I ended up unable to write anything on our last night on the ship because we were wickedly seasick — very rough waters — and haven’t had a chance to catch up since.
The last full day of our cruise was fantastic. We had two snorkeling opportunities, one in the morning and one after lunch, and both were amazing. We started the day with a wet landing on Puerto Egas on Santiago Island and then walked along a rocky beach area where we saw jillions of marine iguanas and some adorable sea lions, including several young babies. We also saw flightless cormorants and a bunch of bright sally lightfoot crabs and had our first look at fur sea lions, which are much like the regular sea lions but a bit rounder and much softer-looking. When we were done with our walk, we returned to the black sand beach where we landed and suited up for snorkeling. By this time I’d become incredibly comfortable in the water, zipping around — but always still with the life jacket on. I felt sort of like a dork, especially because people kept reminding me how buoyant the wetsuits are, but better dorky than drowning.
The highlight of this snorkeling outing was seeing a Pacific green sea turtle and swimming with it for a while. It wasn’t at all freaked out by the humans, and for a long time I was right next to it in the water, but then I started worrying that maybe sea turtles bite so I freaked out a bit and tried to swim away from it. I’m not a great swimmer, as mentioned, so my flailing around just resulted in me getting carried off by the current a bit at the exact same pace as the sea turtle. It still seemed to have no sense of me being there. When we finally got to shore — it took forever that morning because the current was kind of strong — there were a couple of sea lions swimming around me and one of them flippered me before teasing off into the water in hopes that I’d play with it. Alas, the panga was coming so I couldn’t oblige. The sea lion then went and grabbed the rope on the front of the panga and played “tug of war” with it for a bit.
Back at the boat, we had time for a quick shower before our last lunch on board. After we ate, we were sitting at the table watching what looked like a ray out in the water when Malena made an announcement: Someone had spotted a whale near the yacht! Everyone ran up to the sun deck or the observation deck to watch, and we saw the whale up ahead, blowing out water and then showing its tail fin as it moved along. We kept losing it and then someone would see it again a few minutes later. The captain very sweetly chased the whale so we could keep tabs on it, which put us off schedule for a bit, but everyone thought it was worth it. There was much oohing and aahing and it really was exciting to see.
We took a panga to a golden sand beach on Bartolome Island where we suited up for snorkeling right away and immediately started seeing cool things. There were lots of rocks, which meant lots of fish darting around the rocks and swimming in schools. We saw a huge school of blue tang (like Dory in “Finding Nemo”) and some people spotted some baby sharks, but we didn’t see any. We did see another playful sea lion who swam right under us a few times but then it was time to hit the shore again. The snorkeling outings never lasted as long as I would have liked.
We had time for only a fast shower back on the boat — a “Navy shower,” as Malena kept calling it — so I took a quick one leaving Kim just enough time to rinse off the salt water. Then we boarded the panga and headed for Bartolome, which apparently was featured in the movie “Master and Commander: Far Side of the Universe,” which we have yet to see (but have added to our Netflix queue). At Bartolome, we had been told the night before that we’d be climbing 380 feet, which required ascending 374 wooden steps to take us to the top of an overview that turned out to have an absolutely beautiful view of Sullivan’s Bay. We were a little winded upon reaching the top, as you might imagine, but Malena was sweating and breathing heavily too, and she does that hike weekly, so I didn’t feel so bad. I had joked that I was going to take the stairs two at a time so there’d be only 187 of them, ha ha, but as it turns out they were already spaced at two-at-a-time stride. The joke was, as usual, on me.
Back on the boat, we prepared for our briefing for Friday, our final day of the cruise. As we sat and listened to Orlando and the boat started to move, we quickly realized that it was going to be a very choppy voyage. Kim felt so sick that she couldn’t even stay for the group picture, and I was not far behind her in heading for the cabin. We both missed dinner which was too bad (for me) because it was lobster*, but it was all I could do to not regurgitate at the thought of eating anything at all. Eventually the motion settled a bit and we felt well enough to stand up and go to the dining room to see if there was anyone left to say goodbye to — we had been told that the 5-night cruisers would leave before the 7-night people even woke up the next morning. Luckily, we found Jeff, Dana and Vanessa still sitting in the dining room — they were the ones we really wanted to say goodbye to, and trade e-mail addresses with — so we chatted with them for a bit and decided we’d better go lie down again. Jim, Vanessa’s partner, was also not feeling well so we didn’t get a proper goodbye with him, but we do have contact information.
(* A mostly devout vegetarian, I declared myself "on vacation" in terms of seafood consumption during our travels. I thought it was important to enjoy the local cuisine, which includes a lot of seafood. It was important, and I did enjoy it greatly -- but am back on the strict-veggie wagon now. Please do not be alarmed or scandalized by this. Also note that sometime during this trip one of my favorite pet fish, part of the hobby that led to me banishing seafood from my diet five and a half years ago, disappeared and is assumed dead. It turns out that there is karmic justice out there.)
We were supposed to pack that night, but it was too hard to stand up, let alone focus on packing, so we set alarms to wake us up about 45 minutes before the wake-up knock the next morning and decided we’d pack then. On Friday morning, the alarms went off at something like 5:15, but we finally felt well enough to stand up and managed to get everything together before Malena knocked on our door to give us the “breakfast in 15 minutes” alert. We had a quick bite and then got on a panga that took us to Academy Bay on Santa Cruz, where the Darwin Research Station is. The panga trip afforded me a chance to say goodbye to Maurice (sp?), the panga driver, with whom I’d become quite chummy once he learned that I could say a few things in Spanish. That happened one morning after a particularly rocky night when he asked (in Spanish) how I had slept and I said, “así así,” which means “so-so,” and he was all impressed. On one trip he’d announced to another passenger that I speak Spanish very well, and then asked me a barrage of questions that I didn’t understand on the first try. The irony hung thick in the air.
It was still really early that morning, and the boat was observing mainland Ecuador time, which is an hour ahead of the islands, so the research station wasn’t even open yet. We were able to walk around and see the giant tortoises, though. We saw a bunch of really adorable little baby giant tortoises and then went to the juvenile pens. Those were cute too. After that we met Lonesome George, the last known surviving Pinta tortoise. There’s a $10,000 reward offered to anyone who can produce a female Pinta tortoise, and meanwhile George is housed with two ladies from the nearest island, where the tortoises most closely resemble the Pintas. I read somewhere that although there have been “couplings” between George and these gals (known as “Georgina” and “Georgia”), no fertilizations have resulted.
We also got to see Diego, the ladies’ man who came from the San Diego zoo and taught a bunch of sexually inactive turtles how to mate. What a stud. And we sat with about seven giant tortoises who were having a breakfast of greens on a feeding platform. They sure made a lot of noise chomping their greens. Lots of messy eating, too.
We had to rush out to stop quickly at a park shop (I bought a bunch of postcards — apologies to anyone who didn’t get one) and then caught a bus to take us to a ferry which took us to another bus, which took us to Baltra airport. It was all rather rushed. I slept on most of the bus ride across the highlands of Santa Cruz, and got excited to see police dogs when we were about to board the ferry. They were so rompy and friendly looking, and they made me miss Edie all those thousands of miles away. Soon we arrived at the Baltra airport, had our luggage searched, and Malena told us we had 45 minutes before we’d have to move to the boarding area. In that time, I used my Maurice-approved Spanish skills to do some shopping at the airport shops (nothing AT ALL like airport shops we know in this country) and we got some good souvenirs for our petsitters and ourselves. I also learned that international postcard postage is really expensive, so those who do have postcards coming should feel especially lucky.
Returning to the airport, we learned that our flight was delayed by an hour, and Malena had to get back to the yacht, so she left the seven of us at the airport to wonder, each time there was an announcement about boarding (which they often forgot to make in English), whether that announcement was about our flight. Eventually we figured it out, but had time for lunch in the airport café first. It was an open-air café so we were charmed by a lot of little finches while we ate. We tried to identify them by their beak shape using my Galapagos Natural History Guide that was given to me as a birthday gift by my best friend, but questions remained about some of them.
Finally we boarded and were homeward bound. A driver met us at the Quito airport and took us back to our hotel where we checked in, unloaded our stuff in a perfectly lovely room, and then went out to find some dinner. We walked around an area with shops and I tried to find some regional music for my mom, at her request, which required further use of my highly impressive Spanish skills. I managed to find a nice woman who put up with my slaughtering of the language and sold us a couple of CDs — at the mind-blowing price of $1 each (it seems to be perfectly legal to sell computer-made copies of CDs in stores in Ecuador) — that sounded pretty nice. She gave us a preview of both of them.
After shopping for some T-shirts and walking to Restaurante Vegetariano to discover it was closed, we walked back to a pizza place and had a very nice dinner. Then we went back to the hotel to check our e-mail — don’t think I wasn’t eager to do that — and catch some sleep. Because our flight was scheduled to leave at 7 a.m., we made arrangements for a 5 a.m. shuttle to the airport, thinking we were leaving ourselves way too much time, and ordered a 4:20 a.m. wake-up call.
For some reason, our wake-up call didn’t go through so I woke up to the sound of light knocking and someone using a key to try to get into our room. I thought it was another guest who was at the wrong room, and I said this, and a bunch of totally incomprehensible Spanish came back to me. (My stunningly impressive skills are not at all sharp at 4:22 a.m.) Finally the guy and I reached some sort of understanding involving him telling me something about a call and dialing zero to talk to the front desk for more information. Eventually I realized what was going on — that we were supposed to be awake at this godforsaken hour.
At the airport, we learned why the silly hotel desk clerk had told us we might want to leave three hours to check in. It was swamped there, and we stood in one line for a whole hour, stressing out about catching our flight. Once we finally checked in, we had to get in another line to pay Ecuador departure tax, and luckily that line was much shorter than it was the first time we got in it, and stood in it for 10 minutes before I used my spectacularly impressive Spanish skills to learn that we had to check in with our airline first. Oy! Luckily that all moved quickly, as did immigration and security, and soon enough we were on board the plane, headed home. My one lament is that I had no time to buy Ecuadorian chocolates for my coworkers; I pray that they understand and can savor the photos in place of the standard vacation sweets.
The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful, including a really boring 45-minute stop in Bogota, where we had to deplane and sit in a large waiting area with absolutely no bathroom anywhere within our access. We finally made it back to the D.C. area at 7:48 p.m. and had a surprise greeting by Lyn, buyer of Galapagos books and sitter of our pet dog, who had come to drive us home.
This concludes the travelblogue. I do hope you’ve enjoyed it and apologize for not having the technology to post it live as it happened.
Peace out.
