Gorgeous pictures from a gorgeous weekend!

So this entire week from October 22 to 26 has consisted basically of me doing little more than classwork, eating, napping, exercise, and salsa, so I don't have much to share by way of pictures. But I do have last week's beautiful images yet to share here! 

Saturday the 20th almost everybody else in GAIAS took a set of taxis out to Puerto Chino, which is apparently as beautiful as the gorgeous beach in Isabela. I had already organized a group to go there on a 3-stop excursion the next day so I went to La Lobería beach with Laleña and Keegan instead. It's a nice 25-ish minute walk from the center of town and... It. Is. Beautiful. 

We hiked out to the cliff along the beach and then came back to the beach and snorkeled with a bunch of fish, some turtles, and had a sea lion come and play tricks on us before heading back to town. And then I collapsed into a nap, went to dinner, and watched Rango in Spanish (with no subtitles... which is really hard, actually). 

One note: I took these with my camera instead of iPhone and there is a smudge/scratch on the lens. So that's great. 

Hermit crab we met on the trail! 

A glance back as we walked along the "trail" - basically lava rocks with some stakes marking what direction to climb. 

A swallow-tailed gull and blue-footed booby on the same ridge along the cliff =D 

Keegan and Laleña taking a picture of a fat lava lizard. 

Can you see the marine iguana trail from its dragging tail? 

La Lobería isn't quite aptly named, because there are much fewer lobos than on Playa Mann or Playa de Oro, the two beaches nearest to school. However, here are some. The baby that you can see in the water towards the front was playing around after we woke him up from a nap by accidentally being too noisy. 

There are many more marine iguanas than lobos. They were everywhere as we hiked the trail. 

First guy we saw when we got to the sea view portion of Lobería. 

Marine iguanauanauanauanauanauana. 

Lazy lobos snuggling as they nap in the sun. 

View of the trail before it becomes lava rocks. 

Sunday 10/21/12

The only thing that could ruin a 3-stop adventure to some of the top attractions of the island is unfortunate weather - overcastedness, excessive mist, windiness and cold, etc. 

So. It was great that today we were blessed with a perfect, clear blue sky and spot-on weather. It’s actually a little hard to find an online weather forecast for San Cristóbal, but a weather.com screen capture of the Galápagos gives a pretty good idea of the temperatures we experience here: 

We left this morning for a multidestination excursion day. Our stops: 

• El Junco, the only freshwater lake in all of the Galápagos. It is a water-filled collapsed volcano, similar to the likes of Quilotoa except it is significantly smaller, the water isn’t super alkaline, called a crater instead of a caldera since its sides are less steep, and hiking around the rim isn’t going to make me sore for a week.

The crater. Frigate birds come to the lake to wash off the salt from their feathers, since they don’t have an oil-secreting adaptation that makes them waterproof. They then shake their distinctive swallow-divided tailfeathers and fly back out to the coast. 

View from the rim, San Cristobal’s shores are visible from all around. We surely are on an island. 

Smiley Savannah for a size comparison! (especially because her picture is much better than mine at this same location) 

Bathing frigate birds! 

And right across the road is the wind “farm” of 3 turbines that provides ____% of the town’s electricity. There is flickering at the start of the windy season, but it seems pretty successful so far. 

1. Galapaguera, Galapagos tortoise breeding and happiness center. 

This guy was right next to the gate when we came in. He’s pretty far from the rest of the tortoises. The tortoises endemic to San Cristóbal are Geochelone chathamensis and live to be about 180 years old. Specimens of them were moved from other parts of the island to come to this refuge so they could be raised and bred away from the prying and destructive hands of islanders. 

We watched this one eat leaves and twigs for a while. 

For anyone’s who’s worried about their operations. 

Apparently we were there right around mealtime and these folks were just waiting around the water hole for some magic banana leaves to fall from the sky for them from the park rangers. I have a 2-minute video of some of them walking into the water hole, but it is too big to upload. 

This guy was directly next to the trail on our way to the nursery. 

The nursery is my favorite place ever. 

PILE OF BABY TORTOISES. 

TORTUGAS CHIQUITIIIIITAS! (Teeeeeeeny tortoises!) 

Me with BABY TORTOISES. 

Once the tortoises get big enough to be let out of the boxes of rocks, they live in the pen area and eat and make friends. The biggest one near the left side is Genesis, who was the first of her batch of babies in 2005. 

1. and Puerto Chino was our final stop. 

It is a beach. With beautiful clear aquamarine water and not very much to see if you try to snorkel. This is all I have for you. 

Getting to know San Cristóbal

I’m catching up! This one is much more text than I'd like, but reading is good for your brain! 

Monday we still did not have a professor, but our class activities continued as planned. I gave my presentation about a research paper on the water sources in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz island. Lamentably, the paper itself is we had student presentations of papers and then a field trip to the highlands to see the waste management facility and the water filtration plant. 

Recycling and garbage go to the same facility to be sorted and dumped accordingly. Recycling clean enough to be remade into other materials is sorted by plastic/glass/paper, compressed into neat blocks, bound by giant plastic wrap, and shipped to mainland Ecuador for processing. Garbage and recycling not clean enough to be processed is dumped into the landfill. 
Until six years ago, trash was simply dumped along a path between the recycling awning and what is currently the landfill hole. 

 

When the hole was dug for dumping, the trash started going there. As you can see, there isn’t much of a hole now because it is largely filled already. This is the only plot of land alloted for dumping so far by the National Park on San Cristóbal and it’s easy to see there isn’t enough space for the growing population’s continued waste. Good ol’ problems of linear consumption systems... 

But I do approve of the composting portion of the waste collection process in the Galapagos, seeing as to how challenging it is to start and sustain composting services in the states. Of course it only works if people dispose of their scraps properly. The burden comes back to the individual. 

After the waste facility, we Buscar’d a short drive down the road to the water filtration facility. Right now it only superficially filters the water pumped from Cerro Americano before it reaches citizens, but construction is underway to finish in November or December for the facility to treat the water pumped from Cerro Gato to be used for potable water in the highlands and in town. After usage, the water will be pumped through to the wastewater facility (to be located in town instead of in the highlands) and then into the sea. 

Tuesday we had more presentations and then watched “We Feed The World”, a food documentary, with Mick the (previous) sea lion researcher (or he was previously a sea lion researcher. I will go into more detail once I work up the energy to discuss the research drama with the National Park.) giving a short presentation about sustainability and food choices. It shows Europe-specific examples of food production, especially of wheat and chicken, but was generally the same familiar concepts discussed in the likes of Food, Inc., The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and other food things about unsustainable industrialized production. 

Later on Tuesday we met about the Environmental Education program again, worked out specific tasks for planning, and set deadlines for work. It was good. 

After that, I worked on my geology assignment, went to bailoterapia (which you can read all about in Keegan’s recent blog entry here -- again, saves me the time of uploading and writing! He comes with me when I go every Tuesday and Thursday.), and then ran to the salsa class that some classmates set up with Oskar, a Galapagueño friend they made who's close to professional enough to teach us moves. It is $25 for 6 classes, and the first day was tons of fun. I am large and clumsy, so dancing is pretty awkward for me, but I am learning and trying! 

Wednesday we finally had a professor! Andrea came in and finally gave us firm directions and guidance in what to do for our water resource projects. We reworked and presented our conceptual models for the goals, challenges, and connections of ideas dealing with water conservation and figured out the schedule for the rest of the course. It was incredibly comforting and steadying to finally have an authority figure again. 

After class, I holed up to work on my geology field journal writeup, which I had planned on finishing last week but did not because of my time management shortcomings and because I was trying to get to know the town.

Apparently I missed one of the most stunning sunsets while I did work. This is a picture without modification by John-Michael. 

Thursday we talked about specifics of the project proposal writeup and introductory concepts of the science of water systems. I figured out that Andrea is actually Esteban’s wife and spread the word to the class, and we suddenly developed a lot more respect and interest in what she was doing with us because Esteban had such a strong impact on us and she jumped so quickly into class material that we didn’t have a chance to warm up personally first. 

After class, I had lunch with Chelsea and Keegan and had to come to terms with the fact that I am incredibly sick of eating rice here. Especially the dry, hard, excessively large portions of rice that I find at most meals that are rather unlike the soft wonderful Chinese rice that I have had no problem eating at every meal for about 18 years. Keegan has been finishing my rice. 

Then Savannah, Keegan, and I took a hike out to Playa Baquerizo to snorkel. It is very rocky and involves a lot more concentration climbing up and down the giant hill and rocks than I expected. Along the way, we saw lots of marine iguanas and some lobos. One of my favorite snorkeling experiences is getting to swim with sea turtles, and it seems that Baquerizo is one of the beaches where we can be sure to see them! 

Picture by USFQ of Cerro Tijeretas (Frigatebird Hill), which we climbed onto, over, and past to get to Baquerizo. 

Friday we learned about water quality testing parameters and methods and then took a field trip back to El Cafetal to demonstrate the water quality testing techniques in two streams there. We confirmed that there don’t seem to be mayflies (often an organism used as an indicator of stream health) in the area, but we did see lots of midges, shrimp, and mosquito pupae. Andrea concluded that the biodiversity of the streams here is not very high. 

Andrea putting midges into a sampling jar, me holding the container of water used to see what a creature does and looks like in water. 

I finished up my geology assignment and turned it in, and went to dinner with some folks before finishing my Natural Resources proposal draft for the night. 

I have a series of really gorgeous pictures to share in my next entry, so bear with me. 

I’m definitely a land mammal (10/14/12)

I just got back from scuba diving at Kicker Rock, aka Leon Dormido (Asleep Lion). We left at about 8:30 am and got back around 3:45 pm. It was pretty cool, but it might take me some recovery time before I go back underwater again. 

Figuring out diving was a mission throughout the week, since Chelsea was hellbent on diving this weekend and I really wanted to join. I helped her shop around for a good dive company and kind of tried to help with organizing people to dive with us. After walking around town on Tuesday, we decided to go with Wreck Bay Dive Company, not only because Shay the dive master speaks English really well and is extremely funny and approachable, but also because they are the oldest and most reputable dive company on the island. The prices, we found out, are basically the same across the shops, so we chose it based on their customer service and the appearance of their shop and equipment. When I saw their sign with the names of the dive masters as we left, I remembered that Laura had recommended we go with Shay, so it was sealed for me. I was very happy with their service. 

Here is a Google picture of Leon Dormido in exactly the conditions that we saw (minus currents and waves splashing). I didn’t bring any audiovisual equipment because I don’t have any waterproofing implementations for them. The underwater pictures will be credited to Louise if I can get some of them up here. 

We swam first into the channel and I saw a TON of different types of fish. Some of the most remarkable were balloonfish, the school of 50 black-tipped reef sharks that we saw going past us on the wall of the channel, and a diamond ray resting on the bottom. I found out a little after seeing the diamond ray (maybe 30-35 minutes into the first dive) that I happen to breathe a whole lot more greedily than anybody else in my group. 

When I thought to check my air pressure, I was shocked to see that I was already at 1100 psi. We are supposed to start ascending at 700 psi. Chelsea was my dive buddy and when I asked for her air pressure she was only at 2200 psi. Our 3000 psi tank was supposed to last about 45 minutes for this dive, after we’d been in the water for about 10 minutes doing our equipment check off the shore of Isla de los Lobos before that. (It is called that, but we only saw one sea lion, which are lobos marinos - translated as sea wolves, which makes more sense because they act more like dogs than lions) So I swim over to Shay and tell him in scuba signals that I’m low on air, and he takes me up to the boat. I sat in the boat sadly, wondering what wonderful creatures they were seeing underneath and lamenting that I breathe so much more than everyone else. 

When everyone came up they shared accounts of what they saw under, and the more knowledgeable divers of the group advised that I focus more on floating instead of kicking, breathe slowly out, and to definitely not use my arms. I was basically doing everything wrong, but mostly because I was trying to get to neutral buoyancy. I’m not sure I ever did get neutral, so I ended up kicking and using my arms a lot to get to where I wanted. I could use some practice. 

We then ate some snacks on the boat as the dive masters changed out our tanks and drove to the side of the rock to take a dive along the outer wall. In the process, Shay shouted to a passing snorkeling boat that "WE HAVE MORE FUN BECAUSE WE HAVE A RUBBER CHICKEN. WE HAVE A RUBBER CHICKEN," as he waved the chicken in the air. It was pretty great. 

And the dive along the wall was cool except we got caught in CRAZY STRONG CURRENT and the fish species that we saw were not very distinctive to me. When we got to the part of the wall with the strong currents I didn’t realize what was happening until I had floated some distance and someone signaled to me that we were to hold on to the wall to stay in place. In my defense, I was following the national park rules of not touching anything in the wild! But as a result of this floating, Joey, Emily, and I ended up on the other side of a edge of the rock wall, hanging on to coral-covered rock juts with everything we had in us, hoping the current would subside and Shay or Angel (the other dive master) would come tell us what to do. My hands are rather cut up as evidence of this struggle. Shay does eventually make his way over to get us and beckons for us to use the moments when the current has calmed to move forward to the other side where everyone else was also hanging on. Apparently Shay saw hammerhead sharks on his way to get us. Nobody else got to see them. 

I find Chelsea again and take her arm in my version of a scuba hug that turned into us hanging on to each other as the current picked up again. We try to basically resume sight-seeing in the dive, but when I looked at my air pressure I was once more at 1000 psi. Now mind you, I was following everyone’s breathing advice this whole time, except during the current struggle because I was too busy trying to not wash away to slow down my out-breaths. So at 700 I signal to Angel that I was low, who signaled to Shay to take me up. And up we went. 

At the surface, Shay waited with me for the boat - which stopped to pick up everybody else on its way to get us - and I got to chat with him. He’s lived in San Cristóbal for 5 years now and ended up in Ecuador because he met his wife when he was backpacking in South America after he’d served his mandatory 3 years in the Israeli army after high school “many years ago”. And apparently he can get an hour and a half out of a tank of air. I lasted about 25 minutes. 

After that, we drove to a nearby beach and ate lunch on the boat before riding back to Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. 

Another google image, of blacktip reef sharks like the ones we saw except less cool because we're not in the picture. 

10/9/12 The day we met the Major Mayor Mare

School is located on the direct left of the National Park Office, and I live somewhere near the intersection of Carlos Mora and Alsacio Northia. I don't actually have a street address.

Natural Resource Management class is focused on the conservation and sustainable development of water resources in the island of San Cristóbal, and I’m really enjoying it so far! We started Monday with an introduction to the class (of course) and jumped into the theoretical framework of a conceptual map for environmental problems. I thought it was pretty intuitive, and we worked in groups for the last part of class to come up with some of the most broad portions of the conceptual map we’d build for water conservation on the island. 

I was surprised, either pleasantly or unpleasantly, today (according to when I wrote it, which is Tuesday, but I have limited internet capacity so I’ll have to try hard to update in a timely and relevant manner) by several things: 

• yoga at 7 am lead by Mick, and Australian guy who was doing sea lion research with USFQ but now is having research permit problems, involved variations of leg pulses and the expectation that doing a headstand would come easily to everyone. I do not like either of these things very much, but yoga is going to be twice a week on the beach for free and I am thankful for that. It’s a wonderful way to start the morning, even if there are unpleasant core exercises with which to contend.
• I didn’t bring a change of clothes for after yoga because I had forgotten that we were going to meet the town mayor during the second half of class.
• Ecuador only has wastewater treatment plants in two towns: Cuenca and San Cristóbal (which doesn’t currently have one running, but more on that in a bit). Quito is the largest municipality in the country and it has NO WASTEWATER TREATMENT FACILITY. All of the water used in basically all of the cities is taken directly from the ecosystems, used, and then discharged back into the waterways - this means it eventually goes into the Amazon or to the sea. Ecuador technically isn’t a water stressed country, but there are really delicate ecosystems here and clean water is not actually renewable if it is being taken and relocated from these ecosystems. This is really, really unbelievable!!
• San Cristóbal is installing the nation’s first bio-wastewater treatment plant in late March of next year, and it’s expected to greatly improve the availability, distribution, and quality of potable water for its citizens. This means they will no longer be taking freshwater out of the lake here - the only source of fresh water in all of the Galápagos Islands - and that they will be reliably providing potable water to its citizens. They are also changing the payment structure so it is not $3 a month no matter the usage as it is right now, but will be a metered payment and parties more able to pay (businesses, hotels, etc) will pay a nominally higher fee (something like $1.20 versus $1 per 1000 liters). 

I am actually pretty fascinated by how wastewater treatment works. I am signed up to give the presentation about the research paper on wastewater treatment next week. 

The meeting with the mayor went well, and he didn’t have much pomp and circumstance. Dress wasn’t an issue after all. Our professor kept calling him the “Major” and Louise, our resident Australian classmate, pronounces the word like “mare”, and thus I have explained the title of this post. He partially explained things extemporaneously and partially went off of pictures on a presentation about the plans for the treatment plant. We had lots of questions for him, and he gladly answered all of them. The idea in our Resource Management class is to come up with final projects that will be selected amongst, and two of the proposed water solutions will actually be pursued in the months to come and our ideas would come into fruition as an implemented measure. 

Also, Billy take notes: I gave a piece of milk chocolate to Genesis today and she was really happy to get it -- but the first thing she did was show her mom, open the chocolate, and then break it into even pieces to share with everyone in the room. I told her about my increasing mosquito bites from the nighttime this morning too, and she sprayed my room for me while I brushed my teeth and left a note saying, “The bomb has been planted.” 

Round of applause for Genesis for being an awesome 11-year-old! She has a dance recital in town tomorrow and I will be in attendance.

This is a picture of the recital - Genesis is on the left!

Week of 10/11/12

I open this post with a glimpse of the Malecón, aka the tourist seaside part of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno. This is the path to the boat dock, where we came in. 

This is the view if you turn your head to the right from the previous picture.  

Cultural show night with the Puerto Baquerizo Moreno kids, where Genesis danced on Wednesday. A little girl posing for her brother's picture at a flat of paintings done by kids. 

Presentation of certificates of achievement to all of the dancers. 

We found out on Wednesday that we won’t have a teacher until next Tuesday, when Andrea comes to teach the second half of the class. Valeria’s father was very sick and she needed to leave the island to be with him in Quito, so Anna Mae, one of the graduate students in our program, will be taking over conducting the class happenings until Andrea’s arrival.
Valeria used today’s lecture to explain some of the clean water engineering and training work that she’s done in Ecuador. Her favorite endeavor so far was a series of water quality testing workshops that she held for community leaders and involved citizens of some of the towns located downstream of heavy usage areas on mainland Ecuador. One of these places was apparently Coca, our flight destination for boats to Tiputini, and the kit of water quality testing supplies that the researchers left for the town was pulled out during a dispute with the petroleum companies and was key to getting the companies to agree to monitor their waste discharge into the river. Pretty awesome to empower the people!

Thursday was a field trip to the highlands - the place we are to evacuate to in case of a tsunami - to visit El Cafetal, the coffee plantation. But we opened our morning at Mockingbird Cafe, which is run in close affiliation with the plantation and serves their coffee... along with a delicious humongous breakfast that we enjoyed as a class. The coffee plantation was started by Manuel Julian Cobos, who was basically a slave driver and dictator on the island for a great number of years before there was a revolution and he was killed. However, he brought lots of agriculture and invasive guava plants to the island in the process! Wow Julian!

These are Galapagos coffee beans with their shells still on. They are a species of Arabic beans. And I think I bit open the shell. 

Nico our guide, who also works at Mockingbird Cafe, explaining specifics about the hacienda to us. Behind are the coffee plants, and the trees are various other species that provide shelter for the coffee to grow in a shady, more humid environment. 

Compost is "bokash" in Spanish, and this is the bokash pile made of coffee bean shells left from the deshelling process.

The plantation is pretty sustainably run - they don’t water the plants because the supply of rain is pretty reliable throughout the year (and also the switch from Sucres to US Dollars in the early 2000s meant their original irrigation plans became too expensive to implement), they preserve the forested areas around the waterways that flow from El Junco lake, which is the only freshwater source in all of the Galápagos and they know that the forests maintain the health of the water systems, and they are building a completely new coffee shelling machine to match with the wastewater treatment plant that will supposedly start fully functioning at the end of March. Their fertilizer is composted coffee bean shells, and they manage the plants in a forest ecosystem instead of giant open fields, so it maintains the moist and covered environment that allows for the coffee plants to thrive. 

The deshelling machine. 

More of the cover of the forest. There are guava trees everywhere. 

Galápagos coffee is ranked among the top 5 coffee beans in the entire world by some sort of connoisseur organization, and this plantation maintains a high quality of product to sell to really high end buyers who are willing to pay more than 4 times the standard price for coffee; these buyers are mostly in Europe and North America. Apparently some Starbucks stores sells bags of their beans. I don’t know much about coffee since I don’t really drink it, but what we were served at breakfast was pretty tasty! Yes, parents, I will bring some back as souvenir.

When we got back, I went to lunch and had ceviche with Savannah, Mary, and Laleña. This was also the day I snorkeled with Savannah on both Playa Mann and Punta Corola, with a meeting with Keegan and Anna about our plans for the Environmental Education program in between. We saw tons of beautiful fish, and we swam with two types of sea turtles on Corola! It was wonderful.

Friday a ton of people were sick. Savannah texted me at about 5:44 am the previous night to report illness, and Laleña and Anna Mae were both sick. Savannah suspected the ceviche for making her and Laleña sick, but Mary and I ordered the same thing and were both fine. So it could have been anything. =( We went ahead with the class plans for the day without any authority figure to direct us, and ended early. Then I went and had lunch at Aqui Sí, which is a cute little restaurant run by Iris, who is a half Austrian, half Ecuadorian lady with a sassy 9 year old who wants to go back to the US after being in the Galapagos for a little over a year now and two 13-year-old twins who seem more tolerant of their new home. Here I chatted with Iris (the owner and chef), Hubert (Iris’ dad, who doesn’t look like he is her dad), and Larry, who is the English teacher of English teachers on the island. I chatted with him for a long time about education, since he has a huge dearth of experience and knowledge about it after working over 45 years as a teacher, principal, administrator, and consultant. He’s started a ton of charter schools, designed and managed lots of curriculums, oversaw the restructuring of plenty of his consultation schools, and has a special focus on ESL and low-income students. I would say our conversation scored exactly a billion points for being awesome. Then I went to visit sickly Savannah with Mary and ran random errands for the rest of the day.

I don't have pictures from that day, so here is a shot of the chickens that live near my host house. 

This is the view a little bit down the street from my host house. I don't get to live in the bright green house, unfortunately. 

Saturday, we went to a “rodeo” fundraiser for a farm in the highlands. About 30 of us took a van-ish bus that the school arranged for us and “Buscar”-ed our way up the big road. Buscar is the name of the bus company, is a combination of “bus” and “car”, and means “to look for” in Spanish. I thought this was really clever. I’ve learned to not have clear cut expectations for things in this country and just let things surprise me, so that mindset was useful in this situation.
There was supposed to be sheep wrangling, a professional team of female soccer players holding a challenge against local women who dared to play them, and lots of fun and games for kids. This brings to mind something like the NC State Fair, yes? Well... Ecuador... doesn’t do that. It was held in the back yard of a school, so the main events were held on the basketball court and tiny soccer court, and the food was being sold in what I assume is the open-air eating area the students use. We arrived at about 1 pm, ate food that we purchased in a really chaotic Ecuadorian line-bundlesofpeople (if you thought Ecuadorian line-bundles only exist in the airport like I’d thought, you’re very wrong), got rained on, kind of watched kids play musical chairs after a casual game of soccer with the local men, took this picture from the top of a hill near the tents:

and then we took a taxi back to town. 

The taxi driver did not realize that the 5 of us in his truck were very tired, cold, wet, and could not or did not want to hold a conversation with him in Spanish, so he kept chatting with me about his life. It was chevere though. Then I did work for the rest of the day, ran some more errands, had dinner with some folks, and did more work.

Dumbkids all over the world. 

This is the view from Playa de Oro, where I am collecting sea glass and there are lots of smelly funny sea lions. 

Smelly, funny, and sleeping.