, day trips or larger cruises of 3-8 days that sail to remote islands where wildlife is the most abundant.

We are about 1200km from the mainland on Ecuador, and it`s clear that we`re isolated: the islands get supplies on boats via Santa Cruz where they re-distribute products to the other islands. Due to the distance between each island, it can happen that further destinations don`t receive new stock for a month or so causing shortages of certain necessities. This is why, for instance, at the moment there is no bottled water larger than 0.5l on the island of Isabela, but in another similar case there was no cooking gas on the island and the prices of the remaining stock went up to the sky from $5 to $80 a bottle! The prices and the choice on each island reflect the difficulty to get supplies there. For this reason we decided to eat pizza on Isabela after eating rice with meat with limited taste for over 3 days. This helped us appreciate the pizza even more!

The islands are popular with couples and families but less crowded by backpackers due to the generally high prices. Nowadays, however, more and more tourists try to organise their holiday themselves, stay in hostels, eat set lunch menus and do shorter daily trips from the islands to reduce costs and make this place more affordable. Otherwise the local prices are more than double that in mainland Ecuador. In Ecuador the official currency is the US dollar and even mainland prices are clearly higher than in Colombia. First we were actually so surprised about the price level (particularly for excursions!) that we didn`t want to believe that this was not subject to negotiation. After a few awkward discussions at travel agencies where we tried a starting price of about 50% of what was offered, we had to accept that we won`t polish our bargaining skills here too much. As we learnt from a taxi driver, the high excursion prices are driven by the high fees the local government charges in order to re-distribute the revenue to the islands for the maintainance of the national parks (and the provision of social services to locals).

No opportunity is missed to create revenue from tourists! Just to come to the island there is a row of fees charged at visitors: everyone has to pay $20 already back in Quito for a card that we need to keep and return when leaving (we could not really figure out what service/purpose we had payed for in the end with this, but we were told we would need to pay a penalty if we lost the paper), another $100 for the national park entrance fee when landing at the airport (at least we got the fancy tortoise stamp below in our passport, surely worth the fee!?), and a group of unlucky tourists we met (not us thankfully) got charged another $10 to leave the airport (clearly a scam). At the arrival to Isabela island then a further $5 needs to be paid for "using the port" - we wondered if we could just jump out of the boat somewhere else to save this? We try to think that this all goes to save the animals, so it makes us feel a bit better...

We landed on the 16th on Santa Cruz island and spent the day to discover the town. Puerta Ayora is a small town of about 18.000, located on the seaside and has a small market, a few streets with hotels and restaurants. Luckily the quality of food is much higher than on the mainland with fresh food, mainly fish from the day`s catch. There`s a street where restaurants dress their tables for guests in the middle of the street in the evening, and you can pick the fish for your dinner from a big selection. The town is safe (again a big difference to mainland Ecuador) which makes the atmosphere so much more relaxed. You can walk around in the port at night and see seals lying on the ground and the mini sharks that are curious by the lights and come close to shore. The island has a research centre with tortoises but these also live in the wild in the middle of the island which is a more exciting visit.

All the islands are made of volcanic stone and were born as a result of volcanic eruptions under the ocean. We visited some of the remains of these, saw lava tunnels that were formed when the lava cooled down, and also saw two craters. Apart from this, streets, houses and beaches are all made of black volcanic rocks.

On Santa Cruz we also visited one of the most beautiful beaches we have seen so far, Tortuga bay, which is an about 35 mins walk from the town. The prestine white sandy beach stretches to about 500 meters and is the favourite place of marine iguanas, pelicans, finches (the birds that Charles Darwin made so famous) and surfers too due to the strong currents in the bay. We spent my birthday here, relaxed on the beach and read about Darwin`s adventures on the islands. We finished the day with a nice fish dinner that was freshly grilled in front of us. It was a fantastic day - until the terrible news in the restaurant for Szilveszter that the lobster season had ended the night before hence he missed the grilled ones! (This way he only had it about 4 times on previous days in other dishes..) They literally use lobster for all food and it costs nearly the same as anything else! Luckily he could still find some squid on the menu and the mango juice didn`t run out either..This saved the day!

After the day on the beach we had to spend some time to cure our burnt skin. The sun burns even when it`s not out and even when we don`t feel it. The sun cream doesn`t seem to work as we can`t remember frequently enough to repeat the application! The body lotion is our best friend these days, so we are happy to see some clouds sometimes.

About the weather it`s worth mentioning El Nino! Some of you might still remember it from school, it`s an atmospheric phenomenon that isn't completely understood yet - no one knows when exactly it will recur, why it is formed, but when it comes, the temperature of the water changes, huge rainfalls hit the land and it can destroy living habitats of both humans and wildlife. This year turned out to be an El Nino year, and a huge downpour hit the islands only a couple of weeks before we arrived. The locals mentioned that the storm left water flowing on the roads for days. We also saw a destroyed concrete road that needs to be completely rebuilt, it looked like after an earthquake! El Nino seems to impact not only the Galapagos but Peru too, where we were warned to be ready for much caution from the locals meaning closed paths and floods. We`ll see but until then we`re enjoying the last few days in Paradise!