Yesterday we visited the Charles Darwin Research Center here on Santa Cruz Island, just a short walk from the town of Puerto Ayora. It was truly awesome. Regardless of one’s views regarding his theory of evolution, Darwin deserves tremendous credit for putting the Galapagos on the map. These islands are just teeming with wildlife of both the marine- and land-dwelling varieties. Many of the species of birds, iguanas, tortoises, etc. are not seen anywhere else in the world. I also think the country of Ecuador gets credit for balancing the desire to generate revenue with the need to preserve the natural habitats of these creatures. (Of course the latter contributes to the former.)

Prior to these recent conservation efforts, foreign animals such as goats, rats, and feral cats that had been brought to the islands competed for resources, altered the habitats, and left some of the endemic species vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered. One such species is the Española tortoise, which had dropped down to 15 in number. The conservationists intervened by keeping the remaining tortoises in captivity and transferring their eggs into artificial incubators powered by hair dryers! Following the hatching of the eggs, the young tortoises are kept in captivity there at the Center until they are 3-5 years old, at which time they transfer them to the island of Española. Thanks to the efforts of the Darwin Center, there are now over 1,000 of these tortoises, and they are really cool to watch as they saunter around, seemingly in slow motion.

In addition to the Española tortoises, the Center houses Giant Galapagos tortoises, the one and only Pinta Tortoise in existence called Lonesome George (see Wes’ blog for more info), and a couple of land iguanas. There is also an abundance of finches of many varieties with their distinctly different beaks (it is easy to see how these piqued Darwin’s curiosity), lizards. On the beach nearby, Dallas and I saw some marine iguanas that blended perfectly with the volcanic rock as well as a couple of varieties of crabs.

Wes and Tiffany visited the Center yesterday morning, and Dallas and I checked it out later in the afternoon. Between the two trips, many photos were taken (use the link above to check them out), some of which seem to almost capture the experience of seeing these creatures in person. They are all accustomed to people, so it is possible to get really close to them. Thanks to Wes for taking the time to organize, crop, and label all the photos.

The four of us are now packed and ready for a 2-day excursion to the neighboring Isabela island. We are taking a little speedboat over this afternoon and will stay in a hotel for the next 2 nights (you know what that means–hot showers!!). Tomorrow we are told that we will snorkel in crystalline water among diverse fish, dolphins, and flamingoes, go horseback riding along the volcanic landscape, and observe the sea lions, gulls, and boobies (birds, mind you). It should be great fun! We have the camera with us, and as our photojournalist friend Colin has reminded us, we can’t take too many pictures!

Lonesome George

{Thursday}

We just got back from our first encounter with Lonesome George. There were originally 14 species of Giant Tortoise in the Galapagos. The pirates, whalers, and settlers who firstcame to the Islands eradicated 3 species and decimated the other populations by 90%. It is easy to see why. The Giant Tortoise live a year without food or water so they made the perfect meat stock on old sailing ships.

In 1972 scientists found Lonesome George. He is a Pinta species. There have been no other discoveries of any other of his species since then. George is alone, the last of his kind. He is estimated to be 60-90 years old. Most of these Giant Tortoise live to be about 100 years old. When George dies, the species dies with him.

With these facts in mind it was a special experience to not only see the famous Tortoises, but also Lonesome George himself.

He is penned with two females of a different species, but growing up alone he did not learn social or mating behavior so attempts at mating have been unsuccessful. Cloning is an outside possibility, but has not been tried yet.

We also saw land iguanas that were very brightly colored and quite beautiful, but there are actually places where you can walk among and touch the Giant Tortoises, which was very cool to say the least.

Lauren and I did some more boat work this morning before heading in for sight-seeing.  We worked on re-marking the anchor chain every 25´ (all but the last part that´s in the water now), repairing our main cabin door latch/lock, and checking out the bottom.  The visibility isn´t too great here in Academy Bay, but we were able to clean off some nasty brown algae that has grown above the waterline in the areas that are temprorarily submerged when we´re sailing.  It grew on the way from Panama and we´d never seen it before.  We also cleared the last of the fishing line off of the port prop, where we noticed that the line spinning on the prop abraded a couple spots down to the glass on the rudder — that will be a project for another day.  We checked the zincs on the shafts and they look fine, so we´re good to go in terms of bottom work until the next anchorage.

The internet is really, really slow all over town today, so we´ll catch you up on today´s exciting adventures tomorrow.  In the meantime, here are some answers to questions from the mailbag.  We got a cool e-mail from Dave in Chicago and here are answers to his questions.  Feel free to send us some questions if you have them and we´ll get to them when we get a chance.  If you want to comment on a blog, you can click on the conversation bubble that´s to the left of the blog title.

Q: Have you been able to do any scuba diving?  Also, what certifications (if any) do you have?  How do you refill your tanks?  

A: Not yet.  That´s been disappointing, but hopefully that will change soon.  We all have PADI Open Water certifications, which is the basic SCUBA cert, as well as our own gear.  We have a compressor on-board (Max Air 3500) that Lauren bought because she expecially loves to dive and want to be able to do it when we want to.  Unfortunately, we´ve either been trying to make up time or in places where the diving wasn´t very good.  We´ll definitely post about our first dive.

Q: Do you ever catch your dinner fishing?

A: Lots of cruisers do this, and we´ve heard about a really great book on fishing that was written for cruisers by a marine biologist, but we don´t have a copy.  We´ve picked up tips here and there and have tried a line behind the boat, but haven´t had any luck yet.  Lots of people catch Mahi Mahi, Tuna, Dorado, etc. so we´re looking forward to our first fishing success.

Q: Have you gotten any better at wind-surfing? 

A: Another disappointing no here.  We need to stop being so lazy and drag the board to a place where the seas are reasonable and there´s some wind.  The water was a little nasty in Panama.

Q: And, most of all, how in the hell did you convince the girls to do this???

A: Books have been written on how to pull this off successfully.  Lauren read one called “The Sailing Promise” that was written by a woman who was blackmailed/cajoled/bargained/… into going with promises of marriage before and children after.  First I found a girlfriend then wife that I thought would give me pretty good odds at pulling this off.  It was just hard to imagine myself with someone that wouldn´t be into this sort of thing and I ended up being lucky.  In terms of the specifics, I´d always talked about something like this and we read some sailing books togehter that gave both of us a better idea of what it would be like.  We´d also travelled a fair amount together beforehand and knew that we both enjoyed travel and a basic lifestyle.  BUT, this is really a question that takes two to answer, so here´s Lauren´s take on it…..

Lauren here. I have always loved traveling, and I thought that this trìp sounded like an amazing opportunity. Actually, I know plenty of women who are just as adventurous as men, but like me, they probably have competing priorities such as the desire to have a family. As for me, I feel very fortunate to have the chance to have both experiences, since we are doing this early enough (just barely!) that we can have children when we return.

Well, we’ve only been here a couple days, but we’re loving it.  The town is pretty cool, and best of all it’s safe to walk around even at night.  That’s such a nice change.

When we arrived yesterday, Lauren and I went to the Port Captain’s office to start the check-in process.  We’d read that they would try to force you to use an agent ($200 to stand beside you while you fill in paperwork) even though it’s not legally required, so we were hoping to avoid doing that and also to get cleared in before evening so we could go ashore.  A Navy guy in the office saw us looking around, yelled “Amigos!” and motioned for us to come into the building we’d just passed.  He told us to head back to the boat and they’d be there in half an hour or so with a doctor.  We returned to the boat and after a while, three guys showed up with surgical masks on and cam aboard.  They were very friendly and after shaking hands we were all examined by the “doctor”, who listened in about 8 places with the stethoscope as we breathed in and then asked us a series of questions intended to help determine whether we have swine flu.  We all passed and then the 3rd guy explained that he was an agent, blah, blah, blah.  I was ready and told him our understanding was that per Article 50 of the Ecuadorian legal code, since we have less than 10 passengers and are not a commercial ship, we’re not required to use an agent.  He referred to the uniformed guy from the Port Captain’s office us who told us in so many words that we have to use an agent.  I tried telling the agent thanks and we’d give him a call in the morning if we need him, but he and the uniformed guy explained it was “better” to get started right now.  Ahh well, $120 and Javier is going to handle all the paperwork and office visits for us.  Cruisers don’t generally like to be grouped with the other “tourists”, but like them, we’re a source of dollars for the local economy and everyplace has different requirements, schemes, etc. for moving the dollars ashore.

After doing some repair work Wednesday morning, we joined Wes & Tiff ashore, stopped at an Internet cafe and a tour shop, and then had a walk around town.  While we were at the Internet cafe, Ecuador beat Argentina in what was apparently an important soccer match.  From the sound of things it was a 2-0 victory.  After the game, people started driving around town in an impromptu parade with cars, scooters, pick-ups with people in the back, etc.  Everyone was honking and cheering, making what appeared to be laps around the small town for about 30-45 minutes or so.  A local news guy even came out and held up the procession long enough for a couple of quick interviews.

Celebrating Ecuador´s soccer win in World Cup play

Because of the protected nature of the park, we’re not allowed to take our own boat to visit anywhere without a formal permit and about $1000/day in fees, so we’re planning to take advantage of the local tourist industry  It was looking like an all-inclusive, 3-4 day local cruise to several of the islands was going to be too expensive for us when we found a good deal on visiting the large island, Isabela.  We can get 2 days of excursions, transportation, hotels, and food for $170 each, so we’re planning on doing that soon.  We’ve also found out about some cool things to do here on Santa Cruz, so there should be some fun sightseeing in our future.

Around town, we found lots of tourist gifts and excursion shops near the bay and an interesting town behind it.  We walked by a nice Adventist church close to the bay, which may explain the good variety of vegetarian and fake meat food on the menus at many of the restaurants.  We stopped at a few of the grocery stores the locals use and found potatoes and onions for $0.50/pound, which made us happy.  Imported food is a little pricey, but the locally grown produce is cheap.  We also found a bakery that sells 6-7 sandwich-sized pieces of bread for a dollar, so we picked up 6 croissants for a buck and headed for some dinner.

We met Wes & Tiff and went to a street we’d found that has local restaurants on each side for about 100 yards or more.  In the evening, tables and chairs are set in the sidewalks and street and it makes for a nice atmosphere and great food.  Our brother Tim donated to the “give the girls a break from cooking dinner” cause again and we picked an “Asian” restaurant to enjoy his generosity.  In fact, we were hard-pressed to find anything Asian about the restaurant aside from some of the decor, but after a series of menu questions we enjoyed a tremendous dinner (veggie soup: $1.5, veggie omelet: $2, side of fries: $1.5, lobster dinner with rice, fries, and salad: $8, seafood platter with fish, octopus, shrimp, scallops, fries, & salad: $9, etc., etc.).  Not a bad way to end the day.  Thanks Tim!  We may have to add a Paypal button to our site…

Lobster Dinner

Check out the “Photos” link at the top of hte page for more pics of the town.