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!