Moving along



5/30/2012

Today I met with Frank who introduced me to the social science coordinator Daniel who is also working with a volunteer named Chema from Spain. The social science division is fairly new here and is working towards becoming highly GIS focused. Our meeting was to lay out their goals and visions which are a great step in the right direction. Basically they want a standardized way for field workers to collect data with field methods like GPS's and for them to be able to download their own information into an open source geospatial program. From there they want another set of decently trained individuals to be able to produce quick maps of that data. Then the final tier is to have a core group of GIS professionals to manage, analyze, and implement solutions with advanced functions.

However, their information is highly scattered throughout multiple data sets and saved in different formats. Their goal is to bring this all into a geodatabase with a clear emphasis on organization. Since this is all new to them they don't have a database designed yet to handle the mass amount of information that they have. So between Chema, myself, and Danial we are going to design a geodatabase that will categorize the information. This is going to take some time and their chaotic nature here doesn't have workflows so day to day we are going to do what we can...They use ArcGIS like we do at the University but they want to get away from it and onto an open source program called Post-GIS. Since they don't have the money for expensive ESRI licensing they want for their field staff to be able to use the open source as a collection database and then determine what extensions they could implement using the more expensive ESRI software. 

They also have two projects going on that are within the social science division and that is a simple locational project to show were eco-tourism is occuring on the various islands. They want to show, describe, and give information about the places to get a sense of what each place is offering. They also have a GIS fracking project going on but Daniel didn't go to far into that one with Frank there.

Our office at the station

Chema is the volunteer from Spain who is here for one year. He doesn't speak very good English and I don't speak very good Spanish and we'll be working with each other on GIS stuff. Shall be an interesting experience for the summer. But after our meeting we biked into town and ate lunch. Figured if were going to need to chat all summer might as well start now. They serve lunch meals to many of the employees on the island so the place we ate for dinner the other night serves lunch for $4.50 which includes soup, rice, and meat (chicken or fish). Found out he wants to learn to surf as well and he mentioned that Sam the programmer guy is willing to teach us. SCORE.

For now though we'll be sifting through 80gb of geospatial information that is again highly disorganized. I'm also in the process of downloaded Arc 10 on my computer in order to see what they actually have sitting around in these folders. However we started transferring files at 1...and its now 3 with only little over half to go...

I've been checkin my email like crazy :) for some entertainment as well as writing this up. I also have a shotty office which im jazzed about and soon to get keys to the building...get some. Back to organizing files in ArcCatalog.



Rum sautéd banana's

On top of sugar rolls
with chocolate

We've been getting pretty creative with food with everything from squeezed lime-orange juice topped vegetable salad to chocolate barbeque sauced chicken. Joe heard of a great dessert that he put together. Try it out, simple and quite delicious. Light the rum on fire within the pan it makes it look 100 times fancier.










Bike Repair Day

Today I didn’t work because the main GIS guy wanted to meet on Wednesday. He hopes the internet will be better by then in order to actually accomplish something. I forgot his name but tomorrow I have a meeting with him at 11am to go over what all they want to try and do. Hopefully I get started on something but the station as a whole is a little chaotic because their internet is going haywire. When everyone needs it to operate it works even slower than it already is.

With the day off I woke up early and headed to the market in town with Deb. We took bikes, got a little lost but ended up finding it fairly close to where were staying. I ended up spending 5 dollars and got more fresh food than 5 dollars could ever get you at a store in Wisconsin. It was also a great way to practice my Spanish that is highly lagging…They had everything from fresh noodles to fish to spices and lighters. It was based on a covered concrete soccer field which although not especially hopping at 7am was supposed to get busier by the noon hour. On our way home we stopped and treated ourselves to fresh fruit smoothies by the harbor

After the market I filled my day with repairing all the bikes we have. Deb and I stopped at the bike shop on the way back from the market in order to get her some brakes on her bike because it’s really hilly in the residential area and white taxi trucks tend to have the right away. While we were there she bought us another bike that I named young grasshopper. Leaving one there to get repaired we headed home. I walked the flat bike through town to the shop and picked up the fixed one and repeated this process until we had all 5 bikes in ship shape. However, the red bikes tire just exploded and freaked out the station because it sounded like a gun shot.

Since snorkeling is fairly close and Rob was done with work we headed to the beach to troll around for marine life. Yesterday we saw three giant sea turtles, a ray, and a sea lion circled us a few times but today was less lively except for the sprawled out marine iguanas soaking up some rays.

But again hopefully tomorrow gives me some work as for now I’m off to town to chat it up and probably grab a bite to eat J

Living at the Station!

Our porch view

I haven’t wrote in three days but we’ve made it to the Galapagos after a short flight to Guyaguill. They served us really good pepper chicken salad and I jammed while reading “The Short History of Everything” by Bill Bryson. We landed on Baltra Isle which is an old military airport that they bombed back in the day to create a flat landing surface. Stepping off the plane was brutally humid and we quickly scurried through customs, and security. Baltra Isle is about 200 meters away from Santa Cruz Isle so we had to take a ferry boat across this beautiful blue canal. I met a guy named Tato who was carrying a surfboard and turns out his parents live in Puerto Ayora. We chatted and found out his uncle rides pro for some bottled water company. After the water taxi we snagged two white pick-up truck taxis to haul us over to the southern town of Puerto Ayora. It was a longer drive than I thought but also through a lot more vegetation that I expected. Huge craters were along the road, larger than those I’ve seen in Hawaii which was pretty cool. After a 35 min drive from the northern lowlands to the highlands and back down to the southern lowlands we dropped Tato off at his house and got his email for surf lessons in the coming weeks. We were planning on staying at the station until we found out if we could in fact live here for the summer. So Joe who speaks a solid amount of Spanish and myself got lost at the station which is fairly spread out and were panicking about the room situation. Eventually the driver figured it out and we roll up to this condo looking place on stilts. We were assigned #18 and #19 which turn out to be these kick-ass condos with kitchens, bathrooms, dining room area, closets and porches! Although we got lost, we made out with our own place in #19. Without hesitation and plenty of time to unpack later we headed to the beach which is about a blocks length away to go snorkeling. It had plenty of fish and we spotted a giant puffer fish the size of two footballs. Then all of a sudden I’m off on my own and this big brown object swoops in front of my face. I obviously freak out because it scared the hell out of me but it was a sea lion cruising around for some chow. We met back up at the bungalow, which is what I like to call our place, and take the best cool down showers. Get ready for dinner and hike into town which is only about ¾ of a miles away. Ended up eating at this ocean front, open, restaurant which served really good smoothies made from fresh fruit. I ordered a chicken dish that was massive. It was chicken topped in peppers, topped in fried eggs, with a bunch of rice and plantain fries. We went a little further n got a bunch of groceries for the week. Egg sandwiches, spaghetti, and teriyaki chicken! Pooped from extremely long day it wasn’t that bad going to bed at 9:30.

Our second day here we planned on going to this place called Las Grieatas. I had looked it up before I got here and it looked wicked sweet. Happily getting up at 6am we headed to this place by 7 and after a relatively long hike over lava rocks we were there by 8:30. We walked up to this massive fissure in the ground that is filled with sea water but as blue as a perfect swimming pool. Massive cliffs on each side it was a cliff jumping paradise. We snorkeled around checking out some big fish that had gotten trapped when high tides roll in. But this rock was literally perfect for some rock climbing. From what Travis, Rachel, Allison, and the rest of the UWEC climbing crew describe this would be a climber’s heaven. No rope just water to catch your fall.  Beautiful place to hang out on slow days or maybe weekends.

Joe getting ready to snorkel

There’s a small German community that took up roots back in WWII when things started to get hairy in Germany. It’s not private, public, and a touristy place that we walked through on the way. It’s a short hop and a skip on a boat taxi for 60 cents across the harbor. We stopped at their beach which is small but a great way to get cool in the water. I strapped on my fins and hit the water with Rob. As we moved into deeper water I see this massive sea turtle the size of a kitchen table eating away at some algae. I’m freaking out to Rob to get his attention and just as he gets a glimpse it speeds off in hesitation. But then as I’m snorkeling around on my own I come across another massive sea turtle slowly gliding along. This one doesn’t mind my company and I cruised with him for about 5 minutes. They are awesome creatures, glass marble eyes, huge fins acting as wings, and a huge but slimy shell. This too was on my contour camera that decided not to unexpectedly not work all day…grrrr. We sat around in the sun and headed back to our bungalows around 11am. I was thinking to myself…cliff jumped and climbed by 10am…snorkeling and saw sea turtles by 11am…what next right? Most of our group was super tired but I caught a second wind and decided to go find out the internet situation in town. I tried the hotspot at the harbor which was frustratingly slow but hit up the internet café cross the street. For $2.50 you can get an hours’ worth of internet. I called Rachel which was great to hear from and ended up staying about 2 hours J on a pretty slow connection. We met some professors from Colorado State and they are here banding Albatross to try and figure out their breeding patterns. Had them over for some beers at 7pm and I could barely stay awake so I wrote a quick letter J and hit the hay by 9:30

Forgot but we met this other professor from a Canadian University who’s here filming part of a show that’s going to air on BBC called the “Galapagos in Detail”, he’s studying a finch population that is in the mix of becoming two separate species. The species is slowly moving apart and back together based on what they think is human interaction due to the food resources. Interesting stuff, but David Attenborough the famous British guy who narrates Life episodes is supposedly coming in the next few weeks to narrate his work. Oh and I guess Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie were here a couple weeks ago…this place has some people go through it. Wow.

On to today…We were to start work at 8am but since I went to bed so early I was up at 5:45. Joe n I made egg sandwiches and then I hiked into town to see if I could send out an email J  The hotspot in the harbor works decent with no one on it but it worked well enough to skype in the morning! We headed to the station to fill out paper work get the orientation tour and meet everyone. But the station right now is highly chaotic because their internet I guess literally like blew up two weeks ago, their servers down, and they just launched their new Datazone website. So without a way to keep things running smoothly they are a little unorganized. We met our head boss Frank Bungartz who listed out what we’ll most likely be working with. It made me super happy to hear that I’ll definitely be working with GIS!  I have a meeting at 3pm with Frank and the programmers to try and figure out what they need or how they operate as far as the geospatial elements fit in with their web design. We also get snazzy email addresses with the stations name behind them. what what!! Email accounts along with access to their collections database, and connection to their secured internet are being hooked up and personalized to our computers at 2:30ish! I had some time to kill in between our morning meeting and the one this afternoon so I swam some laps at the beach and then biked into town on our bikes that we recovered from Deb’s storage unit!! I decided to try out the internet café that Joe had been to and it was way faster, cheaper, and super close to our place. Skype worked great and even kept up real time. Glad I can finally figure out a system that keeps me connected J I’m just sitting around watching sparrows land on our porch and we just found another tortoise that wanders around our back yard. Tortoise one is now named Charles by Rob and the second which we found is now Darwin…which I think escaped a pen so were probably ratting on them…our bad but they move soo slow. Glad we’re finally figuring things out slowly, getting acquainted and having a super time living with an ocean in our backyard!

Soarin

              

Ziplining and Volcanoes

Yesterday we had the opportunity to drive from our tree top oasis to a small eco-tourism based town called Mindo. It was a really cool town with rafting which they describe as rigging multiple float tubes together and given' er hell. But we had our sights set on another adventure, zip-lining through the Andes. It was crazy cool and the biggest zipline I've ever done. We did 10 cables and the highest was over 300m off the ground. I'll put together a short video to capture the size of the mountains we cruised over. After that we went to an artisan chocolate shop which made chocolate from scratch. We were given a tour through the processes and then sat town to test it out. In truth chocolate, pure 100% chocolate tastes like crap...hardly able to swallow. However once you mix it with sugar, in our case pure cane sugar it tastes phenomenal, almost just adding a flavor to the sugar itself. We also tried a spiced chocolate which burnt my tongue and then a chocolate barbeque sauce which I purchased in the gift shop, its delicious! I also got some different varieties of bars each with a different darkness :) and some passion fruit jam! From there we were back off to our treetop resort to check out and each our last meal which was pork ribs and salad. I just re-read all this and wow it was a big day, because we also drove back into Quito and checked back into Hotel Plaza for the night! I was able to buy some skype credit and get ahold of my dad and Rachel which ended a busy day perfectly :)

Our driver, Johnny mentioned he would take us up to the local volcano, Antisana, that is capped with glaciers...we agreed and decided to wake up at 5am to get on the road by 6am. Woofta another early day but the drive was great. We drove through small Quechua towns that are the indigenous peoples remaning from the days of the Spanish invasion. The condor bird is Equadors national bird and the locals informed us that we had the chance to see 3 of them right up the road. They are HUGE birds even from the distance that we saw them from. The drive started to turn into rolling hills of grasslands with massive incised valleys cutting them apart. It started to rain but as the weather got better this volcano rose out of the air. It was a cone volcano bowl in shape capped with snow and glaciers. First off I worked near Glacier National Park last summer and didn't see one so I was giddy with excitement and took plenty of pictures.


The drive took some time to get up to this area which by the way is at 11,000ft and the top of Antisana reached a mighty ~18,000ft. The air was thin and was apparent after a short jog in which I almost threw up and quickly got a headache. my b. From here we were all super tired from such jam packed days so we headed back to Quito early and arrived at about 3:00pm. It's nice to relax, chat it up online with rach, catch up on what we've been doing, upload photos, and grab some grub down the road.



Tomorrow we're off to the Galapagos with a 9:30 flight to a small town to pick up others and then straight to Baltra Isle. We should be moving into what we think is the station duplex at about 12:30pm. Since we've been in the same time zone we'll be changing an hour back from WI because we'll be hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean. Off to dinner and to grab some dollar pilseners.

The journey begins

5/21/2012 and 5/22/2012

So we land in Quito at about 11:30pm delayed about 15 min for baggage issues. Customs was careless, they weren’t even watching the x-ray scanner that our bags had to pass through…but it finally felt like I was somewhere different with the crisp smell of a city running on diesel. Slightly out of it we found our 6 person Josh who had landed right before us. Advised not to let anyone take our bags we found a taxi and headed for Hotel International. A good drive away from the airport, the city was dead with shops closed up and graffiti coating every inch of exposed buildings. The hotel is this old Victorian looking place and where the language barrier finally became realized. Deb negotiates our rooms and we bugger off to get situated at 1:00am. Waking at 6 to make a taxi at 6:30 we were up before breakfast. Checking my email I got the greatest email ever from Rachel which made me super happy before losing the net for a few days.

Our plan was to head to Bella Vista, a resort located in the Cloud Forest Reserve about 1.5hrs NW of Quito. The drive was great, slowing getting out of the city through rural towns straight out of National Geographic. Farming communities located on the steepest of hills, and women with chiseled, tan, tired, looking faces. It was an unfortunate situation to grasp because they were living in shanties tending to the little amount of land that grew corn and fed their cattle. Getting into the rainforest we turned on to a one-way gravel road that hugged the mountainside for 16km. Driving up the valley we passed even smaller communities that had capitalized on the trout they farmed in streams from the subsequent rain that this area receives.

So we pull into Belle Vista Resort…and I literally thought I was dreaming…this place is straight out of Robinson Crusoe. There was multiple, elegant as hell, tree houses that we were about to stay in. We meet Nelson our guide for the few days were here and he starts our tour. Walking into this complex we come to this 4 story round tree house made of bamboo. The dining room, located on the first floor is all windows overlooking the Andes Mountains that are hard to comprehend from their size in the first place. Nelson goes well you guys are staying in the “dome.” A wood spiral staircase in the middle of the dining area leads us to four rooms bathroom and shower in each…it gets better…from here there is a hole located again in the middle, with a ladder that leads to story 3 which holds 3 beds sharing one bathroom…remind you that we have six people and can stay in any room we want…but it gets better…in the middle again there is a ladder leading to the top floor…I get curious and assume it cannot seriously get better than this…climb the ladder and sure enough there are three more beds on the floor surrounded by all windows looking over the Andes Mountains on the fourth floor of a tree house…so of course I’m sleeping at the top…which is where at I’m typing this up right now…

Local Trout

                Again this is only the start to our day; we got settled and went down our bungalow to get some breakfast…consisting of fruit bowlsJ, eggs, and toast. We hear that Nelson gives tours of the reserve throughout the day and decide to go on the 10am tour. Heading out for this tour he stops at a bird feeder where over a dozen multi-colored hummingbirds, tanagers, sparrows, are buzzing around our heads. I would love to bring my Grandma here. I put my hand down and they land on my hand!! Un-real…So we start our hike into the rainforest and it’s like walking through a scene in Jurassic Park. After learning about dragons blood (a medicinal tree that literally bleeds red juice), eating some red flower that was better than any candy you could find in a store, and seeing a rare bird that lives on the top of dead trees it was quite the morning. We headed to lunch which was squash soup and local trout from the stream down the road. Probably the best food I’ve had in a while. After lunch and plenty of coffee it started to pour, which is normal at this time of the day after the moisture builds up enough to dump. We put on parkas and boots and headed for this waterfall called discovery falls which was again like walking back in time. It was a truly relaxing hike despite the elevation were at (7500ft) and the uphill hike on the way back. I’m pooped by now and as I sit here waiting to know what’s for dinner I’m watching birds try to get in my tree top bedroom and watching Joe and Josh climb up our ladder. I’m off to shower, eat, then grab a beer and go insect hunting with our group.

The video below shows a bunch of stuff we've been doing

          

10 days to go

A locator map that I put together in case your wondering where in the world are the Galapagos Islands? I also included a digital elevation model (bottom left) and extruded it within the ESRI software ArcScene. It helps in getting a sense of local topology that this hot spot has created over millenia. You can see the original size image HERE.