Seymour Boobies!

Everybody loves boobies! For example, look at this fine pair.



We visited them on a day trip to uninhabited North Seymour Island, about an hour and a half from Puerto Ayora. It was a great trip for discovering the wildlife of the Galapagos, especially the birds.

On arrival, we were greeted by one of the locals.

It's nesting and mating season for the boobies and frigate birds. They have no fear of humans; we walked right up to them to take pictures, and they pretty much ignored us. The female booby sits on its eggs for 21 days while the male hunts and brings back food. The nesting booby raises her beak and pants rapidly to regulate the temperature of the eggs.

If the temperature gets too high, she stands up for a while to let the eggs cool down.

Elsewhere the male booby does his happy mating dance for a skeptical-looking female.

Male frigatebirds inflate their neck sacks to attract mates.

A mother frigatebird watches over her fledgeling chick.

A happy family.

We heard a horrible screeching from what looked like an adult frigatebird. It turned out to be a hungry adolescent demanding food, which its mother provided. As with most adolescents, what she provided wasn't enough, so the screeching continued after the meal was consumed.

Is that a balloon on your neck, or are you just happy to see me?

There were also numerous land iguanas, gold and rust instead of black like their marine-adapted cousins. They also had no fear of humans and posed happily for us.

 This one was moulting, but still okay with having his picture taken.

Back on board the boat, we ate a delicious lunch of albacore in a creamy pepper sauce with our fellow passengers. The seafood here is incredibly fresh and tasty.



Then we visited an idyllic tropical beach. Idyllic until the biting flies found us, anyway.



O enjoys her respite from the flies once the boat gets underway again.



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The Galapagos Above Sea Level.

The Galapagos Islands are just as fascinating as the seas around them, rich in many varieties of odd creatures, most of which are unique to these remote shores.

One of my first animal encounters here was with the frigatebirds that followed the boat. Day and night they shadowed us, hovering just overhead, riding the wind to keep pace with our progress. Their silhouette is almost prehistoric; it's easy to imagine that them as pterodactyls, especially at night when their lean, rapacious shadows crisscross the deck constantly in the bright moonlight.

When they tired, they would perch for a while on the awning that shaded the top deck.

The males have a bright red bladder on their throats. More about this in another post. They're very large birds, with wingspans sometimes reaching as much as 7.5 feet. The ones here are smaller than that, with wingspans closer to 4 to 5 feet. They are superb fliers, rarely even flapping their wings as they cruised alongside us.

The volcanic landscapes are prehistoric, too. The Galapagos are a relatively new set of islands that developed over a hotspot like the one that formed and continues to form the Hawaiian Islands. The oldest islands here are only about 5 to 6 million years old, while the youngest, Isabela and Fernandina, formed about a million years ago. Isabela has two recently active volcanoes and Fernandina one, so the process of island formation continues.

One of the most spectacular landscapes is Isla Bartolome. We visited the island for a land tour.

We had to jump from the panga to the rocks to get ashore because the landing was occupied.

Other than the sea lions (we came here to snorkel with penguins, but there were none to be found), the island is practically devoid of life. There are a few small, gray bushes.

A snake that preys on the lava lizards that are also prey for birds. Like all the islands in the chain, Bartolome is its own ecosystem with lifeforms that have adapted to thrive in these very specific conditions. It's like a living textbook on evolutionary biology.



The government of Ecuador has done its best with its limited means to protect these fragile habitats, Bartolome has a system of raised walkways to allow access to its unique vistas while minimizing the impact of hundreds of tourists per day.



You may remember this otherworldly landscape from the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The other islands we visited had their own unique geography sculpted by wind and sea from the easily-eroded ancient lava flows.

Wolf Island is riddled with caves, large and small.

And sheer cliffs teeming with raucous colonies of birds.

Darwin, the most distant island, is little more than a vivid green dot in a very large ocean.

Our best dives were here and some of the most spectacular sunsets.

The famous Darwin's Arch tinted gold by the setting sun.

On the way back south, the weather came in, and the sailing got bumpy. My cabin was on the upper deck, so the motion of the ocean was intensified. The boat rolled and pitched, and anything not securely fastened clattered and banged. There were a few times when I thought I might be rolled out of bed, but toward morning the seas flattened out a bit, and I was able to get a little sleep before the 6 am bell told us it was time to get ready to dive again.

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Diving With Jesús Del Gran Poder.

Imagine hanging by one hand from the top of a tall cliff. Strong winds blow you back and forth, first in one direction then another. You come close to losing your grip on the stone that is all that keeps you from being hurled bodily into the sky, but you hang on somehow. You hang on because the air in front of you is so crowded with creatures of every shape, size, and color that you can hardly see the sky beyond.

The sky is filled with a silvery mist that makes everything beyond 50 to 60 feet away dissolve into an indistinct twilight blue. And out of that murk strange shapes emerge from time to time: a manta slowly flapping its massive wings. It makes a pass directly overhead, pivots with stately grace, glides by again at eye-level, then unhurriedly disappears back into the mist.



Another time it might be a wall of hammerhead sharks, ten high, two or three wide, and seemingly endless in length, shark after shark swimming lazily out of the blue to your right, undulating past not twenty feet away, and merging back into the blue on your left, perhaps 300 of them in all.


(Photo by Andrea Bläsi who was on the boat with me)

Then you look up and you're face to face with one of these strange creatures.


(Photo by Andrea Bläsi)

Or an eagle ray.



A 15-foot tiger shark swims by streaming a trail of obsequious cleaner fish.



Then you let go your grip and swim out to meet the biggest fish of all--a 20-foot whale shark swimming close enough to touch, its huge mouth open to gulp down the plankton that fills these rich waters. It swims slowly enough that you can keep pace with it, making eye contact before it fades into the blue.


(Photo by Andrea Bläsi)

All this takes place over a week of twenty-one amazing dives from the luxurious dive boat Jesús del Gran Poder, aka Galapagos Aggressor III.

I dove with 13 other divers from around the world. The boat was extremely comfortable, the food was excellent, and the company was a lot of fun.

80 feet down and waiting for the show to begin.

We visited many of the islands, including Wolf and Darwin, which are located about 160 miles northwest of the main group.

Wolf and Darwin have some of the most dramatic dive sites in the Galapagos. Because they’re so far out, very few boats visit them. We spent 12 of our 21 dives there and saw just about everything we’d hoped to see.

As we passed Isla Isabel we passed within about seven miles of the Wolf volcano which is currently erupting. At night, we could see clouds of steam and smoke from the crater glowing bright red from the eruption. Here's a video of the eruption taken a couple weeks before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Y3aO-rBOE It wasn’t quite this active when we were there.

We visited dive sites on several other islands as well where we saw much more of the biological diversity the Galapagos are famous for.

Including a lot of playful sea lions.

Seemingly endless schools of fish.

Sleepy sea turtles.

Well-camouflaged stone fish.

And dozens of marine iguanas.

The iguanas eat the moss that grows on the rocks a few feet below the surface. Being reptiles, they can only function in the cold water for a few minutes before their muscles lock up and they drown. So they spend most of their time sunning themselves to raise their body temperature enough to make another underwater foray.

They are positively prehistoric.

I don't have an underwater camera, so all these photos were taken on our trip by our divemaster, except those credited to Andrea Bläsi, a Swiss woman who took a lot of great photos of our dives.

My dive buddy on the Galapagos trip, Heng Yirui, a veterinary student from Singapore volunteering at a clinic in the Galapagos, created a great video of highlights from our 21 dives. All the best stuff is here, and Yurui did an excellent job of shooting and editing this.

https://www.facebook.com/heng.yirui/videos/10152999374851194/


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Huaraz: Alpine Vistas, Avalanches, And Altitude Sickness.

We missed our bus from Lima because we didn't realize that Lima has two main bus stations and our bus was leaving from the one we weren't at. Our taxi driver, once he realized the mistake, did his best to get us across town before the bus left at 10:30, but there's no fighting Monday morning traffic in Lima. So we missed the bus by ten minutes. Next bus not until 8:00 that night.

Luckily, our taxi driver knew what to do. He took us to another bus company, Cavassa, that had a bus leaving at 1:30, and we were able to get on. The terminal was reasonably comfortable. The bus finally arrived, 15 minutes late, but hey, at least we were on our way.

We had been warned against taking any other bus line than Cruz del Sur, and we were pleased with our experiences with the company so far, but Cavassa seemed reputable, so we weren't really worried. That insouciance began to fade a bit as we noticed the attitude and behavior of the staff, who were, let's say, lacking in customer service skills. First we had to argue with them about leaving the curtains open so we could see the scenery along the way. Then they sat in the front row of the first class section, reclined their seats nearly into our laps, and watched movies for most of the trip.

These were fairly minor annoyances, and we probably wouldn't have been bothered by them, but then we started noticing that the bus kept stopping to pick up and let off passengers. We didn't think anything of this at first, but our fellow first class passengers, all locals, were clearly getting more annoyed at each stop.

Finally, as the bus got close to Huaraz and we were already 30 minutes overdue, two women staged a mini-revolt, storming the drivers' cabin and berating the staff for how slow the bus was. The problem was that Cavassa had sold the tickets as offering express service, but instead were making many extra stops to increase their take on the run. As a consequence, we were over an hour late, and the ladies were indignant. "No es un colectivo!" one woman kept shouting, referring to the small buses that stop at every other corner. "Es un expreso!"

The staff just shrugged and looked away.

Since we didn't arrive until well after dark, we had no idea of the geography of the place until we woke up the next morning and walked out on our balcony to be greeted by this view of Huascarán, at 22,000 feet the highest peak in the Cordillera Blanca.

Here's a zoom.

The city of Huaraz lies at 10,000 feet in a lush valley about 250 miles north of Lima. The valley is bordered on the northern side by the high peaks of the Cordillera Blanca and on the south by the lower, snowless mountains of the Cordillera Negra.

Once you get outside the major cities in Peru, you can see how most of the country lives. We saw many scenes that reminded us of our days in Vietnam, with women selling small piles of produce on the sidewalk and men sitting on boxes on the street watching the world go by.

If it wasn't for the local costumes and their Peruvian features, we could have been back on the dusty streets of Hanoi.

And speaking of local costumes, you've got to love those hats.

 Even the style of construction and the combination of unfinished and dilapidated buildings was reminiscent of Vietnam.

 Though I don't recall ever seeing a sheep living on a rooftop in Hanoi.

Our hotel was a gem the middle of the somewhat grimy city. It was practically empty when we arrived, and the last two nights we were there we were the only guests. In fact we were surprised at how few foreign tourists there were in Huaraz. Almost all those we did run into were Europeans. There is a lot of trekking available in the mountains here, and that's what most visitors come for. We also found that there were a lot of Peruvian tourists up from Lima. But considering the beauty of the geography and the abundance of the valley, we expected far more tourists than we saw.

 That's our room and balcony just above the puma.

We spent the next day safe in the heart of Jesus. The Heart of Jesus Tourist Service, that is.

We especially loved the stuffed cow on the dashboard.

We booked the tour through our hotel. No one thought to mention that the guide spoke only Spanish. The bus was filled with Peruvian tourists who enjoyed every minute of his banter. Unfortunately, most of it was lost on us. We found out later that all the tours are in Spanish only. There is simply not enough demand for tours in other languages. Still, we enjoyed the scenery.

First, we visited the village of Yungay, the site of a catastrophic avalanche on May 31, 1970. That afternoon, a 7.9 earthquake struck off the coast of Peru. The northern wall of Huascarán collapsed, unleashing a tsunami of rock, ice and snow that destroyed the towns of Yungay and Ranrahirca. The avalanche started as a sliding mass of glacial ice and rock about 3,000 feet wide and a mile long. It covered the 11 miles to the village of Yungay in minutes, moving at an average speed of 175 to 200 miles per hour. No one had time to get out of the way. About 70,000 people died and 50,000 were injured, making this the most deadly avalanche in recorded history.

You can still see the scars on the mountain where the section broke loose. The plain where the old village of Yungay once stood is now a memorial park.

The tidal wave of debris rolled all the way through the village only to stop at the feet of the statue of Jesus standing at the top of a hillside cemetery.

Here's what it looked like in the aftermath.

 And here's what it looks like today.

The remains of a city bus.

This portion of an arch used to be part of the village church.

Next, we visited Huascarán National Park and took a boat ride on a glacial lake at 12,000 feet.

 The summit of Huascarán was shrouded in clouds.

A couple rain squalls accompanied by high winds, blew in, cutting short the boat ride. We huddled under a thatched canopy until they passed.

Back in town, we had a delicious local ale on a rooftop terrace with an incredible view of the surrounding peaks.

 We sat there for quite a while just watching the clouds move across the sky and mountains.

O had been feeling bad and coughing a lot since we reached Huaraz. We thought it was a recurrence of the allergic cough that she gets from time to time, so she took her allergy meds and we waited for her to get better.

Instead she got worse. She was sore from coughing so much, exhausted from lack of sleep, and constantly short of breath. At about 2 am, she suddenly thought about altitude sickess. After a few minutes of googling, she realized that she had all the symptoms and that severe altitude sickness can be fatal. She woke me up to tell me, and we quickly decided we had to cut short our stay in Huaraz and head for sea level.

The next morning, I walked down to the bus station and got them to change our ticket (it's amazing how much Spanish you can dredge up when you have to). By 11 am, we were on the bus, and by 3:00 we were back at sea level. O is still coughing, but not nearly as badly. She can breathe deeply and her energy is mostly back. Best of all, she's been able to sleep.

Now we have to rethink much of our trip to avoid high altitudes. I go to the Galapagos on Thursday. O was going to spend the week while I'm diving in Quito (9,000 feet); instead she'll stay on the coast in Guayaquil, then meet me in the Galapagos for a week.

We'll visit the Amazon headwaters since they are fairly low, and some of the lower Andean cities like Cuenca and Loja, but we need to stay under 8,000 feet.

Unfortunately, that means most of the places we wanted to visit in Bolivia are out. Instead, we'll probably go straight to Chile, where most of the places we want to visit, like the wine country, are at lower elevations.

Just going with the flow.

P.