MORENO......St Cristobel.. our landing place in Galapagos..
A little disaster....
This is a really rolly anchorage. Never a good sign to see guys surfing two hundred yards away!! The roll led to not one but two hassles.
I wore out my neck, rolling from side to side all night, so I have a severe ‘crick’ in my neck where I crushed the two disks many years ago. Katja who among her many talents is a holistic masseuse, is doing her best to free up the muscles which have gone into spasm.
Mean while poor FARRFLY has suffered too. The extraordinary roll caused the stern gland cooling pipe to pump water into the exhaust and when it reached a critical level it siphoned water into the engine, completely filling it up with salt water. A freak of an incident. Mind you I dug out the instructions for the stern gland unit, which clearly says a vented loop must be fitted, it was not fitted. Its a miracle it never happened before. The fitting was installed in New York about 5 years ago. So we had to strip the engine including the turbo charger, empty the sea water, clean all the parts and reassemble it...
After we stripped it down, I decided to do a runner with Conrad and Samina. As it was their last 4 days we checked into the only 5 star hotel in Galapagos, the Royal Palm Hotel. It is also on the same island (Santa Cruz) as the airport. It is a lovely hotel with great staff, one of the ‘Leading small hotels of the world’. Unfortunately the old Royal is well past her best years and is rather run down, but all the more enjoyable for its entricity. As a LSHW club member we were up graded to a little private villa... which had a huge log fireplace... on the equator?? As it happens, it needed it. In the evening it got quite chilly and the staff lit the fire with big logs.. a little like Ireland in the winter. The weather was poor and unfortunately it rained every day. Pity as I had hoped to finnish teaching Conrad to swim, but it was too cold.. I figured out the problem after a couple of days.. the hotel is 900 meters up the main mountain and is actually above the semi permanent cloud line. While it was teeming rain at the hotel, the sun was splitting the stones down in the port. What nutter decided to build a hotel up so high?? It was clearly a conscious decision as all the villas have original fireplaces... maybe the idea was that it would be lovely and cool after a hot day hunting? (Iguana hunting, or maybe giant turtles?) Nope, although it looked 50 years old it was only 10. Anyhow we enjoyed it, we had our own mini jacuzzi which we filled every night with foam and couldn’t get Conrad the foamy snowman out of it.
And then off to the airport for a sad departure tinged with expectation. Its not everyday someone legs it off the boat to return a couple of months later with a new baby!
Its a sad day for all on board as Conrad has become such a joy for everyone, we will miss his clear sign language and his cheerful bounty. Samina too, the only person on board with an ounce of sense, goodness knows what mishaps lie ahead for us without her sobering influence!
As we no longer have land based internet I will load this without any photos then try photos later.
More on the galapagos (photos to follow).
Having got over the fact that Galapagos has virtually no land based wild life we are forced to rethink and to look again at land, sea and air.
The sea is a bountiful paradise, even evident from the deck of the boat. Every morning 3 baby sea lions and a few penguins swim and dance around the boat sometimes playing other times catching the small fish that hide under the hull. They enjoy the company of humans in the water and will come swimming over to you.
Tony and I went for two dives and despite the limited visibility, it is pacific green not caribbean blue water here, we saw plenty of fish some not to be seen in the atlantic, including a flock of 10 spotted ray fish ‘flying’ slowly past. Our vista included a sea horse, turtles, & the usual reef fish however the dive was cut abruptly short when 6 hammerhead sharks started to swim in ever tightening circles around us, daddy hammerhead was about 18 feet long. I prefer my sharks on TV, clearly so did the dive master.
The local fishermen catch tuna, spanish mackerel and others very easily. We are not allowed fish and no doubt there are restrictions on the locals.
Two hundred miles north of here, lie Wolf and Darwin Islands. I plan to fly back some time to dive there as it is an area famous for whale sharks. This is the wrong season and naturally we are not allowed sail there on FARRFLY.. have to go in a local boat... all designed to make money for the locals under the false banner of conservation. A good example is the bay we are anchored in; the locals run sight seeing tours around the bay and out to the little islands beside the boat, at $25 a pop. Therefore we are not allowed paddle our canoes here! We should be paying $25 each for the pleasure of getting a polluting smelly motor boat back out to FARRFLY... its all very silly, we just ignore them as best we can by going out a dusk and dawn in the canoes.
The penguins are really sweet. They are about 14 inches ‘tall’. From a distance they look like small ducks when in the water. When you see them standing around ‘chatting’ on the rocks you expect it to start snowing. Penguins on the equator is definitely odd...
Odd, that is the beauty of Galapagos.
There are loads of birds here, you would expect that. There are not nearly the variety you get at home(s) either in Ireland or Grenada. However the birds here are a little odd.. What are these penguins doing so far north.. how did they get here, why has the booby got blue feet, how are his feet blue? name the number of blue animals you know? Nature does’t do ‘blue’ animals. Who ever saw a bird with a red balloon for a chest?
Who taught the blue footed booby his romantic mating dance? how & why does it improve his chances of a shag and therefore reproduction?
On the other hand the habits of these strange and foolish creatures have being over studied, there are more Phd thesis on Galapagos creatures than blue foot booby dance steps. The animals at home are no doubt also very interesting, we just never think about it . Darwin didn’t visit your back yard for 19 days and draw the finches there whilst he dreamed up his theory.. To which he was beaten by a few years by an Italian naturalist who didn’t have to leave Italy, his back yard. The poor fellow wrote it up in Italian instead of english and was largely ignored.
There is virtually no wild life on land, however from the tourist view point the simple fact that the birds, iguanas and sea lions don’t run away from you is cool, makes for great photographs. Also most tourists are not as disappointed as we have been. But then we have two giant iguanas living in our garden in Grenada and there is a sea lion living under the deck of the yacht club in Dublin. But then none of these pose for photos!
The scientific community harp on about how rare the iguanas are, and seem successfully to have every different colored group defined as a different species, therefore they are rare. So be it, they are and all efforts must be made to protect their survival. However from the visitors view point, unless you are suffering from an iguana fetish, they are all much the same, and certainly cannot be mistaken for a wide variety of interesting wild life. This is not Africa, yet seems to get an inordinate number of ‘eco’ camera clicking tourists.
Should Galapagos be on your ‘must see before I die list?’ Yes I think so as long as you have plenty of money, but it should be down the page, not at the top of the list.
As you will see from a photo to be posted later, we popped back to Ireland for an afternoon. Above about 600 meters, 2000 feet, Galapagos is remarkably like the wicklow mountains, Sally Gap springs to mind. We see the same ferns, wild blackberries, very few trees, and a view that rolls along for miles. It is always raining up here too.
dc
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