There’s the tall statue way up on the hill.

Apparently, I did not write enough about the volcano the other day, and I suspect to make up for it today I was made to climb up in a tall statue at the top of a high hill. I had to pay money to do this.

A taxi driver brought us up the high hill. There was a long stairway that we could have climbed, but we read that the stairway leads through a dicey neighborhood. From the base of the hill, it didn’t look dicey. It looked open and bright, but our taxi driver confirmed that it was “muy peligroso” to walk those stairs, and he brushed off the idea that we might walk down the stairs back to the Old City when we were done with the big statue. Instead, he waited for us while we climbed around like little ants on a baby carrot sticking out of a watermelon, and then he drove us back down.

Even though we only walked to the top of base of El Panecillo, it was still a little high for me. Safe, though. Very safe at the top.

View from the top of the hill: Old City is in the forefront, more modern Quito (where our apartment is) is in the distance.

I know what you’re thinking. Of course he’s going to tell us the we need him to shuttle us up and down the hill because he’s going to make more money. He could have easily made up that story about the two “Norte Americana turistas” who just last week decided to climb down that very stairway only to have ruffians take their camera by force. As we drove up the hill he cast significant glances at me every time we passed someone by the side of the road as if to say: “You really want to walk up those stairs with THAT guy loitering around?” Every person we passed he looked at me like that.

None of them looked that bad to me, but it turned out all right. At that point, anyway, I was tired and cranky after an over-long effort to find the oldest ice cream shop in Quito and the ineffectiveness of any tourist map to show where Guyaquil Street is. Those quaint streets in Quito’s Old City are best for walking singly or in pairs, not for a party of five. The sidewalks are narrow and you think that the dotted line drawn a little ways into the street is a demarcation line that allows for extra pedestrian traffic. Then a bus comes by and you realize that the dotted line is where the bus’ tire goes and if you’re on that line you’re going to get run over. Even if you’re inside the line, even if you’re mostly on the sidewalk, you can still get whacked by the bus. It’s a very tight situation. There’s a lot of people walking around in the Old City.

Inside this church, it’s super golden.

But we found the ice cream shop (established 1858) and we also got a huge hunk of watermelon for fifty cents and it was so good we bought another. Even better than that, if you can believe anything’s better than that, is when we were visiting La Iglesia de La Compania de Jesus, it sounded like they had their classical music Pandora station blasting, but what it really was was the National Symphony of Ecuador practicing for a performance tonight. It was excellent.

History and frozen confection mix.

Those guys are good; and the church was beautiful. You can find it by googling “Church in Quito filled with gold.” (They would not allow us to take pictures on the inside, sorry.) The performance is tonight and it’s free, but I don’t want to go back down there with those buses.

Actually, I think I’m overstating the bus danger. Remember, though, we’re just spent two weeks in a place where some of the roads were dominated by giant tortoises.  Quito is a very different, and truly excellent contrast.  For one thing, it should be known as the “City of 1,000 Vistas” because everywhere we go — including our apartment — has a different and spectacular view, usually from above.  We haven’t even gone on the Teleferico yet.  This is a gondola that will take us to the top of one of the surrounding mountains (and very possibly something I’ll interpret as a punishment for something else I’ve done to my family). This city is very close to many cool tourists sites — lakes and caves and villages — most of which we won’t have the time to see on this trip.  Also, while we haven’t seen $7 dinners we have caught wind of $3 lunches with a similar three-course menu structure.  Let me at them!  It’s lively at night, although last night was more lively than tonight thanks to a big soccer match, and the food truck scene has been good enough to alleviate the pain of not having $7 dinners.  We went back to the parking lot with the food trucks tonight for tacos, burgers, and pulled pork sandwiches.

Other highlights from today were walking past the Presidential Palace, which we could have visited but I didn’t bring our passports with us; seeing several other churches and monasteries; visiting Itchimbia Park, which is right across the valley from the tall statue but in a safe enough area that the taxi driver let us off no problem; and getting to talk with three different taxi drivers.

Hydrating in the park.

It was like trickle-down punishment: I had to go up in a high place, and three different taxi drivers had to suffer through conversations in Spanish with me.

I learned today that in the back seat the ladies listen to my conversations with the taxi drivers and pick up Spanish pointers, which is somewhat troublesome. I really mustn’t make a lot of sense to these guys, and I really don’t follow what they tell me very well, but they’re all very nice about it.  Somehow today — probably completely against the flow of conversation —  I used the word murcielago (bat, like the kind that flap around at night).  I’m sure it took the driver by surprise — we were probably talking about global monetary policy or something — but in the back seat Zoe and Jen were impressed.  Really, that’s all that matters.

The first people who came to the Galapgos Islands had one concern.

Peeking into the crater of El Chico Volcano

Scratch that. The first people who came to Galapagos were probably Incas who looked around and said, we’ve already got volcanoes at home what do we need this place for? At least, that’s how our tour guide Xavier explained it yesterday as we hiked north from the Sierra Negra Volcano crater across the path of two major lava flows (the more recent from 1979) to a side-spout called El Chico Volcano.

There certainly are plenty of volcanoes here: five major ones on Isabela Island alone. The one we toured yesterday has at least 100 “lava chimneys” or holes of various sizes that reach way down to where all the action is at. Sierra Negra last erupted in 2005, though not nearly as spectacularly as in ’79 when thousands of acres were covered with lava over a span of three months.

The Incas likely went home pretty quickly.

What I meant to say was the next wave of people who came here — fishermen and whalers in the 1500s or so — had one concern. Well, from my experience I can say they probably had several concerns, like: I hope my kids don’t fall into that volcano; and How can I keep sand from destroying our sole remaining camera? But they had one main concern, and this is supported by our guide, Xavier: How were they going to make money off this place?

Sitting on a lava wall

It was not an easy question to answer. The place is beautiful and it looks like it should be a money pot, but mining salt and sulfur didn’t really cut it. It was too far offshore to be a real productive exporter of fish (though fish did factor into the eventual answer, as you’ll see).

It was still very sleepy here when Darwin toured it in the mid 1800s. In fact this Island — the largest in the archepelago — had only a couple hundred residents as the last millennium mark approached. Now, though, Xavier says the population was more than 2,000 ten years ago when the last census was taken, and he estimates that there are more than 5,000 people living here now.

Of course tourism is the main engine for growth here, and all of the tours we’ve been on have been fabulous. Each one is different from the one before. Each guide is extremely knowledgeable and personable.

We make it a point to stroll by early in the afternoon to check out our dinner options.

But I have come to consider the tours, and all of the daytime stuff here — the beaches and animals and such — to just be time-killers for the real main even on Isabela: $7 dinner.

That’s right, each night we cruise Calle Antonio Gil’s restaurant row and peruse the placards offering the day’s set menu items. At least five restaurants do this, all offering slightly different stuff but all basically the same three-course menu (and juice!) for seven bucks. Except one that sets its price at $6.50.

I ask you: Can you beat that?

Granted, it’s not a big dinner, but it’s big enough. We don’t have the facilities to deal with leftovers, anyway. There’s generally enough variation on the small menu of the day to keep everyone happy. I get fish; several other people get shrimp (at one place the shrimp option costs a little extra), Nadia and maybe someone else gets chicken or meat. There are various sauces. We get bowl of soup before the entree, a nice glass of juice, several side dishes, and a postre (Spanish for dessert).

Fish with celery sauce

We did run into trouble one night when no place had a viable non-fish option. And one night two girls decided to split one of the fixed price entrees and a pasta dish off the regular menu. Regular menu options not only tend to be more expensive, they also include neither juice nor postre. Once everybody but me shared a $25 pizza, but I was the only one who got juice and dessert (it was Jello).  Get this, way back on the first night before we really figured things out, everyone ordered drinks on top of our set price menu. We must’ve looked like a bunch of tourists!

While every night the dinner bill has been $50 or below with tip, it wasn’t until last night that we finally hit the sweet spot with a $35 bill. Tonight I plan to shake things up a little by requesting menestra, or beans, instead of the french fries — at no extra cost, mind you.

How do you make money off me in the Galapagos?   $7 at a time.

The demise of our underwater camera came one and a half snorkel trips too soon, by my estimation, but we may have lucked out.

By “us” I mean you, too, because you may get to see some of the cool pictures our guide Carlos took of our dive at Los Tuneles yesterday.

Then again, you may not, because he copied his pictures to our memory card, but we can’t figure out how to access them. With luck, we’ll be able to get to the shots of a school of golden rays and the closeup of the seahorse once we’ll get home. If not you’ll just have to take our word that we saw those things.

If you look close, you might see a sea turtle gliding by in the shallow channel.

Until then, we do have some pictures from the terrestrial part of our trip, which brought us up the coast from Puerto Villarmil to a place where lava and the sea once met in interesting ways. The result is a maze of calm, clear water running around and through fingers of black lava rock, archways and caves.

Carlos showing … there’s no way I can write it so it won’t sound dirty.

Sibling rivalry, vicious among boobies

In the first five minutes after landing, we saw three sea turtles swim by. Then we walked a bit to find a few Blue-Footed Booby nesting sites. Some had eggs; some had chicks; some had one of each. We learned that nesting couples incubate two eggs, but usually only manage to gather enough food for one of the fledglings to survive. Interesting birds, these boobies.
The tour allowed us to encounter several new animals that we hadn’t seen yet. The seahorse and rays are new to our list. We also saw Nasca Boobies, which are different from the blue-footed variety — for one, the larger chick pushes the smaller one out of the nest to spare its parents the problem of deciding which to feed; for another, it is the only booby endemic to the Galapagos. We also caught a shady glimpse of a manta ray while we were in transit. Carlos said they can grow up to seven meters wide. This one looked to be about two meters.

I think we actually saw flamingos two days ago. Yesterday we discovered these birds which satisfyingly stood on one leg apiece.

The last new animal we saw today was the Galapogos flamingo, which we spied from the boardwalk cutting through an inland lagoon. The boardwalk brought us to another tortoise breeding center (the tortoises here do well in the wild once they’re grown up a bit, but they have trouble getting born in the wild for various reasons, including wild pigs eating eggs and invasive guava trees making it hard for parents to dig nests). At the breeding center were many smaller versions of the tortoises we saw on on bike ride through the Humedales the day before.

Watching over the little ones

They’re cute — and decidedly more active, apparently — when they’re this age.

Hopefully looking for a whale on Playa Estacion

We are struggling mightily against, if not major disappointment, at least melancholy here on Isla Santa Cruz. We’ve been combing the beaches here looking for something to compare to the humpback whale that washed up this week back home in New Hampshire, but so far not much luck.

I mean, marine iguanas are pretty cool. Can’t really see them anyplace else in the world. Blunt noses for eating aglae. Can stay under water for a long time. But you’d have to pile up a few thousand of them to get anywhere near the size of the whale on Rye Beach.

We persevere.

Check out this guy.

Going to the beach is not a bad option in the Galapagos. I don’t care what the tourists from Florida say, the water is a very comfortable temperature. Beach parking is not an issue (though we did have to take a water taxi as part of today’s jaunt to Finch Bay). You can walk right in and snorkel and it’s like you’re in the aquarium at the doctor’s office, there’s so many pretty fish.

It doesn’t smell like dead whale.

Well, we can’t do much about it, anyway. We’ve got another island to visit, and then the glorious heights of Quito to experience before we see Rye Beach again. The whale probably won’t be there when we get back, anyway.

Waiting for the water taxi

At least we can distract ourselves by focusing on the tasks at hand, which were: yesterday, recovering from Monday’s dive trip; and today, securing passage for the next leg of our trip, six days on Isabela Island. Of my original anxieties about this, only a few remain. Jen managed to find what appears to be a good spot for us to stay in Puerto Villamil. We found a launch that had space remaining for tomorrow afternoon. Many of our clothes that were wet the day before yesterday have dried by now (it’s a humid here and I’ve had to set up the portable clothes line in our little yard so our drying clothes can catch some sun). Hopefully today’s wet bathing suits we get relatively dry before we have to leave tomorrow.

One lingering concern: money. There is no ATM on Isabel Island. That means all the money we’re going to spend there we have to bring there. Luckily, Jen was able to pay for the room online, and I was able to get round-trip tickets on the boat. Still, we have tour money and food money to account for.  Even here on Santa Cruz we’re limited in the amount of funds we can withdraw and the amount of transactions we can make each day. I think we’ve managed to store up enough, but it’s meant multiple trips to the money machine. At least we know we won’t be sleeping on the street or stranded without a return ticket.

Goofing around at the house

Lava rock.– the only kind of rock here

With those things taken care of, we were able to relax a little the past few days. We’ve gotten relatively late starts, in the 10 to 11 a.m. range for leaving the house and we’ve been low-key in our adventuring. Playa Estacion, yesterday’s main destination, is a rocky beach only a few minutes from our house. It was a great place to swim and play in the sand. It also gave us our first opportunity to see marine iguanas swimming around. I think the snorkeling would have been great, except we didn’t make it into town to rent gear. Dinner last night was street food,  empenadas and an embolado, which proved very inexpensive, but pretty popular among the troops.

For today’s trip to FInch Bay, we went prepared with masks and snorkels, but the water was pretty cloudy unless you went very close to the rocks. Zoe tried to follow a sea lion around for a while but mostly we sat in the sand and read our family book, The Prisioner’s Dilemma (We’re very close to the end!). Then we continued along a path through the cactus forest to Las Greitas, the swimming hole we visited as part of our bay tour last week. This time we found it almost completely empty and extremely satisfying. We were able to explore the area further, jump off some rocks and even swim through a meter-long tunnel connecting one pool to another.

Zoe has the first pool in Las Grietas to herself.

At both beaches and at Las Grietas there was a very pleasant mix of foreign tourists (mostly from the US) and Ecuadorans. This is a very popular destination for Ecuador’s residents, possibly because they don’t have to pay the $100 entrance fee that everyone else who comes to the islands has to pay. Also, it’s a short flight from Guyaquil and Quito. Today, while the ladies were exploring at Las Grietas, I talked with several families, some from Ecuador and some from the US, as they were getting ready to take the plunge. (I was keeping an eye on our bags, some of which were stuffed with money for our stint on Isabella.) They all thought the water was too cold. Clearly they haven’t been swimming at any beaches in New England.

Lanie hops off the rock wall.

Tonight, we rest a bit more and tomorrow we have time to pack (we declined to take the 7 a.m. launch, selecting instead the one that leaves at 2 p.m.) and maybe read another chapter or two of our book. Perhaps during our boat ride tomorrow we’ll get to see a humpback whale, too.

We’ll let you know.

What’s it like to swim with sea lions? Check out this video that Jen shot today on our big day trip to Pinzon Island. The sea lions were particularly interactive.

Nadia takes to the sea.

We also saw tortoises and white tipped sharks, but, alas, no penguins. There were plenty of fish — huge schools of sardines, large, colorful parrotfish, and plenty of others I can’t name but looked really cool. Zoe even found an octopus crammed into a crack in the rocks.

Aside from Pinzon Island, we visited a beach on the north shore of Santa Cruz (which is where Zoe saw the octopus) and snorkeled around something called Drowned Rock, just off Daphne Major Island.

On the homeward leg with Daphne Minor in the background

Possibly the two best photo opportunities of the day went unrecorded: once because I didn’t have the camera and a sea lion nibbled at a resting shark until the shark got angry and swam off (with the sea lion following, swimming in loops around the shark); and once because I did have the camera but was sitting in the boat with Lanie while Zoe, Jen and Nadia were snorkeling with sharks and rays. Oh, well.

The Pansonic Lumix DMC TS25underwater camera did its job once again, though not without causing some stress. After it’s been submerged for a while the screen stops working and we’re never sure if it’s taking pictures until we get back and plug it into the computer. It did that in Belize, we remembered; but still after seeing so much cool stuff, we wanted to be able to share.
Here are some of the many pictures we took:

Sleepy sharks waiting for a sea lion to come nibble them

One of us swimming above a sea turtle

Zoe dives into a school of sardines.

Lunch on the boat was yellowfin tuna caught during yesterday’s tour. (Most of us were excited about it.)

Fab, our guide, tried to catch something for tomorrows’s tour…but it got away. If he had landed something good, he was going to give us a little as sashimi.

Even the little birds here are important. Darwin learned a lot from the beaks of finches.

You might have noticed that our blog posts from this trip have been pretty boring so far. Why is this? We’re in one of the most interesting places in the world. How come we’re making it seem so bleh?

It is because, dear readers, we all had to fill out forms and check the box and sign the line next to the part that said we would not make any money from the pictures we take on Galapagos. Now we must take pains to bore-down our accounts of this place so you don’t start throwing money at us in thanks for how interesting our blog is. Curse the day we checked that box!

Today we had pancakes in the morning. I washed the dishes…I can’t do this. We have to tell you about some interesting things.

We got up early in the morning because we’re two time zones (only two, isn’t that interesting?) behind East Coast time. Also we went to bed very early because we were tremendously tired last night from two full travel days. (Also, it gets dark early here — before 7 pm. It must be in the western part of the time zone. Also interesting, I think.)

Lanie, when the zipline is not locked up

We walked into town — our place is about a ten-minute walk to the main tourist strip On our path is a cool park with a playground. Lanie was very disappointed this morning because the cool zip line hadn’t been unlocked for the day (it apparently gets padlocked each night).

We booked a tour at a place that offered a two-for-one promotion. The lady at the desk just spoke Spanish. I always feel we get a better deal that way. It may be because I can’t understand they way I’m getting ripped off.

Then we walked out of town to a special place where there are two beaches: one long one that is beautiful but dangerous to swim in and one shorter one that is rather like the lagoon on Gilligan’s Island. Calm and not very deep. That one they let us swim in. To get there we had to walk a few kilometers on a cobblestone path through a forest of cactus trees. That’s right, trees. Many were four or five meters tall and had trunks like trees that you could touch without getting pricked. They had bark like regular trees. I’d better tone it down. This is getting too interesting.

This is what downtown looks like (the tortoise is only a statue).

After swimming we had to walk back along the long beach and back through the cactus forest and back into town and I had to take a taxi to our place so I could pick up the Dramamine and the girls’ fleece jackets. Nothing interesting about that. Only I got halfway into town before I realized Jen had the keys to the house. So I had to walk back out to the rest of the family and get the keys. Then I had to take another taxi to the house while the ladies went into town to get a little lunch. The lunch was pizza, albeit in interesting varieties, they told me. All the taxis in this town are white Toyota pickup trucks, almost the least interesting vehicles on the road anywhere. The town is pretty big, not the remote outpost one would expect on the Galapagos Islands. It’s got several pizza places.

All the rushing about in taxis worked out in the end (except I couldn’t find the Dramamine) and I made it back into town in time to catch the boat on the dock. On this trip I have learned a new Spanish word, muelle, which means dock. Our tour of the bay was very interesting, so I won’t tell you too much about it, except to say that the lack of Dramamine turned out to be not much of an issue. I will post some pictures if you promise not to pay us.

Diving deep in a local swimming hole

Walking along the beautiful, dangerous beach

It’s a cactus AND a tree.

This bird has blue feet.

Green sea turtle as seen from underwater

Sea lion, also as seen from underwater — photo by Zoe

This rock looks like it’s made out of marine iguanas.

This sea lion is named Marianna.

Lastly, if you’ve managed to make it this far into this rather bland blog post, we’ll share with you a happy little accident.  Someone touched a switch on our fancy new camera and we found a new mode.  It’s cool, but rather memory-intensive, so we probably won’t use it a lot.  This took a good six hours to upload to youtube and it eats a lot of precious hard drive space.  Still, it’s kind of like a behind-the-scenes reel of how our Day 2 pictures were made.

Yes, blog readers, we’re moving along again.  Even though Jen has not yet wrapped up the second book of our Central America trip (she finished the volume on Nicaragua and it’s awesome, but the sequel covering Costa Rica and Belize is not yet in the can), she’s also been pulling together our next adventure.  She’s been multi tasking.

Jen at the computer, editing or planning. It’s always one or the other.

First she had to pick a destination.  Then she had to get time off from work.  Then she had to get new destination because the first one was too expensive to get to.  Then she had to shoehorn the trip between a dance recital and a violin camp.  Finally, we’re able to go.

In the meantime, here’s what some of the rest of us have been up to.  Follows these youtube links to see:

Zoe’s silent movie solo —

Lane playing the expression session (with me accompanying —

Second place ribbon for Nadia and Sebastian

Also, Nadia’s been in a few horse shows.  And there’s been track meets, concerts, soccer games and dance recitals.  I’ve  been working in the schools and can once again see the beginning of summer vacation as a reason to celebrate.

Now that school’s over, we’re ready to go.