Alternate title: Everything you ever wanted to know about Boobies but were afraid someone would tell you.

The Galapagos. 1000km off the West Coast of Ecuador. A wonderful place. I have spent the last week there, island hopping, sleeping on board a smallish (crew of 7, passengers 15) boat, being rocked to sleep every night by the motion of the waves. All right, so a couple of nights it was liked being rocked to sleep by someone who´s a bit overzealous in their rocking, but never mind, I loved it. But its good not to be susceptible to travel sickness.

I{m not even quite sure where to begin with it all. Land is a good spot, I guess, since that´s what everyone seems to know of a fashion, what with boobies, and Darwin, and giant tortoises. I saw all these things. The bird life is a happening thing in the Galapagos, ready to turn many people, myself included into a regular David or Dickie (the one thats the birder) Attenborough. I feel prepared to start going on twitches any minute. That said, it hit a point that we were all there with our checklists everynight (I kid you not) that you start to wonder if we all turned into real geeks without thinking twice about it. I suppose not. We took it pretty seriously, but not quite seriously enough. By day 3, we were prepared to name any bird anything we felt like it. Since so many birds are endemic to the Galapagos, their names start with the word Galapagos, for example, the Galapagos small lava finch. And reference is made to their size and preferred habitat as well, referring you again to the name Galapagos small lava finch. We would spot a wandering tuttler, and if it was on lava, well suddenly it was the Galapagos golden lava finch. That sort of goofiness. We had a pretty good group, unified in our loathing of one member, who oddly enough was Swiss and doing his best to break all reptutation the Swiss have for neutrality, harmony and as nature loving Alps wanderers. He was foul, I tell you. He kept trampling on things, wandering too close to the animals and startling them, all that sort of deal, and he would not listen to the guides or the members of the group in being dissuaded from any of these practices. I myself nearly clocked him one when he nearly stepped in the middle of a sea turtle nest. The guides, and the Galapagos national park I´m happy to say take the conservation aspect quite seriously, but maybe not seriously enough as in any other park such bothering of the wildlife would get you arrested, or at least kicked out. But never mind. I digress.

The birds. We saw loads. I will not bore you all with the lists of finches, etc., but will mention that I am now quite capable of spotting and classifying a booby at 50 paces, which is actually pretty easy since they are about a foot and a half high, the blue footed ones do indeed have blue feet, the red footed ones have red feet, and the masked ones look like seagulls in racoon costumes. Moving on land, they are quite funny little things, and the mating dances have to be seen to be beleived. I have assiduously made a study of the dance and as members of my group have discovered, will perform it at the least provocation. The mating dance of the two meter sandal footed booby. Though clumsy on land, they are nimble in the air and you constantly see them diving from about 50 feet high smack into the water to fish, and its quite a sight. As they are quite cute, and you feel that you´re never going to see them again (apparently people take more photos in the Galapagos than anywhere else), I have loads of pictures of these birds. The great collection - a booby in a tree, a booby in its nest, a booby with a stick, two boobies. You get the idea.

I also have a fair number of pictures of iguanas. There are your two main types, the land iguana and the marine iguana. One is the only marine lizard, and I´m sure you can guess which one. The iguanas are vegetarian, but they sure enough look feirce as hell. Spikes down the back, claws that enable them to climb up sheer vertical walls of lava cliffs, and fully grown they are almost a meter long and hefty buggers. One was climbing up a path I happened to be coming down, and I was on top of a rock very quickly for a big girl.

The other bird of note that people will want to hear about (Ryan Rabinovitch, this means you in particular) is my first sighting of wild penguins. Yes, on the equator. They are small, the second smallest breed of penguin (Todays quiz: what is the smallest breed of penguin?), and they live happily on certain of the Galapagos islands, building their burrows in lava tubes from the old volcanoes and swimming up to unsuspecting and suspecting tourists alike and zipping around them. Good fun, that.

Which leads me nicely into the sea habitat portion of my trip, and there was almost as much snorkel time as there was land time. Swimming with penguins? Yes, but only a bit. Swimming with sea lions was very common. They are very curious, and they will startle the heck out of you while you are swimming as they will come right up, right over and right under you while swimming at fairly high rates of speed, investigating everything. You have to be a bit careful though, as they will bite. Generally, they will only bite you on land, but I felt no need to be sidelined by one in the water.

Lots of things in the water bite. The only things that bit me were a couple of investigatory tangs, so no harm: But I saw lots of things that would bother me severely if they bit me. For example, the hammerhead shark. Now granted, John (another member of our group) had seen it while snorkeling, and on hearing this I immediately headed out to where it had been seen, hoping for a peep (and thinking to myself as I swam feebly out there - injured arm still hobbling me quite a bit, although the ocean salt water does seem to have helped in many ways - that this may not have been exactly the brightest thing I had ever done) and indeed I got one. It was one of those experiences that happens and while its going on, you think "this is one of the coolest things I have ever done" and about 10 seconds after it swims by it occurs to you that cool is occasionally quite synonymous with stupid beyond comprehension, but that didn´t stop me the same afternoon from swimming out and viewing four white tipped reef sharks, which at least were only about 4 or 5 feet long. The hammerhead was a rather huge thing. I spotted a huge manta ray swimming below me on the same snorkel, but it was only about as big as the reef sharks.

We also saw lots of sea turtles. Speaking of things that bite, one of them (I swam over it for quite a long time to observe) was missing a back leg and obviously had a large chunk taken out of its shell at some point by a shark. Interesting, that´s for sure. The first time I saw a sea turtle, I was hovering over a puffer fish, when I noticed some movement off to my right. I thought it was Rob, as we´d only just started out and Rob was quite near me, but I turned my head, saw this enormous sea turtle and squealed. Top tip of the day: do not squeal while wearing a snorkle. You will require almost immediate surfacing to clear the salt water you´ve just sucked into the snorkel, which you will not enjoy breathing. You heard it here first. We saw loads of sea turtles. In fact, the were the first animals we really saw in the Galapagos. We hit the boat, and motored out to our first island, and while tying up, we saw two while just standing on the boat. The water there is incredibly clear, and we learned quickly not to sit on deck without a camera at hand, or you´d miss something. Sea lions, turtles, puffers gathering under the boat, rays, etc etc. We also had on land the rather phenomonal experience of happening by when two baby sea turtles, just hatched, broke through the sand heading out to the ocean. Wild. We actually reburied them, as if they hatch during the day, they suffer an almost 100% mortality rate as everything seems to find baby sea turtle highly tasty. The Darwin Research station tells you to rebury them, so that´s what we did.

All that snorkeling was great, but it did make me feel a bit guilty about the lobster dinner we had last night. I felt like I had really gone too far in intruding on their space. Its a common feeling in the Galapagos. You really notice that man is not designed to be here. Human impact easily upsets things, so your hiking is kept to set paths, and woe betide you should you leave them, except to not disturb the animals. So leaving the paths actually happens quite a lot, as the animals are totally unafraid of humans, which is one thing to read and another thing to experience. But despite them being unafraid of humans, you still shouldn´t touch them, etc, as all kinds of things from passing diseases to their mothers not taking them back will happen with dire consequences. Sometimes this means you have to all but outrun a sea lion on land. The sea lions are VERY curious.

At any rate, back to Quito now, to try to make some sense of it all. Peru tomorrow! The Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu by the end of the week. I think that´s going to be quite a change, but still an interesting one. Its going to be odd to be back in cities for a few days first (today, Quito, tomorrow Lima, the day after that Cuzco, the day after that Ollaytaytambo) while re-acclimating to altitude.

Lots of love,

Anne



Quiz answer; The smallest breed of penguin is the little blue penguin, and is found in Australia, New Zealand and the New England Aquarium.