To refresh your memory: I’m in the Galápagos. Island of San Cristobal, town of Puerto Baquerezo Moreno. After two weeks, I’m starting to really settle into my life here. It was definitely a huge adjustment from Quito. Think of it this way: my flight took me from an Andean 35 km – long city of nearly 2 billion people at 9,000 feet elevation to a tiny sea level town of under 7,000 people (that’s about a quarter of the student body at my home university alone) on an island so isolated and barren in resources that most of our produce comes in bi-weekly deliveries by barge. Can you get culture shock when you’re coming from a place that was already relatively new to you?
In all honesty, the change has been more than welcome. The small, friendly town is much more my speed. One of the first words people here use to describe the island life is “tranquilo”: peaceful, relaxed, slow – take your pick. Still, the first few days flew by as I tried to adjust with a full schedule. The transfer happened in the middle of our second module of classes, so school started right after our orientation, which included a walk up to the tsunami evacuation zone. My classes are 9am to noon. More often than not, we have field excursions at least a couple times a week in the afternoons. Occasionally, we get to take a dive trip. A required trip to a nearby beach for snorkeling or boat ride to a dive location? Totally worth the field report assignment that follows and the associated scientific paper readings. My homework load helps alleviate the question of how to spend my open afternoons. I am in school, I assure you.
Speaking of Kicker Rock, that’s where we spent our first Saturday. Kicker Rock is called Leon Dormido (sleeping lion) locally. I’m still trying to figure out where the lion actually is in the formation. Anyway, it’s basically this huge rock formation jutting out of the ocean off the coast of San Cristobal. Most of it is cliff face. The secret geologist in me is absolutely fascinated by the fact that this rock is composed entirely of volcanic ash, and yet is a solid structure within rough open waters. Below the water line, the walls host a huge number of marine organisms. The cold water (no really, our dive went beneath the thermocline and reached 16°C – roughly 60°F. That’s pretty dang cold to dive in, even with a 5mm wetsuit.) and the mixing currents at the rocks swirl up nutrients and help turn this place into a productivity hotspot. Urchins and sea stars and algae and coral and other benthic organisms galore! There are huge variety of reef and semi-pelagic fishes as well, and sea turtles and sea lions frequent the area. Oh, did I mention sharks? Nearly every species of shark found in the Galápagos is represented at Kicker Rock, especially Hammerheads, Galapagos sharks, and Blacktips. Our Marine Life class trip was actually meant to function as a shark observation dive. Unfortunately, visibility was poor and shark numbers seem to be low right now (El Niño effects?) so we didn’t see much. Maybe it was just our location…the snorkelers at the surface claim they saw over 40 sharks during the same time period! That was frustrating, but at least I know I’ll be coming back soon, multiple times. I have another class dive there for the Marine Ecology class that just started up yesterday (Module 3, have I really already been abroad seven weeks??). I also have a dive there for another class….Advanced Diving.
It only took the couple of class dives so far to convince me that I seriously want to get the next level of certification. Scuba is incredible. I still get a little nervous before every dive, and breathing underwater is totally designed to kick off my anxiety…. But once you start exploring underwater you just get lost in it. It’s incredible. It’s everything that ever fascinated me in aquariums and marine books, and I get to be inside of all of that life. I wanted to dive deeper, in more places, and also have my PADI ID card say advanced certified in the Galápagos. A couple other girls felt the same, so we are taking classes from a local dive shop. We already got to do a drift and fish ID dives at Punta Pitt, a location on the opposite side of the island with warmer, perfectly clear waters and blue-footed, red-footed, and masked boobies all nesting on the land above. We also did a night dive in the bay, which was terrifying and amazing. At one point, we turned off all of our lights and played with the bioluminescent planktonic organisms that fill the water. In the pitch dark, we waved our arms and ignited specks of green light. I also learned that if you smile too hard while diving, you’ll flood your mask. Also respirators aren’t conducive to laughing. But it’s pretty hard to flail around underwater and make a trail of living sparks with a straight face – it’s just too much fun!
Terrestrially speaking, life has otherwise gotten relatively more normalized. I’ve gotten back into running as close to daily as I can manage, which has helped me to really learn the town and the places to adventure around it. I’ve figured out the bakery that stays open even on Sundays where you can get enough fresh homemade whole wheat bread for the week for a dollar or any number of delicious treats for 50 cents. I’ve poked my head into enough minitiendas to know where you can hope to find avocados and apples and the like to save money on lunches. I’ve figured out the best restaurant for a cheap but incomparably delicious vegetarian meal and which stand to go to for a chocobanana – frozen chocolate covered banana. Obviously, food is a priority. I’ve found the best place for pay-by-the hour internet that actually works (the university technically has wifi. It can sometimes send e-mails. And my house’s router has a range of about ten feet). I know where to snorkel at low tide and which road to take for a good hill run. I’ve started recognizing locals to an extent where I can tell if an Ecuadorian is local to the islands or not. Of course, sometimes visitors make it obvious by sending a catcall our two our way. Locals here are generally more respectful than that, which is a nice change from Quito. Other visitors are obvious for other reasons: they travel in groups with khakis, backpacks, and binoculars, and are probably white. You can tell how long a gringo has been on the island based on their level of pale, freshly burnt, or well-tanned toning.
So yeah, you could say I am adjusting well. I’ve almost established a set routine already. Of course, there are challenges too. The Spanish here is a little bit different. It’s fast and slurred and I have a lot of trouble with it. When I speak, I still pleasantly surprise locals with my decent Spanish skills, but I’m more likely to get scared from talking here because I can’t follow a full conversation nearly as well in the local dialect. The charm of the town also faded pretty quickly as soon as I realized how many anthropogenic issues the Galápagos has, and how much they’ve progressed in recent years with population booms and spikes in tourism. Example: Here I am walking along a path in this birthplace of evolution, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, portrayed in science classes as one of the last pristine sanctuaries for rare and endemic species….and a local teen bikes past me and TOSSES AN EMPTY PLASTIC WATER BOTTLE INTO THE BUSHES which are sadly already littered with refuse that had only accumulated since an island clean-up effort less than a month ago. Other Example: The bay tends to suffer periodic sewage leaks due to haphazard piping and at least one oil spill per year from one of the weekly tankers that ship in the gas and diesel for the island. There’s more. There’s so much more. And it kills me. But a rant on human impacts and the need for sustainable system is for another blog post.
One other challenge has been home life. I’m taking longer to mesh into my new host family than I did in Quito. I like them, and I think they like me. They feed me well, and are polite and friendly, but it’s not especially comfortable yet. Especially in the first week, I felt like an awkward guest who happens to be staying way too long. It’s gotten better, but could use more progress. My host mom still won’t let me help cook or anything, and insists on doing my laundry for me, and I always get served first at meals. I should feel pampered, but instead just feel like I make a lot of extra work. Part of the issue is the more difficult language barrier here, and that I spend probably 80% of my day at the school or elsewhere out of the house, and a good portion of my time in the house is spent on homework, so I don’t really get to connect with my host family. Other than my four-year-old brother, of course. He’s not shy at all about coming into my room and talking and drawing with me, which is awesome.
It also helps that dinners spent at home are family meals. We students have three meals a week in restaurants with other students as part of the program, four meals a week at home with family, and two meals a week where we are expected to provide for ourselves. Unlike most of Ecuador, people on the islands tend to eat three big meals a day – more like in the States. Of course, it’s still mostly rice and meat. But they do eat together, which does make for good interaction time with the family in the evenings. Last week, we spent almost every dinner with my host mom’s extended family at her mom’s house. There, 15 people share a meal in a two-room wood hut. It was loads of fun. One cousin is a bit younger than me and keen on practicing his English while I practice my Spanish in return – bilingual conversation. He has a lot of questions and weird ideas about the states so talking to him is pretty entertaining. My host mom’s sisters are all plenty chatty as well, and it’s just a lot of fun to be around a big family. I’ve actually started looking forward to family dinners. We didn’t go last night, though. Instead, we grilled up some slipper lobster. It’s lobster season in San Cristobal right now and they are everywhere as fisherman bring in new catches every day to sell locally. In the states, I was never much one for steamed lobster or crab. I’m not sure what exactly my host mom did – somewhere between grilling and pan frying - but this lobster was insanely delicious. Most of my meals at home are, really. So the food situation is great, and that’s definitely helping with feeling more comfortable here.
That’s pretty much what my life is like now. I’ll work on updating more frequently so that I’m not always just posting ridiculously long narratives on my day to day activities and can actually talk about more substantial topics.