Ecuador & The Galapagos

      So you may be asking yourself, why would I combine both Ecuador and the Galapagos on one post?  And it's a good question since so many folks spend an entire vacation just in the Galapagos, often making one of the many ships their "home" for a week or more (we stayed on land).  But need I remind you that the Galapagos islands are a part of Ecuador.  Okay, weak excuse but I'll cover all of that later.   Right now, we need to head back to Lima, well, to us leaving Lima...and a hotel bathrobe.  And all of it begins at 4:30 AM...

The natural remedies given, one a probiotic...

     We were on the move, having left to catch the early, early flight to Ecuador (did you notice that 4:30 AM wake-up?)  The bus met us at the airport in Quito, dropped us off at the hotel, and we were given a few hours to catch our breath before heading out for a quick city tour (we all just wanted to plop down and take a nap).  Now let me add that I have never worn a hotel's bathrobe, thinking that whenever I see one hanging in the closet, I have paid too much for the room (or that I would be billed a zillion dollars for wearing it upon checkout, sort of like finding out that the mini bottle of vodka in the fridge was $15); in my mind, the only people who wore those fluffy cozy robes were Hollywood celebrities, cartel bosses, and Congressional politicians, which perhaps says something about how I view them as pretty much one and the same.  But here I was in the capital city of Quito (which made me think of mos-Quito), watching my wife sleep and me, comfortably wearing a hotel robe after a dip in their pool, happy perhaps because I got to miss the additional three cathedrals the rest of the tour group were now off to visit.  Wait, we just checked in, didn't we?  Again, I've jumped ahead of myself so let me explain.  Soon after checking in late (after our 4:30 AM pickup) we arrived in Quito, unpacked, toured and discovered it was nesrly time for dinner (time flies when you're delirious).  But come the next morning we were worn out, my wife especially: scratchy throat, plugged up, and no energy.  We would have to let the tour director know, if only to say that we would skip the visit to more conquistador monuments (cathedrals) and simply rest for the day.  I'll call a doctor, she said.  It's okay, I said, we would test for Covid just in case, and let her know the results later.  Ecuador's system is different, she said; I'll call a doctor.  Soon there was a knock on the door of our hotel (and remember, this was a Sunday); it was the doctor.  She gave my wife a battery of tests (including Covid), wrote out a prescription for a natural remedy (not only did the doctor carefully go through all of the meds we brought, such as a Z-pak, but the hotel had a pharmacy downstairs which made getting everything as easy as ordering empanadas), and then she left.  No charge (our tour director said that the normal charge for a Sunday house call would be $40).  Uh, a different system from the U.S?  I'd say so (almost all museums in Ecuador are also free)...the natural remedy "prescribed" for her cough was a eucalyptus-honey solution, one which provided almost instant relief for my wife's scratchy throat.

The captivating pool of our hotel in Quito

      Now the bathrobe...let me erase that thought that I may have gone rogue and abandoned all of my principles (did he eat some cuy, you're asking yourself).  So after the doc left, my wife lay back down and was out; and while she slept, I gazed out at the pool below, not your Vegas monstrosity lined with tanned bodies of starlets and wannabes, but a sedate palm-lined version with only six lounge chairs and the water just deep enough to please a child.  Why not, I thought.  A quick dip in the pool would be a nice break from just reading in the room while she slept.  So down I went and sat there in the sun (another thing I rarely do because, well, I was born in Hawaii so getting a tan is superfluous), then I figured I'd quietly slip into the water to cool off a bit.  But wait, the woman before me had never gotten out, so where was she?  I "swam" over to the small waterfall and saw there was an opening going through, one which led to an indoor lap pool.  Okay, time to start working off those vacation desserts, and off I went.  Half a short lap, breathe, then another half lap and...gasp.  Wait a minute, I thought that with all that hiking at Machu Picchu, I shouldn't be this out of shape.  Swim back, catch a few breaths, then off again for another try.  But after just one additional lap, I was done.  Trying to swim at 9000' was like trying to run in the ocean.  Futile.  Dang those high altitudes.  A quick dry off in the sun and I was back in the room, showering and gazing at that bathrobe.  I slipped it on and it felt just fine, sort of guilt-free fine.  Which brings up another part of Ecuador, it's so named because it rests on the equator.  There are no surprises here: the sun rises at 6 in the morning and sets at six in the evening, day after day, 365 days a year.  Not at 6:01, but at 6...so that pool time and me getting a bit chilly?  I knew that the sun wasn't just behind a cloud; it was setting.

Photo of actual equatorial line: quitsato.org

     The name Ecuador comes from the Latin equitas which translates into equality.  The equator is here (duh), those minute/second navigation lines equal from north to south (a navigational second is different for latitude vs. longitude, although some now prefer to use UTM instead...what??).  There are two (perhaps more) "stand on the equator" sites (the one close to Quito is the "tourist" site but is actually 250 meters off) but only one true site,* even visible (via infrared) to the Space Station as the 0-0 point.  Here the sun moves directly overhead, day after day, with no variance.  It is also here that you can see both hemispheres in the sky, the northern and southern constellations, the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) as well as the Southern Cross (Crux).  Early people somehow recognized this, "this" being the fact that they were aware of this point of reference, and they began building mounds, large mounds that covered part of a hillside or a mountain (275 have been discovered so far, archeologists working outwards from the 0-0 point in all directions).  These mounds have been credited to the quitu-caranquis peoples, a civilization that constructed all of that 5000 years before the rise of the Inca.  So again, how?  And why?  And think that if you were in charge of creating such structures, what direction would you have their entrances face?  For the early builders,

all of their sites faced east, probably because from that position they could look up and see directly north and south in the sky.

     We were lucky that we were where we were; not just my wife and I being here on the equator but for any of us being here on this anomaly of a planet.  Said the late Lyall Watson in his book, Heaven's Breath: Voyager spacecraft passing the planet in 1981 [Saturn] heard static from what appeared to be a massive thunderstorm sixty thousand kilometers wide, raging round the equator, with wind speeds of over 1500 kilometers per hour.  That translates to 932 mph, a far cry from my slightly chilly breeze as I got out of the pool.  But more than that, he added this about our own planet's atmosphere and the air which we breathe: Almost everything about it violates the laws of chemistry.  For a start it is a highly combustible mixture and there should by now be no free nitrogen in it.  Nitrogen normally reacts with oxygen, and all or most of both gases should long since have ended up in the ocean in the form if stable nitrate ions.  But the air we breathe remains stubbornly uncombined, with concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen at a steady and separate 21 and 78 percent respectively.  Nor are either of these proportions arbitrary.  If the abundance of oxygen was any greater, all life would be at risk.  The probability of a forest fire increases by 70 percent cent for each 1 percent rise in oxygen concentration above the percent level...Everything from the driest arctic tundra to the wettest tropical rainforest would burst into flame.  And if the level of nitrogen, which is largely responsible for air pressure, were to fall to 75 parts per hundred, nothing could prevent the onset of global and possibly permanent glaciation...The presence if methane in the contemporary atmosphere is equally problematic.  It is toxic and highly unstable,  combining readily with oxygen and vanishing almost as fast as it formed...without methane, oxygen concentration would rise by a dangerous 1 percent in every twelve thousand years...Everything points to the same conclusion.  The atmosphere cannot be just a fortunate one-off emantion from some ancient rocks.  Life does not merely borrow gases from the environment and return them unchanged.  Our air begins to look more and more like an artifact, like something made by, and maintained by, living things for their own ends.

Cocoa "pods" at a fruit stall

     A slippery slope that, about as slippery as a banana peel.  But bananas (how's that for a segue?) were nowhere near as evident as the mangoes, passion fruits, and papayas (I once again drank the juice of each of those).  Of course, oil and shrimp are the main exports of Ecuador, with bananas being third (shrimp farms have steadily taken over at the cost of destroying 70% of Ecuador's mangrove forests, something the government is working to amend).  But coming close at number four...roses (there are 800 rose farms in Ecuador).  Not the perfume type but these more the erect stem and destined for bouquets type.  Being on the equator, the sunlight is straight above so the 600 varieties of roses do indeed grow upright.  All of that is helped by the rich soil from the nearby volcanoes, the deep fissures and valleys visible throughout the land as if giant fingers had been playing in this land's soil (many of the valleys were large and deep enough to need bridges).  Many of the volcanoes here top 20,000 feet and erupt on average ever 200 years, said our guide (20 of the 22 volcanoes on mainland Ecuador are considered "active").  Such high lands (condors nest around the 16,000' level on cliff edges) and rich soils were in sharp contrast to that of the equally-volcanic Galapagos.  I was tempted to say the "nearby islands of the Galapagos" but as we would soon find out, the islands are anything but nearby, or unpopulated, or bursting with animals scampering at your feet...

Approaching the Galapagos Islands

     To begin, what I imagined to be a remote series of nearby deserted islands is not only quite far away (about 600 miles off of the coast of Ecuador) but is also home to 26,000 residents, nearly half of them on the "touristy" side of Santa Cruz island.  But back up.  The government is quite strict about who can or cannot actually live on the island; and those 26,000 people are pretty much limited to just one or two of the recognized 19 islands which tourists flock to see (which included us, of course).  And who wouldn't want to see the Galapagos and feel a tiny bit like the young Charles Darwin, still in his mid-20s and fascinated by all the wildlife which seemed to show no fear of humans.  This lack of fear was detrimental to many of the species in earlier days; whalers and others quickly realized that the tortoises could live for three months without food or water, making for an excellent source of protein for sailors returning back to Europe, even if the sheer weight of them made getting them back to the ship a daunting proposition.  This led to an estimated loss of hundreds of thousands of the tortoises, so much so that three of the species were estimated to go extinct during that period.  Even the iguanas proved an easy source of protein, mostly for the surge of introduced animals that preyed on them, dogs and cats which quickly overpopulated some of the islands and became feral, adding to the introduced goats which took advantage of the once-abundant (but limited) vegetation (eradication measures to try to control the feral animal population only entered the picture in the late 1950s, and efforts continue to try and eradicate the rat populations).   That said, eradication of introduced species may prove an uphill battle since nearly 1600 new species have been brought to the islands since the arrival of humans, said an Oxford study.

     Darwin is credited with his observation of evolutionary adaptation (or as it is more often known, the natural selection of species), but this was partly triggered by the specimens he had sent back to Cambridge (Darwin's visit was on the second trip of the ship, the HMS Beagle) when an ornithologist at Cambridge pointed out to Darwin that the beaks on the mockingbirds gathered on different islands came from different species (Darwin just getting on the trip was a bit of pure luck, and money since his family was quite wealthy and influential; Darwin's story is worth reading on the Wiki "summary").  From there, Darwin would begin to study the finches he is so noted for (Darwin was a geologist by trade so he was originally brought onboard for that skill).  Of course, Darwin's observations just skimmed the surface; here's what Orion had to say about the evolution of our eyes: Wherever you are, if you look up and watch a scrap of cloud drift across the sky, you are seeing through the complexity of 600 million years of work.  This was a collective architectural, scientific, bodily effort.  Jellies did it first, clustering opsins, but plants, too, knew the light was there to be seen and saw it, in their fashion.  Your camera-like orbs are so complicated that Darwin nearly conceded that gods may have made them, but they began somewhere with your jawless eely vertebrate ancestors pushing through the dark.

     This "land" of giant tortoises and marine iguanas is actually rather small; if clumped together the 127 islands that make up the Galapagos would be about the size of Delaware.  And yet once in the water, with choppy waves and cold water currents, the islands seem much larger -- our boat ride from one island to another took 2 hours.  We were staying on the island of Santa Cruz (which holds the majority of human residents), a 5-minute ferry ride from our landing at the airport.  Stepping off the plane you begin to wonder how anything survives out here, the land appearing as barren as a desert (indeed, 17 people are known to have wandered off-trail and perished from heat and dehydration, said Smithsonian).  But once on the other island we found ourselves entering the wet portion, the part where clothes don't dry and where the dampness nourishes the ferns and grasses.  It is here where giant tortoises creep by almost unnoticed, their moving "helmet" shells unaffected by the parade of people sneaking behind or to the side of them (we were advised that we should not approach the tortoises from the front).  Some of the early Spanish felt that the shells resembled the saddles on their horses and to this day, scholars differ on whether the islands' name translates to "tortoise" or to "saddle." (the islands were called the Enchanted Islands by the first recorded discoverer, a bishop from Panama whose boat strayed off course and stranded him there).  But after seeing the umpteenth tortoise in the pond (who knew that they could float), coupled with the steady rain and mist, it all grew somewhat ordinary and we were ready to move on (and dry out).  Which is exactly what we did...

     Once again, we had drawn a lucky card and not only had great and sunny weather on the "dry" side of the island, but the waters had warmed nearly 10 degrees due to the changing currents and was a nice 76F degrees (when our neighbors went almost exactly a year ago, the water temp was closer to 65F).  This made for great and up close snorkeling along many of the rocky shores.  The schools of surgeon fish and small red creole fish seemed as curious as we were, although that wasn’t saying much.  The first seal that barked at my chatting to it was rather cute until I saw its baby pup trying desperately to get enough grip to jump onto a rock and get out of the water.  You know that old "don't get between a mother and her baby" thing.  I quickly swam away.  Then two seals appeared directly in front of me, moving back and forth as easily as me moving my fingers on a drawing board.  Maybe this would be my take-home memory, me telling everyone that the seals were so friendly that they swam right under and between my legs.  That is until I heard someone yell, "where's your guide?"  It was loud enough that I heard it through my ear plugs.  "Move away from there unless you want to get bit," said the other guide (doing the yelling).      

A marine iguana, so named because it can swim & feed in the ocean

   This pleasant snorkeling waters hid a rather sinister tale, that of the oceans warming in general (the marine life here counts on the cooler waters of Antarctica being brought up by the Humboldt current).  Said an article in TIME: ...the European climate-­monitoring agency reported that May 2023 had seen the highest ocean temperatures on record, increasing ocean acidity, weakening marine eco­systems, and forcing coral polyps to expel their colorful symbiotic zooxanthellae algae in a near-death phenomenon called bleaching.  By the end of July, waters off the coast of Florida had reached Jacuzzi temperatures, and volunteers were racing to transfer fragile coral sprouts to indoor aquariums before they cooked to death.  According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about 40% of the world’s oceans are currently experiencing a marine heat wave, with as much as 50% forecast for September...The havoc wreaked on coral reefs destroys habitats that nurse, nourish, or shelter a quarter of all marine life, including the fish that provide critical protein and income to a billion people around the world.  Goods and services provided by reefs in the form of tourism, shoreline protection, food, and fisheries are valued at $2.7 trillion a year...A 2°C or higher rise in average global temperatures since humans started burning fossil fuels for energy would be enough to wipe out an estimated 99% of existing coral reefs.  The month of July already averaged 1.5°C.

Turtle nesting sites being blocked off...

    But these were the Galapagos, a UNESCO marine protected site so there was hope, even if this designation only occurred 25 years ago.  Despite the 400% increase in ocean plastic in general, the islands do their best to discourage plastic usage, especially those flimsy grocery bags so commonly carried away by wind and into the ocean.  And the article noted: ...in 2022, then Colombian President Iván Duque more than doubled the country’s marine protected areas, bringing it within reach of the 30% goal, and joining forces with regional neighbors Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Panama to establish the largest protected marine zone in the western hemisphere, if not the world.  And does this help?  In a related piece, the magazine wrote this: In 1995, the Mexican government, pressed by local activists, created the Cabo Pulmo National Park on the southeastern tip of Baja California—­covering both land and a portion of the offshore region.  Cabo Pulmo once saw much of the devastation that the rest of Baja California is ­suffering.  But not anymore.  Industrial fishing is prohibited, and ecotourism is heavily regulated.  The result has been a 465% increase in the population and diversity of fish in the local waters and a recovery of the region’s damaged coral reef.

The National Geographic boat off one of the islands...

     All of our guides on the Galapagos were generational and passionately loved the islands (two of them had law degrees, and the other a masters in marine biology).  The islands have a rigorous vetting process and many, many hoops to pass to become a registered guide and almost every land and marine "tour" requires such a guide; in other words a yacht "sneaking in" would quickly be intercepted, fined, and escorted out.  The guides conveyed their love and passion for the Islands, even explaining the cattle?  Wait, cows on a protected-status island?  So let's go back.  Protection for the indigenous plants and animals is relatively recent, appearing only in the past 50 years.  Prior to that, the Galapagos Islands were a hell on earth, as one early explorer described them.  This was volcanic land with little usable vegetation and almost no fresh water (many of the islands only receive 3-4" of water per year).  It's only perceived use was as a military outpost, something the US put to good use during the second world war (remnants of the barge hookups can be seen rusting out on Barcas beach).  At the end of the war, many nations wanted to lay claim to the location.  But by the 1950s, Ecuador officially annexed the chain and made them their own, but not before trying to convince mainland folks to make the islands their home.  Come over, they said, we'll give you land, as much as you want, as long as you take up permanent residence...thus the cattle (many other efforts --such as a pizza restaurant-- all failed).  Then the government said "enough" and imposed severe restrictions of who and what could be there; protected status was the only way to have tourism generate income (that said, organized tourism only began in 1970).  And one has to bear in mind that pretty much everything, from fresh water to clothing, has to arrive by ship or by plane (did I mention that these islands sit 600 miles from the nearest coast?).

Guides ensure you stay on the paths and 7 feet away from the animals

     So by now, you're getting a bit too much Galapagos (think of how we felt since I haven't even mentioned the blue-footed boobies or the endemic penguins).  But there is one factor about this place and that is how everything --even the land iguanas (vs. the marine iguanas which can and do enter the ocean) and the frigate birds (which, unlike the boobies, cannot dive in the sea for food so they survive by "stealing" it from others)-- depends on the ocean waters.  And changes to those waters may be coming.  So one last piece, this from WIRED: Imagine, for a moment, that you are standing on a pier by the sea, grasping, somewhat inexplicably, a bowling ball.  Suddenly you lose your grip and it tumbles down into the waves below with a decisive plonk.  Now imagine that the bowling ball is made of gas—carbon dioxide, to be specific, compressed down into that familiar size and weight.  That’s approximately your share, on a rough per capita basis, of the human-caused carbon emissions that are absorbed by the sea every day: Your bowling ball’s worth of extra CO2, plus the 8 billion or so from everyone else.  Since the Industrial Revolution, the oceans have sucked up 30 percent of that extra gas.  The reason so much CO2 ends up in the oceans is because that molecule is extremely hydrophilic.  It loves to react with water—much more than other atmospheric gasses, like oxygen.  The first product of that reaction is a compound called carbonic acid, which soon gives up its hydrogen ion.  That’s a recipe for a caustic solution.   The more hydrogen ions a solution has, the more acidic it is, which is why as the CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere has increased, its water has gotten more acidic too. By the end of the century, models predict the oceans will reach a level of acidity that hasn’t been seen in millions of years.  If that scenario seems way too large to grasp (the oceans cover over 70% of our planet), a series of much-simpler graphs came from The Conversation, which talked about an even larger scenario...El Nino (it's coming).

     It was time for us to leave, as in time to return to the U.S.  And we left with the impression that both the Galapagos and the country of Ecuador itself were trying.  How do you juggle boatloads of tourists (necessary for income) and yet not affect the land or waters?  In Quito we saw fast-flowing rivers white with detergent foam and plastic jugs, waters headed for the ocean.  And I noticed that  "information" ------from the scientists debating the arrival of El Nino in the article above, to the blitz of money-making "official" equatorial sites (vs. the struggling non-profit, but actual, marker)-- seemed driven by social media (even Darwin's age when he arrived in the Galapagos varies).  Once home we would discover that crime in Ecuador was a major issue in their recent elections (placing prison "ships" 80 miles off of the coast was a campaign promise).  And soon, we'd have to try and sort out Hamas and Hezbollah and nuclear cruise missiles from Russia that can travel 14,000 miles.  We somehow weren't exposed to any of that (my wife and I never turned on the TV or radio during our trip), but it was happening.  We were fortunate enough to have just soaked in the beauty of this land we were leaving, a land of 4200 species of orchids (a bit of trivia: orchid means testicle in Greek), over 1600 species of birds, 15,000+ vascular plant species (fruit & flowers), and islands filled with life that's still evolving.  We had seen what ancient civilizations had left and how life had adapted and was still adapting, just as we were.  We had hopefully come to realize (as my friend so often expresses) that everyday was a gift and that we should just live in the moment.  As the saying went, not the past, not the future, but exactly what you're being given now: the present.

*In actuality another 12 countries "share" being on the equator.  As to those stand-on-the-equator sites, yes, they are pretty much tourist traps and get far more press than the educational (and non-profit) site at Quitsato, which is the only one verified by the Ecuadorian military as being accurate in its location.