Solamente un otro día en Paraíso

Last time I titled my entry ¨The Best Week of My Life,¨ but I think this past week in the Galápagos takes the cake. Since we don´t get a spring break during the program, I´m considering this ¨educational excursion¨ to have been our spring break equivalent: a fully paid and planned vacation in Paradise. The archipelago was absolutely beautiful. It was hot and sunny all week long, with few clouds and no rain (even though it´s the wet season there right now). We spent most of our time outside, either hiking around the islands, snorkeling along lava reefs, or relaxing on the pristine beaches.

For the first half of the week, we lived on a boat (which was actually more like a luxury yatch) and island-hopped each day. We vistited the islands of Baltra, Santa Cruz, Rabida, Santiago, and Bartolomé. The majority of the islands in the Galápagos are uninhabited and can only be vistited if accompanied by a registered guide. These islands are all protected by the National Park System and the Charles Darwin Foundation and have been conserved surprisingly well. During our time on the boat, we also went snorkeling twice a day, each time at a different lava reef. The water was beautiful, warm and clear, and it was incredible how many exotic fish we were able to see.

For the second half of the week, we lived in a homestay in a small port town on the island of Isabela. We spent our days hiking volcanoes, snorkeling, and playing on the beach. As much fun as our time in Isabela was, it was also saddening to experience the harsh realities of life in the Galápagos. While most visitors to the archipelago are rich, retired, white tourists, the local residents live in poverty and harsh environmental conditions. My homestay mother was a guide on the island, which is the best paid job available, but even they didn´t have running water. The majority of residents are fishermen who live in one-room houses with large families. Quality of life largely depends on the availablility of freshwater, which is a rare commodity but a necessity in a location as hot and arid as the Galápagos.

I´ve found that it´s much easier to make lists than to explain everything I saw, so here´s a quick summary:

Most Interesting Things Seen Each Day
Tuesday: 3 hammerhead sharks (3m each)
Wednesday: 4 dolphins swimming alongside the boat for 30 minutes
Thursday: enormous manta ray (6m wide!)
Friday: giant tortoises mating
Saturday: 2nd largest volcanic crater in the world
Sunday: ¨Wall of Tears¨ (an old prison torture sight)
Monday: 25 white-tipped sharks

Animals I Swam With While Snorkeling
1. Spotted Eagle Ray
2. Marine Iguanas
3. Pacific Green Sea Turtles
4. Sea Lions
5. White-tipped Sharks
6. Galápagos Penguins (rarest penguin species in the world)
7. And an endless list of exotic fish...

I´d love to be able to show you how beautiful the landscape and the animals were, but it turns out my bad luck with cameras this semester has continued and worsened. On our first day in the Galápagos, I was on the boat taking a picture of a beautiful sunset over the ocean... and what happens? I dropped my camera off the side of the boat. I assume it is now resting peacefully at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

I´ve been back in Quito now for two days, while half of the program group is still in the Galápagos. Long story short, when they switched with us to stay on the boat for the second half of the week, the boat engine failed and they were stuck on an island for two days and weren´t able to see all the cool things we did. So they remained in the archipelago on a new boat for two extra days while we are stuck in Quito. It´s completely unfair if you ask me, but we´ve at least made the most of having two days without classes.

Yesterday I went to my first professional soccer game here. It was Ecuador vs. Paraguay in an elimination game for the 2010 World Cup. The entire day, this whole city was a gigantic tailgate. Everyone in Quito was dressed in bright yellow and all of the streets were filled with crowds and Pilsener stands. The game itself was incredibly exciting - there was more energy and excitement in that stadium than at a Penn State football game. Ecuador pulled ahead 1-0 in the second half and the crowd went absolutely nuts. Unfortunately, Paraguay scored in the last 10 seconds of the game to tie it 1-1. At first, there was a stunned silence in the stadium. Then there was an outburst of outrage, effectively met by the SWAT team and military who had been lining the field the whole game. A disappointing ending to a fantastic match.

Today I hiked Volcán Pichincha, the volcano under which Quito is located. We took the Teleférico up about 2.5 km and then went on a killer hike to the top. The view the entire way up was incredible. We could see 5 other glaciated volcanoes surrounding Quito and the entire city stretched between the two mountain ranges of the Andes. The hike itself was brutal - we hadn´t yet acclimated even to the Quito alititude (9,000 ft.) after being at sea level for a week, and we hiked up to about 15,000 ft in 3 hours. On the way back down, which at the top was a vertical wall of unsolidified volcanic ash, I basically just fell and slid down the mountain (very graceful). But it was an absolutely beautiful hike.

Next weekend, I leave for Guaycuyacu (try saying that 3 times fast), a small rural town in Northwestern Ecuador to work on mining issues for a month. The town is sitting on a hefty mineral deposit and the government intends to open it up for extraction in the near future. In the next town over, across the river, a gold mine already exists. I´ll be working with another girl from my program to conduct a listening project in both towns and to do environmental impact studies in both locations. Just like in the States, it is much easier to prevent a mine from starting up than to shut down an existing one. So I plan to draw from the experiences of the community near the gold mine to raise awareness about the real impacts of mining in the target community where I´ll be living. We hope to produce some kind of pamphlet to distribute in the target town that can educate them about the ecological and social realities of mining as experienced by their neighbors, as well as a guide to the permiting process and options for community involvement. Ideally this project will have the ultimate goal of empowering the local community to stand up against the mining companies to protect their land and their way of life, rather than being directly involved in the fight myself.

The town where I will be living does not have internet access, so this will probably be my last update for about a month. If you want to see the pictures I´ve taken in Ecuador (which will likely be all the pictures I will ever take here, being that I have no camera), you can see them at my Picasa Web Album page at http://picasaweb.google.com/caroline.cress. Enjoy!