The Long Awaited Galapagos Post

After Montevideo, I took a plane back to Quito and went straight home. The End.

No, wait, I’m forgetting something here. A little errand I had to run at the end. Before I left I still had the little task of going to THE FUCKING GALAPAGOS!

Now, as a biologist, I’m trained to believe this place is the Holy Grail, and it is. But why that is, is a question I have difficulty answering. Surely it’s not the beautiful landscapes; the islands are little more than humps of black sharp lava sprinkled with ugly shrubs. It’s not the gorgeous coral reefs, as there are none. There are no glorious lions and giraffes roaming the plains; the largest animal on most islands are feral goats. The famous Darwin’s Finches are not much different than your average noisy food-thieving sparrows. The feelings of untouched pristine nature are shattered the first time you shell out your already-dwinding dollars (Galapagos entrance fee: 100 US) in the internet cafés, nightclubs, art galleries, or faux French restaurants.

And yet, the Galapagos is just as spectacular as you expect it to be.

Perhaps for some, part of the enjoyment comes from spending a week cruising the open Pacific in luxury; our cramped 16 person boat reeked of diesel fumes, kept us up all night with it pitching and rolling, and fed us the same repetitive food of potatoes and illegally caught fish.

Perhaps some love soaking in the Equatorial sun; I missed a spot on my back the first day snorkeling and could barely lay down the rest of the week.

Perhaps some love the fresh ocean breeze. I’m sure they enjoyed it while out clutching the railings, bent over into space, hurling their illegally caught fish back into the sea. I was one of maybe 3 passengers not to get seasick. A couple left the boat early, forfeiting the 1000 dollars they paid for a week of what they must’ve misjudged as pampering.

No, what makes the Galapagos special is the animals. They sit still and stare and pose for your photographs. These animals have no fear. You will yield to seals and step gingerly around boobies.

And speaking of boobies, I’ve never seen so many, big pairs of boobies swaying beautifully. I took plenty of photos. Blue Footed, Red Footed, and Masked, all plenty. The Frigatebirds were showing off their huge sacks to uninterested females. And the sea turtles were just fucking shamelessly on the beach, continuing to go at it when capsized by waves.

The sealions though were the stars of the show here. They crowded every beach, snoozed on every dock, and clamored up on anchored boats. How one evicts a 300 pound sealion from their dinghy is beyond me. They show neither fear nor aggression. The babies would waddle right up to you, wishing to get petted.

And the diving. Scuba diving in the Galapagos is something you can gloat about for the rest of your life. Its hard to understand why, since there’s no reefs here, and the fish are less spectacular than any other Pacific reef I’ve been on (). The marine park is famous for its huge schools of hammerhead sharks, but tourists can’t get there. Hammerheads can also be found closer to shore, but in 4 dives I never saw one. The pro diver I’d met had done his own set of dives, and he hadn’t seen one either. With no reefs, no sharks bigger than a Blacktip, and not-particularly-exceptional fish, you’d think diving here would be a disappointment, but you’d be wrong. The marine life, the sea stars and sea turtles and moray eels, were in just the right abundance and variety to make the Galapagos one of the best diving places I’ve ever been.

Really, that’s kinda the crux of it. Surely you’ve noticed by now this entry is rather dull compared to, say, the volcano incident or any of my late-night social disasters. And that’s just the thing; nothing stands out as notably horrible here. In fact, nothing really stands out as exceptional at all, because everything was. The extraordinary is ordinary here. When I first arrived in the islands, the sealions were amazing and floored us all; by the end, we’d walk past them unaffected. The ability to make the exotic mundane speaks loudly either of our abilities to rationalize and adapt as human beings, or our collective ADD as a culture. A debate for another day I suppose.

If I took the Galapagos for granted (as the world at large seems more than apt to do), I regret it. But I don’t think I did. Because as long as I was surrounded by noisy, stinky sealions, as long as I bobbed and rolled in the nauseating sea, as long as I ate shitty repetitive meals with my new friends across from me and my old friends on my mind, I was happy. See, I discovered the formula for happiness in the Galapagos. Friends plus health times relaxation, minus financial woes, to the power of the future. 4 simple variables: If you’ve got you’ve got your friends, if you’ve got your health, if you don’t have stress (especially work and money related), and most importantly, if you’ve got your whole future open ahead of you, you can be happy. I found this sitting on the bow of the boat, far from diving iguanas and blue footed boobies. I knew this in my gut in the Salt Flats of Bolivia, and while hiking past the glaciers of Patagonia, but here I found the words for it. I had to go to some of the most exceptional places on Earth to discover just how mundane and ordinary true happiness can be. Maybe that’s what’s most special about the Galapagos…

… Actually, no, it’s definitely being face to face with sea turtles fucking.