Galápagos Shmalápagos

Mitad del Swamy

While my dad was in Ecuador visiting me, we took a trip to the tourist spot la Mitad del Mundo. This is the place where they claim the equator passes through the country, so people like to do silly things on the line and take pictures.

Not that silly.

One of the attractions at the equator is a simple scale because since the Earth bulges at the equator, people weigh less when they are there. My dad jumped on the scale and the machine told him he weighed four pounds heavier than he did when he left for Ecuador. 

I guess the Earth isn't the only thing that bulges at its equator (that's a hint, Dad).
 
The Plan

Last week I departed on a four day adventure in the Galápagos Islands with my father. We flew from Quito to Guayaquil, then from Guayaquil to the island of San Cristobal. My father made the reservations for an all inclusive trip that included the hotel rooms, meals, and most importantly, English-speaking tour guides. When we got off the plane we were met by our tour guide who told us, in Spanish, where to put our bags down.

Since my father doesn't speak Spanish, he just stared blankly at the guide waiting for him to start speaking English. The tour guide's face became filled with anxiety as he struggled for the words in English, "You... don't espeak Spanish", to which my father replied in the negative. The look on the tour guide's face immediately informed me that I would be serving as a translator for the rest of the trip.

I can understand Spanish pretty well at this point so I didn't think it would be a big deal to translate what the guide was saying for my dad, but people who live in the Galápagos Islands speak with a coast Ecuadorian accent. This means that they speak very quickly and like to drop consonants. For instance, in the Sierra (where I live), the phrase "más o menos" would be pronounced exactly as it is spelled, with all the letters being vocalized. On the coast, they drop some consonant sounds and it comes out more like "maomeo." I had to hear the tour guide say "tolaila"about five times before I realized that he was saying "todas las islas." I personally dislike the coast accent and don't like how it sounds, but I guess I could just be bitter that I don't understand every third word they are saying.

Do not Touch!

Nearly all of the land (97% I think) of the Galápagos Islands form part of a national park, so as soon as you step off of the plane you need to pay a park entrance fee. For foreigners, the fee is a whopping $100. For nationals, it only costs $6.

I am obviously not an Ecuadorian citizen, but I figured since I work in the country I might as well try to get by paying the park fee for nationals. I walked up to the counter and showed the officers my visa to work in the country.

- I'm not Ecuadorian, but I live in Ambato and I have a visa to work here. Can I get in as a national?
- (*looks at me, inspects visa, looks back at me*) This kind of visa is only given to diplomats or people who work for the government. Are you a diplomat?
- Uh... yeah, sure.
- Do you work for the Ecuadorian government?
- ... Kind of.
- (*calls another official over, followed by inaudible mumbling and a short pause*) Alright then, $6 please.

Boom.

The first stop on our tour of San Cristobal was to a beach. Like I said before, I didn't understand our guide that well, but I was pretty sure he told us that there would be "water wolves", and he warned us that if we got too close they could bite us. I took a class about evolution in college and read a lot about the animals in the Galápagos, but I never heard about water wolves so I was both excited to see what they were and terrified that I would be hunted down by a pack of amphibian lupines.

It turned out that in Spanish, the word for sea lion translates to sea wolf, so what he was really talking about were harmless seal-like creatures, not vicious marine/land pack animals. The sea lions summed up pretty well what most of the animal watching on the Galápagos was like.

First of all, they don't do anything. The only things they did in my presence was lay out on the beach making honking noises and smell like shit. One interesting aspect about the species on the Galápagos Islands is that since it is very difficult for animals to make it to the isolated archipelago, the few that do make it there usually don't encounter many natural predators that they need to be cautious of. This means that the animals live very comfortable lives of not doing a lot of work and posting up on the beach.

Second, the animals on the islands are not afraid of humans at all. Our guide warned us about not getting too close to the sea lions because they might attack us, but everyone in our tour group was walking right up to them and the sea lions didn't even flinch. At night when there is less pedestrian traffic on the boardwalk, the sea lions come onto the sidewalk and into the streets and just hang out. A few times I walked right past sea lions hidden in shadows and under bushes and didn't even notice it until they moved or honked at me.

Third, you are not allowed to touch a lot of things on the Galápagos because people want to conserve the nature there as much as possible, and human interference can screw up the natural order of things. For instance, we were told not to touch any of the baby sea lions because if our scent gets on them, the mothers can reject them and they will die from not being cared for.

You will never know how hard it was for me to not try to grab this baby and put him in my bag. It would have been just like having a Pokémon...

The next type of impressive animal we saw were the Galápagos tortoises. The tortoises are awesome because they weigh up to 400kg and can live to be over 150 years old. Like the sea lions they don't really do much, but at least they have an excuse since they are 100+ year old turtles.

Me trying to fit in with a little guy.

The islands used to be crawling with these tortoises before humans came. The thing that did so much damage to the species wasn't direct human action, but introduced species. Feral cats, rats, and fire ants were all introduced to the islands by humans, and they all like to eat the eggs of baby tortoises. Goats also contributed to the drastic decline in the tortoise population because they feed on the same plants as the tortoises do and provide too strong a competition for them.

An interesting thing I learned about the Galápagos is that the only species that were able to get to the islands naturally were the ones that could survive without water for long enough to make it from the mainland to the archipelago. Birds and bugs can obviously fly, but only the plants with seeds that could survive the long journey without water were able to grow when they finally reached land. Amphibians are not present on the island because they need lots of water to survive, and all the reptiles on the islands are endemic, which is to say that they are not found anywhere else on Earth (neat-o!).

George

Lonesome George is a turtle they found on one of the islands who is currently the only known survivor of his species. He was moved from his native home island to the most populated island in the Galápagos, Santa Cruz, so he could be cared for and studied to possibly find a way to keep his species alive.

The different tortoise species I saw had slightly different shells, but they pretty much all looked the same, so I wondered why they couldn't just breed George with a slightly different species. The guide told me that hybrids might be able to be produced that way, but that the hybrids, in turn, would be sterile and not be able to produce offspring of their own.

Fittingly, considering his history, Lonesome George was the most miserable looking creature I have ever witnessed.

Sympathizing with the 150 year old virgin.

Besides the giant tortoises, we saw a ton of other plants and animals that are only found in the Galápagos. It is really interesting that a lot of the biology on the islands is found nowhere else, but besides that fact they are otherwise largely unextraordinary. I could imagine seeing most of the animals and plants I saw on the Galápagos in the United States because most of them look like regular plants and animals, but in reality they are almost all very unique species that have been isolated for so long that they can no longer breed with similar species from where they originated before migrating to the islands.

I also found out that there are species endemic to particular islands in the archipelago. Because I only visited two islands while I was there, I missed out on seeing a few cool animals like the Galápagos penguin and the blue-footed booby. Although, if seeing a baby sea lion brought back my tortured childhood fantasy of Pokémon being real, maybe it was a good thing for my adult psychological development that I didn't see these guys in person.

If I was only in charge of the Galápagos Islands, I could make it my own, real life Safari Zone...


You Know What I Mean

Something that drives me nuts in Ecuador is when I say something correctly in Spanish, but people act like they have no idea what I am talking about. I say enough stupid, incomprehensible things in Spanish that I like to get responses that signal comprehension when I actually say something correctly.

Yesterday I went to the bank to pick up my ATM card. I walked up to the woman at the desk and told her that I had created an account with the bank already and was there to pick up my "card." She then replied with "what card?"

What card? Seriously? What card could I possibly be talking about in a bank except an ATM card.

"Yeah, I'm actually looking for a 'Happy Birthday Grandpa' card, where do you keep those."
"This one! (*pulls Ace of Clubs out of sleeve*) Was this your card?"
"I left my hologram Pikachu around here somewhere, would you mind helping me look for it?"


I finally explained that I wanted the card that would allow me to withdraw money from my account, and twenty minutes later she came out with it. One good thing to come from this experience was that while I was waiting for her to get my card, I had the best Snake game of my life. I defy anyone reading this who has Snake Xenzia on his phone to try and beat my score of 6,256. It was a beast snake.

Vaca

Anyone who knows me knows that I am not the best planner in the world, so I still have little clue as to how I will be spending the rest of my vacation. I have off until Jan. 10th, so I am considering meeting friends in Peru or Chile, or maybe just bouncing around Ecuador to see some things I haven't yet.

The only thing I am certain that I will do during my vacation is make a copy of a grammar book to use for my class. The school I teach at doesn't have a syllabus or books for its students, and I found out last semester that makes it very difficult to be a teacher or student. I am determined to get a bunch of books, break every copyright law ever written, and take the best from all of them to make the greatest English grammar book ever created by a WorldTeach volunteer in Ecuador.