Quito, Ecuador 1st Day and Galapagos Islands 1st Day

January 28 & 29, 2010

-- Becky writes unless noted by Marilou --

January 28, 2010

Aloha,

Marilou had spent Christmas through New Years on Midway Atoll with a team of volunteers counting the half million Albatross nests (+ or - a few). There she met Mark who owns Galapagos Travel. In their conversations, he said lately some of his tours are a few folks short of full and if we can travel on short notice he'd be glad to offer some excellent deals. Little did we know that only a few weeks later he'd offer us one of those great deals! We jumped at the offer. We had about one week to prepare.

Getting to Ecuador for us was an all day event and of course very tiring. Kauai to Honolulu to LA to Houston to Quito, Ecuador. We joined up with the tour group in the Hotel Mercure Alameda in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, situated in a large valley in the Andes Mountains at almost 10,000 feet. More about Quito and Ecuador later.

We arrived in Quito around 9:30 pm and got to our hotel about an hour later, with not much else on our minds other than sleep.

Above: The lobby of Hotel Mercure Alameda in Quito.

The tour took care of everything from booking us into the hotel, picking us up at the airport, and on from there until we returned from Galapagos 11 days later. They even drove us back to the airport after we stayed about a week more in Quito after the Galapagos tour was over. I must say, we are totally thrilled with the service of Galapagos Travel. Classy all the way!

Within a couple of hours of arriving in Quito, altitude sickness began to set in. We drank lots of water, took some Ibuprofen, and after a night's sleep we felt much better. Though we had to get up very early that next morning to have breakfast with the group and be bused off to the airport to catch our flight to the islands.

The group we were joining were Americans from Ohio. Most of them had traveled together before. They all belong to a Nature Conservation Association lead by a biologist named Gordon.This was his 3rd trip to the islands. There were 12 in his group. They had been planning this trip for about a year and had filled only 12 of the possible 16 spots for this particular tour. By us joining them, we brought the total to 14. A good number.

------------------------------- Day 1 -------------------------------

January 29, 2010

Top left photo: Leaving Quito.
Top right photo: The island of Baltra where we landed with Seymour closest in the photo.
3rd photo: Landing on Baltra.

After we landed on Baltra, we had to go through Customs, even though the Galapagos Islands are property of Ecuador, which we'd just flown from. Etienne and Elisabeth were waiting to greet us on the other side of all the formal entry stuff. ET and Ely were to be our guides for the Galapagos tour. Ely is Ecuadorian. ET is Belgium. They married 20 something years ago after meeting in the Galapagos and have remained there ever since. They both are naturalists and are well studied in their expertise of the area. Plus they are real characters! Fun and very caring folks. And their English is very good.

We then rode in a large bus to the boat harbor about 2 miles away from the tiny airport, to be taken by dinghy to our home for the next 11 days, a yacht named Tip Top IV. You can see in the photos above how Baltra is very low and flat and dry. As we traveled from island to island we began to see how different each is from the other. These differences are the setting for Darwin to have his historical insight, which I'll talk about more as we go.

At the boat dock, a lazy group of Sea Lions were there to greet us. And also we had our first meeting with a Marine Iguana. The Marine Iguana was a bit more lively than the Sea Lions, only a bit though. Already we were seeing how the animals here are completely in their own element...very little flight or fight reaction. Which puts the responsibility on us to not take advantage of that too terribly much. The Galapagos National Park and the Galapagos Marine Reserve make it very clear the ecosystems of the archipelago are to be protected.

Of course, we all had to take a dozen photos...not knowing that by the end of the 11 days, these wonderful creatures were going to be seen hundreds of times.

Above is the Tip Top IV, a 118 foot yacht built in 2006, with all modern equipment and a crew of 8. It has Teak wood throughout and double lower berth cabins with private baths. Since I get seasick just looking at a boat, I prepared myself with the patch, enough for the duration of the tour, and extra prescription pills, just in case. The patch worked!!! I didn't have any problems at all. In fact, I fell totally in love with living on a boat this size, especially with being taken care of as well as we were by the crew, which included a 5 star chef. The whole crew were Ecuadorians and some didn't know much English, though that didn't stop them from being wonderful hosts and caretakers.

Also above (right) is ET giving the group its first brief as we sailed to our first stop on Seymour that afternoon. Once we arrived on the boat, it was a nonstop adventure. We were kept busy discovering islands and their inhabitants, both dry and wet, at all times of the day. We had no trouble going to sleep each night.

LUNCH / Almuerzo

Ham & Cheese Sandwich
–Triple sanduche de jamón y queso
Season Fruit
–Fruta de estación
Fresh Fruit Juice
–Jugo de fruta

Note: I will be listing our meals verbatim (misspelling and all) as they were written by our chef, in his broken English. We found some of his stabs at English fun and sincere, in that he tried very hard to please us. His food preparation was wonderful.

The following photos are from the tiny island of Seymour, just north of Baltra. We spent about 2 hours walking...more like ambling along a marked path. Everything was new to us. ET and Ely were patient with the group's curiosity and shared their knowledge well.

Note: Our photos are fairly evenly split between Marilou and I. Most of the close ups are Marilou's.

Marilou and I on Seymour. The bird in the photo with me is a Great Frigatebird. There were always many birds in the air at most of the islands we visited.

ET leading us. Notice the nice wave action in front of him. The right photo shows the low growing plants of Seymour, including red phase Ice Plant.

ET and Gordon with Great Frigatebirds overhead. That's Marilou just at the left edge of the photo. Two Sea Lions basking in the sun on the lava rocks.

Only a certain number of people are allowed on the islands on any given day. The guides carefully planned our visits in coordination with the few other tour boats. Landing spots on each island are designated and paths are marked and we weren't allowed to wander outside the boundaries.

A Land Iguana on the left and some Marine Iguanas on the right. Depending on the island, each of these critters change in color. It was seeing the same animals on different islands and how they had adapted to those specific surroundings that got Darwin to thinking about evolving according to environment.

The Marine Iguanas come out of the water to warm up and tend to not move much once they gather around as a bunch of black lumps on the black rock. We had to really be careful to not step on them. They blend in that well. The Land Iguanas do move around some as we watched them, sometimes heading towards a plant for a snack.

Above is a Lava Lizard sunning itself on the back of a motionless Marine Iguana and maybe looking for insects that the iguanas may attract.

More Marine Iguanas basking in the sun on worn lava rocks.

And then we began to see Boobies! Blue-footed, Red-footed, and Nazca Boobies. The Blue-footed Booby is one of the icons of the islands. Though most of the time the depiction mistakenly colors the bill blue, too. Actually the Red-footed Booby has a blue bill. Perhaps the icon is a conglomeration of the two birds, I don't know.

A nesting Blue-footed Booby. The bit of white under it, peeking out from the blue feet is an egg. The birds will move with the sun as the day progresses to keep the the shade on their feet.

The dance of the Blue-footed Booby.

On the left are two Nazca Boobies and on the right is a Red-footed Booby (Brown Phase). The Nazca were formally grouped with Masked Boobies and recent DNA study has shown these Boobies on the Galapagos Islands are separate from the Masked Boobies elsewhere in the world.

A Brown Pelican.

Juvenile Great Frigatebird in left photo. Adult male Great Frigatebird bringing nesting material in right photo.

Juvennile Great Frigatebirds flying above. The one with a red throat balloon is an adult male Great Frigatebird looking good for the females.

The white fluffy ones are Great Frigatebird chicks in both of the above photos.

Swallow-tailed Gulls.

Left: Galapagos Mockingbird. Right: A happy Sea Lion.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron juveniles.

Yellow-crowned Night Herons.

Yes, we are as close as the photos look like we are. We are walking on the marked paths and the birds and other critters are right there in the bushes or whatever, within touching range much of the time. Zoom lens are hardly needed.

Yellow Warbler.

The finches on the islands were the key to Darwin's first recognition that something was going on with these guys from island to island. The Darwin Finch group, as they are popularly called consist of 15 different birds. They aren't particularly remarkable at first glance. Mostly drab brownish birds. Its the differing sizes of their beaks that mainly caught Darwin's keen eye. He only actually visited 3 of the islands here and yet, he saw that these nearly same looking birds had developed differing beaks to accommodate the differing foods that each island provided. He deduced, and solidified at some point later in his life, that while these birds were probably of the same origin and had colonized each island probably close to the same time period, they had, in time since, evolved differing beaks to deal with the differing food types of their new locations.

Illustration used without permission from Wikipedia's page on Darwin's Finches.

1. Large Ground Finch, 2. Medium Ground Finch
3. Small Tree Finch, 4. Warbler Finch

You can see from these four beak structures how compelling the thought path must have been for Darwin. Each different finch is found on different islands with different food types. The largest beak had to break open large hard nuts, while the bird with the smallest beak had lots of insects on its island. We will see some of these different finches as we travel to the other islands.

Sometimes the wildlife gets right in the path. The young Sea Lions are very inquisitive mainly due to not being able to see well while they are out of the water. Some would come right up to us and even try to follow us.

And then there was this guy! A big male master. These guys you don't mess with. We needed to walk between those white markers to get to our landing spot in order to leave the island. Needless to say we didn't stay on the path this time. ET called for the dinghies to come pick us up and we made our way down the rocks a short distance from the planned debarking spot. Adaptation is what the Galapagos are all about, right? :-)

Below are the dinghies coming to collect us. When we got back to the boat we were served a snack of Spinach Tartlet (Tartaleta de espinaca) and a bit later we had dinner as the sun set on our first day in the Galapagos.

DINNER / Cena

Braised Fish in Red Sauce
–Pescado en salsa roja
Steemed Broccoli in Garlic Butter
–Brócoli salteado con ajo y mantequilla
Fresh Lettuce and Tomato Salad
–Ensalada fresca de lechuga y tomate
Whole Wheat Rice
–Arroz integral
Baked Apple
–Manzana al horno

Below is a 4:28 minute video from our first day visit to Seymour Island. In hindsight, I realize now just how little I pulled out my vidcam during this trip. Juggling just being there and all the wonder that in itself brought, and having a still camera, too, I was often hard pressed to remember to keep putting one foot in front of the other. We hope even short videos will add to your enjoyment of our experience in Galapagos.

This video will need QuickTime 7 (or later) installed on your computer. If you don't have it, a free download is located here.

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------------------------------- Go to Day 2 -------------------------------