Week One in the Galaps

I felt prepared. I was fairly deep into Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos, I read Herman Melville's novella "The Enctantadas" on the plane, and my Spanish was on the up and up. The town of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristóbal Island, my new home, was not what I expected.

When you think of the Galápagos, you think of tortoises, iguanas, and blue-footed boobies. You think of gorgeous landscapes and more gorgeous seascapes. You don't think of people. As it turns out, this town has a lot of them- maybe six or eight thousand. It feels large and even a bit cramped. I would never have guessed that. One or two story houses made of concrete and plaster line street after street. The only industries are fishing and tourism, as well as the amenities needed to provide for the providers of tourists. The Spanish here is fast and truncated and thus endlessly harder to understand than the perfect Spanish of Quito. I spent the first day or two a little bummed out, lamenting what the Galápagos had become, how developed this place is. Then I got in the water.

In Melville's "The Encantadas", he writes of the apparent desolation of the islands. "Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot, imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea, and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. A group rather of extinct volcanoes than of isles, looking much as the world at large might after a penal conflagration." "It is to be doubted whether any spot on earth can, in desolateness, furnish a parallel to this group." He even specifically mentions Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal) as being particularly barren "still south of James's Isle lie Jervis Isle, Duncan Isle, Crossman's Isle, Brattle Isle, Wood's Isle, Chatham Isle, and various lesser isles, for the most part an archipelago of aridities, without inhabitant, history, or hope of either in all time to come." Oh how humanity would prove him wrong on that account. But more pertinent to my experience is Melville's inaccuracy. Certainly the island appears desolate, but this is merely an illusion, a trick of duality of above and below. Known for being maddeningly thorough in his tendencies to describe everything about an object for proper educational purposes, he missed a huge section of the story of the islands. He may have been a whaler, a writer, a thinker, an observer, a philosopher, but Melville was not a diver.

The beautiful thing is that you don't even have to dive. You barely even have to snorkel. You just need to be able to open your eyes underwater and you'll see things like this:

This one kept bumping me- it seemed to be extremely territorial and I thought I was for sure going to get bitten

Or you can pop your head out of the water and see this

Once you walk out of town to the North and away from everything, you end up atop Frigate Bird Hill after about 10 minutes. It sits above the cove where I took most of those photos. You're guaranteed to see sea turtles every time you get in the water, it's the most incredible snorkeling I've ever done hands down. But the view from up top isn't too bad either.

I took this on an overcast day, the water is even more gorgeous when it's sunny

I love this overlook for many reasons, but the primary one is again the duality of Galápagos. To the right stretches the west coast of San Cristóbal as far North as you can see. It is what it always has been- completely untouched, pristine, even wild. Kicker Rock is out there in the distance, as is Cerro Brujo. More to come about those. But a quick head turn to the left shows the sprawl of town. It's definitely big, about a half hour walk from my home to the school. There's an airport tower and such. It's all quite modern over there on the left, yet so ancient on the right. What was, what it has become with a slight turn of the head.

I did say you don't have to dive to see gorgeous things, but it certainly doesn't hurt to dive. On Saturday we took a dive excursion to the iconic Kicker Rock, including a brief beach outing to Cerro Brujo, which is an incredible white powder sand beach that looks like this:

And then we dove. Here was another example of duality. Here's a stock photo from the internet of the monolithic rock formation:

It's stunningly gorgeous but appears utterly lifeless, save for some birds perched along the edges once you get close. But it's sheer 90 degree walls extending below the water could not be filled with more life. Despite a quiet day by the dive shop standards, likely due to a particularly strong El Niño year, I still saw maybe a half dozen turtles, a massive school of fish, and maybe 20 sharks (including 4 hammerheads!!, but I missed them with my camera- they're fast and the visibility in that spot was a little lower). I'm working on a huge video combining snorkel and dive footage from Week 1, so check back in the next day or two for a link (or maybe two). Anyway, here's some stills:

This school of salemas was so massive and concentrated that it was like dusk when you swam through it

Galapagos Shark in the distance

Another, a bit closer. Posting them without any size context is great, because these guys are only actually about 4 or 5 feet

This is a hammerhead, you have to take my word for it. We're diving here again in two weeks so I'm vowing to get better Hammerhead footage and also hoping to see Eagle Rays, which are normally quite common here

Chilling with a school for school

Oh yeah, we dove this place for class. We weren't going to look for sharks, we were going to count them. They're that common.

What've I missed? Probably a lot. Oh, for one, there are sea lions everywhere, especially in town. They're loud and they smell horrendous but they're hilarious for the most part. There's an alpha male on the beach outside of school that barks all day and night, non-stop. He patrols the beach just constantly making a racket I'm not sure how he sustains the vocal power. But they're everywhere and they're generally fearless.

MVP is the pup directly in front of snack bar wall

Lots of pups around this time of year 

Besides Ricky Ross, Aubrey the biggest boss here

Personality pic

I was sitting on the beach and this guy just walked (waddled) right up to about a foot away, paused, did a little head nod to acknowledge me, and went on his way

They come and sleep on the boardwalk at night. Shameless

The other extremely important thing is this:

There's always money in the banana stand!

It's a 50 cent chocolate covered frozen banana stand about 2 minutes from the university and it's the best food on the island or potentially anywhere. It still tastes like a banana and isn't too frozen so that you can't bite into it. Legit amazing.

More stories to come, more photos, more videos, more words. It's hard to keep up a blog when there's so much to do. It's even harder when I don't have internet in my room so I have to go to a room in the basement to do so. Stay tuned for that snorkel/dive video, it's well underway.