An Introduction to the Galapagos

For people like me, that don’t have religion, the Galapagos is kind of like Mecca. It was the birthplace of the evolutionary creed. Complete with God-like idols of Charles Darwin.

So for me, at least, this trip was a pretty big deal. But really, it’s hard to look around these islands and not understand what Mr. Darwin was thinking. Each island has it’s own species or subspecies. The differences between the islands lead to different variations on animals that do different things. It’s the only place with tropical penguins, birds with blue feet and iguanas that swim. The most remarkable thing about the place, however, is that the animals have no fear of people. You can approach the animals and in many cases reach out and touch them (though you’re not actually allowed to), and they seem completely oblivious to your presence, or even interested in you. The sea lions are particularly known for playing with tourists.

Over the next few posts, we’re going to share what we saw, where we went and so on, but we’ll start with how our routine typically went.

Just about the only way to see a fair amount of the Galapagos is on a cruise, sleeping aboard a boat transporting you from place to place overnight. There are land based options, but they’re both more damaging to the environment and less enjoyable since you spend so much of your time traveling to and from a destination. Of course, they are cheaper than boats and if you get seasick are probably more appealing than spending your evenings over the railing.

But in Quito we found a very good last minute special on a first class catamaran, the Nemo II, and so booked it and headed out to the islands. Though space was certainly at a premium (and being the last minute passengers, we had the smallest cabin with bunk beds), the boat was a beautiful motorsailing catamaran, and felt exactly like how we should be traveling the Galapagos. Lounging on the top deck as the sun set (or rose!) with the sails fully extended or laying on the catamaran netting just above a group of leaping dolphins could not have been more perfect.

Aboard, our days were just packed. Morning wake up call was at 6:30 followed by breakfast served at 7. By 8 we were expected to be ready for our first landing of the day, lasting between 2-3 hours walking on short trails along with plenty of time for our guide to explain all the things we saw. We would return to our boat in time to do a bit of snorkeling before lunch at noon aboard the boat (no food is allowed on shore except in the three port towns). Around 2 pm we’d have another landing comprising of either a short hike or free beach time or more snorkeling or free time in port. If we were traveling that evening, we’d often start before sunset to look for dolphins or whales. After watching the sunset around 6:30, dinner would be at 7 and then it was relaxing time. All in all, it was a full day, and we were usually exhausted and fell into bed before 10 … especially since we had a 6:30 wake up call the next morning.

All this week we’ll be documenting our trip, and don’t worry, your wishes have been heard. We will be posting plenty of photos — with over 1600 of them, it’s just a matter of choosing which ones!

Living Like a Quiteno

Wherever we go, even the most touristed cities, we make an effort to get a bit off the most beaten of tracks. We find the local restaurant and have the set lunch menu, surrounded by families and business people. We wander around the neighborhoods, shop in the weekend food markets, and whenever possible, try to talk to locals. But regardless, we are tourists.

In Quito, we’ve had a bit of a different experience, however; here we’ve seen the city through different eyes, all thanks to a connection first made thirteen years ago. You see, during the 1996-97 school year, my uncle and his family hosted an exchange student from Quito, and I thus gained an Ecuadorian cousin, Sole. Through the years since Sole lived in Louisville, our family has kept in touch with this long-distance extension of the family, and now many years and many life changes since our gatherings around Zimmerman dining tables, we have managed to reunite.

As her American cousins, we have been welcomed into her home and treated with the warmest hospitality by Sole, her husband Fabrizio, and their son Nicolas, not to mention her parents, sisters, cousins, and other family members who live near by. Essentially now not only is Sole a Zimmerman, but Jeff and I are also Naranjos.

And while Sole has been the best tour guide we’ve had—through the Old Town of Quito, to restaurants in La Mariscal and much less tourist-frequented areas, on day trips to Mindo, Mitad del Mundo, Otavalo, and Papallacta, and even on an exclusive tour of the only wool hat factory in Quito (owned by her husband’s family)—it’s not the sites that will stick out in our minds say another thirteen years from now. No, instead what we will remember is the comfort of being in a home where we felt welcome and were able to throw down our backpacks for a while. We’ll remember homecooked lunches at Sole’s parents every afternoon. We’ll remember pillow fights with Nicolas. We’ll remember after-dinner conversations with Sole and Fabrizio. We’ll remember Quito as a well-loved and well-lived-in city. And most importantly, we’ll remember that in a year of being essentially homeless, for a while, we had a home in Ecuador.

Delightfully Tacky

You might think the middle of the world would be deep within the earth’s core (that is, assuming you believe the world is round). Well, you’d be wrong. Turns out, the middle of the world (Mitad del Mundo, as it’s known here) is just outside of Quito, Ecuador. And my is it a delightful place.
You might begin with the Colonial Quito scale model, and follow it up with the model versions of Ecuador’s two other largest cities, Guayaquil and Cuenca. Or perhaps you prefer a history of French expeditions to determine the equitorial line. Or maybe bugs are more your thing, there’s a great insectarium with all sorts of gross creepy crawlies (seriously, they’re so big here!). You can hold your favorite and have your photo taken for only $2! Seriously, I can only feel for the guy that had to capture these bugs, then stick a pin through their exoskeletons so they could be pinned up on the wall.

But don’t worry, there’s more. There’s a planetarium that unfortunately costs extra so we didn’t go. But the highlight is the 30 meter tall tower museum of indigenous cultures (also extra, so we also didn’t go in) that stands right on the red line indicating the equator.

Just into the northern hemisphere are a wide variety of souvenir shops, while just into the southern hemisphere  you’ll find restaurants with touts galore! There’s even a bull fighting ring.

And here’s the kicker of the whole thing … it isn’t even the real equitorial line. The French were about 150 meters off (though, in defense of the French, this is still quite accurate given the measurement was made in 1736, well before GPS’s exposed their error). The real equitorial line runs through the Inti-Nan museum next door, an even more delightful place.

The Inti-Nan tour starts with a guinea pig coop followed by the guinea pig roaster. Moving on, we witness the immense size of Ecuadorian tarantulas and anacondas. Not for the faint of heart. The highlight are the authentic shrunken human heads on display, complete with a short recipe for how to do it (we may share after we’ve tried it!). This is followed by poison dart shooting practice and life size models of naked indigenous people. Brilliant, eh?

But what was actually really cool (as if we hadn’t had enough coolness for the day) was the demonstrations of various things that happen on the exact Equator. Toilets really do flush clockwise south of the equator and counter-clockwise north of the equator. We proved it. And on the equator, water just rushes straight down, no spinning involved. You can balance an egg on the head of a nail (although apparently I defy laws of physics because I still couldn’t).

You also weigh less and can jump higher on the equator because of the bulge of the earth (hence you’re farther from the core and gravity is weaker) and you’re not as strong. While standing two feet from the equator I could keep Theresa from opening my hand, right on the equator she had no trouble pulling apart my fingers. It all has to do with the fact that the only force pulling on you at the equator is straight down, there are no sideways forces. It’s really a pretty magical feeling.

So in summary, in the last year:
Top of the World: Abisko, Sweden
End of the World: Ushuaia, Argentina
Middle of the World: Ecuador

I think I’ve covered it.

Bad News Book Exchanges

I have never thought of myself as a book snob. I was an English major and have thus read a large majority of that which is classified as “classic literature,” but I’ve by no means restricted myself to reading just high-brow literature. Along with the Secret Garden and Little Women, I loved, as a child, the Babysitter’s Club and all the R.L. Stine horror books. I cried reading The Notebook, and I’ve laughed at all kinds of low-brow “literature.” I read books that end up on the NY Times Bestseller List and books from the Washington Post Book Review’s year-end best lists. I like to read. Period.

Or at least that’s what I thought. Then I met the book exchanges of South America. Dear Lord, I’ve never seen such crap—and I’m not just talking about the one or two shelf exchanges; I’m also talking about the full book store exchanges.Every single Danielle Steele book ever written, plus every single knock-off of a Danielle Steele book, has made its way onto a book exchange bookshelf. The best of chick-lit, oh yeah, that’s there too. John Grisham, Dan Brown, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy are the Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of the traveling world. Given, all of those guys are popular and they aren’t terrible per say (aside from Dan Brown’s dialogue), but they aren’t exactly quality. And who the heck is it that’s carrying around the hard back versions of these books? Seriously, in nobody’s world are they good enough to be worth adding a good 5 pounds to your backpack.

As for good books, well, on occasion we do find them. The problem? Well there’s two. The first is that I’ve probably already read it. That’s the downside to being a prolific reader. The second problem is that it’s probably in Dutch. Apparently people from the Netherlands have good taste in books. Unfortunately, that’s a language I haven’t yet mastered.

So here I am languishing away in bad book world, forcing myself to put down the few good books I read after just a chapter or two rather than devouring them as I normally would, because then I’d be left with nothing. It’s tragic. Really, if you asked, it might be the worst part of the trip so far. Fingers crossed, African and South East Asian travelers have better taste, but I’m not holding my breath.

Off to the Galapagos

Since we left home in October, we’ve had multiple experiences in which we’ve gotten to see some pretty cool animals: penguins, whales, dolphins, monkeys, llamas, alpacas, lizards, snakes, bugs, and much of what falls in between.

But I can pretty much guarantee that not one of those experiences can hold a candle to the animal encounters we’re having right now. Yes, that’s right, we’re currently in the Galapagos. For eight days, we will live aboard the Nemo II, a catamaran that will carry us to many of the Galapagos islands. In the process, we will get up close and personal with sea lions, swim with penguins, watch marine iguanas dive for food, witness the saga of Lonesome George, take note of the finches that helped Darwin formulate the theory of evolution, and photograph the beloved blue-footed booby. Expect plenty of pictures and stories when we return. This week, however, enjoy some posts about our recent adventures in Ecuador as well as a throwback post to Peru.

Market Day in Otavalo

I am not much of a shopper. I don’t enjoy malls or trying on clothes or searching for the perfect gift. Additionally, I’m not good at spending money on myself. My first reaction is always, “I don’t need this.” And though that’s probably true most of the time, the truth is I live a comfortable existence where I have the freedom to occasionally buy something that I simply want, not need.

I’m also immensely practical—to a fault in fact. How will I get that home? Does it match my couch? Where would I put it? Would I have to dust it? All these questions and more go through my head, with the end result being that I hardly ever buy whatever it is I’m looking at. Most of the time this is fine, but occasionaly I regret my decision, and wish I had “splurged.”

On this trip, we have bought very few things so far, and for the most part it’s not been because I’ve been overly practical (though if I go back to Pucon, I’m buying the Don Quixote metalwork piece, to hell with how I’d get it home); we simply haven’t found too many things that we like. I admit that we don’t spend all that much time looking; very rarely do we go into stores, but we do usually check out the markets. And though market shopping is the one type of shopping I do enjoy—Eastern Market just might be my favorite place in D.C.—I’ve been disappointed time and again in the markets we’ve found in Central and South America. In general, I find that the goods are generic; what I see in Nicaragua, I see in Chile, I see in Peru, etc. Again and again I see woolen socks with llamas on them, the immensely ugly drawstring pants Jeff and I have taken to calling “hippie pants,” wooden flutes, paintings of geometrically shaped indigenous people, and a slew of other items that I’m not entirely convinced aren’t made in China and then shipped here to be sold as “authentic” South American items.

But yesterday, we traveled north from Quito to the city of Otavalo to visit their famed Saturday market. The market is huge—in a few hours, we covered at most half of it. People in indigenous dress mix with people in modern clothing, buying and selling.

Hats, which nearly everyone seems to wear here, deck both heads and booths.

Entire families perform musical interludes in hopes of making a few bucks.

Nearby shops open up their doors and hope market goers wander in. Tiny restaurants roast entire pigs and then carve plates of food straight from the pig (why don’t we ever take pictures of the good stuff!?). It’s a feast for all the senses.

As for the goods on offer, a fair amount of what we saw was similar to what we’d seen elsewhere—there must be a lot of people buying this stuff, I’m just not sure who—but we also found quite a bit of stuff that we hadn’t seen before. And for once, we actually bought a few things. It was fun. We looked, we compared, we bargained, we bought. As for the worrying about how to get it home later, well, we’re saving that for later. Right now we’re holed up at our friends’ home, conveniently ignoring the fact that one day soon everything has to go back into our backpacks and onto our backs.

The Duality of a Gringo Town

Vilcabamba, Ecuador, is an lovely small town nestled in a narrow valley. The area around Vilcabamba is beautiful for hiking, with a variety of peaks, valleys, waterfalls and riverbeds full of butterflies, hummingbirds and other colorful tropical birds. In addition to being a typical small Ecuadorian town, it’s people have earned a reputation for their longevity.

All of this has made Vilcabamba a famous little town, especially among us gringos. And while a popular destination to visit as the southern terminus of Ecuador’s “gringo trail”, many people have loved it so much they stayed. The ex-pat community at times seemed to outnumber the locals. Allegedly, the first people set down roots in the 60’s, drawn by tales of the “fountain of youth” and the beautiful countryside.

Naturally, because of the high number of Americans and Europeans, Vilcabamba is blessed with delicious food and delightfully comfortable places to stay. We twice ate Mexican food (since we haven’t had authentic Mexican since leaving) in addition to spaetzle and “sri lankan” chicken. There’s a book exchange that had the largest selection yet. And beautifully maintained hotels with orchid gardens, swimming pools, hot tubs in addition to all the comforts of home grace (or is it intrude on?) the town.

Now, this leaves the town quite a paradox. On the one hand, it is still a beautiful place and a very comfortable place to stay and enjoy. We found it very relaxing (and, even though we had spent the last few days relaxing, another few days was no trouble!). On the other hand, we couldn’t help thinking that this naive, small town had been taken over. The houses just outside of town were enormous, multi-storied, walled complexes complete with swimming pools. The ex-pats ate at the foreign owned restaurants (which admittedly, were very tasty) and seemed to run in their own social circles. They sat around the park with blackberrys and iphones.

We sat next to two who, amongst their talk of chakrahs and doing palm readings, were talking about their efforts to start a recycling program in Vilcabamba. They couldn’t believe they didn’t already have recycling in the central park and were trying to recruit businesses to separate their trash to send to nearby Loja. Now, I’m all for recycling programs all over the world, especially after all the trash we’ve seen strewn everywhere, but this just smacked to me of something imposed, not something particularly desired by local people. It just felt like the town wasn’t what it originally was. The ex-pats had changed a quaint small town into a quaint small “gringo-ized” town. It had lost a fair amount of the authenticity that surely is what attracted the first foreigners.

Now, obviously as I say this I’m a bit hypocritical, because we loved having the comforts of home surrounding us, and they wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the ex-pats and their efforts to start businesses and attain the comforts they were used to. It did make the town a thoroughly relaxing place to visit. But there was the paradox there between being a well traveled and comfortable tourist town and being an authentic place. We’ve noticed varying degrees of this balance in many of the cities we’ve visited. The real question is about how to do it right. No beautiful town should be kept from visitors enjoying it, but no beautiful town should be overrun and destroyed by visitors. This balance is surely is something many cities are constantly wrestling with. So the real question is how do you make and maintain that balance? I don’t have the answers.

Where in the World Have We Been Lately

I apologize for the lack of recent posting, but we’re currently in Quito visiting a friend we haven’t seen since 1997. That’s a long time, and there’s much catching up to do. Plus she has many places to take us and things to show us, so we’re always on the go. (And we’re without Internet at her place, where we are staying, so posting isn’t all that easy.) But we’re alive and well and we’ve got a few new posts lined up, so check back in the next few days for much more. As for now, in response to your demand for photos, here’s a few images of where we have been lately.

Huanchaco, Peru

Vilcabamba, Ecuador

Cuenca, Ecuador

Quito, Ecuador

Now We’re Traveling

Things have been going just a bit too smoothly for us so far on this trip. Giving credit where credit is due, a large part of that is due to the voracious consumption of information for planning. I think we all know who is the general driving force behind this. I mean, if you exhaust and explore every possible option from every angle, it’s hard to make the wrong choice too many times. But alas, on our border crossing from Peru to Ecuador, our over-preparation was our greatest weakness.

We were in Huanchaco, a beach town near Trujillo, looking to get across the border. There are two main routes from here, the coastal route via Tumbes, Peru to Machala, Ecuador, widely regarded as a busy, thief infested, scam ridden border crossing, and the inland route through Piura, Peru to Loja, Ecuador, which is much less used, has a direct international through bus, and our guidebook alleges is a much more pleasant experience. Needless to say, it was pretty clear which way we would be heading, especially since we also wanted to visit Vilcabamba, a pleasant gringo-haven town just south of Loja (more on Vilcabamba to come as we are currently here).

So off to Piura we headed on an afternoon bus, complete with a 4 feature Jean Claude Van Damme marathon (in Spanish!). We hoped to then hop on the TransLoja International bus the next morning. Unfortunately, neither we nor our various gold mines of information accounted for unhappy agricultural workers. I mean, I’m sure they’re unhappy, underpaid and overexploited, but do they have to go and close down the highway as their protest?

These striking agricultural workers meant our bus to whisk us across the border was not running, had not run for the previous two days and its status for the next few days depended on the positive resolution of the strike. Everyone assured us this would happen, but as we awoke the next morning and called the bus company, they told us no buses that day, and as the Latin American cliche goes, maybe a bus would go “manana”.

With the uncertainty of the buses, we decided to take matters into our own hands and to hop a bus to the nearby town of Sullana where collectivo taxis run to the border. Surely these guys would be up on the latest developments or know ways around these wily farmhands.

Arriving at the collectivo stand we quickly learned that yes, the road was still blocked, but yes, there was a way around; it just cost twice as much and took twice as long. Skeptical, I started asking some of the other local passengers waiting just the same and found that (shockingly for all the other “negotiating” we’d done with taxi drivers in the area) we had been told the honest price. While this meant not getting to the border until only a few hours before dark, we eventually filled up a car and headed out. And by filled up a car, I mean eight close friends and luggage in a five passenger station wagon.

So it was with that backstory that we found ourselves bumping along a badly maintained dirt road, clearly anyone’s distant second (third? tenth?) option for travel. No one was surprised when the car rolled over yet another bump, a strong hissing started, and within 100 yards we were stopped repairing a flat tire. Eight people piled out, several went to urinate (neither of us, for the record, we were preoccupied trying to get dirt out of my eye that had flown in earlier), and the driver set about fixing the tire. Three hours after leaving Sullana, we made it half way to the border (on what is normally an hour and a half trip up the highway). Fortunately, the rest was on the highway, and we found ourselves finishing the trip going a little too fast.

As advertised, the border crossing was a cinch. We were the only ones and everyone was helpful and friendly as we walked to Ecuador (my first border crossing on foot!). On the other side, we got a taxi to the the town of Mancara, where we hoped to catch a late afternoon bus to Loja for the evening. Unfortunately, the next bus was an overnighter at 11 pm. It was currently 5:30 pm. So, already exhausted from the day’s adventure, we found some dinner (having not eaten since a morning pastry) and sat around the bus station for five hours as the rain started outside.

Upon leaving the station, we discovered that I had the “wet seat” just below the air hole on the top of the bus. While closed, it sure wasn’t impermeable to water, as a steady drip set in. Fortunately, we found two seats in the back of the bus right next to the toilets (normally the worst seats on a bus, except that night). Even more fortunately, nobody decided they needed to use the toilet during the course of our five hour ride. We passed out as best we could, and got off in Loja at 4:30 in the morning. We found tickets to Vilcabamba at 5:30, slept through that hour ride, and stumbled up to our hotel, where we promptly passed out in hammocks until we were allowed to check in.

Thus went our trip into Ecuador. I hope those farmhands held out for the motherlode.