This weekend started off with a run to the market Saturday morning bright and early at 8am. We ended up getting the usual and then some. We also treated ourselves to a fresh coconut and managed to get a whole tree of bananas for four bucks. It probably has about 50-60 bananas, although not ripe yet we hung it outside on our back porch. Afterwards we went to fix our bikes again because 4/5 of them have flats…not cool but it’s a way of life around here. Then we were all off to our work party which was held at the marine lab. They have the best view to work with…and a ping pong table. We had plenty of food, beer, and a good time that I was beat by 7. Regardless I wanted to chat with Rach so I headed into town to hit up an internet café : ) Then Joe and I just walked around town to the pier where we saw what we think was a shark, a sea lion bobbing around, and a massive ray. The town’s main pier has fluorescent blue and green lights that allow you to see into the water at night. There are all sorts of things swimming around at night. Pretty exhausted, I was in bed by 10pm.
The plan on Sunday was to head to a place called Los Gemelos which are huge volcanic craters up in the highlands by the town of Santa Rosa. We were going to ride bikes but conveniently one lost air overnight…again bikes here are highly un-reliant. The cab right instead was interesting because we didn’t end up where we wanted to go but instead he took us to a tortoise farm…which we had no ambition of seeing. After a while of trying to talk to him he brought us to a lava tunnel. For some reason we had the notion that Los Gemelos was nearby and that we would walk to it from the tunnel then walk back to Puerto Ayora. He insisted he’d wait which turned out to be great because it was nowhere near where we wanted to get to. But this lava tunnel was HUGE. Ceilings ranging from 25ft tall to small enough you had to squeeze through on your belly. It was very old with visible collapses that blocked the path. It was also electrically lighted but who knows the source. After walking about ¾ of a mile we came to another opening that was the end and our driver was peering in haha good thing he waited…He then took us to up Los Gemelos and we parted ways with all the ambition to hike back to Puerto Ayora. Los Gemelos although a rather short hike was to a crater about 100x100 meters large with a depth well over 50 m deep. That was the first, and the other was a combination of two equal sized craters that had been joined in the middle at one point. Maybe as the roof collapsed thousands of years ago, it caused a chain reaction for the second to simultaneously go down as well. Joe, Rob, Josh, Joel, and myself were only there for a solid hour and started to hike back towards Puerto Ayora.
Literally this is where our day got interesting. What we thought was a reasonable hike started to become one of the most grueling walks ever...We were in the highlands past the town of Santa Rosa on the westward side of the island headed towards Bellevista, another small town that meets up with the only highway spanning the island from Baltra to Puerto Ayora. So we started this hike jazzed and kidding about not going the entire way with the whole “dude, we got this” attitude. On the way we passed over 200 dead birds with the majority yellow warblers. The taxi’s drive too fast and either smoke the birds out of the air or hit them drinking out of the divots in the road which is another reason locals have large issues with the taxi service. However, were hiking this endless road that is extremely swervy, and hilly none the less. We have plenty of water still pumped, laughing about aimless things. Then we all shut up for about an hour, in the zone as we get baked in the sun. Every corner we’re like yeah it’s totally around the next one only to continue walking corner after corner after corner. As we’ve been walking for over 2 hours now were going crazy right, thinking we made a wrong turn, hungry, all of our feet are blistered. We go on and I just crack up laughing to myself…”to be honest this is acccctually a pretty entertaining time” and we continue walking. We finally make it to Bellavista at 2:30 which means we’ve been walking the highway for over 3 hours. Grabbed some much needed grub like there was a white beam shining down on the restaurant. It would have been another 2 hours to walk from Bellavista to Puerto Ayora and our feet/bodies couldn’t handle it and snagged a $2 cab instead. Our day consisted of 1 hour crater hikes and a majority enjoying the highland landscape by foot from the highway. Brutal, yet a great work out..?! Interested, I looked up on Google Earth how far it actually was when I got back...9.5 miles from Los Gemelos to Bellavista.
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| snack time?! |
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