It’s the evening of our fourth day in the Galapagos as I write this. Time has twisted and slowed, and the last few days have presented the extraordinary as everyday. The islands are a wonderful place, a world that I would never have believed could exist. The animals have never learned to fear humans, and we have discovered again and again what that means.
But to go backwards first: Ecuador greeted us with something of a punch to the mouth when my wallet was stolen. We were staying in a nice hostel run by a woman with a Japanese name, and she advised us to get the bus into the centre of the city so we could make the most of our one evening there. We thought that was a great idea. When it pulled it up, it was a lot more packed than I was expecting, but I thought nothing of it. I kept a good eye on my rucksack, which had my camera in it, and then at some point I put my hand in my pocket and my wallet was gone.
It was an unfortunate collision between the opportunity of the pickpocket and the stupidity of myself. I had far more money than I needed – a few hundred dollars, originally brought in case of emergency – and I had both my bank cards, plus my driver’s licence. Oddly enough I had taken out some euro cash and other things from it just before we left the hostel, but alas I didn’t go far enough. Lesson learned, expensively.
That particular disappearing act meant that our evening in Quito was spent on the phone to Bank of Ireland and MasterCard. The latter offered a cash advance, which I took them up on, and that meant we had to find a Western Union that was open late to collect it. We did so with the help of the hostel owner, who got us a local taxi to drive us over and wait. When we got there, we found armed guards outside, and they would only let in one person at a time, so Katie had to wait outside. Interesting.
We were picked up very early the next morning for the Galapagos – the taxi was outside at 5.15am. On the way, I realised the flight was at 6.20am and had an internal few minutes of panic, given my conservative tendency to be very early for flights. But we made it no problem. Our first view of the islands was from the air, a small one not much more than a small rocky uprising from the water. The airport on Baltra was tiny and well-run, much of it built out of wood. There is no luggage carrousel, so your bags are brought into a holding area on a trailer and then a sniffer dog gives them the once over. I am not clear if the dog was looking for alien flora or fauna or something more narcotic.
We had some difficulty finding our tour guide but hooked up eventually, learning somewhat to our surprise that we were on a GAP tour. We had seen the GAP group in Machu Picchu, and were not entirely enthused, though in the event it has worked out wonderfully. More people were to come but their flight was delayed, so we were taken on a bus from the airport to where you cross the small channel that separates Baltra from Santa Cruz, and from there we were driven south in a 4X4 all the way to the other side of the island, which took about 45 minutes. The final stage was a small boat which I think is called a Zodiac to the main boat where we are staying.
We were shown to our cabin, about a third of which is taken up by bunk beds, a third is the ensuite bathroom, and a third is floorspace, two shelves and a small wardrobe. There are two portholes that don’t open, rectangular in shape, slightly longer and narrower than an A4 sheet. The air conditioning was not working, and was in fact pushing out hot air. I pointed that out, and they told me that there was an engineer working on it at that very moment. I asked several more times during the day when it would be fixed, and each time they told me it was almost done.
To finish the air conditioning story, then, before going on with the rest: when we got back from our day out, we learned in short order that the air conditioning was not fixed, would not be fixed for a few days, and there were no other cabins for us to move to. No apology followed.
A few years ago in Greece I lost my temper in public in a hotel. I thought at the time I was rather explosive, and felt bad about it later. This time, to understate the matter, I comprehensively eclipsed that. I threw all my toys out of the pram and then I cried until I made myself sick, to stretch the phrase. I told them it was unacceptable, amateur, unprofessional, unbelievable, unfair, ridiculous, misleading, cowboy-ish and unacceptable again. There were many synonyms for essentially the same thing. I told them I was not going on the trip we had paid so much money for if they could not even get the damn air conditioning right. They said I was welcome to leave.
That drove me into further paroxysms as I couldn’t believe they were not even trying to make the situation better. There was colourful language. There were raised voices. It ended with me storming into the cabin, roaring that I would never deal with GAP again, and slamming the door. Then I needed to open it again to find the light switch. I closed it gently the second time.
I was very upset. I suppose, in retrospect, the frustration of missing out on the MP hike and then being relieved of such a significant sum in Quito in such a stupid manner boiled up. The room was stiflingly hot. In the end we did not leave the boat, and I tried to sleep in the cabin. I now understand what people mean when they say heat is ‘oppressive’. The noise of the engine was close and loud, and the heat was heavy and thick, and eventually I gave it up and brought my duvet and pillow to the main salon, which was successfully air conditioned, and slept on a couch. Katie had sensibly been there a few hours by the time I arrived.
The next day the rage was tempered by guilt. The guy on the receiving end of my tirade was the guide, and from the point of view of the GAP machine he is just a middle man, a position I have often been in myself. I apologised to him for getting angry, and he said that I was completely right. This, somehow, made me feel worse, like I had kicked a puppy. Several other cabins were also without AC, but over the course of the day they were all magically fixed when they replaced the newly-installed pump with the old, failing pump. So we only had one night on the couches.
On the third day, they wheeled out ‘the manager’ from GAP, and he apologised in a reasonably effective way. The long and the short of it is that we have had a free bar for a few days, and tomorrow we are being moved to ‘a cabin upstairs’. I am entirely unclear what this means, but I assume they are bigger and may have windows and other such luxurious applications of science. I said thanks, we shook hands, and that was that.
Anyway. Returning our eyes to the prize, there can be few things more surreal than walking through a field not unlike a field in Sligo, and finding that it is populated by several giant tortoises who are not remotely interested in your presence. And they are quite giant – you could comfortably sit on top of one, if such a thing was not forbidden by the rules. They are roughly the size of a coffee table, though wider and higher. If you get too close, they get annoyed and pull their heads back into their shells and make an angry pneumatic sound. When you back off, they come back out again and resume what appears to be their favourite activity of eating grass, though it should be noted they are also rather fond of making new tortoises, and I have pictures to show that. They remind me forcibly of dinosaurs, and they seem temporally incongruous, as though either you or they or both have wandered entirely off the timeline. It’s amazing.
And there are loads of them. We saw them in the highlands of Santa Cruz, going back along the same road we had come from the airport. No-one is quite sure how many there are, as they are not all tagged and as the guide noted helpfully ‘they move around’. But there are certainly several thousand on Santa Cruz alone. A tortoise, incidentally, remains mostly on land. A sea turtle remains mostly in the sea, and a terrapin lives in rivers. They are all essentially the same species though, and in Spanish the generic word is tortuga with the medium appended, i.e. you have a land tortuga, a sea tortuga and a river tortuga.
Later on that first day we went to see a lava tube, a tunnel that formed during an eruption from the volcano on Santa Cruz about 100,000 years ago. If I am understanding things correctly, the volcanoes around these parts tend to not explode with violence in the model of Vesuvius et al, but rather gently burp a very large amount of magma out of the ground which then flows downhill. In this flow, the upper part is cooled by the air and solidifies, but the lower part keeps on flowing. And because of its 1000C temperature, it melts the ground beneath it. The combined effect is that a tunnel is formed – the roof is created by the solidifying upper magma, and the lower flow scours a channel in the rock of the ground, and then flows out of the way leaving empty space behind. The tunnel we walked in was maybe five metres high, but we have since seen many smaller examples of lava tubes, some only a few centimetres high. (In a rather classic case of learning something once and then coming across it again shortly after, I read about lava tubes in a children’s book by Isabelle Allende on the plane to Ecuador, unaware that I was about to see them for myself.)
After the giant tortoises, we began to meet more of the islands’ inhabitants on the following days, and all of them have the same attitude to humans. Sea lions loll on the beach and you could walk over and touch them. If you sit on a rock near a baby sea lion and keep your hand still and at their level, they often wander over and sniff your fingers to check you out. Birds resting in the low bushes of some of the islands don’t fly away as you approach, but calmly let you take their picture. There are land and sea iguanas, and I have been within two feet of them and they have not moved. On the boat, a type of bird called a frigate tends to rest on the upper rigging, level with the upper deck, and you can pause in your walks around the boat to regard them at your leisure. They regard you back. There cannot be another place like this on earth, or if there is it is a secret, a place known only to a few.
I asked the guide about it, about how it could be so, and he said that it was simply that humans had not been coming here long enough for the animals and birds to learn to be afraid, and so they are just not afraid. I find that hard to believe, I have to admit, but whatever the cause this is a place where the animals inherited the earth, and we are just passengers through it, respectful of their primacy.
On the second day we went snorkelling, which was an entirely new experience for me. There wasn’t much in the way of official instruction, but one of the guys on the tour was kind enough to show me how to spit in the goggles to stop them from fogging up and what to do if you got a mouthful of water. And off we went.  The first day there wasn’t a huge amount to see, and I was very nervous about being in such deep water, but the second day was beautiful. I floated along peacefully at the surface – I haven’t yet got the courage to dive down and then blow the water out of the snorkel upon resurfacing – and watched the fish dash here and there, nudging at things in the rocks below. Schools of fish passed me by. There were towering rocks marking the edge of the cove and for the first time I got to see what such rocks look like beneath the surface, and the see the continuity with the earth. A Galapagos penguin came and swam near me, passing within a few feet, and I followed him as far as I could. On land he looks cute and sort of inept, but in water he has the agility and power of a jet fighter. And at the end of the afternoon, just as we were heading back for the shore, I was alone in the water – the nearest person probably 30m away – and I saw a shark. Not the people-eating kind, or so I have been assured, but a shark nonetheless, passing close to the ocean floor, timeless and powerful.
When you have your face down in the water, the only sounds are of liquid sloshing and your breathing, and it is a world entirely to yourself. Lifting your head to look around and hear what is happening is like crashing back into this world, jarring and unwelcome. To stop the poor gringos from finding a way to drown themselves, the guys from the boat tip around in the two zodiacs, and if you get into trouble you just hold up your hand and they come over and make sure all is well. The flippers give you such buoyancy though that it’s very easy to stay afloat and adjust your mask or whatever you need to do, but it’s nice to have them as a backup. As well as that, they’re expert at spotting things, so what happens is that every now and then they yell ‘Shark!’ and point, and everyone hammers over to where they’ve spotted it to try and get a glimpse. The first time I heard them call it out, I thought it meant get the hell out of the water rather than go over and have a look.
It is very compelling to slide back into that world and be entirely with yourself and the water, and I can see why people move on to scuba diving. It’s a spiritual experience, both in the sense that for periods of time you are entirely alone with your thoughts, and because you are floating only partially in the world below, unable to join it fully. I think I’m hooked.
The last few days have passed in a routine where we get up early, have breakfast, go to one of the islands and walk around among the animals, come back to the boat for lunch, and travel to another island for snorkelling and swimming. The days have blended together, merged to form one blissful elongated period of discovery and newness. Not that everything has been quite perfect. Despite my very best efforts and much application and reapplication of sunscreen, I have been badly burned on the backs of my legs, which happened on the second day of snorkelling. It’s painful to walk or sit or move. I am on my bunk as I write this, the upper one, and I have to have my pillow under my legs just to be able to sit. From now on I will use a wetsuit, which offers sun protection as well as additional buoyancy. Also, my sore throat has returned, and after hesitating for a day or so I am now taking the antibiotics that I bought in Peru. I feel fine again, but clearly I have not shifted the dose. And finally, I have contrived to lose the sunglasses I bought just before I came here, Ray Ban Aviators, of not dissimilar value to the contents of my wallet. I and others spent much time and effort trying to track them down, and I retraced my steps over and over, but to no avail. I cannot quite understand it, but yet again I am left with no recourse other than these things happen. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit upset by that too. Oh and actually, if I am putting my complaints together, I cut my toe on a rough part of the floor in the cabin, which bled more than I would have expected for a relatively shallow wound.
But overall, it has been a time of magic here, a journey through a magic kingdom. Several people who had been here told me this was the best thing they had ever done, and I can see why. It is almost indescribable how different the animals’ behaviour is to what you would expect, a sort of Eden idyll. The most mediocre photographer gets to feel like they could grace National Geographic. And we have four more days of it to come.
