Author: Jared

So you’re in this boat. It’s a gray Thursday morning, the kind that Douglas Adams predicted would mark the end of the world. You’re speeding away from the questionable seaside town of Puerto López toward some offshore rock called Isla de la Plata, part of Machalilla National Park, where they’ve got frigate birds, blue-footed boobies, and snorkeling. They call this coast the “Poor Man’s Galapagos” and so far it’s lived up to its appellation. The big draw for this excursion is that during the months of August and September, humpback whales are known to call this stretch of water their turf. You’re not guaranteed to see whales, of course. But there’s always a chance. You watch, but to either side of the boat as far as the horizon, the sea is unbroken cloud-gray and blue.

But then…

A flurry of excitement. Someone’s spotted something way off to starboard. You crane your neck. There – off in the distance – a spout of water. Then another! Whales breaching the surface to breathe. The captain and the tour guides confer, but the boat presses on toward the island. The whales are too far away. Nevertheless you fumble to extract your trusty Canon T3 with its telephoto lens out of the safety of its drybag. You check the settings – high shutter speed, continuous shooting mode, focus, ISO – and you get ready, watching the horizon with a much less casual eye.

They’re here.

More excitement. Several passengers yell “Whoah!” in unison. Another whale spout, this one much closer and ahead of the boat. The captain changes course. You’re going after them. You shift into a crouch. For millions of years your forebears have been hunters. That instinct quickens your pulse, sharpens your senses. Your weapon is a camera, not a harpoon, but the lizard brain at the base of your skull doesn’t know the difference. The chase is on.

You hear the splash before you see it – like someone dropped a bus into the water. You swivel your lens forward and zoom in toward the spreading bruise of sea foam flattening the waves in a wide oval. You wait. You wait.

Then you watch a hill of black flesh crest a wave and blow a spout of water toward the sky. It sinks back under the ocean and a giant tail follows, black on top and white below. It slaps the sea as it plunges, sending up a wall of spray. Your camera has been clicking three shots per second. You ease up on the trigger and let yourself breathe. Come back, Mr. Whale. I’m not done with you yet.

The captain idles the engines. All the passengers hush. Then another cry and a giant splash forward. You turn to catch it but it’s gone. A whale had jumped out of the water and you missed it. Its tail rises up from the sea and splashes as it sinks, as if it’s laughing. At least you got a picture of that.

Another whale breaches and blows. You swivel for the shot. You’re getting the hang of it, but you’re still slow on the trigger. You quickly figure out that your camera loses focus when the horizon vanishes on the upswell of a wave, so you learn to wait until the boat is sliding down the other side to keep your focus true. You watch for signs that a whale is about to appear: the spout, a slight fuzziness on the water’s surface that hints something big is just below. You shoot several more whale humps and plenty of tails, but the handful of times that a whale leaps full out of the water you’re just too slow to catch it.

One whale sticks his tail straight up in the air and slaps the surface repeatedly. The captain guns the motors and steers the ship around the pod for different viewing angles. You set your camera down in  your lap and simply enjoy the experience. There are whales all around you, creatures that make elephants seem small, graceful beings that dwarf the tiny hull you hope protects you while giants casually swim by.

Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum.

The breachings become fewer and farther between. The pod is moving away save for one, maybe out of idle curiosity about the strange hairless monkeys in their silly little raft. The captain sets course for the island and revs the engine for the next item on the day’s agenda. You look behind for a final glimpse and, jaw dropping, see that the whale is following. Instead of your life flashing before your eyes, all you get is a silly line of dialog from an early episode of South Park: “Oh my god, it’s comin’ right for us!”

You take the shot.

To your relief and secret disappointment, the whale does not Moby Dick your tour boat. You reach the island safely, where you climb a friggin’ mountain to take pictures of boobies and frigates, eat tuna sandwiches while being pestered by hungry sea turtles, then snorkel a reef with big, colorful fish and a fairly strong current.

All in all a good day. You peel off your neoprene wetsuit pants, wring out your soaked t-shirt, wrap your thin, quick-dry African towel around your shoulders, and relax as the captain steers you for home.

But wait. There’s more.

Not fifteen minutes into the ride back, another breach is sighted. This one is close, just off the stern. The captain slows and adjusts our course. A pod of humpbacks is coming alongside. Unlike the ones from this morning, these aren’t feeding or marking territory. These are here to play in the afternoon sun.

Your camera is out and you’re ready this time. And now, the whales are making it easy. You can’t know for sure, but you suspect they’re putting on a show for the cheers and applause every time one of them leaps into the air, flips over, and flops on her back with a splash like God skipping stones. This is what life is about, they seem to say. Why, what did you think it was?

This pod, your group soon figures out, is a family. There is a huge female, a smaller male, and a calf just learning the ropes of what it is to be a young, little leviathan. The mother is a maestro of megaton water displacement, but every now and then her pup leaps from the water in a spiral of sheer delight.

Gone is the primitive hunter in the back of your mind, replaced by pure exhilaration. Speeding along the waves with a trio of vast beings whose lives are so alien to your own, yet who share a common experience of play, of the sun and the waves, of a child running off the end of a diving board and cannonballing into a pool full of adults, it brings such a feeling of unadulterated joy that you want it to last forever.

In the same opening chapters to The Hitchhiker’s Guide in which Douglas Adams ends the world on a Thursday, he also makes the claim that dolphins (and I’ll expand this to all cetaceans) are much more intelligent than human beings because despite their large brains, all they do is muck about in the water having a good time. Damned if the man wasn’t right.

Life Lesson from Quito: If you see a guy juggling machetes on the side of the road get off the bus and take a video. You can always catch another bus, but you won’t find the machete juggler again no matter how hard you look. And the universe even gave us two chances: once when we were heading north toward Mitad del Mundo, and again after we realized we were on the wrong bus and had to turn around. We went hunting the next day and the day after, but we never saw the dude again.

So what, you may rightly ask, were we doing back in Quito? When I last left you hanging, dear readers, Lea and I were enjoying the hot springs in the little resort village of Papallacta. We spent one night in the ultra-nice resort at the top of the valley then moved down to the pueblo itself for cheaper accommodations, laundry service, and the hot springs park favored by the locals instead of the tourists. Throw in some hiking in the Andes with only a little bit of rain and you have the makings of a pleasant few days.

Papallacta, however, is to the east of Quito and the places we wanted to head next were to the west. And besides, while we were more than ready to move on from Quito, we still hadn’t hit its most famous attraction – the equator itself. Mitad del Mundo is the big, chintzy monument park, museum and shop complex north of the city where you can take pictures of yourself standing on a yellow line marking 0.00⁰ latitude.

Yes, yes, yes, if you do the research you’ll find that the monument and the line aren’t exactly on the equator, and there’s another museum just up the road that claims to be the real thing. But the ex-physicist in me says, “Oh yeah? Well for your information, smarty, the Earth wobbles on its axis so that the poles and the equator are changing slightly every day, so no line you draw will ever be completely accurate. So shut up and don’t spoil my equator photos.”

Ahem.

Anyway, after a couple days parked at a crummy hostel near the Ofelia Bus Terminal in a sketchy part of the north end of town, we were very much finito with Quito. Our current port of call is Mindo, a village to the west that’s lower in altitude yet still in a cloud forest, in a valley that’s a biodiversity hotspot. We spent our first night taking photos of birds from top floor of our hostel. The next day we went to a butterfly farm and saw even more species of hummingbirds just sitting on the back porch of a different hostel on the edge of town.

Yesterday we rode a taxi up a mountain and a cable car across a gorge so we could hike to Cascada Reina, one of seven falls you can hike to at once if you’re a twenty-two year old German athlete in perfect physical condition. For us old folks, it was an experience that’s already been described quite accurately by blogger Mark McElroy in his article “Death March to Cascada Reina.” (No, we didn’t find that article until after making our trek. So much for research.)

Today we got up before dawn to take one of the many bird-watching tours offered in the area. Even my telephoto lens was inadequate for birdspotting, a task much akin to picking out insects in Central Park from the International Space Station. Fortunately our guide had a telescope that she’d apparently borrowed from NASA and was able to help us out with some photos of her own. Birdwatching in the jungle was a fun experience that Lea and I now know we never have to do again. It was also a tour which, unfortunately, blew our budget for the day and then some.

And there’s the rub.

So far the little towns in the mountains, Papallacta and Mindo, were by far more pleasant and relaxing than the big, bustling city of Quito, but in a way they’re more expensive. In Quito you can ride from the south end of the city to the north for a mere 25¢ (and the emotional toil of standing for two hours in a dense human scrum on a bus driven by a lunatic who turns corners like Sandra Bullock in the movie Speed). In towns with no public transportation you’re at the mercy of the cabbies and tour operators.

In Quito there are plenty of museums and beautiful old churches you can visit at no cost. Even the ones that aren’t free don’t charge much – the Basilica only costs $2 to enter and the city’s really nice botanical garden only cost $3.50. Our excursion to the falls alone cost $22 in cab fare and cablecar rides, plus the food and water we had to bring ourselves, plus the Cuba Libre and Mexican food we needed afterward for medicinal purposes. The bird watching trip cost what you’d expect to pay for a shore excursion from a cruise line, and we’re not anywhere near a port.

Our goal on this trip (well, one of them) is to slow travel. To travel cheaply and stay cheaply, moving from town to town while absorbing the local atmosphere and culture, discovering the casual, everyday beauty that the fast-paced tourist would never notice. That ideal is harder to meet in practice than in theory, and it seems to be easier in the Big City where the air can be so bad it literally made my eyes burn from the fumes.

It’s early days yet and I’m sure we’ll get the hang of it. Our next port of call will be Puerto Lopez on the Pacific coast where, yes, we’ll take at least one tour and hopefully see some whales. After that we’re off for Loja and, sooner than you think, the Peruvian border.

Along the way the plan is to kick back, let the hummingbirds come to us, enjoy the cool evening breeze and, as they say, stop and smell the roses. But I’m still holding out for a guy juggling machetes.

Mindo Wildlife Photodump!

 

First things first. Some of you may have wondered if I regret quitting my job and running away to South America. Gaze for a moment upon the photo headlining this article and take a guess.

That picture is of the steaming pool right outside our room at the Termas de Papallacta Hot Springs Spa and Resort, nestled way up in the Andes east of Quito. Even though it sorta blew our budget for the week, Saturday night at the resort was our reward for completing two weeks of Spanish classes (and a birthday present from Lea to me – emoji smiley face).

How did we do? Well, after two weeks of one-on-one conversation with a private tutor, I think Lea’s well on her way to fluency. As for me? I was able to get a haircut all on my own without any help. Granted it turned out to be a really short haircut, since I tried to communicate “a little shorter on top” with hand gestures that didn’t quite came across the way I intended.

Also, when los vendedores walk through the bus, running their nonstop sales pitches, I can now pick out individual words and even make a little sense out of what they’re saying. Which, given how mind-spinningly fast native Spanish speakers talk, is an achievement for as little training as I’ve had.

My lessons were in a more traditional classroom setting, though there was only one other student, the teacher, and me. We learned basic vocabulary, conjugated verbs, conversed, read, and wrote in Spanish. The result? I now have a fighting chance to communicate, as long as I know what the topic is going to be beforehand and can prep myself with the appropriate vocabulary.

In retrospect, I feel that taking Spanish engaged the same part of my brain that I use at board-gaming meetups, where I have to learn the rules to some new game and figure out how to apply them against more experienced players who are going to kick my ass anyway.

But it is soooo nice to be out of class.

And it’s so nice to be in a place with HOT WATER. Let me be honest, up here in the mountains it’s cold and damp. As I’m typing this (in the much more reasonably priced Hostal Coturpa downhill from the resort) it’s been raining and chilly all day. But that doesn’t matter because the springs are so, so nice. I’m not kidding, you should get on a plane and fly here right now.

Because of the thermal springs, the hotels here have actual hot and cold running water. This was not a thing in Quito, nor in some other places we’ve visited. Which means, por ejemplo, cleaning your pots, plates, and cutlery in cold water (a questionable venture at best). It also means that when you take a shower you get to use the Shower Head of Electrical Death.

There’s no way in hell these things would pass any U.S. safety code. Essentially, you have an electrical hot water heater affixed directly to the shower head, with live wiring (that may or may not be exposed, we’ve seen both) just waiting to electrocute you.

These machines are extremely finicky. The first one we ever saw was in Tanzania. Every electrical circuit in the house seemed to have been run through a single breaker, and when anyone used the shower it would blow the breaker several times between turning the water on and rinsing the shampoo out of your hair.

The ones in Central and South America have been a little more stable but they don’t have the capacity to heat very much water. Therefore you can only have a hot (or tepid) shower if you keep the pressure dialed almost all the way down. Not enough water pressure and the Death Heater won’t turn on, but too much pressure and it doesn’t have a chance to heat the water at all.

Please, someone figure out a way to get a few million real hot water heaters imported to this continent before we get much further into our trip.

So, you may ask, besides learning a few useful phrases in Spanish, how else is this time away from the American Wage Slave Work Ethic been going? Well, in terms of personal development I’ve kept my promise to myself to write every day. That’s come in the form of this blog, writing book reviews on Goodreads, and working on my rusty fiction-writing skills. In that department, I’ve already finished a new short story and started shopping it around, while also beginning to outline the first novel I want to write while on this trip.

Speaking of book reviews… Even though I’m no longer librarianing, I’m never going to stop telling people what books to read. One thing I decided to do for this trip was to read a novel about each country we visit written by an author from that country. For Ecuador, my book-of-the-month pick is The Queen of Water by Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango.

The Queen of Water reads like a YA novel, but it’s really an autobiographical account of Virginia Farinango’s actual childhood, living as an indígena servant to a mestizo family in the mid-1980s.

Check it out!

New Blog Feature: Lea’s Awesome Photo Corner

Lea and I both take photos that I use for this blog, but to tell the truth I use more of hers than of mine. In addition to having a great eye for composition, she’s got a skill for incredible macro-photography. Check these out, from the Jardín Botánico de Quito and the Termas de Papallacta resort:

What did I tell you? Follow her on Instagram.

(or: It’s more than an altitude adjustment.)

Welcome to Quito, capital of Ecuador and city at the center of the world! (Mitad del Mundo, as they’ll have you know.) Quito sits in a valley in the Andes, and up the mountains as well. Remember this scene from Mission: Impossible?

Yeah, that’s what it feels like to walk around Quito, the streets are so steep. And it’s crowded! The guidebooks all crow about Quito as a jewel of Spanish colonial architecture. (Yeah, thanks Fodors and Lonely Planet.) What that really means is that the Spanish picked the steepest, most defensible hills to build on, then squished the buildings so close together that there’s barely room for one lane of traffic, don’t even think about two. Most of the street corners in the old part of the city have blue paint scrapes from the buses cutting it a little too close.

What that means is that there’s not much in the way of elbow room, whether you’re walking down the street or taking public transport. This was quite a shock when arriving here from the comparatively deserted Galapagos. I could feel all my introverted little brain cells vibrating frantically in an attempt to generate a force field between me and everyone else.

Just to make things extra fun, our arrival in Quito coincided (by no fault of ours) with Ecuador’s Independence Day celebration. Technically, Independence Day was on August 10 when we were still in Puerto Ayora, but the celebration continued all through the weekend with Quito’s biggest annual party, La Fiesta de la Luz.

So Lea and I take a bus from the airport, drag 40 kilos of backpack up the side of a friggin’ mountain to get to our hostel (seriously, Booking.com and TripAdvisor should list the incline of all surrounding streets) and our hosts, oblivious to the fact that we’re both about to die like a pair of overworked Himalayan pack mules, insist that we should go and see the celebration. Since we’re starving and the word “festival” implies the availability of mystery-meat street food, we dive right in to the experience.

Or should I say mosh pit?

La Fiesta de la Luz (Festival of Light, mantén con mi español, por favor) is an event where many of the churches and other buildings in Quito’s Centro Historical are lit up with displays of moving artwork. In addition, there are more light shows in the middle of the street.

Mira:

To give some perspective, Lea filmed that umbrella show while we were inching through a shoulder-to-shoulder mob down a steep cobbled street. Once we got to the bottom there was a bit of a breather, but the crowds around the big displays were really thick. The biggest, the lightshow on the Iglesia y Convento de San Francisco, was surrounded by exactly the kind of slow-crush mob that one could easily get trampled under should you lose your footing.

And that was just the first night!

Our two weeks of classes started Monday at the Yanapuma Foundation and Spanish School, which was mercifully downhill from our original hostel. We study from 9:00 – 1:00 each day, Lea in private tutoring for intermediate Spanish speakers and myself in a beginners’ class. In the evenings we stay with a host family who provide lodging, breakfast, and dinner, and who speak only Español, forcing us to practice whether we’ve got the energy for it or not. Our home is an easy ten-minute bus ride from the school.

Oh my brothers, let me tell you about buses in Quito.

Quito has a lot, I say, a lot of buses. They go nearly everywhere and in town they’re only 25¢ to ride. The trouble is figuring out which bus to get on. Google Maps is very handy about which route numbers will pick you up from which stops and take you close to your destination. The problems with this are that A) Google is sometimes inaccurate about where the bus stops are and B) only about a third of the buses post which route they’re running.

Instead, the front window of each bus is plastered with a list of destinations and stops along the way, which is fine if you’re a local resident. If you’re not, then all you can do is search for a word that corresponds to something on your route, jump on said bus, and watch Google maps carefully along the way so that you can jump off if the bus starts heading in the wrong direction. Lea and I went so far as to stake out the bus stops near our casa and photograph the destination signs on each bus that came by so we’d know how to get home.

Lea and I have stitched together several trips by just picking buses heading in the general direction we want to go and switching when necessary. The bus rides are so cheap we still prefer traveling this way as opposed to arguing with taxi drivers. (That’s a rant I’ll perhaps save for a future entry.) What’s crazy-making is that the old part of Quito is so congested it seriously took us an hour one time to travel by bus a distance we could have walked in ten minutes.

So why not just walk? Allow me to refer you to the Tom Cruise video at the beginning of this post.

For all my grousing, Quito is a beautiful city. Ecuador is like the Switzerland of South America. Everywhere you look, there is some gorgeous mountain vista. Buildings that appear shabby on the outside may have gorgeous courtyards and villas on the interior. There are plenty of parks, all of which are full of people and families in the afternoons and weekends, resting in the grass, playing ball, or tooling around in paddleboats (which are still a thing here).

The churches are simply amazing, both outside and in, with the Basílica del Voto Nacional and the Iglesia de San Francisco being the champs. We also made the arduous journey up to the Virgen del Panecillo (a giant aluminum statue that overlooks the city), took a four-hour, three-transfer bus trip to the Saturday market in Otavalo (same trip back), and the easy but nerve-wracking Teleférico three thousand feet up the side of the Pichincha volcano to a breezy altitude of 12,943 feet above sea level.

As close as we are to the ionosphere, mis amigos, the adjustment I’m having to make on this trip isn’t to the altitude. It’s to long-term travel as a way of life as opposed to vacationing, and this week it really started to hit me.

Some of it’s to do with the feeling of helplessness that comes from not having all the information I’d like – it can drive me batty waiting on a bus to appear when I don’t know if I’m at the right stop or if that bus route even exists today – or when the police start closing all the streets around our bus stop and rerouting traffic for no damn reason. I’m learning to cope with that level of uncertainty, though we have caved in once or twice and grabbed a taxi.

Some of it’s to do with the sheer crush of people and the seeming lack of personal space everywhere in the world outside the United States. Yeah, I’ve been on a crowded subway car in the States, and I’ve also been crushed in the chaos of Bourbon Street late in the evening on Mardi Gras. In this author’s humble opinion, the first should never feel like the second.

The hardest thing to accept, though, is the idea that wherever Lea and I travel for the next ten months, we will always be in someone else’s space – sleeping in someone else’s bed, using someone else’s shower, eating at someone else’s table. Some of our hostels have offered more privacy than others, but there’s never a “do not disturb” sign to hang on the door. Staying in someone else’s home brings it to a whole new level. It’s incredibly generous for someone to open their house to us, but sometimes it can feel like we’re intruding, and sometimes it’s difficult to accept that I can’t just go be alone whenever I want.

I’m not homesick for our apartment in Atlanta, but I find myself missing the concept of “home” – some place that’s just ours and no one else’s, where we can close the door and shut out the world. But living without that comfort is part of the deal when you decide to travel the world.

Speaking of, just one more week of school and we’re back on the road!

Assuming we can find the right bus.

PHOTO DUMP!

So we began our journey by stepping off the edge of the map. That’s really what it feels like to be in the Galapagos, but it doesn’t hit you all at once. It creeps up on you, bit by bit, while your brain is still insisting that you’re on just another island vacation. But you aren’t. This isn’t Hawaii, or the Caribbean, or even Zanzibar (been there, bought the shirt). This is Terra Incognita. This is the frontier. Here there be dragons, and they won’t even get out of the damned road.

Of about thirty or so islands (and 200 “rocks” that don’t merit the title) only four are inhabited. On three of those, “habitation” barely amounts to planting a flag and paving a handful of streets. Ninety-seven percent of the Galapagos are still wild. Lea and I are here in the low season so the archipelago isn’t crawling with hikers, divers, backpackers, and other tourists, but even in the settled areas the wildlife doesn’t seem to care one bit about the invasive hairless apes encroaching on their territory. Marine iguanas and sea lions roam the docks and nature trails as unbothered as sacred cattle in India. Humans have certainly had an impact on the ecosystem – just look at all the strident attempts to bring the Galapagos tortoise back from near extinction – but these islands don’t let you forget that humans are interlopers and the original residents would be perfectly happy if we’d all just bugger off, thank you very much.

The only way to see the majority of the islands is by cruise but that would have blown our budget for the South American mainland, so we opted to take the landlubbers’ tour by visiting two of the port towns, Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz and Puerto Villamil on Isabella, staying in hostels instead of resort hotels and taking whatever tours and hikes were available from those two home bases.

Our plane landed on Isla Baltra, which looks like the surface of the moon if Buzz Aldrin had planted a few cacti while he was up there. The airport feels like a National Park entrance somewhere in the American west. As soon as passengers get off the plane they walk across a specially treated bit of astroturf to kill any invasive bugs on the soles of their shoes and then, where the immigration and customs desk would be in an international airport, visitors pay the Galapagos Park Entry Fee to the tune of $100 per person. This is in addition to the Transit Control Card that had to be purchased in Quito or Guayaquil before getting on the flight. (See instructions for that bit of fun.)

A bus ($5 per person) shuttles you across to the other side of Baltra where a ferry ($1 per person) takes you across the narrow strait to Santa Cruz proper where you can either hire a cab, meet up with your tour group, or take the express bus (another $5 per person) to Puerto Ayora.

(Side note: use of the word “ferry” in the above paragraph is generous. If you’re picturing a large flat-bottomed vessel that you could drive a vehicle onto, it’s not that. They have those, but only for tankers and cargo trucks. Even the “ferries” to the other inhabited islands are simply motorboats into which they cram as many passengers as they can before taking off into the wide, choppy Pacific. For shorter hops, such as the Baltra crossing, it’s more like a tender or water taxi – a smallish boat with a canopy and outboard motor. These run $1 – $3 depending where you are and where you’re going, such as crossing a bay to get to a secluded beach or to get from the dock to your inter-island ferry or cruise ship.)

The express bus dumped us off in the middle of town, and Puerto Ayora looks like an island tourist town. Walking in any random direction, you’ll likely stumble into either a hostel, restaurant, or travel agency selling excursions to dive and snorkel sites. However, it’s a much more laid back tourist town than any I’d seen (and only because I hadn’t been to Puerto Villamil yet). There are no aggressive touts shaking you down for souvenirs. The taxi drivers don’t hassle you every five seconds. People are friendly without latching on to you and offering to “help” you buy stuff at all the tourist shops.

Two things on that first day signaled that we’d entered another world. First was the fishing dock and market. The seaside was crawling with crabs and rock-black iguanas so thick we have to watch our feet not to step on them. The fish market was crowded with more seabirds than you’d believe – big birds walking around like they were shopping for dinner – and a sea lion right there among the workers who apparently serves as the fish market’s mascot (and main tourist draw).

The second sign that we weren’t in Kansas anymore was our inability to connect to the Internet from our hostel for any length of time. At first we put it down to irritating problems with the WiFi, the local ISP, or bad weather blocking the island’s satellite signal. Little did we know, but after days we would come to realize that the Galapagos are almost completely cut off from the World Wide Web. You can get a slow connection early in the morning before the islands wake up and start sharing the bandwidth, but by noon any hope of connecting to the outside world is gone.

My god, y’all. Do you have any idea how hard it is to function without the Internet in the 21^st century? It’s like having your oxygen taken away. It’s not just that we can’t look at cat pictures on Instagram, it’s that we can’t search for reviews on tour options, check the weather, or confirm our housing arrangements for the next stay on our trip. We were able to get out the occasional message on Facebook, but all connection with the wider world would be confined to the wee hours of the morning or the occasional miraculous mid-afternoon break when a signal would get through.

Anyway, back to the islands. Santa Cruz and Puerto Ayora are pretty well developed as things go. It’s easy to catch a ride, groceries are readily available, and the street food is fantastic. Why go to some pricey restaurant when the lady at the market two blocks from our hostel is handing out beef, cheese, and chicken empanadas for $1 each? Then again, there’s something to be said for two-for-$8 caipirinhas and mojitos from an ocean view table.

We took a taxi to Los Gemelos, a pair of giant volcanic sinkholes, and El Chato Tortoise Reserve. For a $3.20 water taxi ride we hiked to snorkel at Las Grietas and picnicked at La Playa de las Allemanes, and after a very long walk we made our way down to the Darwin Research Station (which was infested with small, screaming children, not really worth the effort, and necessitated the caipirinhas and mojitos mentioned above).

It wasn’t until we took the choppy, bouncy, water-flume ride to Isabella, the Galapagos’ largest island, that we realized how far into the wilderness we really were.

Despite the palm trees and crystal clear waters, Isabella’s lone village of Puerto Villamil is nothing like an overdeveloped island resort town. It tries to be, with a seaside street of tourist-catering restaurants and dive shops, but it feels like a precarious illusion. One reason is because it’s so cold. This time of year the Humboldt Current sweeps up from Antarctica bringing cold water and chilly air. There is misting rain every morning and evening, with the sun only breaking free in the afternoon. The temperature hovers between the upper 60s and lower 70s. While strolling along the beach you would never expect to see a giant cruise ship appear over the horizon. An 18^th century British whaler would be far more likely.

Despite the impression that the whole town might slide off into the Pacific or be swallowed by one of the nearby volcanoes, I love Puerto Villamil. The town is so quiet and easy. When it comes to a laid-back atmosphere, Jamaica’s got nothing on Isabella. Lea says she could imagine coming back here and teaching English for a month or two, but not staying any longer than that. Me, I’m not sure. Were I to, say, become a bestselling novelist and take up the Ian Fleming lifestyle, I could imagine building my Goldeneye right here.

In Villamil there is snorkeling in abundance so snorkel we did. We took two trips from Pahoehoe Galapagos Tours, one to an islet called Las Tintoreras and the other to a volcanic formation called Los Túneles, and Lea went snorkeling off a pier at a spot called Concha de Perla, where she saw some fantastic starfish.

The tour to Las Tintoreras was somewhat spoiled by a bunch of Germans who thought that snorkeling was about flailing their arms violently, treading water in giant flippers, kicking their legs like five-year-olds learning to dog paddle, knocking their neighbors in the head, and stirring up so much sand and muck from the seabed that no one could see anything. Seriously, who thought letting Germans in the water was a good idea?

The trip to Los Túneles, though, was hands-down the best snorkeling experience I’ve had in my life. The thing about snorkeling and diving is that once you’re in the water and the sounds of the upper world fade away it truly becomes an otherworldly environment. Also, from an intellectual standpoint, any time you go into the ocean you’re entering the realm of creatures that wouldn’t mind eating you, much more than on any well-trodden nature hike on land.

Previously I’ve snorkeled off Mexico, the Bahamas, Caribbean islands, the Red Sea, and Zanzibar, seen beautiful coral and colorful reef fish. Next to the Galapagos, those other sites seem completely domesticated. Here we saw sharks, three whitetips and a baby blacktip. We saw sea horses sleeping with their tails curled around an underwater log. We saw manta rays, a spotted ray, and a flight of five golden rays swimming in formation. We saw giant sea turtles minding their own business while surrounded by a school of neoprene-clad sea monkeys from the surface world.

One of the turtles swam right by me so close I could easily have reached my hand out and touched his shell. Instead I kept my arms to my side, didn’t move or breathe, and let him glide on by me. Mis amigos, sharing space with one of the most beautiful and majestic creatures I’ve ever seen is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a genuine spiritual experience. Now I know how Darwin must have felt being here.

It was hard for me to leave Isabella. It’s harder still to come back to the world of pavement, skyscrapers, obnoxious taxi drivers, and crowds and crowds of sweaty humans. Not that human civilization doesn’t have its charms, but having been to the Galapagos and getting a glimpse of what the world would be if we’d just leave it the hell alone, I’m not going to feel so bad the next time I see an abandoned shopping mall being slowly reclaimed by nature.

Still, like salmon returning to their home stream, Lea and I returned to the world of fast WiFi, personal automobiles, and regular bus schedules. Our plane landed in Quito, and we were completely unprepared for what we would stumble into that first night back in the World.

But that is another story…