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I recently returned from a trip to the Galápagos Islands. It was a fantrastic and eye-opening week and a half in Ecuador, which I'll try to recount the highlights.
First, a quick technical note about the photos and videos...
I took my Canon 60D with the 18-135 mm zoom and 60 mm macro lenses, but I only ended up using the 18-135 mm one. There were some shots that would have looked fantastic with the macro, but I probably would have been scolded since we were supposed to stay at least eight feet away from all the wildlife. Anyway, I took a few photos and videos. The video clips (720p@60, H.264) amounted to 21 GiB and the photos (5184 x 3456 pixels, JPEG) to 9.7 GiB with a grand total of roughly 30.7 GiB. I was using a 16 GiB SD card, so I got in the habit of swapping it out every day. I took most of the shots in manual mode with the aperture wide open, only varying the shutter speed, focal length, and ISO settings. Automatic mode just wasn't producing very good shots, for some reason. I used UV and circular polarizer filters for some of the days. Also, I bought a mini-tripod but never really used it.
If you don't care to read the highlights below, and want to jump straight to the photos, here you go:
The above is more or less in order, except for the Quito (some photos were taken during the second visit) and miscellaneous galleries. A very small percentage of the photos aren't mine, and they should be obvious (because they might be of me!). If they're not, just look at the EXIF data at the bottom of the image - pictures that aren't mine aren't shot with a Canon 60D (or Nexus One). Below is a timeline of the trip followed by some details on the wildlife and miscellaneous observations. I've interleaved some smaller and/or cropped variations of the above photos, too.
The itinerary we took was dictated by Celebrity Cruises, since this was in fact a river cruise (probably just to distinguish it from a Caribbean or Meditteranean-type trip). We flew to Quito, Ecuador via Houston, TX and arrived in the early morning on September 30th, staying at the JW Marriott Quito. We spent two days there; one by ourselves and one with the Celebrity tour group (90 people who accompanied us on the ship, too, and some tour guides). And, shocker.. I got a sunburn the first day since I'm a bit stupid and like to learn the hard way every year.
The tour group exposed us to some of the highlights of the area: government buildings, old churches, the local cuisine (love the blackberry juice!), and a trip that took us north of the city to a location that was supposedly at a latitude of 0°0'0" (it actully wasn't, since the original inhabitants didn't have GPS receivers at the time, but it was close enough). Here's a screenshot of the GPS receiver information on my phone:
Since Quito is located in the mountains, the temperature was fairly cool for being so close to the equator. When we were there it got up to around 25°C during the day but got down to 12°C during the evening and part of the morning.
From Quito we took a roughly two hour flight to the Galápagos Islands, specifically Baltra Island, since that's the only one with an air strip. The airline was called AeroGal, and appeared specific to trips between the Galápagos Islands and the South American mainland. Upon arriving in a tiny airport, we took a bus to the bay and traveled to our ship, the Celebrity Xpedition, via Zodiac (a name-brand dinghy), since it wasn't anchored in the bay. In fact, all of our excursions were via Zodiac, which made things interesting when the sea was choppy.
The Celebrity Xpedition is a small boat built in 2001. It's registered in Guayaquil and carries a maximum of 100 passengers and 65 crew. As a result it moves quite a bit more than other typical larger cruise ships. I saw quite a few passengers with the sea sickness patches behind their ears. Since there were three of us, we got a suite with a verandah, which was a nice touch.
The Xpedition took us around to eight of the islands, crossing the equator twice along the route:
The weather in the Galápagos was probably around 22 to 24°C most of the time and partly cloudy during the day. It was sunny sometimes, but certainly not the majority of the time.
Our first excursion was on Sunday, which took us around and onto North Seymour Island via Zodiac. The first thing I noticed about the island is that it was very dry and desolate with lots of cacti and some little green bushes strewn about. This description pretty much sums up all of the Galápagos Islands (except some of the highlands) at this time of year. The rainy season between December and February is when it gets very green.. and overrun with bugs and inclement weather.
We saw sea lions, blue-footed boobies, frigatebirds, yellow wurblers, and marine iguanas. The majority of the rocks we saw the wildlife sitting on are volcanic in origin, which were very dark and sharp.
For the first excursion, I thought we saw quite a bit of wildlife, but it was nothing compared to the next several days. We were instructed to remain at least eight feet away from the wildlife, and to not touch or otherwise disturb them (no flash photography, no yelling at them, feeding, etc.). Surprisingly, most of the wildlife wasn't scared of humans, at all. I walked right past a blue-footed boobie next to its young and it didn't give me the time of day.
On Monday we visited San Cristóbal Island in the morning, which has a small population. After visiting a small museum with the history of the Galápagos (violent and unfortunate, I might say) we shopped a little bit and then headed back to the ship. In the afternoon we visited Española Island, where we were greeted by tons of iguanas and barking sea lions. This was the first island that presented us with a large amount and variety of wildlife.
The marine iguanas that we saw looked pretty menacing, but really are no danger to humans or really anything else on the islands. They're slow-moving, eat algae from the shore, and mostly just sit out in the sun during the day:
The sea lions were loud and active, except when they weren't. Apparently it takes some effort to move on land, so we would routinely see them hopping along at a quick pace and then fall flat on their face and seem to take a nap for a minute or two.
Española Island also presented us with lots of lava lizards, two variants of boobies (Nazca and Blue-footed), and some interesting Galápagos crabs.
On Tuesday we had our first snorkeling experience in the Galápagos. We took the advanced deep sea snorkeling around Champion Island, and used wetsuits since the water was 20°C. It was still cold even with the wetsuit. We saw lots of fish and a sea turtle, but nothing really all that interesting, except for the sea lion swimming around with some of us during the tail end. It probably would have been better if the sun was out to provide more illumination of the reef.
On Tuesday afternoon we visited Floreana Island where we saw some Galápagos Penguins on the rocks near the shore. While in the Zodiac we also got a chance to see some sea turtles poking their heads out of the water to breathe. Getting a good shot was a little difficult.
We took a hike up to the Baroness Lookout (our tour guide gave us the abridged story about this), which gave us a few photo opportunities:
The next day (Wednesday) we went to Bachas beach on Santa Cruz Island and did a short walk and snorkeling. We spotted our first flamingo on the walk. The snorkeling wasn't all that good due to cloudy water (and the sun wasn't out once again).
In the afternoon we went to Bartolomé Island and hiked up 114 meters where we saw some interesting vegetation, lizards, cacti, and a nice view of the island:
In hindsight, this was the day I should have used the circular polarizer filter. We also saw some penguins close to the shore before snorkeling again:
On Thursday we landed in Urbina Bay at Isabela Island and took a 2.0 mile hike across part of the island, which included some rocky turtain and dense vegetation. I was honestly surprised that all of the people in our tour group managed it without issue, since there was quite a bit of balancing involved. The landing part was interesting because we saw a fierce shark fight (for food) right near the beach. We ended up seeing some different wildlife, including two giant tortoises and a couple land iguanas.
We saw a Galápagos Hawk sitting on one of the national park stop signs:
On Thursday afternoon we took an excursion to Fernandina Island where we saw the most iguanas on the trip, so far:
I also snagged a short clip of some of them fighting (not mating: listen to the tour guide):
We also spotted a couple oystercatchers, which have a distinctive head and beak:
Friday brought us to Santiago Island where we saw some fur seals. I kept forgetting the subtle differences between seals and sea lions and eventually just learned to identify them by their colors: seals are black and sea lions are gold. The seals were the first species of wildlife we encountered in the Galápagos that seemed genuinely scared of humans.
We managed to spot a few orcas a mile or two from the island, and did some whale watching for a little bit. I took a few photos, but wasn't able see much detail. The best shot I got that showed the distinguishing white area near the eye is this one:
Snorkeling at Santiago Island was great. I was literally inches away from some sea lions swimming by and we saw one constantly diving down into a crevice looking for food. I spotted a jellyfish, sea turtle, and stingray (I think it was a stingray, it was under a bunch of sand), too. It's too bad I don't own an underwater camera.
In the afternoon we went on a longish hike to Dragon Hill on Santa Cruz (yep, we returned!). The terrain looked a bit like Mars:
Our last day brought us to Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz. It's one of the heavily populated ports with an urban area and lots of farmland. We took a trip to the Charles Darwin Research Station where we saw some giant tortoises in captivity. One of them was Lonesome George, a 90 year-old tortoise who can't seem to find a compatible mate. He's the last one of his subspecies (categoried as EW: extinct in the wild). They apparently breed giant tortoises at the CDRS, too:
In the afternoon we traveled to the highlands (see map here) and visited a lava tube. We also saw lots of the giant tortoises in their natural habitat:
The highlands were overcast, humid, and very green. Apparently it mists there all the time, so all sorts of plants grow. It was in stark contrast to the rest of the Galápagos islands we'd visted earlier in the week.
The next day we flew back to Quito via AeroGal and departed for home the next day.
Here's a list of everything we saw on or from land:
And a list of things we saw while snorkeling (incomplete, since it was hard to identify most of the fish):
The two animals that were the most visible during the tours are the sea lions and marine iguanas. The sea lions were fun to watch, since they would play with each other or just walk right in front of us, barking. We saw quite a few young sea lions, too. Their vocal cords apparently aren't very developed so their bark sounds a bit different (and cute). Here's a video:
The marine iguanas were everywhere. Sometimes it would be hard to walk since they were scattered all over the trail. For food, they swim into the ocean and eat algae, but have to expunge the sea water from their system when they get back on land. As a result they were constantly doing what one might identify as sneezing. But, instead of a sneeze it was really just the iguana blowing out the salt water from their system. I almost got sprayed by one as it was doing this, too! Also, they smell really bad, especially when there are 20 or 30 of them piled on top of each other.
The giant tortoises are big and slow moving. Shocker, really. They can grow up to 300 kg and have no ears, so they can't hear a thing. They can detect vibrations in the ground, though, so they can tell someone is approaching. When we were walking too near to some of them, they would omit a hiss that sounded like Darth Vader, and pull their head into their shell.
Lots of the birds that we saw on land we also saw from the ship.. even when we were traveling between islands! The Blue-footed Boobies and Frigates apparently travel far out to sea to hunt for fish. We watched several of them nose-diving in the water right near the ship. I got a lucky shot, here:
There were quite a few symbiotic and mutualistic relationships we witnessed among the wildlife. The lava lizards crawl on the sea lions and eat the flies (that apparently get really annoying for the sea lions). Some of the finches pick off ectoparasites from the tortoises, too. There were a few others I don't recall, unfortunately.
About half of the 90 passengers on the cruise were from the United States, I think. The others were either from Canada, England, Hong Kong, or elsewhere. I think only two or three of the passengers were younger than me.
Since my Nexus One works throughout most of the world, I picked up an international data plan for $50 from AT&T that gave me 125 MiB per month. So, without fear of overage charges, data on my phone worked in Quito, the Galápagos Islands, and on the ship. In Quito I had a choice between two Ecudaorian GSM providers: PORTAGSM and MOVISTAR, both of which seemed to use 850/1900 for UMTS and provided HSPA for data. On the Galápagos Islands I picked up both of the same Ecuadorian cellular providers but with wildly high (but usable) latency. Apparently in 2002 the Galápagos Islands obtained a satellite connection back to mainland Ecuador, which is used for the cellular backhaul, too. On the ship, there was a similar cellular site (only supported GPRS) backended by a satellite, but the performance was horrible. And when I mean horrible, it was completely unusable at times:
Request timeout for icmp_seq 311 Request timeout for icmp_seq 312 64 bytes from 69.9.189.182: icmp_seq=163 ttl=46 time=150991.762 ms 64 bytes from 69.9.189.182: icmp_seq=164 ttl=46 time=150401.031 ms
On Wednesday we took a tour of the bridge of the Celebrity Xpedition. It was a fairly modern-looking bridge with no wheel and most components were computer-controlled. I spotted a networking rack that housed a few Linksys-branded devices and a satellite router. Expensive shipboard Wi-Fi was provided by a Cisco WLC (yay 1.1.1.1!) that was apparently centrally-located on the mainland. It was better than the cellular connection, but not by much:
HOST: orion Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1.|-- 192.168.172.1 0.0% 32 1.8 2.3 1.1 9.1 2.1 2.|-- 192.168.15.1 3.1% 32 2.5 2.9 1.7 12.7 2.0 3.|-- 10.224.7.49 3.1% 32 7.2 5.0 3.4 11.7 1.8 4.|-- 10.102.33.53 3.1% 32 671.7 635.1 594.5 693.9 27.3 5.|-- 10.102.33.1 3.1% 32 710.9 638.2 592.1 710.9 27.3 6.|-- 10.102.1.5 3.1% 32 648.1 628.4 589.0 688.0 26.4 7.|-- mci.gwa.vizada-net.net 3.1% 32 681.0 640.5 595.9 743.5 34.5 8.|-- serial3-3.gw4.bos4.alter. 43.8% 32 609.4 636.4 601.9 766.7 37.4 9.|-- 0.ge-3-3-3.xl3.bos4.alter 43.8% 32 646.4 642.8 597.9 714.1 31.3 10.|-- 0.xe-6-1-2.xt1.nyc4.alter 43.8% 32 664.7 650.8 610.3 709.3 29.4 11.|-- gigabitethernet6-0-0.gw1. 45.2% 31 681.1 654.2 602.3 687.6 23.8 12.|-- teliasonera-gw.customer.a 45.2% 31 718.1 654.3 598.6 718.1 37.7 13.|-- nyk-b6-link.telia.net 45.2% 31 656.2 650.5 620.2 709.5 22.5 14.|-- 0.te1-4.tsr1.lga5.us.voxe 6.5% 31 746.9 647.7 608.3 746.9 30.1 15.|-- 0.ae57.csr2.lga6.us.voxel 6.5% 31 684.3 659.7 605.0 817.1 47.0 16.|-- dax.prolixium.com 25.8% 31 646.9 649.7 599.6 716.5 33.9
There was some crazy ICMP error throttling that caused the erroneous packet-loss. Anyway, our stateroom suite status gave us three hours of free use for the week.
Lots of the Galápagos species seemed to be just slightly different than those found in the rest of the world. To distinguish them, it seems that "Galápagos" was added to the title. I kept wondering if we were going to see a Galápagos squirrel.
Some of the tour guides gave us pieces of history about the islands. Apparently the early settlers on the islands brought donkies, dogs, birds, hogs, etc. that disrupted the wildlife on the islands. Some of these animals died off since they couldn't handle the harsh climate and some of the others apparently were slaughtered by ecological societies in order to preserve the balance. One tour guide specifically said that one of the societies is currently investigating the use of painball-like guns to kill a certain species of black bird that is doing damage to the ecology on the island. Sometimes I get confused about what's natural and what isn't, but maybe that's just me.
On an unrelated note, the airport security in Quito (UIO) was very strange compared to airports in the United States. There are two security checkpoints passengers pass through on their way to the plane. The first one is at ticketing, which is similar to a pre-9/11 checkpoint at a United States airport. The second one is at the gate itself, and involves airport employees going through passengers' carry-ons. Afterwards while the passengers wait at the gate, a dog is sent loose and sniffs all of the passenger's carry-on bags. Another security oddity (a good one, I might add) is the checking of baggage claim tickets upon pickup. I don't think I've ever been at an airport in the United States that cares about baggage claim tickets. Ashame.
Not sure what else to say here, but it was an awesome almost two weeks away from the office. Although it's not the cheapest vacation, I'd definitely recommend it!
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