After the come-too-soon goodbyes, the long overdue hello. From our goodbye drinks I went directly to catch the midnight bus to Guayaquil, arrived at the airport at 8am and waited a mere 5 hours until my long-suffering girlfriend walked out of a door marked arrivals. As soon as she was with me again the sadness of all the goodbyes was gone and I knew that an exciting second part of my time in South America was about to begin. An exciting new period which started with an intensive 3-day bootcamp getting ready for the first real stop on our travels - The Galapagos Islands.
Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador with 2 million inhabitants, and it's also the most dangerous and surely the hottest. Nothing against the city, but once we'd strolled past all the couples making out on the malecón, or promenade (a common theme amongst malecones in Ecuador), slogged it up a hill in the slums painted pretty for the tourists, and hung out with about a hundred very tame iguanas with whom we shared the central square, we were kind of bored and happy to spend our time getting over the jetlag and getting ready for the real fun to happen.
We flew to San Cristobal island (the easternmost inhabited island in the archipelago) on Friday 14th February. Very romantic, I know. Before setting off, our bags had to be searched for organic material, ie anything with seeds which could take root and disrupt the fragile ecosystem over there. All apples thus confiscated, we paid $10 for don't know what, got on the flight and landed an hour later. An initial panic ensued when we discovered we couldn't pay the $100 park entrance fee (Ecuadorians pay 6) with visa card and had our passports confiscated until we could get the money.
The prospect of being illegal stowaways on a group of volcanic islands 1000km from solid land came closer as our cards were rejected, but we sorted the matter out with a little begging at the bank and escaped from the situation with the only damage done being to our dignity.
Once recovered and settled, we wandered to the malecón for a well-earned sit-down only to find it had already been taken. By a sealion. The entire beach and malecón was packed with these belching and rather ungraceful (on land at least) creatures, the vast majority of which were lazing around sleeping and paying no attention to the stunned tourists posing for photos not more than a metre away from them.
From there we hitched a lift on the back of a pickup to la lobería, a beach-based sealion colony and sat ourselves a comfortable (2 metres) distance from a sleeping female and presumed baby. We had spent a good half an hour gawping at the cuteness of them when the male returned from the sea, waking the excited child. To its disappointment the male headed straight for the female, cuddle up and did what lazy sealions do on Galapagos - sleep. Try as the kid might to wake its presumed parents it was snarled away, so we had a front row seat as the little one waddled away in search of further entertainment. We watched him perform a 'pile-on' on a group of sleeping mates of his and crawl on the back of (and pose for photos with) a group of sunbathers, and he even came up to me and gave me a little nudge in the back. I almost committed the cardinal sin and gave him a little stroke - with such friendly and unperturbed creatures it's easy to forget you're dealing with wild animals and not household pets.
In that last sentence lies one of the dangers of Galapagos. Some tourists on the same beach of us wanted to really take advantage of the animals' friendliness and looked to get pictures touching them. One particularly idiotic woman (an Ecuadorian I might add) simply laughed as she was a snarled at on three separate occasions for getting too close to the sleeping female. With ongoing expansion of the inhabited areas on the islands and increased flights so Ecuador can capitalise on this jewel in its crown there must be a risk of the docile animals finally getting sick of being constantly disturbed and turning decidedly less cute and cuddly. Having said that, the inhabited parts take up like 0.1% of the islands so maybe they choose to lie across the piers and on the benches because they like the attention...
The next day we took a 2 hour ferry to Puerto Ayora on the Isla Santa Cruz and arrived seasick, crushed and sweaty to a place which could be any bustling port or market town on the mainland, with parping taxis circling the streets and souvenir shops selling all manner of t-shirts with hilarious 'booby' puns. On that day we made it to las grietas, a gorgeous rocky canyon filled with deep crystal blue water, and the spotless golden beach of tortuga bay. Amazing natural beauty, but conspicuous on Galapagos for a lack of animal life - surely the impact of the noisy town around the corner.
That evening we booked a last minute trip to Floreana, an island south of Santa Cruz, with a bloke called Michel who offered me ridiculously low prices (precio de amigos) for our 3 remaining ferries. I knew it was too good to be true but must have been feeling adventurous at the start of my travels. Floreana involved another choppy 2 hour ferry before a hike to some very cool caves formed by lava flows, then to a giant tortoise sanctuary. There we witnessed a real life giant tortoise fight! It went something like this:
"Aaand the tortoises are edging closer to each other, 1m away... 80cm away..... 50cm away... They're extending their necks and hissing at each other, neither willing to move... Have they fallen asleep? No, now we have a super slow-mo swordfight with necks for swords, and tortoise 2 is doooown! He's retreated into his shell, tortoise 1 makes his way painfully slowly over to lord it over his defeated foe... Wait! A surprise attack from 2, he bursts out of his shell (relatively speaking) and pushes 1 away, who is forced to resign!"
Who knew such incredibly slow creatures could be so exciting?
Another 7am ferry the next day took us further west to the largest island but with the smallest human settlement - Isabela. As soon as we settled into our beach hotel with volleyball court and so many iguanas you found yourself tripping over them, we knew we'd be happy there.
That day and the day after saw two great snorkelling experiences.
On Monday we went to an open snorkelling spot just past the ferry pier and after stepping over hoards of iguanas and sealions we made it to the spot and swam with a very cheeky sealion. Their grace in the water is in sharp contrast to their clumsy land behaviour, and it mocked us by swimming slowly backwards then diving under us as we tried to get close.
On Tuesday we were taken to los túneles, a set of floating lava islands and tunnels where cactuses and ferns grow where they really have no right to. We saw giant turtles grazing on the seabed, all sorts of tropical fish, a lobster in its cave, a seahorse amongst the coral, and Mareike was even able to jump out of the boat and swim with a 5m manta ray, before one beat of its massive wings took it under and far beyond her. We saw the famed blue-footed boobies larking around on a rock as frigate birds swooped into the sea on the hunt for fish. The manta ray aside, all of these creatures once again didn't bat an eyelid about 15 humans fighting to get as close as they could to them.
Unfortunately those hours facedown in the water under the equatorial sun gave us some pretty nasty sunburn on our backs, limiting our actions for the rest of the trip. We were still able to see flamingoes, handle 20-day-old giant tortoises and see the amazing marine iguanas swimming (and snorting salt out of their nose to cope with the seawater that they were not evolved to swim in) on a beach on Isabela, almost miss our ferry back to the airport due to our too-good-to-be-true offer meaning our ticket was worthless, and I caught a glimpse of the only penguins to live in the tropics and saw the odd tiger shark on a final snorkelling trip.
I know I've written a lot, but I could have easily written twice as much. The costs of a trip to Galapagos are inhibiting, but if you in any way have the chance to go then go - before the humans ruin it.
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